# Forum > Gaming > Roleplaying Games > D&D 5e/Next >  Replacing Gold, Silver, etc... With Salvage?

## werescythe

I have a post apocalyptic setting that I'm working on and I've been thinking about it and figured that it would make more sense to replace gold, silver, copper, etc... With salvage (maybe different types as well to represent the different currencies), which can be used to "buy" things but also be used to repair weapons, armor, etc... Or even to create fortifications.

So I want to ask for some thoughts/suggestions on the matter.

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## Particle_Man

Well there are already various crafting kits and crafting rules so I guess this would be giving the raw materials so that someone doesnt have to spend half the cost of an item being created, or at least gets the cost cut down further?

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## EggKookoo

My first thought is we need more detail. Is it literally just replacing currency, or are you working up a way to interact with it that's different?

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## Tanarii

Add some kind of degradation to all gear.  Most systems go with use based.  But you could also just go time based.  I'd recommend gp equivalent so it's easy to track how much salvage is required to repair it.

Then salvage can be used to enact repairs.  You could just go with something simple like a single type Salvage (gp equivalent) weight #.  Or you could have different kinds, probably primarily Metal, Wood, Cloth.

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## spacedog

Not sure if you want to remove standard wealth (gold etc.) altogether. The salvage idea is cool, but would probably be more among the average and working people. The truly wealthy with still have the prettiest, shiny metals and stones, along with copious amount of steelor whatever else you had in mind. (Plastics? Tech? Not sure where you are going with this exactly, but I still like the idea.)

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## werescythe

> My first thought is we need more detail. Is it literally just replacing currency, or are you working up a way to interact with it that's different?


Well, as stated above it could be used as both a currency/resource.




> Add some kind of degradation to all gear.  Most systems go with use based.  But you could also just go time based.  I'd recommend gp equivalent so it's easy to track how much salvage is required to repair it.
> 
> Then salvage can be used to enact repairs.  You could just go with something simple like a single type Salvage (gp equivalent) weight #.  Or you could have different kinds, probably primarily Metal, Wood, Cloth.


I generally try to avoid breaking player items unless they do something dumb with it and roll a nat 1. Now I am thinking of having Infernal Warmachines (though they won't use Soul Coins), so they could use salvage to repair their ride(s). 

Maybe an artificer could try using salvage to create new items/weapons as well. 




> Not sure if you want to remove standard wealth (gold etc.) altogether. The salvage idea is cool, but would probably be more among the average and working people. The truly wealthy with still have the prettiest, shiny metals and stones, along with copious amount of steelor whatever else you had in mind. (Plastics? Tech? Not sure where you are going with this exactly, but I still like the idea.)


That is true. I have thought that there might be some group of nobles that still acknowledge the original currency. 

I'm not 100% sure about plastics, though maybe tech. In this setting there have been numerous apocalypses, one being an alien invasion and another being terminator robots (among demons, weather catastrophe and zombies). 

And to clarify, yes, there is magic in this setting.

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## Sparky McDibben

If you want to do this, I think there are two ways. The first is to give some amount of Scrap a value in gp equivalent, and then convert everything from the PHB into Scrap-equivalent costs. Personally, I think this is the wrong way to go about it, because what happens when you get into fractional Scrap?

What I'd do is simply use units of Scrap that can be recovered during missions. Scrap is available in four flavors: Poor, Middling, Good, and Arcanotech. 

Poor Scrap is worth a suit of light armor or a simple weapon. 

Middling Scrap is worth a suit of medium armor or a shield.

Good Scrap is worth a suit of heavy armor or a martial weapon. 

Arcanotech Scrap is either a) a cypher like the Cypher system, or b) must be collected before you have to visit the artisan that can forge it into magical gear (2 pieces = uncommon, 3 pieces = rare, etc). 

Scrap traded for gear that isn't weaponry is just a 1:1 swap, regardless of quality. You can play around with this system a lot, including masterwork items that can be made out of Good Scrap, or crafting consumables from Scrap + some herbs / minerals, etc.

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## Yakk

Pounds.

Pounds of salvage of various grades and types.

Grade A, B and C can be worth 10x factor compared to each other.

If you are doing a post-apoc modern world, maybe:

Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, Metallic, Plastic, Fuel, Luxury

The values of these would be more powers of 10 compared to each other and depend on the situation.

In fact, how about a double logarithm.  Grade C is 0-9, Grade B is 10-19, Grade A is 20-29.

The values of Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, Metallic, Plastic, Fuel, Luxuries would also have a value.

If Electrical has base value 22 and you have 10 pounds of Grade B (15) electrical salvage and you want to trade for Grade C (7) Fuel (base value 8), that is (15+22-7-8=22) 1600 Pounds of fuel for a "fair" trade.

Now, the base value of each salvage is going to be in dispute, as is the grade of the salvage and the profit margin of the person you are dealing with.

This is probably too complex, but it does handle goods whose value is many 100s of times more expensive than others.

I started with "pounds" because it makes the inventory problem clear.  Moving salvage requires transport.

