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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kid Charlemagne" data-source="post: 4013182" data-attributes="member: 93">Looking in Wikipedia (and we all know Wikipedia is always right) the valuation in pre-1492 times was between 6-1 and 12-1.  After that, largely due to the discoveries of huge mines in South America, the value of silver decreased.  For ease of use, and because it stays within the general bounds of historical reality, I'd pick the same 10-1 ratio of silver to gold that D&D currently uses.  In real life, the ratio varied of course, but in game I wouldn't worry about that unless it worked for a particular campaign angle I was shooting for - even the 10's of thousands of silver coins the PC's are likely to bandy about won't affect the economy of a large kingdom.  It takes the budgets of Kings and Queens to do that (one African King caused the value of gold to be depressed in Egypt for something like 14 years after he passed through, he was spending so much of it).Gold coins tended to be hoarded, but they did still get used occasionally - I would assume for ease of use that one could easily spend gold on big ticket items like horses and armor.  I would probably also have coins similar to the spanish pieces of eight exist (break them into pieces to pay for stuff), although I wouldn't ask my players to track that level of detail!</blockquote>