How To Justify Adventuring: Money & Quality of Life. (Archive)

If you’re here from my Good Economics in Your 5e Handbook? post, welcome! You can start in Part 3.

Benefits of laying out, exploring, reworking D&D 5e’s income/expense system.

• Bringing Economic awareness to D&D players.
• Provide an underdeveloped way to play D&D.
• A helpful GM / Worldbuilder’s tool.

Part 2: Disposable Income Builds a Home

Adventuring is not Ordinary. The majority of people are laymen living their ordinary lives. We know what ordinary is, because we live it.

Knowing why ordinary people make money and how they spend it, is useful to distinguish adventuring from the ordinary.

To find the How:

1. Analyze the whole. Consider inconsistencies.
2. Rearrange to nullify inconsistencies in a way that lets us extrapolate necessary factors for Income.

Income tells us the “How” by looking at its byproduct with Expenses. (Disposable income)¹

1. Analyze:

Wretched	—
Squalid	10cp
Poor	2sp
Modest	1gp
Comfortable	2gp
Wealthy	4gp
Aristocratic	1,000cp Min

• The Poor lifestyle is tied to unskilled labor.
  • “People at this lifestyle tend to be unskilled laborers” (P. 158). You make† and spend‡ 2sp per day. (†P. 159^{Table: Services}, ‡P. 157^{Table: Lifestyle Expense})

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• The Comfortable lifestyle is tied to skilled labor.
  • “You associate with… skilled tradespeople” (P. 158). You make† and spend‡ 2gp per day (†P. 159^{Table: Services}, ‡P. 157^{Table: Lifestyle Expense}).

With no official income table, we can assume all lifestyles must (at Minimum) make the same amount they spend, because, as written, not making money is the Wretched lifestyle.

The only way to generate disposable income is to live under your means, and living above your means only happens on a windfall separate from your daily income.

2. Rearrange:

The previous arrangement fits the adventurer/free-lance spending cycle. But we are trying to find the layman’s spending cycle. I got that mathed out in my Good Economics in Your 5e Handbook? post, check it out.

Part 3: Why Dose Food Cost More The Richer You Get? (The “Why?”)

At the end of the day, disposable income is used for improving quality of life temporarily; a luxurious night out. Or more permanently; new tools.

Disposable Income: In Advancing Quality of Life

Why dose Wealthy spend more than Comfortable lifestyle?

First, is 3 words used by WoC to describe the “higher” lifestyles, “Life of Luxury”.

Compare Wealthy and Aristocratic, the differences are no longer about what new comforts are available (you got the full range at Comfortable). It’s about the quality of those comforts.

• Your clothes materials are not just high quality, they’re also exotic.
• As with Comfortable, your (FDL) now includes servants, but now you are paying for skilled laborers: tutors, accountants, etc.

Wretched	—
Squalid	0%
Poor	20%
Modest	20%
Comfortable	35%
Wealthy	30%
Aristocratic	40%

The main difference form (Poor to Modest) and (Wealthy to Aristocratic) is the opportunity to advance.

Modest has the money to spend on tutors; access to specialized skills that Wealthy people pay for.

Alternatively, Wealthy has more to loose than Modest, you are almost Aristocratic, a position who’s value comes from its security.

Focus is on spending to earn social points on top of financial security.

A Living World

A good personal finances system helps make a world feel alive.

There will be those who struggle to advance to the next lifestyle². Some people will find alternative ways to secure their futures. So, the Adventure is born!

Wrapping It up

It is important to know what ordinary is to better understand the extra in extraordinary.

Money and the quest for a higher quality of life is an easy way to engage players/readers in a story. So, you need a system robust enough to allow outside-the-box thinking.

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