Using said salvage becomes another problem.  Salvage will rarely be perfect for the role.  When you use Salvage, what you end up doing is searching through it for the right components.  This act of extracting the right components lowers the Grade of the salvage (as you have harvested some good stuff).  Higher Grade salvage lets you do this faster and produce stuff with more success.

Meh.  Too complex.

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## Segev

If all you're concerned with is verisimilitude, have a standard unit of currency that translates to gp, and then make "salvage" the equivalent of finding trade goods in D&D. The statues and jewelry and art objects and the like that drop as loot but are basically just gp when gp would make less sense.

If gasoline/fuel is the currency backing thing and a quart of gas is 1 gp: "You search the wreckage of the bandits' vehicle and find 10 gallons (40 quarts) of fuel and another 80 q worth of salvage."

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## Unoriginal

> I have a post apocalyptic setting that I'm working on and I've been thinking about it and figured that it would make more sense to replace gold, silver, copper, etc... With salvage (maybe different types as well to represent the different currencies), which can be used to "buy" things but also be used to repair weapons, armor, etc... Or even to create fortifications.
> 
> So I want to ask for some thoughts/suggestions on the matter.


Do you mean bartering with different material goods or just an abstract ressources called "salvage"?

Ex: "the merchant agrees to trade you 10 bars of iron for the salt you found yesterday and the dagger the dead messenger had on her" vs " the merchant sells you 10 bars of iron for 4 salvage points".




> Not sure if you want to remove standard wealth (gold etc.) altogether. The salvage idea is cool, but would probably be more among the average and working people. The truly wealthy with still have the prettiest, shiny metals and stones, along with copious amount of steelor whatever else you had in mind. (Plastics? Tech? Not sure where you are going with this exactly, but I still like the idea.)


It's post-apocalyptic, depending on how big the apocalypse was there is no reason for "truly wealthy" people to still exist.

Even if there are warlords or new governments, they won't care about things that only have value because people agree they have value, like coins.  

Gold, silver and the rest can still be worth something as a bartering good, because as you said they're pretty, shiny metals & stones, but that means any coin likely got melted for the metal.

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## spacedog

> It's post-apocalyptic, depending on how big the apocalypse was there is no reason for "truly wealthy" people to still exist.
> 
> Even if there are warlords or new governments, they won't care about things that only have value because people agree they have value, like coins.  
> 
> Gold, silver and the rest can still be worth something as a bartering good, because as you said they're pretty, shiny metals & stones, but that means any coin likely got melted for the metal.


You could be right, but we dont have enough information to make that definite. Consider that the dark ages were arguably apocalyptic and yet ancient Roman coins didnt all get melted. They are considered worth much more than their base metal, and Ancient Egyptian tombs were looted for artifacts, not salvageable metals. The very wealthy, didnt survive the dark ages as individuals necessarily, but they and their clan, families etc. did, and the physical wealth definitely did. If anything it became more valuable.

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## Joe the Rat

> If all you're concerned with is verisimilitude, have a standard unit of currency that translates to gp, and then make "salvage" the equivalent of finding trade goods in D&D. The statues and jewelry and art objects and the like that drop as loot but are basically just gp when gp would make less sense.





> Do you mean bartering with different material goods or just an abstract ressources called "salvage"?
> 
> Ex: "the merchant agrees to trade you 10 bars of iron for the salt you found yesterday and the dagger the dead messenger had on her" vs " the merchant sells you 10 bars of iron for 4 salvage points".


A bit of the crux - are you about removing money as loot, or removing money as a concept?  The first part is easy - all "loot" is stuff. bits of metal and machinery, strange materials, artefacts and old writings, food, hides, and whatever the bandits you just killed had on them.  Now different buyers may have different needs (an antiquarian would pay more for an object engraved with ancient writing than the blacksmith, who would either turn around and trade it to the weird collector, or melt it for scrap if it doesn't happen to be a useful size or shape).  Which can lead to odd chains, because to get the most out of your finds, you will have to chain deals to find what's worth the most to each, and offload and shuffle goods to between sellers and buyers.  

Unless you want to spend a session or three playing merchant, don't do that.  Run it like downtime: selling magic items if you want effort to squeeze more value.

For the latter, at some point you need to establish (roughly) what things are worth, and then make it all about goods and services rather than precious metals or representations of value.  A dagger or a day's food (or water, depending) would be a reasonable value marker.  But your players will need some sort of yardstick, since they aren't fully versed in the specific needs and necessities of wasteland living.

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## JackPhoenix

Apocalypse supplement for the old (it's been 17 years, it can be called old) d20 Modern system used Trade Units (TU) as measurement of value. 1 TU was equivalent to a enough food to survive for a single day, a gallon of gas or a single round of (common) ammo. All items had listed TU value. Salvage (i.e. not usable items) was separated into mechanical and electrical parts, with one "part", whatever form it took, was valued at 1 TU. Their main use (beside trade) was for crafting... you needed a number of parts based on the complexity (i.e. craft DC) of what you were trying to repair or make, if you failed the crafting check, you needed to get more parts before you could retry the check, though the parts weren't expended: you simply haven't found what you needed in the current pile of junk.

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