Currency in a POL setting

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I really liked the BECMI D&D idea of the "gold piece" being a unit of weight.

 

[Aristotle]

Some good ideas here...

I've been working on a setting for 4E that focuses on a trade city. Now that the empires have fallen away it has become the center of world trade, especially between the city-states of the "old world" and the various tribes and kingdoms of the "new world".

I've been playing with the idea of all of these cultures using varying currencies, and a centralized bank in the trade city which smelts and re-coins all money to the trade standard (minus a tax that only really affects merchants, adventurers, and other non-citizens attempting to bring foreign currency into the economy).

Treasure vaults in my campaigns rarely have piles of coin. They more often contained precious metals and gems that have been crafted into jewelry or other items.

 

[WyzardWhately]

Throughout the centuries a few less than honorable souls have tried to alter the weights and measures that came into their possession. These attempts always resulted in the death of the forger. Although no magic can be detected on their adamantine surface, it is suspected that the cruel and ancient masters of Bhael Turath enacted a great and lasting curse on each weight forged, one that would ensure the correct accounting of their currency through the end of the last Age of the world.

Stolen back.

I guess rituals are going to be a bigger part of the game now, something I completely support. I dig the idea of a curse of inviolability being put on certain things. There's a price if you want to break it.

 

[Lackhand]

To be fair, they punished all KINDS of stuff with death back in the day.

The best reason to use "real" gold is that it's reliable. Problems of time and distance arise if you want to sail across the sea or last centuries. Empires fall, and your name might be worth nothing on the other side of the world. Real gold is forever and everywhere. Representative money only works as far as your influence extends.

Oh, aye -- I just meant that the reason it's dealt with on the shiny disc level at all is because of the implied vouch-for-its-weight. Otherwise each transaction MUST be done with scales; the representative money thing lets you do transactions on faith, occasionally.

 

[WyzardWhately]

Oh, aye -- I just meant that the reason it's dealt with on the shiny disc level at all is because of the implied vouch-for-its-weight. Otherwise each transaction MUST be done with scales; the representative money thing lets you do transactions on faith, occasionally.

Oh, yeah, I get what you're saying now. I we need a sourcebook for how often real-world merchants weighed their stuff, how they did so, etc.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

One real-world issue (that's come up in at least one campaign for me) is that if the "points of light" are too isolated, the values of various precious metals might vary. (For example, the dwarven city next to a huge gold mine might not value it as highly as an area with no local gold resources.) The easiest way to "fix" this in a PoL game is to assume that there are at least a few mid-level wizards out there making their living teleporting around (or flying, or riding, depending on the setting) trading currency to keep things more or less in equilibrium.

 

[WyzardWhately]

One real-world issue (that's come up in at least one campaign for me) is that if the "points of light" are too isolated, the values of various precious metals might vary. (For example, the dwarven city next to a huge gold mine might not value it as highly as an area with no local gold resources.) The easiest way to "fix" this in a PoL game is to assume that there are at least a few mid-level wizards out there making their living teleporting around (or flying, or riding, depending on the setting) trading currency to keep things more or less in equilibrium.

If they don't, an enterprising PC might. In a high-level interplanar game I was playing once, we gained the ability to move between the various settings. The Greyhawk/Dark Sun/Forgotten Realms/Dragonlance trading run was the stuff of legend.

 

[Irda Ranger]

One real-world issue (that's come up in at least one campaign for me) is that if the "points of light" are too isolated, the values of various precious metals might vary. (For example, the dwarven city next to a huge gold mine might not value it as highly as an area with no local gold resources.) The easiest way to "fix" this in a PoL game is to assume that there are at least a few mid-level wizards out there making their living teleporting around (or flying, or riding, depending on the setting) trading currency to keep things more or less in equilibrium.

You don't need wizards teleporting around to do FOR/EX arbitrage. Merchants in the ordinary course of trade will perform the exact same function, if only a bit slower. Your Dwarven Keep will probably pay for all of its imported goods in specie, making them spectacularly wealthy for a while, but it will also cause inflationary pressures in nearby human lands, eventually lowering the value of gold everywhere.

How quickly this happens really is a question of how isolated the various settlements are. This has been discussed extensively in other threads, and I think the general consensus was that the wild lands between PoL were too dangerous for (non-Paragon) individuals to travel alone, but that large well-guarded caravans and Dragonborn clans would usually travel from place to place largely unmolested (they're too tough a target for your average goblinoid raiders). Your coinage arbitrage would probably take place over the course of a single trading season or two.

As for those mages, if they're Teleporting around solely to take advantage of gold mispricings, then (1) the DM is clearly not giving them enough to do, and (2) Teleport is too easy and safe.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Here's my take (which might change in 3E).

You know how creating magic items supposedly costs so many "gold pieces" worth of material to create? Some of that is based around buying special material components, but precious metals can also be used as literal fuel for permanent magic.

Platinum, gold, silver, and copper (though you need a lot of it) are literally "magic metals" that can fuel powerful magics. Since there is a fixed exchange rate of a certain mass of each to a certain amount of magic, the exchange rate remains constant. Thus a "gold piece" is always defined as a certain mas of metal.

 

[JohnSnow]

I think that when you accept that the world is ancient (one of the key conceits of Fourth Edition), standardized coin weights are far more believable.

In the real world, coin weights became more standardized as time passed. And the coins primarily used for trade were either silver or gold. Now, according to some articles I found, Archimedes found out how to determine the purity of coinage in ancient Greece by determining the specific gravity, so clearly it's possible. On the other hand, it wasn't particularly effective on coins until modern times.

Now, if the world is sufficiently old, it stands to reason that most coins would follow the same standard.