D&D 5E How much is 1.000.000 GP?

[CleverNickName]

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

Let's see.

• A goldpiece is approximately 1/50 of a pound, so 1 million GP is about 20,000 pounds, or 100 tons of gold.
• In an average gold mine, you get one ounce of gold from 1 ton of gold ore. Some ores are richer than others, but this is a good baseline. So to get 100 tons of gold, you would need to dig and process 3.2 million tons of ore. Ooof.
• It takes about 10-20 years to construct a mine: dig the shafts, lay in the tracks, build the smelters, lay the water pipes, etc. Once the mine has been constructed, they can begin extracting ore. But let's assume the dwarves already have the mine, and it's already in operation.
• More people doesn't necessarily mean more ore: only so many workers can fit in a mine tunnel at the same time. Adding more tunnels won't necessarily help, unless there are more ore veins to follow. (This is one of the reasons why modern gold mines are usually strip-mines. More room to work, safer, easier to construct...)
• 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.
• Once the ore has been dug, it needs to be processed. A modern ore processing facility can process about 7,000 tons of ore per day, using cyanidic acid baths and such. I don't have numbers for smelting, but I imagine it would be much slower as well. So let's again assume that the dwarves have the D&D equivalent of modern chemistry and metallurgy (magic furnaces, alchemical baths, etc.) and call it 3,500 tons of ore per day.
• SO: to dig 3.2 million tons of ore, your dwarves would need 160 days, or just over 5 months (not counting the 10-20 years needed to build the mine in the first place.) But it takes much longer to process 3.2 million tons of ore into gold: at 3500 tons per day, they would need 9,15 days, or about 2.5 years. In 201 years, that mine would produce about 80 million gold pieces.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: Corrected an embarrassing math error.

 

[Ancalagon]

Question speaks for itself but for some background:
Im creating a oneshot in which Mammon (Archfiend of greed) has tricked a dwarven lord into accepting a deal that reads: "your mines will have undepletable riches for 201 generations at the cost of 1% of the total wealth gathered + a fee of 1M GP per generation". Obviously, the Dwarven lord figured that since dwarves live 350+ years, obtaining 1m GP in a generation seemed easy enough. But Mammon didnt specify that it were dwarven generations, and took ants as his generation-benchmark creatures. so now after about 201 years he comes to collect and obviously the dwarves are f****d. so the PC's (its a high level oneshot) are about to ruin Mammon's day.
The dwarven city is home to about 15k residents

I just have no real concept of how much wealth can be obtained from an endless mine in 201 years. Would the dwarves be doomed? or would they be like "you lied but here is your 201m GP and now piss off?" I at least want my oneshot to be somewhat believable...

All right! You have, perhaps, the "best" person at replying this kind of question. There are questions that need answer here:

1: How much gold is 201 million, physically? Is this even possible?

2: How much gold is 201 million, economically? Can the dwarves realistically "save" 1 million gold a year?

1 is easy. The "default" weight for coins in D&D is 50 coins a pound... but historically, that's a big high. So let's modify that to 100 coins a pound. 201 million gold is thus 2.01 (so 2) million pounds or 1000 ton of gold. So physically this is not an incredible amount - it's not a lump of gold bigger than a mountain or something ridiculous like that (actual volume, if it was a solid block, is about 53 cubic meters, roughly speaking).

Is this possible? Well the california gold rush produced about 3700 tons of gold, so as long as the vein is quite rich, 1000 tons is not an insane amount.

2: The economics.

Now that's a challenge. Basically, you want to know if it's realistic for a community to save 1 million gp per year. Thankfully for you, I've already done the math:

Reasonable rewards

So, a town of 3000 people has a trouble with brigands. They offer a reward... how much should it be? What is reasonable? Can we "figure i...

slugsandsilver.blogspot.com

this is pretty complicated (only go to the link if you feel like doing math ha) but basically in an "ordinary" community, the average citizen contributes 22 gp in taxes to the community. And about 10% of that is available for use by the community in case of a serious threat- guards have to be paid, roads maintained etc.

so 15 000 * 10% * 22 gp = 33 000 gp/year... This is not good.

However, this is for an ordinary town, not a GOLD MINE. So let's check assumptions etc.


a: A dwarven gold mine can be a very wealthy place. I would at least triple the base amount. so the 33 000 becomes 66 000 gp

b: I assumed that the default community had to play taxes to some overlord somewhere else (say, the king). Dwarven communities are usually preeety independent, so this money transfer outside the community isn't happening and I would therefore double the tax basin.

