Gold or Silver Standard?

The New Standard in POL should be...

  • Gold Standard: It's worked well thus far.

    Votes: 82 22.7%
  • Silver Standard:

    Votes: 255 70.4%
  • Platinum Standard!

    Votes: 1 0.3%
  • Other.

    Votes: 24 6.6%

JohnSnow said:
Just for comparison, at current trading prices, silver is about 1/55 the value of gold (~$16 per ounce vs. ~$880). Rounding that to 1/50, we could easily get a very interesting coinage system.
Ahem.

Yeah, as I said upthread, Gold is trading at about 50x silver, and silver is trading at about 100x copper.

So let 1 (new) silver coin = 1 (old) gp, 1 (new) copper coin = 1 (old) cp, and therefore 1 (new) gold coin = 50 (old) gp.

The math is easy, I just wonder what I should move the cost of iron to. Also, one pound of (new) gold is equal in worth to 2500 (old) gp -- a +1 sword is worth a pound of gold, instead of 40 pounds of gold.
 

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Huh, I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner with the talk of ones vs. twenties...

In US history (as far as I am aware, and I am open to correction), precious coinage has mostly been minted as copper pennies, silver dimes, quarters, and dollars, and golden dollars (the size of dimes) and $5 to $20 Gold Eagle coins. In the days when individual dollars had a lot more value than they do right now, the twenty dollar bill was a gold coin.
 

JohnSnow said:
There was a similar system [to the one Irda Ranger mentioned] in Mastering Iron Heroes. That system (designed, btw, by 4E developer Mike Mearls), let characters trade their wealth money to gain influence, manors, cohorts, followers, and so on.
Funny you should say that.... ;)

In essence, the wealth system in Mastering IH gives you access to a number of "virtual feats" that any character can use at any time in the game (you don't need to spend feat slots to get them), but that require wealth points to actually make use of them. This includes the basis of the Leadership feat (broken out between followers and cohorts), getting a stronghold, having entree to a particular social circle, etc. as well as some interesting game benefits (a bonus on social skill checks, ability to get out of jail free, etc.). I've expanded the use of wealth IMC to include affiliation-related stuff (if your wealth is associated with that of a particular noble house or merchant coster, you cement your allegiance to that organization) and to deal with "basic lifestyle" issues. It's quite useful.
 

ruleslawyer said:
Funny you should say that.... ;)

In essence, the wealth system in Mastering IH gives you access to a number of "virtual feats" that any character can use at any time in the game (you don't need to spend feat slots to get them), but that require wealth points to actually make use of them. This includes the basis of the Leadership feat (broken out between followers and cohorts), getting a stronghold, having entree to a particular social circle, etc. as well as some interesting game benefits (a bonus on social skill checks, ability to get out of jail free, etc.). I've expanded the use of wealth IMC to include affiliation-related stuff (if your wealth is associated with that of a particular noble house or merchant coster, you cement your allegiance to that organization) and to deal with "basic lifestyle" issues. It's quite useful.

Yeah, I have Mastering on my shelf and the .pdf on my computer. Iron Heroes is my favorite 3e based system (not counting its magic system of course...although there are some pretty interesting alternatives out there).

I'm hoping Mike Mearls might have imported something similar into 4th Edition. 'Cuz if he didn't, I'm houseruling it in.
 

Kid Charlemagne said:
Throughout most of history, the valuation was in the 12-1 or 13-1 range, I think.

Yup. In 5th-4th century BC Greece it went from 20-1 to 10-1 when Persian gold started flooding in. Or with the original English coinage, AIR 12 silver shillings to one gold sovereign; likewise sestertii to denarii. Silver has been cheap the past hundred years or so.
 

S'mon said:
Silver has been cheap the past hundred years or so.
Because of silver produced as a byproduct to other types of mining where the minerals were co-located in the same veins of ore. And that there's just so much more of it than say gold or platinum but wasn't exploitable prior to modern mining techniques.

1/20 gold to silver ratio sounds like a good compromise. Lower than the current inflated gap between the metals but rounded off to a close position to the historical difference for easier math.
 

Money,money, money...

JoeGKushner said:
Another thread talking about currency made me wonder... should gold be the standard in a POL setting?

I say no.

Right now, copper pieces make about zero sense since most things are priced in gold, especially from an adventurer's point of view.

Silver standard would allow other types of metals like bronze and electrum to be added while making things like platinum and gold 'real' treasures.

Opinions?

I agree, unless you're running a game in Sharn or Waterdeep gold should be rare and most coincs would be copper and silver but silver should be the most valuable outside of gems although if I remember rightly electrum was worth about 1/2 a gold piece so it would be more prominent than gold would whilst anyone carrying platinum ought to be afraid of being robbed purely because those that see it think they're absolutely loaded...

