Gold or Silver Standard?

[3catcircus]

Why? I don't see your logic at all...

Again, I don't think you understand what the effect on the game that I want happens to be. Doing what I said results in the exact effect I want.

You wanted to change the book values and change the values of coinage, as per the following posts you made:

Setting the new game under a silver standard has nothing to do with absurd twists of fantasy economics and setting verisimilitude, as it simply involves altering the costs in the DMG and the expected value of any given coin.

TwinBahamut]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.

Err... what? Nonsense. If I want to say that the new silver piece is equal in value to the old gold piece, and that the new gold piece is worth 20-100 times the value of the new silver piece, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that it can't be so.

Changing the book value of items so they are in silver pieces, but then making silver pieces so much more valuable does nothing much at all. You've devalued items, but overvalued coinage. This isn't using a silver standard, it is acting like the Federal Reserve Bank, manipulating the economy.

If that is what you want to do - fine, but it isn't basing the game on a silver standard.

You actually have to do one, but not both. Otherwise, your coinage becomes fiat money.

 

[Lackhand]

You wanted to change the book values and change the values of coinage, as per the following posts you made:
....
If that is what you want to do - fine, but it isn't basing the game on a silver standard.

You actually have to do one, but not both. Otherwise, your coinage becomes fiat money.

Sure it is! It's just changing the relative value of silver due to the actual mineral occurring in a different frequency than it does here on earth, or being more easily extractable.

It's not a fiat money in the sense that I think that you're using it, because you're not looking at the relative scarcity of the specie it's being applied to; if instead of Gold and Silver we spoke of Goldesque and Silveresque, it'd be a lot clearer what we're talking about doing here (because I agree with Twin Bahamut).

Because honestly, the prices at which things are pegged aren't that realistic to start with. It's already fiat money: X coins are worth Y goods because Gary Gygax (/Monte Cook/Mike Mearls) says so.
There's nothing wrong with saying "Silver economy, in which the base coin is silver, and you will primarily be interacting with silver coins. A longsword costs 15 of these coins; a horse costs 75 of these coins, and so on".

 

[mmadsen]

Changing the book value of items so they are in silver pieces, but then making silver pieces so much more valuable does nothing much at all. You've devalued items, but overvalued coinage. This isn't using a silver standard, it is acting like the Federal Reserve Bank, manipulating the economy.

If that is what you want to do - fine, but it isn't basing the game on a silver standard.

You actually have to do one, but not both. Otherwise, your coinage becomes fiat money.

You seem to be confusing world-building, where we decide what our imaginary game world will be like, with policy, where the state decides what the rules in its jurisdiction will be.

If, as DM or game-designer, I declare, "A longsword will now cost 15 florins," that is very, very different from declaring, as king within that game world, "A longsword will now cost 15 florins."

 

[TwinBahamut]

You wanted to change the book values and change the values of coinage, as per the following posts you made:

Changing the book value of items so they are in silver pieces, but then making silver pieces so much more valuable does nothing much at all. You've devalued items, but overvalued coinage. This isn't using a silver standard, it is acting like the Federal Reserve Bank, manipulating the economy.

If that is what you want to do - fine, but it isn't basing the game on a silver standard.

You actually have to do one, but not both. Otherwise, your coinage becomes fiat money.

Err, first, I already said that the use of the term "silver standard" is completely different in this thread than it is in real-world economics. After all, this is just a discussion of preferred relative values of coinage in a game system. Real world economics have absolutely nothing to do with this.

I am not manipulating the economy because there is no economy to manipulate.

Again, I have to say that you are completely missing my point.

 

[3catcircus]

Sure it is! It's just changing the relative value of silver due to the actual mineral occurring in a different frequency than it does here on earth, or being more easily extractable.

It's not a fiat money in the sense that I think that you're using it, because you're not looking at the relative scarcity of the specie it's being applied to; if instead of Gold and Silver we spoke of Goldesque and Silveresque, it'd be a lot clearer what we're talking about doing here (because I agree with Twin Bahamut).