But this extra money is "more" available than the baseline tax (90% of which is devoted to "running" the community). So instead of only 10% being available, let us say that 80% is available (the rest is to pay for security for the huge fortune)

so 15 000 * 80%*22*3 = 792 000 gp

We are now near the million GP/year mark. So you are good to go!

I think the problem of course is why hasn't a dragon come in and claimed the fortune

 

[Ancalagon]

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

Let's see.

• A goldpiece is approximately 1/50 of a pound, so 1 million GP is about 20,000 pounds, or 1,000 tons of gold.
• In an average gold mine, you get one ounce of gold from 1 ton of gold ore. Some ores are richer than others, but this is a good baseline. So to get 1000 tons of gold, you would need to dig and process 32 million tons of ore. Ooof.
• It takes about 10-20 years to construct a mine: dig the shafts, lay in the tracks, build the smelters, lay the water pipes, etc. Once the mine has been constructed, they can begin extracting ore. But let's assume the dwarves already have the mine, and it's already in operation.
• More people doesn't necessarily mean more ore: only so many workers can fit in a mine tunnel at the same time. Adding more tunnels won't necessarily help, unless there are more ore veins to follow. (This is one of the reasons why modern gold mines are usually strip-mines. More room to work, safer, easier to construct...)
• 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.
• Once the ore has been dug, it needs to be processed. A modern ore processing facility can process about 7,000 tons of ore per day, using cyanidic acid baths and such. I don't have numbers for smelting, but I imagine it would be much slower as well. So let's again assume that the dwarves have the D&D equivalent of modern chemistry and metallurgy (magic furnaces, alchemical baths, etc.) and call it 3,500 tons of ore per day.
• SO: to dig 32 million tons of ore, your dwarves would need 1600 days, or just over 4 years (not counting the 10-20 years needed to build the mine in the first place.) But it takes much longer to process 32 million tons of ore into gold: at 3500 tons per day, they would need 9,150 days, or about 25 years.

Hope this helps!

You know, yours and mine answers combine is preeeety thorough, thank you

 

[Torquar]

The dwarves can lawyer back and make their gold pieces really small (a grain).

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

 

[J-H]

1 Milllion GP ?
it's Half of my fortune that I lost during the War of Rwanda !

As I scrolled, I expected this to continue. "My fortune is locked up in a bank in Rwanda, and I need a trusted individual with impeccable credentials to transfer the funds to. I will pay you ten percent (10%) of the amount of funds transferred for your services in this matter.
Please respond soonest with your banking information.
Best Regards,
Scammer."

 

[Faolyn]

Even if their mines are inexhaustible, they're presumably not just going to be taking that gold, milling it into coins, and then sticking it in a massive Scrooge McDuck vault. They're going to spend it.

Could be fun, though. Instead of a water park they have a gold piece park.

 

[MarkB]

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

Let's see.

• A goldpiece is approximately 1/50 of a pound, so 1 million GP is about 20,000 pounds, or 1,000 tons of gold.
• In an average gold mine, you get one ounce of gold from 1 ton of gold ore. Some ores are richer than others, but this is a good baseline. So to get 1000 tons of gold, you would need to dig and process 32 million tons of ore. Ooof.
• It takes about 10-20 years to construct a mine: dig the shafts, lay in the tracks, build the smelters, lay the water pipes, etc. Once the mine has been constructed, they can begin extracting ore. But let's assume the dwarves already have the mine, and it's already in operation.
• More people doesn't necessarily mean more ore: only so many workers can fit in a mine tunnel at the same time. Adding more tunnels won't necessarily help, unless there are more ore veins to follow. (This is one of the reasons why modern gold mines are usually strip-mines. More room to work, safer, easier to construct...)
• 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.
• Once the ore has been dug, it needs to be processed. A modern ore processing facility can process about 7,000 tons of ore per day, using cyanidic acid baths and such. I don't have numbers for smelting, but I imagine it would be much slower as well. So let's again assume that the dwarves have the D&D equivalent of modern chemistry and metallurgy (magic furnaces, alchemical baths, etc.) and call it 3,500 tons of ore per day.
• SO: to dig 32 million tons of ore, your dwarves would need 1600 days, or just over 4 years (not counting the 10-20 years needed to build the mine in the first place.) But it takes much longer to process 32 million tons of ore into gold: at 3500 tons per day, they would need 9,150 days, or about 25 years. In 201 years, that mine would produce about 8 million gold pieces.

