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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1640483" data-attributes="member: 10201">Well, now i'm not sure whether i'm thinking of Medieval or earlier coins, but that more-or-less matches the ones i've actually seen. IIRC, a modern US dime is about 1 pennyweight and a penny is ~2 pennyweights. And a pennyweight, not surprisingly, derives it's name from the weight of a [silver] penny. Anyway, the small-denomination ancient coins i've seen are [U.S.] dime-sized or smaller. Ancient coins were positively tiny by modern standards--just to save everyone else the conversion work, the weights he's citing above are around 1-2 tenths of a pennyweight. It's only the large-denomination coins--gold boullion, spanish dubloons, probably actual silver pounds (never seen one) that are fairly large. Anyway, Google is failing me right now on producing some actual numbers for anything useful--closest i got is the gold coins minted in Australia these days range in weight from 1/20th of an ounce (Troy) to 1oz--or 15-300 per pound. Averaging that with my recollections of various Medieval coins i've actually seen, i suspect if we want more-authentic weights we could leave gold coins about the size they are now, and make silver coins more like a twentieth of an ounce or less--say, 300/lb, at the very biggest. 'Course, the denominational difference between gold and silver coins was often much greater [than 1:10] in Medieval times, too, so maybe we should make the gold coins smaller. But, yeah, D&D coins are, and always have been, huge--they're just slightly less huge now than in previous editions.edit: actually, now that i think about it, are you sure you or your source didn't slip a digit? 1/20th of a pennyweight or a 7th of a gram is *really* tiny for coins--especially for something as dense as silver or gold, they'd be awful tiny to hold onto, and there wouldn't be much of anything there for stamping or otherwise marking. The coins i've actually seen in real life were probably on the order of 1 pennyweight, or maybe as little as 1/2 pennyweight--i couldn't pick them up, and i doubt i could accurately judge masses by feel at that size even if i could, so i'm guesstimating based on their relative size and density compared to a US dime.</blockquote>

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