Because honestly, the prices at which things are pegged aren't that realistic to start with. It's already fiat money: X coins are worth Y goods because Gary Gygax (/Monte Cook/Mike Mearls) says so.
There's nothing wrong with saying "Silver economy, in which the base coin is silver, and you will primarily be interacting with silver coins. A longsword costs 15 of these coins; a horse costs 75 of these coins, and so on".

Granted, the prices aren't realistic, but there is no reason why your D&D economy can't be self-consistent, no?

Saying "A longsword costs 15 of these coins..." is fine, but my point is that the equivalent of the "copper piece" will be the most heavily traded coin, not the equivalent of the "silver piece," so most of the time, the longsword that costs 15 "silver pieces" really means that the purchaser is going to hand over 150 "copper pieces" (assuming 10:1 like we do right now in D&D).

I guess a more concrete example would be that the blacksmith says that the standard noble's sword costs 4 shillings. What this means is that most of the time, a buyer is going to hand over 80 pence, not 4 shillings. For a comparison of wages, the average daily wage for a thatcher between 1261 and 1520 was about 4 pence (starting a 2d in 1261 and ending up at 5.25d by 1520). The average knight earned about 2s/day in 1316. (This is all from the medieval price list on Fordham Univ's website.)

So - the hero makes 40 pence/day - 10x what the commoner makes. Very similar to D&D, but unlike D&D, the knight in the real-world is most likely actually carrying around 40 coins instead of 2.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Fordham's is your friend. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html
For the economy side of world building its actually extremely easy to set prices. Define the currency system and relative worth of various levels of currency. Like the entire copper-silver-gold/pence-shilling-pound array and fix the price of a staple item. I prefer to use the price of grain for this purpose. Then pick a historical period and use that as a baseline to determine the prices of other goods relative to the staple serving as baseline.

EDIT: Just saw 3catcircus's last post beat me too it. But at the same time the issue of which coins are being USED is effectively on another axis from what most of the posters here are discussing. They're talking about setting the relative pricing and value of items in context to the monetary system. Also working at a more fundamental level than the price control via economic system manipulation level they're not saying x shall be worth y as a king would, they're saying balance of commodities between x and y is z.

 

[3catcircus]

Fordham's is your friend. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html
For the economy side of world building its actually extremely easy to set prices. Define the currency system and relative worth of various levels of currency. Like the entire copper-silver-gold/pence-shilling-pound array and fix the price of a staple item. I prefer to use the price of grain for this purpose. Then pick a historical period and use that as a baseline to determine the prices of other goods relative to the staple serving as baseline.

EDIT: Just saw 3catcircus's last post beat me too it. But at the same time the issue of which coins are being USED is effectively on another axis from what most of the posters here are discussing. They're talking about setting the relative pricing and value of items in context to the monetary system. Also working at a more fundamental level than the price control via economic system manipulation level they're not saying x shall be worth y as a king would, they're saying balance of commodities between x and y is z.

True, but the problem is, what most people are discussing does nothing to change the dynamics of the game. Saying "a silver piece is now worth what a gold piece was worth and a gold piece is now worth what 20 gold pieces was worth" and then turning around and saying "change all book prices to the next lower category" means that you are shifting the scale without changing the actual values involved.

By making the prices shift while at the same time making the coins more valuable as TwinBahamut suggested, you aren't making gold more valuable - you are making silver more valuable. The only easy-easy way to make it more valuable is to keep the book prices as-is while removing all of the platinum and the majority of the gold coinage from circulation. You are artificially creating the use of the silver piece as the basis of the economy this way, but it isn't what the definition of a silver standard is. A silver standard only means that you are using a set quantity of silver to define the basic unit of currency. By doing what TwinBahamut suggests, you are forcing prices to fit the money instead of the other way around.