Hope this helps!

The ore processing facility isn't a bottleneck unless it needs to be. You could just build several, running in parallel.

 

[CleverNickName]

The ore processing facility isn't a bottleneck unless it needs to be. You could just build several, running in parallel.

Yep, that is true. There might only be one mine that doesn't deplete for 200 years...but that doesn't mean there has to only be one processing facility.

 

[NotAYakk]

So the real trick is, just like Mammon lawyered it into ant generations (I'd basically have it be a grammarical trick; the "your generation" means "a generation of one of you present", and there was literally an ant in one of the contracting dwarves backpacks), the dwarves can lawyer back and make it ant scale gold pieces.

An ant weights about 4*10^-3 grams. A dwarf about 10^5 g. So ants are 1/4 * 10^8 times smaller than dwarves.

210,000,000 ant-sized gp is thus about half a gp in mass.

The real trick is Mammon isn't about to tell them this. Mammon won't even tell them that it was an ant that rules-lawyered them into being able to call in the mark. Mammon just states the compact is up, that they owe 1% of the total wealth gathered plus 210 million separate gold pieces, as specified in the contract, by (suitably short period of time).

The contract specified specific locations for each.

Mammon is hoping that the dwarves don't realize that the 210 million gp is actually a tiny pile of gold dust. Note that it must be 210 (or more) million separate pieces of gold, so a single gp won't work.

The bit where the generations is based off the contracting parties, and the contracting parties are those who arrived with the dwarves and where present at the signing, and that the gold pieces are defined as customary coin size for the contracting parties of standard and reasonable size, is spread throughout the contract.

So untangling the fact that one of the contracting parties was an ant, and that the gold piece definition is tied to that, and that the pile of gold dust fullfills the contract, becomes the game to play.

Another twist is that the Dwarves, not being morons, got a Modron to audit the contract for "is there anything in here that would make it nearly impossible to fullfill". The modron found it would be easy, as 1% of the gold mined plus a small pile of gold dust after 210 years wouldn't be hard at all. The Modron didn't detail why it was a reasonable contract, that wasn't their job.

The Dwarves, also not being morons, arranged for an arbitration via a Modron. So Mammon's delivery of the demand comes guaranteed by said Modron, which should really confuse the Dwarves. The Modron does not explain the contract or the interpretation that makes this valid, but what it does say should include some clues; to the Modron, the fact that the generations are that of an ant, and the like, are obvious. It is written right there (in the huge complex contract).

Mammon will have gone off and arranged for some red herrings. But some of those red herrings will provide clues for the PCs to work this out.

Some clues could include:

1. The ant colony is still intact, and its continued existence matters. Maybe the dwarves are using giant versions of the ants to do some of the mining, as underground beasts of burden; they use the ant forge to turn tiny common ants into large laborers.

2. The death of the original contracting parties and all of their descendants is one way to avoid the contract. They get consigned to hell, but the city gets off. At least one faction of the dwarves should be doing this. But if they miss the ants, it won't work. Wiping out the royal family ... doesn't make it fail. Include divination methods to find all issue of the original dwarves so the players realize they hit a dead end, and that there are other contracting parties that where not the original dwarves. Another clue.

3. Maybe the deal has multiple default clauses. Like, after 1 week, the contract specifies a price of 1/1024 of the contracting and descendent body and souls to Mammon, which he turns into hell-warped dwarves ... who ride hell-warped ants. This default doubles every week. The ants being hell-warped is a clue.

4. The Modron-judge will answer 1 yes/no question each day stated by one of the contracting parties representatives if there is a descendant of one of the contracting parties in the room as part of the deal during the "default" stage. Any ant in the room makes this happen to the first question uttered. This is another possible clue.

Mammon can engage in red herrings. Some of them should involve screwups. Maybe the Fey are involved, paying off a debt to Mammon. Maybe using magic to make more dwarves become blood relatives of the original contracting parties? And one of their requirements is not to cause damage in the area where the ant hive is (not mentioning the ant hive by name). Another fey sneaks in and tries to steal some ants as a backup plan (which the PCs can run into and get suspicious of).

 

[was]

maybe they found a priceless gem....something w/awesome magical properties?