Just *how* big is that gold piece again?

[Altalazar]

Not yet. I loved Cryptonomicon, but the reviews I've seen of Quicksilver have had me put the new book somewhat lower on my list of things to read. I'll note that 100 pages is not all that far into a 900+ page book.



Okay, so you're adding paperwork and skill checks, but you're not going to actually go through the description, rendering the thing a purely mechanical matter? I'm not sure I see how that makes things more interesting for anyone.

I just checked - it is actually 124 pages. And I do like it.

It is true that there wouldn't be too much to the market situation, but it would still come into play when treasure was found or when some merchant tried to give coins to the players for something - like where they ar selling something and have to decide if they'll take the rather dubious 200 coins the merchant has - but perhaps there are no other buyers.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Make a new "penny": Use another metal (such as zinc, tin, lead, iron, aluminum, etc.) as the lowest-value coin in the game, and bump copper to the status of a silver piece, silver to a gold, etc. Gold will be rarer, & platinum even more so.

Well, it's already laid out for you

5 iron drabs make a brass bit.
10 bits make a bronze zee.
5 zees make a copper common.
4 commons make a silver noble.
5 nobles make an electrum lucky.
10 luckies make a gold orb.
And an orb and a lucky make a platinum plate.

Greyhawk should only be played with real Greyhawk money

-Hyp.

 

[Altalazar]

All in all, most commoners should treat gold coins like you would $100 bills while platinum are $1000 bills. Pocket full of silver means you're quite well off. Pocket full of gold? Wealthy. Pocket full of platinum? "Hello Mr. Gates, Mr. Trump is waiting on you."

Yes, in terms of pocket change, but still, it seems it should not be treated like $100 bills - because the "common" people today could have plenty of those. I'm thinking a peasant should never even see a gold coin, and a silver coin should be something they rarely see and never have. A peasant should feel like he won the lottery if he has one or two battered silver coins. A gold coin is simply something whispered of as the province of the king and lords.

I think your analogy works better if you say peasants should treat SILVER coins like we treat $100 bills. And perhaps even then, they should really be less common. It was my impression that peasants almost never had ANY money - that you really only saw non-aristocracy with money with the rise of a middle class of merchants who were not peasants.

 

[LazarusLong42]

But DnD does have that middle class of merchants (as a default). Otherwise our characters would all have to be royalty, basically

Part of this is that gold is apparently more common in DnD worlds than on Earth. A single peasant might own several pigs--each worth 3 gp.

(Of course, said-same table lists one pound of saffron as equal to 15 gp, but one pound of saffron today would cost around $3000.)

I guess DnD--at its default--postulates a peasant class which is not so much peasants as we think of them--serfs who are basically slaves with their own piece of land to farm--as they are the equivalent of lower-class people in colonial America: poor, but still having some money.

 

[Altalazar]

But DnD does have that middle class of merchants (as a default). Otherwise our characters would all have to be royalty, basically

Yes, there is a merchant class - but that's not the point. We are talking about peasants, who by definition are not part of that class.

 

[Bloodsparrow]

Just because a coin contains "1gp" worth of gold and weighs a certain amount doesn't mean that the ore making up the coin is pure gold...

 

[baradtgnome]

Well if at 50 coins a pound, the coin in question would have to have a volume of 0.47 cubic centimeters (~0.03 cubic inches), then at 500 coins a pound, the coin would have to have a volume of 0.047 cubic centimeters, and thus, if it has a diameter of 1 cm (which is a little smaller than a dime), it would have to have a thickness of about half a millimeter, which is not much. The coins would get destroyed immediately.

AR

As was already pointed out, most ancient coins were hand stamped and not very consitant in their flatness or roundness. I won't pretend to know accurate facts about the thinkness, but the ancient coins that I have seen at the British Museum and other museums in europe were pretty darn thin, and did indeed look like they could be folded and mangle fairly easily. That said, most commoners probably never even held gold, let alone look at it.

for a while I had a more elaborate monetary system for 'flavor' reasons. but in the end I scrapped it in favor of a more standard and easy to use (though less true to physics) system because the elaborate system just didn't add enough to the game to be worth the extra work.

YMMV - it's all about the flavor.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I'm thinking a peasant should never even see a gold coin, and a silver coin should be something they rarely see and never have. A peasant should feel like he won the lottery if he has one or two battered silver coins. A gold coin is simply something whispered of as the province of the king and lords.

There are two kinds of peasants; urban and rural. Urban peasants must be paid in coin because at least 50% of all exchanges in a city are non-barter. Some bartering will still occur, but a good portion won't. Plus, most commoners will be in scut labor and will not have items they can barter with.

Rural peasants rarely touch money because they have an established barter system. Eggs to the woodcutter, milk to the ploughman, a tithe of grain to the millwright, woven cloth to the shepherds for raw wool, candles to the smith for an axehead, and trade vegetables with the family down the road. In the country, coin is just another form of barter and is mainly used for items brought in from outside the community or based on foreign raw materials (i.e. the smiths if there's no mine handy).

Rural peasants will typically only have a few coppers at hand and perhaps a silver or two near harvest times. Urban peasants will be used to spending a handful of coppers at the market every week and a silver every few months.

Merchants will always live in the province of silver and gold; look at how much metal items or a wagonload of grain costs. Every mid-sized village will have a small cache of gold coins outside the lord's manor, though it's likely smaller than the locals suspect. Inns too, will have gold coin from fairly well off travelers.

Now platinum on the other hand....

 

[Orius]

Naturally occurring platinum and platinum-rich alloys have been known for a long time. Though the metal was used by pre-Columbian Indians, the first European reference to Platinum appears in 1557 in the writings of the Italian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) as a description of a mysterious metal found in Central American mines between Darién (Panama) and Mexico ("up until now impossible to melt by any of the Spanish arts").

Really? I didn't know that. I guess I can put platinum into any Maztica campaigns I might run.

Seriously though, I still find pp to be a bit redundant, so I have no immediate plans to put them into my campaign.

 

[Orius]

I think your analogy works better if you say peasants should treat SILVER coins like we treat $100 bills. And perhaps even then, they should really be less common. It was my impression that peasants almost never had ANY money - that you really only saw non-aristocracy with money with the rise of a middle class of merchants who were not peasants.

Realistically perhaps yes, but then the average D&D PC hardly fits into the typical social and economic structure of feudal Europe. It's of small relevance if the D&D currency doesn't match the real world. In feudal Europe, the same peasant who would never see that gold piece also wouldn't go out into the world, pick up a sword or a spellbook and start battling orc hordes or raiding dungeons. Looking at D&D currency from the point of view of the great masses of 1st level commoners itsn't really that important, IMO.