[MENTION=25643]ca[/MENTION]ppnZapp
Sorry mate, you seem to misunderstand me here and also your assumption how valuable a mountain of copper RAW might be seems a bit of.
First lets take a longsword: 15 sp might be a reasonable price for it assuming the silver coins are comparable to historic equivalents e.g. roman denar.
15 gp like in PHB is wayyyy off. Why? let us see: let's take the size of a standard gold piece you could e.g. craft a ring from the material in it. Unless your goldsmith is taking 10s of gold by the hour let us assume the material value of the ring is 1gp still the actual price be 2gp with the work.
So I need the material value of 15 gold rings to buy a long sword or the market value of 7,5 gold rings. So I assume every city guard who can afford a long sword would be running around with more bling than Mr T from the A-team.
Other things like a bucket, no matter if made from wood, leather or some metal would be 5 cp according to PHB. That is a reasonable price if you would use a silver based pricing (all prices for weaponry is silver instead of gold) but with the currency system as is it is totally out of any reasonable relation.
Imagine a D&D Walmart: Sir, do you rather buy the Longsword or the 300 Buckets with your 15 gp? The Longsword took 1 smith a week to craft the buckets took the people who crafted them let's assume 2 a day that comes to 150 work days. so your weaponsmith must be a very wealthy man and surely got some of the highest wages around.
You see the RAW gp system as is is totally broken there is no reason to use it other than for simplicity, and within it cp and even sp are garbage not worth picking them up.
You stated your single counter point : the dragon hoard. So let us see, of course, if it looks in that Smaug the hobbit movie then no matter what metal it is it would be very valuable. But. Smaug is a legendary level 30 dragon and it is not his lair from the beginning but the outcome of many centuries of dwarven mining, he just took over.
A typical heap of precious metal would be mixed a bit, with the coins being present roughly about there value so for every 10c there is 1s and for every 10s 1g, since lower value coins are more frequently, just look in your purse as soon as you got some change. So only 1% of it is gold. And with 1 gold coin would be 10 grams e.g. the players could carry away lets say 10.000 gold in one go if they only take the gold.
You are right in so far that this is a fortune in a silver based economy, well that does not matter because by the time the players could face a dragon with such a hoard, money should be the least of their problems in a vanilla setting.
And still your fortune could only buy you 2 raise dead by the temple in the standard setting, well in a silver based setting you could raise 20 fallen comrades.
Sorry mate, you seem to misunderstand me here and also your assumption how valuable a mountain of copper RAW might be seems a bit of.
First lets take a longsword: 15 sp might be a reasonable price for it assuming the silver coins are comparable to historic equivalents e.g. roman denar.
15 gp like in PHB is wayyyy off. Why? let us see: let's take the size of a standard gold piece you could e.g. craft a ring from the material in it. Unless your goldsmith is taking 10s of gold by the hour let us assume the material value of the ring is 1gp still the actual price be 2gp with the work.
So I need the material value of 15 gold rings to buy a long sword or the market value of 7,5 gold rings. So I assume every city guard who can afford a long sword would be running around with more bling than Mr T from the A-team.
Other things like a bucket, no matter if made from wood, leather or some metal would be 5 cp according to PHB. That is a reasonable price if you would use a silver based pricing (all prices for weaponry is silver instead of gold) but with the currency system as is it is totally out of any reasonable relation.
Imagine a D&D Walmart: Sir, do you rather buy the Longsword or the 300 Buckets with your 15 gp? The Longsword took 1 smith a week to craft the buckets took the people who crafted them let's assume 2 a day that comes to 150 work days. so your weaponsmith must be a very wealthy man and surely got some of the highest wages around.
You see the RAW gp system as is is totally broken there is no reason to use it other than for simplicity, and within it cp and even sp are garbage not worth picking them up.
You stated your single counter point : the dragon hoard. So let us see, of course, if it looks in that Smaug the hobbit movie then no matter what metal it is it would be very valuable. But. Smaug is a legendary level 30 dragon and it is not his lair from the beginning but the outcome of many centuries of dwarven mining, he just took over.
A typical heap of precious metal would be mixed a bit, with the coins being present roughly about there value so for every 10c there is 1s and for every 10s 1g, since lower value coins are more frequently, just look in your purse as soon as you got some change. So only 1% of it is gold. And with 1 gold coin would be 10 grams e.g. the players could carry away lets say 10.000 gold in one go if they only take the gold.
You are right in so far that this is a fortune in a silver based economy, well that does not matter because by the time the players could face a dragon with such a hoard, money should be the least of their problems in a vanilla setting.
And still your fortune could only buy you 2 raise dead by the temple in the standard setting, well in a silver based setting you could raise 20 fallen comrades.
)
