There's kinda two ways to go about it, in my experience:
1. Break out Excel and start plugging in in-game gil values of anything that has a quantifiable real-world equivalent (e.g. a glass of orange juice). Next to the column with the gil value put the real-world value (call up your local Dennys or other restaurant which serves orange juice, I guess). By doing this for several items, you can come up with an estimated gil-to-reality ratio, which you can then apply to other things (such as, if someone in the real world leading a low-income lifestyle earns about X currency per day, apply the ratio, and you can estimate about how much gil someone doing the same job would earn in a day). Good luck getting anybody to adhere to such a scheme, though, no matter how logical it is.
2. Just avoid metrics at all and discuss gil in terms of abstracts. If someone says their character is rich, then they're rich, if they say they're poor, then they're poor. If they say they're poor and then describe paying someone 1,000 gil for a bottle of wine, gloss over the metric that they quoted, and instead in your head insert "paid a reasonable amount of money for a bottle of wine that a poor person could afford". This is the easiest method to use because it doesn't try to enforce anything on anybody else. People who like quoting numbers can do so, and as long as you know generally their lifestyle and the intent of the purchase (e.g. they're poor but it's an expensive purchase to them) you can just write through it.
1. Break out Excel and start plugging in in-game gil values of anything that has a quantifiable real-world equivalent (e.g. a glass of orange juice). Next to the column with the gil value put the real-world value (call up your local Dennys or other restaurant which serves orange juice, I guess). By doing this for several items, you can come up with an estimated gil-to-reality ratio, which you can then apply to other things (such as, if someone in the real world leading a low-income lifestyle earns about X currency per day, apply the ratio, and you can estimate about how much gil someone doing the same job would earn in a day). Good luck getting anybody to adhere to such a scheme, though, no matter how logical it is.
2. Just avoid metrics at all and discuss gil in terms of abstracts. If someone says their character is rich, then they're rich, if they say they're poor, then they're poor. If they say they're poor and then describe paying someone 1,000 gil for a bottle of wine, gloss over the metric that they quoted, and instead in your head insert "paid a reasonable amount of money for a bottle of wine that a poor person could afford". This is the easiest method to use because it doesn't try to enforce anything on anybody else. People who like quoting numbers can do so, and as long as you know generally their lifestyle and the intent of the purchase (e.g. they're poor but it's an expensive purchase to them) you can just write through it.
Lydia Lightfoot ~ The Reliquarian's Guild «Relic» ~ Lavender Beds, Ward 12, #41
This player has a sense of humor. If the content of the post suggests otherwise, please err on the side of amusement and friendship, because that's almost certainly the intent. We're all on the same team: Team Roleplayer! Have a smile, have a chuckle, and have a slice of pie. Isn't pie great?
This player has a sense of humor. If the content of the post suggests otherwise, please err on the side of amusement and friendship, because that's almost certainly the intent. We're all on the same team: Team Roleplayer! Have a smile, have a chuckle, and have a slice of pie. Isn't pie great?
