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If you look at the price list, the buying power of a gold piece is roughly equal to about $100 US, which makes a copper piece about a US dollar. Or a Euro, or a British pound, all of which are roughly the same amount of money (compared, say to the Vietnamese dong, or even a Japanese yen.)
Another way to look at is is that an "average" cost of living is defined as 10 gp per month, which again makes a copper piece roughly equal to a dollar (living on $1000 per month is possible in much of the world, and the next step up is 100 gp per month, which is definitely extravagant -- $10,000 per month).
Finally, any competent person can make a Craft, Profession, or Perform check and make roughly 1-2 gp per day, which works out to about 300-600 gp per year.
So there's a lot of the economy balanced around the idea that 1 gp is roughly $100.
So 200 gp is a lot of money, but not out of the question for a successful professional like a baker. It's not, on the other hand, the sort of thing he would just carry around in his pocket as "walking around money"; it's the kind of money that would represent quite a bit of savings.
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Money curculation in pathfinder is weird.
Do inflation exist?
Inflation does not exist according to the core rules, but it's something that the GM is encouraged to add as a local condition. Actually, the Pathfinder economic model, like the Dungeons and Dragons economic model that preceded it, is pretty bad because economic modeling is both hard and not-fun. As several people have commented over the past forty years, the game is not called "Papers and Paychecks," and, in fact, the economic system is actually deliberately biased to give characters in-world incentives to go out and do stupid dangerous heroic stuff in keeping with the heroic fantasy tradition.
One of the main issues is that Pathfinder both allows and explicitly expects that player characters will buy magic items, which have no direct price equivalent in the real world (for obvious reasons). In the real world, I can't even begin to guess at a price for a magic item that lets you cast cure disease once per day (or even better, at will), but the price would start at several tens of millions of dollars since any hospital could use it as a last-ditch cure for the most horrible forms of cancer and such -- and it could be used forever in a way that would -- literally -- change the world.
So magic items are, at $100 per gold piece, extremely expensive; the price of a simple +1 long sword comes in at close to two million dollars, and the price of the +2 or +3 sword that an 8th level fighter would need is closer to ten or twenty million. I can't think of anything I could buy in the real world for twenty million dollars and expect to carry with me into a dangerous wilderness survival experience, but this provides a cash sink for the game that makes it practical for adventurers to earn huge rewards without making the game unplayable.
For more information on the D&D economy, this is a pretty good article.
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Pathfinder's economics are a direct inheritance from D+D. Which as Gygax stated, he deliberately set up as modeled on the "Gold Rush" economy where prices had very little to do with anything resembling a sane, stable, economy.
If you want to know the feeling he was aimg at, just watch the first Conan movie, where adventurers acquire fortunes, and spend them just as rapidly.
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If you want to know the feeling he was aimg at, just watch the first Conan movie, where adventurers acquire fortunes, and spend them just as rapidly.
It is, of course, much older than the movie. In the original Howard stories, Conan was even self-aware enough to comment on how he managed to earn untold fortunes at the end of each story, only to lose it (usually through debauchery) by the start of the next story.
... which makes sense, because Conan the Accountant or Conan the Venture Capitalist would neither be particularly interesting nor fun to read.
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So magic items are, at $100 per gold piece, extremely expensive; the price of a simple +1 long sword comes in at close to two million dollars, and the price of the +2 or +3 sword that an 8th level fighter would need is closer to ten or twenty million. I can't think of anything I could buy in the real world for twenty million dollars and expect to carry with me into a dangerous wilderness survival experience, but this provides a cash sink for the game that makes it practical for adventurers to earn huge rewards without making the game unplayable.
Off by more than a little. A +1 longsword costs 2,315 gp. At 1gp = $100, that is only $231,500, not 2 million. Likewise, even a +3 sword (18,315gp) would only be $1,831,500, not 10 to 20 million. A +10 equilivent weapon would be $20,000,000.
Sorry, dropped a zero in my head.
I disagree that Pathfinder economy is inherited from Gygaxian D&D, which did not exist. Economies appeared wth 3rd party publishers, from Chivalry and Sorcery, EnGarde, and the various Judges Guild source material. Pathfinder economics is mostly derived from video games. Since the endgame appears to be a MMORG, this is appropriate. PFS play is the purist video game mechanic, also tournaments. Equipment can only be purchased, and individual items often need to be unlocked by gameplay.