How do monsters spend gold pieces?

[Bubbalicious]

Undead strippers!!!
Toss them gold and they peel off skin and body parts until there's nothing left.
(Orcs find this particularly amusing!)

 

[Emirikol]

As to why UNintelligent monsters collect treasure there are two options. Either, "Ooh! Sparkly!" or the valuables are what's left lying about after the creatures that actually BROUGHT it there are killed/eaten.

I don't buy the "ooh, sparkly" argument. If they were interested in that stuff they wouldn't live in dull, drab dungeons full of dull-drab walls and dull-drab caves.

jh

 

[Crothian]

I don't buy the "ooh, sparkly" argument. If they were interested in that stuff they wouldn't live in dull, drab dungeons full of dull-drab walls and dull-drab caves.

It''s because of all that dull drab they live in they want the sparkly. If everything was sparkly in their life it wouldn't be as rare and cool and worthy to keep.

 

[Cedric]

I don't buy the "ooh, sparkly" argument. If they were interested in that stuff they wouldn't live in dull, drab dungeons full of dull-drab walls and dull-drab caves.

jh

There is a distinct lack of shiny, sparkly things in nature that would compare to a gold piece. There are numerous small mammals, birds and the like who collect all of the shiny bobbles they find (buttons, coins, fish hooks, broken glass, beads, etc.). I see no reason why there wouldn't be unintelligent or semi-intelligent monsters who do the same thing.

 

[Sejs]

How do monsters spend gold pieces?

On life insurance.

 

[Sejs]

Anyway, regarding the actual question -

This is just a subject dear to my heart: why do we think that monsters place value on gold coins when they have absolutely no use for them? How are all these PC's finding gold in the hands of orcs when they wouldn't have accepted any payment from evil wizards in anything other than elvish slaves, rusty armor, swords and ale?

For example: Ogres. WHERE are they going to spend their bag of coins? Wouldn't it be more valuable to get a bag of live elves, or swords, or a new axe or club? Coins? We humanize monsters and think that they covet coins. For example: DRAGONS. There is no reason why they should be even remotely interested in coins. Oh, to lay on them? B.S. Why not lay on iron chips instead? I propose there's no reason why non-coin commodities wouldn't be exponentially more valuable to any given non-D&D-PC-race and gold would be laughed at (or eaten).

Are our fantasy games a farce by handing out coins?

jh

First off, it sounds like you're operating on the assumption that polite human/elven/etc civilization is the only civilization out there, and that all those orcs, ogres, kobolds and the like live in complete isolation, except for occasionally terrorizing polite society.

Why do orcs and ogres have any interest in coin? To barter things from other groups that they lack the ability to produce on their own, or the inclination to steal. An orc tribe might have hunters enough to provide themselves with food and skins, but they arn't much for mining or smithing. Ah, but they know a tribe of kobolds that is, and who they lost a lot of warriors to last time they tried raiding, thanks to all the kobolds' traps and poison. So the orcs trade some food and raiding spoils (including coin) to the kobolds in exchange for nice heavy iron swords for all the orc warriors.

An ogre might want to keep wealth around as a status symbol. Look how mighty and fearsome he is - tribute and spoils everywhere are a testiment to his prowess.

Why do dragons care about coin? Because they're two things: they're greedy, and they're smart. Pay mercenaries and agents, mess with polite society from behind the scenes, ego-stroke ala the ogre, pay for all those defenses on their lair that require someone else to put them in, so on and so forth.

 

[jeffh]

While they sometimes provoke good discussions (and maybe that's the real point of them), I never like your actual polls. The options always seem either slanted toward a particular view, or non-exhaustive so that my answer is missing, or not mutually exclusive so that I couldn't pick one and hope for the result to be accurate, or too cute so that all of them seem wrong, or just plain unclear. This particular one seems to have every single one of those problems. Interesting discussion, but I sure hope you don't expect the poll results to actually reflect anything...

 

[blargney the second]

Eberron.

 

[GreatLemur]

While they sometimes provoke good discussions (and maybe that's the real point of them), I never like your actual polls. The options always seem either slanted toward a particular view, or non-exhaustive so that my answer is missing, or not mutually exclusive so that I couldn't pick one and hope for the result to be accurate, or too cute so that all of them seem wrong, or just plain unclear. This particular one seems to have every single one of those problems. Interesting discussion, but I sure hope you don't expect the poll results to actually reflect anything...

Yeah, I've got to agree, in this instance. This poll is lacking some very important--and, in my view, obvious--answers.

[ ] - They spend the gold among themselves. If they're smart enough to wear armor, they're smart enough to understand the usefulness of a token economy.

[ ] - Precious metals are precious metals. Primitive humans loved gold almost as much as modern ones, so why can't goblins?

[ ] - They spend it the same way that humans do. There's no reason to assume the whole campaign setting map is divided up into two halves--good guys and bad guys--with no civilization at all on the "bad guy" side of the line. In a more logical world, for every dwarven paladin and every murderous orc barbarian, there are thousands of just plain regular folks, who are all more interested in surviving than in what the other guy's "alignment" box says. Why wouldn't a human merchant trade with a gnoll tribe? If they're truly evil, it's probably a bad idea to refuse them, anyway.

...Not that I expect an answer as long as that last one to actually be included in a poll.

 

[haakon1]

Those who trade with the humanoids are interesting.

I figure they fall in 4 camps:

- Bandits, necromancers, and others who seek alliances with humanoid tribes or are trying to provoke conflict.

- Unscrupulous frontier traders, like the bad guys in Westerns who sold firewater and Winchesters to the Apache, or in a more sophisticated version the bad guys in "Lord of War" and "Casino Royale". I believe it was Soviet Premier Krushchev who said capitalism would fall because it would sell the hangman the rope to hang it.

- "Civilized" humanoids who act as go-betweens between human and humanoid society. In my campaign, there's a goblin trader who is actually not evil and doesn't deal in arms. Definitely a dangerous line of work -- the PCs rescued him from evil humanoids who thought he was a spy, and the humans don't trust him either. Half-orcs could certainly do this sort of thing, and really could be of any alignment and motivation (from can't we all get along peacemakers to unscrupulous merchants of death to agents provacateurs).

- Scared border humans, seeking to make nice with the humanoid threat.