I've been thinking of using UK currency as a comparison, so a small copper piece being the same as 1p, a large copper piece being the same as 2p, a small silver piece being the same as 5p with a large silver piece being the same as 10p.
Then we go to the small electrum piece being the same as 20p a large electrum piece being the same as 50p with a small gold coin being the same as £1 and a large gold coin being £2 a small platinum piece being the same as £5 and a alrge platinum piece being the same as £10...

How are you valuating a bronze coin?
 

TwinBahamut said:
Exactly. For example, as it stands a horse or a good suit of armor cost hundreds of gold pieces. Imagine that instead they costed hundreds of silver pieces, but could be bought with only one or two gold pieces. It means you need fewer coins to purchase meaningful objects.

I think you are missing the point. In a silver standard (heck even in a gold standard), there *aren't* any gold coins that the average person will ever hold in their hand, with most gold coins being relegated to some king's vaults - and then more than likely as gold ingots instead of coins - as a reserve for all the money actually circulating - thus the ability to issue, say, 10,000 silver coins (at the standard 50 coins/lb in D&D), while only needing 20 pounds of gold to back it.

The light warhorse in the PHB costs 150 gp. That means you'll have to carry 1500 sp worth of coins (30 pounds of coins).

It should be interesting to note that the pre-decimal British £sd system issued primarily pence as the main coinage, with more valuable shillings also circulated. There were no pound coins (gold or silver) until the issue of the gold sovereign in 1489. Given that the sovereign represented 240 pence worth of silver (there was no silver pound coin at the time) and the ratio was roughly 12/1 (on average), that means that gold is 12 times as valuable as silver. Similarly, in D&D, gold is 10x as valuable as silver, so there really shouldn't be very many gold coins at all.

What the gp in D&D represents (same as it does real-world), in conjunction with the sp, is fungibility. Nothing more.

In order for the silver standard to work in D&D, you have to eliminate gold coins from circulation while keeping all book prices in gold (i.e. that 150 gp warhorse now costs 1500 sp.) Note that the "old" sp is still silver, but just a different size/weight coin than the silver gp coin. What this means from a practicality standpoint is that, other than starting equipment/money, all treasure is gonna be silver or copper coins, which means the PC's buying power goes down. Which is fine when you consider that one of the probably goals of everyone here (me included) who wants a silver standard is to make buying/selling magic items much more difficult.

The really interesting thing that I don't think has ever been covered is in regards to the 50 coins/pound standard in D&D - the density of gold is nearly twice that of silver, and copper is less than twice as dense as gold. So - that gp (at 50 coins/pound) weighs around 9 grams, which makes the volume of that coin roughly roughly .5 cm^3. The size of the coin in the PHB is roughly 1.17 inches (2.9718 cm) across, which means that, for the given volume of .5 cm^3, the coin would have to be .0067 cm in thickness (roughly 1/37 of an inch thick). At those thicknesses, your gold coins are gonna soon get melded together while you carry them and handle them.

Going back to the 1st edition 10 gp coins/pound, each coin weighs roughly 45 grams, and for the given 2.9718 cm diameter in the 3.5 PHB, the coins become a respectable roughly 1/8 inch thick - much more believable. More importantly, this is nearly identical to the modern British one-pound sterling coin (granted it is mostly Cu-Zn, but is still roughly the same size and weight as a real gold guinea coin).

Basically - for the fungibility (1 gp = 10 sp), the amount of coins you can carry per pound of weight is much greater for silver due to the difference in density between silver and gold and the gold/silver ratio. That is - 10 sp coins equal 1 gp coin, but if the coins are all the same size per the 3e PHB, then you should be able to either carry 50 gp at one pound, or 1000 sp at one pound.
 
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3catcircus said:
I think you are missing the point. In a silver standard (heck even in a gold standard), there *aren't* any gold coins that the average person will ever hold in their hand, with most gold coins being relegated to some king's vaults - and then more than likely as gold ingots instead of coins - as a reserve for all the money actually circulating - thus the ability to issue, say, 10,000 silver coins (at the standard 50 coins/lb in D&D), while only needing 20 pounds of gold to back it.
You don't need a reserve when the money in circulation is already made of precious metals worth exactly as much as their weight implies. You only need a reserve when the money in circulation is, say, paper bank notes, which say they're worth a certain amount of gold or silver, because they're a written promise to deliver that gold or silver upon demand at the bank.
 

mmadsen said:
You don't need a reserve when the money in circulation is already made of precious metals worth exactly as much as their weight implies. You only need a reserve when the money in circulation is, say, paper bank notes, which say they're worth a certain amount of gold or silver, because they're a written promise to deliver that gold or silver upon demand at the bank.

True, assuming you don't worry about real-world things like debasement of coinage in order to mint more coins from the same amount of specie, which will lead to inflation, which will require that that 15 gp longsword might now cost 20 gp.
 

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