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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2630081" data-attributes="member: 3051">Gems are fine as a currency.  Obsidian isn't a gem.  It's a natural glass, and calling it "common" in volcanic regions is an understatement.  It's everywhere, laying there on the surface; go to any national park containing a volcano and you can probably find a softball-sized chunk (note: it's usually illegal to take these away).  And you can't really cut it like a normal gem, because it's a glass; it has flow patterns in it you can break it along, instead of the cleavage planes normal gems would have, but you can't control this nearly as well.Obsidian had value in primitive cultures for two main reasons, as far as I know:1> It looked nice.  (While this applies to most gems, too, most real gems have some other benefit.  Diamonds, for instance, are extraordinarily hard and so can be used for other purposes.)2> When broken, it could make very sharp edges (like I said, it's glass), and so nomadic cultures (who couldn't really stop and set up mines) could use it in lieu of metal for weapons.  That being said, it was replaced by bronze in practically every culture that set up any real civilization.In D&D it has value, sure, but that's because volcanos aren't that common.  If you're changing the system such that a culture lives primarily in volcanic regions, then there's no way it'd be worth much as a commodity.  Other gems have to be mined, obsidian can simply be "harvested".You can use gems instead of coins as the currencies if you want, but you're always going to run into the same situation: why does the item have value?  If it's meant to be abstract wealth (which is what most gems and precious metals are), that's fine, but there has to be something of underlying value.  And gems aren't any more connected to Fire, Water, or Air than metals are.  You still have to mine them, and yes, this gives a natural advantage to the Earth races.  But you're ALWAYS going to have that problem; they're closest to every natural resource.  The easy way to balance it is to say that while Earth races have the best miners, the Water races have the farmers, so they get paid a lot of metal and gems for the food.  And so on.</blockquote>

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