D&D General Coinage as Dragon Scales

[Xeviat]

I recently started rolling an idea around in my head. D&D worlds have a lot of precious metals going around. Piles of gold coins is unrealistic by real world standards. What if copper, silver, and gold coins are the scales of copper, silver, and gold dragons?

What if that's part of why peaceful with metallic dragons (their discarded scales are valuable, but killing them stops them from shedding more). What if that's part of why dragon slaying is a big mythic idea? What if chromatic dragons were hunted because their scales are only useful for armor?

Brass and Bronze dragons could have kick-started the bronze age.

 

[MarkB]

You'd have to work something out regarding the, um, scale of the scales, since older dragons make bigger scales.

And work out how this ties in with dragons hoarding wealth - do they lie on piles of each others' scales?

 

[Xeviat]

You'd have to work something out regarding the, um, scale of the scales, since older dragons make bigger scales.

And work out how this ties in with dragons hoarding wealth - do they lie on piles of each others' scales?

I recall Silver dragons being described as having small scales that don't change size as they grow, so that they look smoother and smoother as they age. That was the thought I had.

And yeah. Metallic dragons collect their own scales, while Chromatic dragons try to kill or steal from Metallic Dragon boards.

 

[MGibster]

And work out how this ties in with dragons hoarding wealth - do they lie on piles of each others' scales?

I don't know what would be more metal and bad%#@ than hoarding the skin of your enemies.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I talked about my version of this in this thread. In one of my settings, Giants use Dragon scales as currency. The older the dragon, the higher the value of the scale. Scale color doesn't really matter in this system, though.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I think that's a really fun idea!

I could see Chromatic Dragon scales being used as currency either by "enemy" nations, or maybe a kind of magic black market? You can buy most things with gold / silver / copper coins, but magic weapons can only be bought with red dragon scales, wands and staves with green dragon scales, etc.

 

[Dustin Cooper]

There's precedent for not being too picky on exact sizes and weights matching between coins, even in a society where the weight of the metal was the basis of the value. In the Roman Republic, it seems like how they produced denarii was that they'd make a certain number of blanks, weigh them, and if the whole was too heavy, gouge some metal out of the heavier looking ones until the whole weighed the right amount. It was more important to them what an average coin weighed than what a specific coin weighed, and I could see similar wiggle room allowed to keep the variation in biologically produced dragon scales from making the underlying money system overly complicated.

 

[jayoungr]

You could work in gem dragons for extra economic shenanigans. Maybe there's no actual mining in this world! (So what would be the stereotypical profession for a dwarf, in that case? Brewer? Stonemason?)

 

[Dioltach]

Years ago I introduced a baby dragon into my campaign that needed to eat gold in.order to mature and grow. The party started to dislike it very quickly.