On the Economy of Dragons, Fermi Problem style.

This is a post regarding Dungeons and Dragons, particularly 3.0/3.5/3.75, as I am most familiar with the magic involved, but it applies to previous editions somewhat.




Dragons in D&D have the overwhelming need to gather up large amounts of coinage over their lengthy lifespans, to the tun of hundreds of thousands of gold pieces.  These vast sums sit, inert, in the floors of their lairs (or somewhere similar), waiting for adventurers to slay the dragons and steal the gold for themselves.  Often this is justified via institutionalized racism (i.e. you know whether or not a dragon is good or bad solely on the color of its skin), but it needn't be.  However, the real importance of this is to be explained shortly.


Dragons, as they enter their twilight, decide that they aren't going to leave their horde behind for some schmuck to just take.  Dragons, in their nigh-infinite greed, seek to literally take it with them.  They consume their entire hoard, leaving behind nothing at all, before they head off to a graveyard to die, or transform themselves into a portion of the landscape, or something similar.  The point is that an aging wyrm simply destroys his hoard before dying.




Also of import is that the dragons value their hoards, and those of others, by the physical size of the pile of coins.  Larger piles equates to larger prestige, to the point where some dragons use vast amounts of copper coins under their more valuable gold and silver coins to enhance the size and therefore prestige of their hoard.  A wyrm's hoard can easily exceed 300,000 gold pieces in value, which is no trivial sum.  Further consider that magical items count for half of their nominal value for assigning comparative wealth to a hoard.  This means, primarily, that a dragon will certainly do his utmost to have his stash mostly in coins--or nearly so as is practical, not just because they love piles of cash (literally) but because of the prestige it brings.


So let's make some assumptions here.  Let's say that a dragon, in general, prefers to keep his hoard as 15% coins, period.  For a great wyrm, let's average their net value to 300,000 GP (though this may be off, I am just making some sort of educated guess here).  This means, that on average, a dragon holds approximately 50,000 in coins at any time (I rounded somewhat there, but none of these values are hard and exact, so please excuse some minor discrepancies).  We'll say that 80% of that is in gold, the rest in silver, copper, and platinum in some mix or another.  Given that a coin weighs canonically 1/50th of a pound, we can say that there is 40,000/50 pounds of gold in coinage, or 800 pounds of gold coins.  That is a rather hefty sum, but we're not finished here.  We can also guess that, in order to maintain sufficient breeding populations and the like, and that the population will generally reach equilibrium barring humans deciding to exterminate dragons (which is unlikely, since dragons would certainly take exception to his pastime, and their wrath is terrible indeed).  So, for the sake of argument, this means that every decade or two, a great wyrm enters twilight and decides to end it.  We're considering across all types, but the chromatic ones die younger than the metallic (and they said only the good die young).  So, over a century, say 5-7 die like this, and are replaced by others aging.  It's lonely at the top, but it rather has to be.


This means that every century, 4 tons of gold are excised, outright, from the world.  Maybe more (a lot more) maybe less (but not terribly much.)  Over the course of a dragon's typical lifespan (1200 years or so), this means that 50 tons of the stuff is vanished from the world.


Now, if we take Faerûn as an example, we have 20,000+ years or so of recorded history.  It is not hard to assume, then, that dragons were around for most of this, and were mostly in a relatively stable population such as described above, or were averaged out to such.


This means then, over Faerûn's history, 1,000 tons of gold has been removed, permanently, from the economies of the world.


That seems like a lot, right?  I mean, this is a crude estimate, but is probably a lowish estimate.  There could easily be more dragons for this time frame, or they could hold more gold, etc


The US currently holds more than four times that amount in it's treasuries, as bullion.  That, in turn, is 2.5% of Earth's supply, that has ever been mined from the Earth.


Let's examine another angle.  There are twelve age categories of dragon, from Great Wyrm down to hatchling.  Now, let's assume that each category has one fifth of the previous category of members, to compensate for them dying to each others' and adventurer's hands.  And, going with the above assumption of death rates, we have ~20 worldwide dragons of great wyrm age or so at any given time, two of each type.


That means there are 100 wyrm, 500 ancient, 2,500 very old, 12,500 old, 62,500 mature adult, 312,500 adult, 1,662,500 young adult, 8 million juvenile, 40 million  young...this puts a population of dragons in the billions, minimum.


So I must revise downward my previous estimate of 5 per category beneath.  3?  That puts the total at 3^12 wyrmlings, and that is 1.5 million so we aren't much better off. 2?  That puts the total number of dragons at 2^13-1, or just over 8,000, per variety.  That seems much more reasonable.  That still is a fairly tiny population, but that does mean ~ 80,000 dragons overall.  So, we're in a good ballpark.  That revises downward the estimate of gold removed by dragons through death down somewhat, by a factor of 5 or so.  Hey, we're getting somewhere, right?


Now, let's look at how much gold they're hoarding.  300,000 on average for the top.  And, I'm going to guess 2/3 of that for each lower category.  That's 300,000 * (2/3)^11, or ~3500 for the wyrmling hoard.  Looking at the table in the Draconomicon, I get that a CR 3 hoard is 2700 GP and a CR 4 is 3600 GP.  So, I'm pretty close, I think to this estimation.  Close enough for the math at hand.


We can write an algorithm for each successive generation's wealth hoarded in terms of the previous, and this is actually fairly simple.  Twice as many, each holding 2/3 of the previous generation's wealth, so we have 4/3 of the total, average, wealth, held by each successive generation.  The wyrms hold 400,000 per dragon race, ancient ~530,000 and so on.  The jth term equals 4/3 of j-1, and we say that j(1)=300,000.  We can factor out the 300,000, so we get a nice steady sum:


4/3+(4/3)^2+(4/3)^3+...(4/3)^11=122.27.  A nice little sum that Wolfram Alpha did for me.  Multiply by 300,000, and then by 10 (for each major species of dragon), and we have...366,831,501 held by dragonkind collectively.


Let's put that number in comparison.  90% of the world is peasants, of the 1st level variety.  And, sticking with Faerû, the global population is approximately 45 million, at least by summing the populations of the nations.  Now, 90% of these people live on 2GP a month, and even the next 9% don't live substantially more lavishly (say, up to maybe 100 GP/month for the highest end of them, and twice that for the top tier).  Let's just look at the poor end.


.9*45000000*2*12=972,000,000 coins passing through their filthy hands annually.


That's nearly three times the money held static by the dragons.  Now, in the US, the bottom 80% hold or consume ~7% of the financial wealth of the nation.  Let's keep that number, even though really, it should be much lower.  That means that the rest of the mortal races have ~ 12 billion gold coins, or so, in their collective hands.


That is 40 times what the dragons own.


So, how does this compare with earth?  Well, Wikipedia's page on the US Bullion Depository states that there is ~168000 tons of gold on Earth or so.  And, let's guess that of that coinage listed up there, a third actually exists in coin (the rest passing from person to person, constantly, which gives a velocity of money of 3, so this is pretty high, actually considering that the US had a velocity of 1.6 or so in the 50s), and half of that is gold.  So 2 billion gold coins, at 50 to the pound gives us 20,000 tons of gold in circulation, total.  If we revise it to 1 or so, then we still have only 60,000 tons of gold coins.  Given their limited population and extraction capabilities, 60k tons sounds about right.  Dragons, again, have 2.5% of that.


So what does this mean?  Realistically, killing off the entire race of dragons and spending their gold won't destabilize the global economy at all.  So if your DM tells you that you are going to destabilize a national, or even largish city's, economy by spending all that cash, you can tell him that he's dead damn wrong, and you have the math to back it up.