The D&D Shopping Trip: A Guide to Shop Prices and Treasure

'Fish Market' by Frans Snyders and Anthonis van Dyck

Here’s the thing: players love shopping. Why? I don’t know. Nobody knows. But what I do know is that at some point in a campaign, the players will decide to go on a shopping trip — they want to spend their hard-earned treasure on something cool. This is a system for creating an internal game economy to prepare for that eventuality.

In order to create a balanced and satisfying internal economy for your players, you’ll need to know how much gold they'll have on average and set shop prices accordingly. Luckily, that’s entirely up to you.

INCOME

Decide on an average income-per-level of a player character. This shouldn't be too difficult as the amount of treasure the party gets is completely in your control. This income typically increases as the characters level up. You want them to have just enough to get some of what they want, but not so much that they stop feeling hungry.

Using the average treasure-per-level in the D&D 5th edition DMG as a base (p. 133), I discovered the following income averages:*

Level	Average income-per-level
1st - 4th	140 gp
5th - 10th	3,900 gp
11th - 16th	18,300 gp
17th - 20th	228,000 gp

*This assumes a party of four characters splitting treasure evenly.

PERCENTAGES

Thinking about your internal economy in percentage values can help clarify how much of the party’s resources you’re draining with your prices. Take the average income of a player character and make that value equal to 100%.

When rolling for starting gold in 5e instead of taking the equipment packages, the average amount any given character will have to spend at 1st level is 100 gp. This is the perfect number for translating to percentages.

Now, looking at the equipment lists, you can easily see how much of a 1st-level PC’s average income these items will cost them. Leather armour? 10%. Greatsword? 50%. Chainmail? 75%.

Once the game starts, between 1st and 4th level, a PC’s average income increases to 140 gp per level. Therefore, 140 gp is your new 100% mark. Now that chainmail only costs 53%. And so on as the party levels.

SETTING PRICES

If you have your percentage values, setting prices is as easy as deciding how much of a PC’s income something is worth. Make yourself a chart of common percentage values for each level range and keep it handy for quick reference when the players get in the mood to shop.

Percentage	1st-4th Level	5th-10th Level	11th-16th Level	17th-20th Level
100%	140 gp	3,900 gp	18,300 gp	228,000 gp
75%	105 gp	2,925 gp	13,725 gp	171,000 gp
50%	70 gp	1,950 gp	9,150 gp	114,000 gp
25%	35 gp	975 gp	4,575 gp	57,000 gp
10%	14 gp	390 gp	1,830 gp	22,800 gp
5%	7 gp	195 gp	915 gp	11,400 gp
1%	1 gp, 4 sp	39 gp	183 gp	2,280 gp

*Each of these amounts is per character, not per party, assuming an average of four characters.

It’s definitely okay to set prices above 100% — PCs can choose to save up, or they may choose to pool their money if they really want something.

No matter whether you’re running a low-treasure or high-treasure game, just decide how much treasure you’re going to give out in advance and build your percentages off of that. If you decide you want a low-treasure game and the players are only going to see 100 gold pieces between them over the course of the first four levels, there’s no need to scale up your percentages as they level — just stick with the initial costs. Heck, you might even want to switch your income averages to silver pieces but keep the costs the same to create a really gritty tone.

KEEP THEM HUNGRY

Now that you’ve set up an income and decided on percentage values, you need to find ways to keep charging the PCs between 5% and 75% of their average income-per-level in order to keep them hungry. You can charge them for tolls, bribes, plot items (which could cover a lot of things like official documents, artifacts, information, etc.), access to new areas, special clothing for access to court encounters, bailing an NPC ally out of prison, temple prices for healing...

If you want the economy to feel meaningful, gate mostly optional content behind gold costs. To make it feel really satisfying, throw more stuff at them than they can afford. Tease things for them to save up for.

GATES

Gates are barriers which require payment in order to pass. As an abstract concept, a gate can be a bribe to gain an audience with an NPC, a toll for using a road, the cost of passage on a ship, or a literal gate with an entry tax.

In most cases, gates should lead to optional content. If you put a gate in front of an essential path to progress, realize that you are stealing wealth from the players and essentially lowering their income. Keep the costs in mind: are you draining 100% of their income with this single, non-optional gate? You don't want to hobble them financially for the rest of the level.

Gates are great for tempting players to spend their treasure on optional content.

UPKEEP

Upkeep can help give low-level motivation to PCs. A constant tiny drain of income will add just a dash of a race-against-time element to your campaign, which ideally keeps the party from loitering around too much.

For inn costs, to make them meaningful and worth tracking, bump them up to at least 1% of a PC's income per night. If using the figures I’ve outlined above, make staying at the party’s first inn cost 1 gp, 4 sp per character per night. If they want to pay for a better inn/room (5%), you could give them Advantage on one ability check the next day. If they stay at a poor quality inn (book prices), they make a DC 10 Con save or get Disadvantage on Con checks the next day and may get robbed (50% chance) in the night for 5-20% of their gold. Whatever you want — just give meaning to their choices.

