Gold or Silver Standard?

Electrum!!!

As I mentioned in the other thread, I prefer a silver standard in a PoL setting because within the mechanics of the D&D world, silver has more true value than gold. Gold is valuable because... well, you know, it's pretty and stuff. In theory, someone out there who can cover all the necessities of life and then some would like to have a pretty necklace made of it, so next time traders come through, they can take this pretty metal off our hands and will probably give us a lot of the necessities of life for it.

Silver is pretty too. But more importantly, even a first level cleric can use it to create holy water to use against undead, or to cast a protection from evil spell on the village defender. Or it can be applied by a sufficiently skilled smith to make a weapon more potent against a host of high and low level threats. (obviously the examples I give are 3e based, they could change everything in 4e, etc) On the other hand, while you will often see material components of "X gp worth of oils/inks/playdoh/etc" the only mechanical use for gold I can think of is the gold ring focus for shield other.

So, while in a setting with a strong central government (or two or three that honor currencies) the gold piece standard is as good as any other version of that social fiction we call money, in a PoL setting I see silver as a better standard since it has the precious metal aspect and a practicality that gives it value in even the most isolated community.

Maybe in my next campaign the economy will operate on a Salt Standard.

Lackhand said:

Alternatively, you end up on effecively a gold standard, as everything is measured in hundreds of silver pieces.

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Or in units of, say, 240 silver coins. Which together weigh one pound.

Wulf Ratbane said:

I voted "Other." I'd rather a barter economy. Small, everyday transactions-- currency is fine. When you're talking about the value of magic items, currency gets ridiculous, fast. I mean, who minted all these coins? Is there not a finite number of coins in the world? Especially a PoL world?

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Yes, there's a finite number of coins. You'd never really run out of them though; their value would just escalate. But then all the prices in the PHB would be wrong.

Alternately, you could create a special currency that is used only for magical items. They really are more expensive than anything else in the economy, other than Castles and Warships, or the cost of fielding an army for months at a time.

Perhaps magical items have a de minimus g.p. cost (a masterwork sword is all you need), and rest is something more rare and only used in making magical items. Perhaps a special kind of crystal that can only be distilled from fresh demon blood. If the crystals lose their potency after only a couple hours there wouldn't be a market in them; so it's purely a "go get your own" thing.

Irda Ranger said:

Yes, there's a finite number of coins. You'd never really run out of them though; their value would just escalate.

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I would look at metal coins the way we look at cash today, as something you carry for liquidity, i.e. in case you need to buy something. You don't generally hold on to thousands of dollars in cash, even if your net worth is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A quasi-medieval lord would hold his wealth in land, which yields an income measured in pounds (of silver) per year, and luxury goods, not coins.

Irda Ranger said:

Alternately, you could create a special currency that is used only for magical items. They really are more expensive than anything else in the economy, other than Castles and Warships, or the cost of fielding an army for months at a time.....Perhaps magical items have a de minimus g.p. cost (a masterwork sword is all you need), and rest is something more rare and only used in making magical items. Perhaps a special kind of crystal that can only be distilled from fresh demon blood. If the crystals lose their potency after only a couple hours there wouldn't be a market in them; so it's purely a "go get your own" thing.

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:) said:

High-end magic items had ridiculous prices in gp in 3e, I mean once you got past the first couple + equivalents you're talking about hundreds of pounds of gold. Yet with various conjuration, creation, or summoning spells raw materials of any kind become trivial beyond a certain level. Want platinum summon a djinn and have it provide, bind a lantern archon and produce potentially thousands of everburning torches, etc...Above a certain level it becomes worthless since characters of that level can effectively have as much as they desire via magic...What this means is while there can be a trade in high-powered magical items they can't be bought for anything so crude as a raw material beyond a certain level. Beyond 15,000gp you can't buy it with gold or silver or even platinum. It takes souls, or gems useful as spell components, or weird planar currencies based on things like raw chaos, bottled pain, high level scrolls, etc.