The original intent of the thread was to figure out if it made sense for people who are far apart and disconnected from one another to have gold as the primary medium of exchange, with JoeG's point being that copper made no sense as the standard since prices are in gold, but making silver the standard would allow other types of metals to be used for coins while making gold and platinum really valuable.

The problem is one of, I think, semantics - due to the fact that the coins are referred to by their metal type, rather than some different name. "What do you mean that I can't use gp to buy this 50 gp armor?!?!" It is much easier to think of the coins as penny, dime, dollar. You can still charge $1 for something, but if all of the dollar coins/bills are removed from circulation, the buyer may be forced to pay in pennies or dimes (with nickels and quarters and half-dollars being fractional denominations.) A real example of what I am talking about is the US $2 bill (ignoring the fact that it is fiat money). There are $2 bills around, but most of them are sitting in banks rather than in retailers' tills. Wanna buy a $2 soda? Give the cashier two $1 bills. Same amount of money, different amount of physical pieces of money.

 

[Traycor]

I don't see this having any effect whatsoever.

Smaller currencies will always be useless to high-level adventurers. Changing teh standard currency will do nothing to change that.

Well, at current prices, anything except gold is useless to even lvl 1 characters. Why have silver (or for that matter copper) at all if they will never be used?

Change the standard I say. A copper piece should be a day's wages for most folks.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

True, but the problem is, what most people are discussing does nothing to change the dynamics of the game. Saying "a silver piece is now worth what a gold piece was worth and a gold piece is now worth what 20 gold pieces was worth" and then turning around and saying "change all book prices to the next lower category" means that you are shifting the scale without changing the actual values involved.

That is so incomprehensibly wrong. They HAVE changed the value, to use your example the longsword used to be worth 15/50lb of gold, now is worth 15/50lb of silver, while gold has gone from being worth 10 to 20lb of silver per pound. In short the sword has gone from being worth .3lb of gold to being worth .015lb of gold. Massively increasing the value of gold. You have increased the value of silver yes but also of gold. Both are now worth much more as can be seen by the decreased value of commodities in relation to set quantities of these metals.

 

[3catcircus]

That is so incomprehensibly wrong. They HAVE changed the value, to use your example the longsword used to be worth 15/50lb of gold, now is worth 15/50lb of silver, while gold has gone from being worth 10 to 20lb of silver per pound. In short the sword has gone from being worth .3lb of gold to being worth .015lb of gold. Massively increasing the value of gold. You have increased the value of silver yes but also of gold. Both are now worth much more as can be seen by the decreased value of commodities in relation to set quantities of these metals.

And it won't matter one bit if the PCs are still carrying around x amount of silver instead of x amount of gold, doing what you propose.

The fighter gets 150 gp as average starting wealth in the current 3.x rules. Now, what you are proposing is to give him an average of 150 sp. But that 15 gp longsword now costs 15 sp. It does *nothing* to change the ability of PCs to lug around a silver mine with them, flood a town with cheap silver, and spend like a drunken sailor buying magic items (which are now priced in sp).

What I am saying is the following:

The fighter still gets an average 150 gp worth starting money. Only now it is 1500 sp. That longsword still costs 15 gp, but he has to carry more weight in money to pay for it. Instead of finding 1,000 gp in the dungeon, he finds 1,000 sp, but that +1 longsword still costs 2,315 gp, so it is gonna take him a bunch more trips to dungeons to afford one (or pay the smithy in installments or on layaway). That loaf of bread still only costs 2cp, though, so the commoner, making 1 sp/day (in the form of 10 cp/day), can still buy 5 loafs of bread to feed his family for the week.

Look - saying everything costs less but people don't carry gold is fine if you want to do that.

I prefer a more realistic (in the sense that anything in D&D could every be realistic) approach to money, based upon how people really interact with money. How many people will ever see a $1000 bill? A $100 bill? A $1 bill? When you withdraw $100 from the bank - do they normally give you a single $100 bill, or a mix of $20s, $10s, and $5s?