As they level, they acquire wealth, and the innkeeper notices (if it’s the same innkeeper), so maybe he raises the prices because he knows they can afford it. Or maybe they move on to a new area with a new inn, and then you can just raise the prices accordingly.

STATIC PRICES

Keep some prices static so the players feel their wealth gains matter. Make these mainly rare or expensive items they can work towards buying.

SHOPS

Create a few shops. You can make a single shop which has prices covering multiple levels of income, or a few shops with prices covering different levels. The benefit of having a single shop which covers multiple levels of income is it can tease the higher cost items to the players. The benefit of having multiple shops is the joy of discovering a new shop full of new items.

I recommend making items in your shops behave like one-use spells (kind of like scrolls) or permanent minor-effect spells. You can look at magic items in the DMG and just tone them down for the shop shelves. I don’t recommend selling full +X magic items in your shops, but you could sell pieces of artifacts which can be collected and combined to make a full-powered magic item.

Sell mysterious objects as well, objects the shopkeeper has no information about; they just want to get rid of it for a good price. Include quest items, maps and riddles, clues leading to treasure — anything that could be of value to the PCs or lead to adventure.

Use wonder in your equipment lists, with threads leading to juicy history or adventurous background stories. Put carvings, initials, and symbols on items. Describe the cultural style items are made in. Give items intriguing titles. Make them interesting. Make them weird.

Make shops reflect your world.

SMITHS

Smiths can upgrade the PCs' weapons and armour for an appropriate cost. This allows players to forge bonds with their gear instead of replacing it every few levels.

Upgrading an item simply means giving it a +1.

Depending on the size and effectiveness of the item, the cost for the first upgrade should vary between 70% (club) and 350% (greatsword) of income. When pricing your upgrades, use your judgement to decide how much each should cost. Looking at the base value of the item to be upgraded in conjunction with the table below is a good starting point.

You can have the smith require special materials for upgrades as well, which the PCs must either purchase elsewhere or attain on an adventure.

Looking at the Magic Item Rarity table on p.135 of the DMG, we see the following prices:

Rarity	Character Level	Value
Common	1st or higher	50-100 gp
Uncommon	1st or higher	101-500 gp
Rare	5th or higher	501-5,000 gp
Very Rare	11th or higher	5,001-50,000 gp
Legendary	17th or higher	50,001+ gp

Using the average income-per-level table from before, these are the translated costs:

For 1st to 4th level incomes, magic items are worth between 50% and 500%.

For 5th to 10th level incomes, they are worth between 13% and 128%.

For 11th to 16th level incomes, they are worth between 27% and 273%.

For 17th to 20th level incomes, they are worth anywhere from 22% and up.

Admittedly these costs seem arbitrary, and they probably are; after all, 5th edition wasn't designed with a magic item economy in mind. However, it's a good rough guide to pricing your upgrades and items, and if it doesn't suit — change it!

TEMPLES

Temples offer healing at a fraction of the cost of potions. A potion of healing costs 50% of a 1st Level character’s average income; a potion is more convenient than temple healing, so you could lower the temple cost to something like 10%. As the party levels up, the temple will expect them to give ever larger donations. If the PCs don't donate appropriately, they may need to succeed at a Charisma/Reaction check in order to acquire healing in the future.

The expected donation might be 10% of income for a basic healing spell; 20% for greater healing.

SPELLS & SERVICES

Go ahead and charge the PCs for expert consultations, sage opinions, hirelings, enchanting, and spells-for-hire. Nothing is free!

ON RANDOM TREASURE

If you're using random tables to generate treasure (which is perfectly fine), your players may have more or less than the average income you figured out for your campaign. That's okay. You want your game world's internal economy to feel organic (even though it's not), so the PCs getting a variable income each level is just fine; it probably won't stray too much from the averages to matter.

KINDS OF TREASURE

Be creative when coming up with stuff for your players to spend their coin on, especially at the higher levels when their income makes the cost of all normal equipment and upkeep into pennies.

Treasure could be any number of things: coins, gems, jewelry, art objects, goods, furnishings, clothing, magic items, spells, animal or human companions, information, access to new social or adventuring areas or encounters, social status, land, property, renown, vengeance, gratitude, protection, safety, honour, approval of the gods, completion of a quest, or anything else that could feel like a reward to your players.

You can make any of these things for sale within your internal game economy.

REALISM

This is not a realistic economy. This is an internal game economy, a mechanic to enhance the campaign at a game-design level. It's meant to give the players something to spend their gold on, and to give the DM a way to further motivate the players.

AFTERWORD

All of the prices I have set down here I have done so with my own discretion: you can set prices to anything you wish. The important thing is to realize what percentage of a player character’s income you are charging so you can be deliberate about your prices.

I have used 5th edition as a common point of reference, but this system can work with any version of the game.

I know not all DMs will want a structured system like this. Many are content to handwave treasure and shopping, and that’s a perfectly legitimate way to run the game. For those looking to expand and formalize their internal game economy, however, I hope this proves useful.