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You mean like this? Key thing is that you allow smaller magic items to be bought in the specie economy. Because beyond a certain point these things aren't an important power boost anymore so having lots of them isn't a great help. Whereas more powerful magic items are by their nature potentially more disruptive if available early or too easily. But you still want to be able to properly reward PC via "money". So instead you have that cut-off point, beyond it mere specie is worthless and it takes something cosmologically valuable like souls-chaos-xp-expensive spell components-favors of extraplanar beings-whatever. It serves the dual purpose of granting more DM control over the powerful items while separating them from the specie economy so that PCs can plow their wealth into things beyond the highest tier of mechanically optimum magic items.

*Wow!* Silver is winning by about a 3-1 ratio; the reverse of what I would have expected.

I'm a traditionalist and thus prefer the gold standard. That said, I wish adventure designers would recognize there are more types of coin in the game than gold and silver. I do the treasury in our games and I can always tell when we're playing a modern "canned" module: there's no entries at all in the c.p., e.p., or p.p. columns!

Lanefan

Heck, stick with the gold standard, and even go back to giving 1 experience point per gold piece gained (in other words, greed pays )

But remember, the Tax Man Cometh, and if your PC has gold, the King wants to share in your good fortune. He is the Lionhearted King, which means he wants the Lion's Share of your gold - which means he wants ALL of your gold.

Barter was common in medieval times. I can see copper and other small denominations being used (and a thriving black market and under the table exchanges) but if someone is walking around with a king's ransom of gold, that's going to grab a lot of attention of the kind you don't want to have.

So keep the gold standard, but remember common folk barter or use small coinage like copper. Gold coinage, especially in large sums, is the stuff of heroes, villains, and the fantastically wealthy.

Irda Ranger said:

Alternately, you could create a special currency that is used only for magical items. They really are more expensive than anything else in the economy, other than Castles and Warships, or the cost of fielding an army for months at a time.

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I would love to see mid-tier on up magic taken out of the gold piece economy and into one of it's own. Large sums of gold then might actually see some other use in the campaign (castles, armies, mansions, servants, etc...).

I like the idea of magic being bartered for with other magic (several lesser items for a greater one), ingots of magical metal (adamantine, mithril, abyssal steel, etc.), body parts from exotic magical monsters (eye of a beholder, demon's heart, dragon scales, etc.) and so on.

Cadfan said:

There will be wealth/level requirements in 4e. There HAS to be. Or at least their equivalent.

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Maybe not quite: see below.

Hussar said:

1e and 2e most certainly did have expected wealth by level. It didn't state it explicitly, but it was certainly there. Look at every module. How often do you see Vorpal swords in 1st level modules? How often do you see 9th level NPC's with no magic items? There's a reason for that.

It may not have been explicitly stated, but, it was there.

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Hussar, what you are describing is not quite wealth-by-level: rather, it is item-cap-by-level (ie none of an item better than +X until at least level Z).

Given that 4e will classify items by level, I think that this latter sort of cap may be more likely. Thus, it does not matter how many +1 weapons a 3rd level character has (after all, they can only use one of them at a time) - but they can't have a +2 one until they are 7th (or whatever).

For this sort of system to work, a couple of restrictions have to be in place:

1) no +1 items that stack;

2) a limit on the number of character stats boostable by +1 items (in order to ensure that after the first one or two such items no cumulative benefit is gained by owning more, but only a substitutable benefit) - maybe this could be done instead by hosing item slots;

3) some way of restricting trade in magic items that makes sense in game, so that a 3rd level character can't just sell all their +1 items to buy a +2 one.

The first of these is fairly easily to implement (and has been fairly widely called for). The second isn't too challenging, and fits with the death of the big six. The third seems hard to reconcile with the continuation of gp as a universal currency (as posters on this thread have noted) but maybe it will be PoL to the rescue - perhaps to get better items you either have to make them or else buy them in the City of Brass (or from deities or whatever) and the rituals make them, and to travel to those marketplaces, aren't available until the appropriate levels.