D&D General Does anyone else use a silver standard in their DND game?

[Helldritch]

I realized long ago that the gold standard was for adventurer only. The vast majority of folks never see/own a gold piece in their entire life.

So, if we assume that the gold standard is for characters only; the current system makes a lot of sense. If we assume that the system is for everyone, then the silver standard makes much more sense.

Both approaches are OK. I really feel that this is very much table dependant.

 

[payn]

Back in 3E we were so rich we had trouble with the weight of the coins. We just converted them into spyglasses which are worth 1K gold and only weigh a pound each. We could always see whats coming as a bonus.

 

[Lyxen]

Back in 3E we were so rich we had trouble with the weight of the coins. We just converted them into spyglasses which are worth 1K gold and only weigh a pound each. We could always see whats coming as a bonus.

Why not gems ? Why would spyglasses be available in such quantities and gemstones not ?

 

[el-remmen]

I guess I've never wanted to play "Dungeons and Spreadsheets".

Was literally just looking the shared spreadsheet my player use to keep track of coins and other treasure. It was their idea, not mine - but as someone who loves spreadsheets (as long as they are not work related), I did not complain.

 

[Lyxen]

Was literally just looking the shared spreadsheet my player use to keep track of coins and other treasure. It was their idea, not mine - but as someone who loves spreadsheets (as long as they are not work related), I did not complain.

In 3e where the amount of wealth was linked to the survivability of encounters, we actually had a database who parsed the PCGen character sheets to ascertain the wealth of adventurers, so that we could track them (in a graph). It was important because it was a multi-DMs campaign and we wanted to be fair to everyone...

 

[payn]

Why not gems ? Why would spyglasses be available in such quantities and gemstones not ?

This is an old joke, I should have used an emoji my apologies. In 3E rulebook items range from a few coppers to a few gold, then you have this weird stand out of spyglasses at 1,000 gold... Which is why my default is to handwave economies because I have not seen an edition yet that makes any economical sense.

 

[Charlaquin]

For my upcoming campaign, I plan to use the default conversion rates, but to express prices in terms of silver. So a Greatsword costs 500 sp instead of 50 gp. Same actual value, but expressed in terms of the base unit of currency. Listing the price in gold feels a bit like charging five $10 bills instead of charging $50.

 

[fba827]

In my campaign, the big cities use gold for quoting prices etc. in the smaller towns and villages however they work in silver pricing and if you try to use gold and ask for change the poorer folks will feel like you’re giving them currency that they can’t make change for and will have a hard time spending for their basic daily goods to feed their family (and buying food for a week just means half is going to be spoiled before eaten)

 

[Whipblade]

I haven't seen it posted yet, but we've been using this in my own game, which is VERY helpful if you want to commit to a Silver Standard:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Lyxen]

This is an old joke, I should have used an emoji my apologies. In 3E rulebook items range from a few coppers to a few gold, then you have this weird stand out of spyglasses at 1,000 gold... Which is why my default is to handwave economies because I have not seen an edition yet that makes any economical sense.

That makes much more sense indeed, thanks for the clarification. I remember that price of 1000 gp, which was not that odd for a complex piece of precision optics in a "medieval world", and I remember that it really gave bonuses to perception, which was cool as well.

That being said, I agree, D&D is really made for economics, especially for adventurers, it does not make sense and then, on the other hand, why would it need to ?