D&D 5E How much is 1.000.000 GP?

[UngeheuerLich]

Mammon also didn't specify the size of the coins. So if it is ant sized generations, it is ant sized coins.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Mammon also didn't specify the size of the coins. So if it is ant sized generations, it is ant sized coins.

On the other hand, an estimated guess is 100 dollar per gp. So even 21m gp is just 2 billion dollars, not too much for the owner of a gold mine.

 

[Ancalagon]

"If Ants be the unit by which ye measure time, then Ant-scaled coins ye shall have by the billions!"

or you could do that, yes

 

[tomBitonti]

How about … O Mammon, your gold is ready. As you are appreciating an accurate accounting, so as to know you are not being cheated, and that the dwarves can be shown to be scrupulous in fulfilling their contracts, the official counter has begun counting the delivery. This is of course being triple checked. Our estimate is that 1000 gp will be counted per hour. So as to avoid overtaxing the official counter, which increases the likelihood of errors, a strict limit of 8 hours per day is set for counting. An abbreviated counting may be requested, but the dwarves shall be held blameless if this introduces errors.

TomB

 

[MattW]

It was foolishly greedy to specify Gold Pieces. Those are coins.

There's nothing to say that the dwarves have to use PURE gold in their coins. In fact, it's really hard to make pure gold coins (they're usually an alloy of some kind). Therefore, I suggest that 10% gold would be more than fair. Yes, this could lead to a MASSIVE inflation problem, but that will be quickly resolved when Mammon takes all this money "out of circulation".

Mammon really should stop using abbreviations.

 

[akr71]

• A goldpiece is approximately 1/50 of a pound, so 1 million GP is about 20,000 pounds, or 100 tons of gold.

Shouldn't that be 10 tons? Still a huge amount for sure.

 

[jgsugden]

Some adjustments you might consider to explain the situation:

The mines were connected by Mammsy to the Elemental Plane of Earth in a rich deposit of gold.

While undepleteable, there was not specification on the yield per day, right? Perhaps the trick was not the ant/dwarf generation issue, but just that the yield per day was muuuuuch smaller than expected.

 

[MarkB]

Some adjustments you might consider to explain the situation:

The mines were connected by Mammsy to the Elemental Plane of Earth in a rich deposit of gold.

While undepleteable, there was not specification on the yield per day, right? Perhaps the trick was not the ant/dwarf generation issue, but just that the yield per day was muuuuuch smaller than expected.

Ah, so Mammon's plans were nearly seamless.

 

[Mannahnin]

Did someone ask an engineering question? Civil engineer here to help!

• Modern equipment (explosives, power drills, bulldozers, diesel-powered ore hoppers, front-end loaders...) can dig and process about 50,000 to 100,000 tons of ore per day. I don't have numbers for manually digging through rock with pickaxes and shovels, but I imagine it would be much, much slower (pick your favorite number here; I'd estimate 5-10 tons per day.) But let's say your dwarves have the D&D equivalent of heavy equipment: magical pickaxes, steam engines, golems, etc., and let's wave our hands and call it 20k tons per day.

Awesome post. But don't we all know the answer to this?

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The current highest output gold mine in the real world (with double the output of its nearest competitor) is the Muruntau mine in Uzbekistan which produces 73 million grams per year, or about 160,000 pounds, or about 8 million D&D gold pieces. Now this is the biggest mine in the world and using full on modern, industrial strip mining operation. Adjusting down for lack of technology and having perhaps only one of the richest veins of gold in your fantasy world rather than the richest, and then adjusting up for fantastical dwarven mining aptitude I think giving their mine an output of a million gold pieces a year is reasonable enough, making the Dwarven interpretation of the deal be that they would set aside a year's output from each generation and Mammon's plan being that he would demand exactly all the gold they've ever produced and protest that it wasn't his fault they made a bad deal and didn't save up their money. Mammon's actual plan is presumably, of course, to have them default on the deal and demand their souls or what have you.