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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lackhand" data-source="post: 4003340" data-attributes="member: 36160">Someone with a greater knowledge can correct me if I'm wrong, but chiming in: The reason gold gets stamped into coins with famous emperors heads stamped on them is to guarantee the weight of the coin.This is why forgery was occasionally punished by death; it was essentially treason, falsifying the king's word. Common methods of gaming the system involved shaving or clipping bits off of coins, so that you could make (say) 51 gold coins from a pound of gold, using impure additives to make the volume match up. It eventually caught on as a good idea at the national level, when the need to measure wealth outstripped the ability (or desire) to produce actual ingots of ore.So coinage in a POL setting can be both reasonable and interesting. Perhaps there are a small number of individuals (heros) who sponsor their own coinage, enforcing its value with their own good names? Perhaps the larger cities still have mints, and honor each others coinage by weight alone? Perhaps fallen empires leave behind bales of the stuff; dwarven city-states make the stuff, temples commission the stuff...Just view the coins as specie, not currency.</blockquote>