By that I mean that the sheer number of coins that are expected to buy pretty much anything at mid-to-high levels is so absurd that it makes the old imagery of treasure chests full of the stuff feel not only underwhelming but burdensome.
If 50 coins equal one imperial pound, as the rulebooks typically state, you could just about melt down and hammer out a house or a boat approximating the prices in the book for such things. It gets even sillier when magic items are so obscenely priced yet at the same time a typical adventuring party picks up so many of them that they could, materialistically speaking, pull a Mansa Munsa on any quasi-medieval economy if such items are really priced that highly where a hand-me-down magic protection ring could set up a peasant in endless luxury for life.
I don’t try to fix all of that mess, but I do tend to use a house rule where coins have as much written buying power as 100x the listed prices for most things, and the coins found in a listed lair are reduced by to 1/100th of the listed values, which also keeps coppers, silvers, and electrum relevant a lot longer. As long as all the players remember the conversion tables and don’t forget them in a way that fucks up the bookkeeping, it works pretty well.
How about the rest of you? :d20:
one of the D&D 3.5 books had a whole section on how the players could effectively torpedo local economies with high value dungeon items. it listed total wealth capacity of various sized villages, hamlets, etc. so basically you would have to haul your shit to the largest capital cities or else accept very rock bottom prices or just trade for essentials and IOUs or maybe land grants. i thought it was a nice touch.
How long can an established setting, like Forgotten Realms, really continue to have those stupidly high prices for magic items when they’ve been “open for business” for centuries or longer with random adventurers digging up or looting stuff then throwing it into the local economy?