Just *how* big is that gold piece again?

[ciaran00]

Divide by 10, fellas... divide by 10.

ciaran

 

[dsfriii]

Coinage

Yes - if the "standard" currency is the debased one, then it can be something special to find a chest full of coins (200 gold coins) then, upon further inspection, to see that they have the seal of the kingdom of Kazacan, meaning they are the purest currency in the land - worth 10 times what normal "Harry-Dubloons" are worth.

I just hate how gold coins are cheapened in the game. They should be something so rare that no one who isn't rich should ever even have seen one. Instead, they are passed around like popcorn by peasants shopping at the market.

Its simple than change all GP values to SP and SP to CP and toss CP. Then make GPs something rare. It sounds like the perfect place for your own rules or the DMs. But I like the the way things are now in general. I am not expecting reality in a fantasy game....

 

[Hardhead]

One of my favorite monistic stories is about the phrase 2-bits to mean a quarter. This comes from the old spanish dabloon (a very large valuable coin). In order to make change people would cut the coin in halfs quarters and eighths. The smallest part 1/8 being called one bit. i.e. a quarter being 1/4 or 2/8 is 2 bits.

Unfortuanately, the story is also untrue.

Bit, which ultimately comes from the Old English bita, originally meant a morsel of food. From there it went on to denote any small thing, particularly a fraction of a larger whole. By 1683 in the American colonies, bit had come to be the American name for the Spanish/Mexican real ("real" is the name of the coin). A real was one eighth of a peso. The peso was a common form of currency in the colonies, so much so that pesos were commonly used as dollar coins. The real/bit coins represented twelve and half cents (1/8 of a dollar), hence two bits equaled 25 cents.

Shout out to Wordorigins.org, where I originally saw this.

 

[AFGNCAAP]

I'm a bit bothered about the size of the "standard" coinage for D&D, especially at the 50 coins = 1 pound exchange. I'm thinking of using a 500 coins = 1 pound exchange as a possibility (BTW, what would the coin dimensions be for that?).

In the interest of "real" coinage, here's a few things to ponder:

Debasement: Gold & silver, in their pure form, are way too soft for coins. They'll most likely be alloys for durability's sake. However, if a coin gets too debased (basically falling under 75% of the "main/name" metal in the alloy), then the coin's not going to have that much value at all (and may be harder to detect counterfeits).

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.

Some other metals used for coinage:

Zinc
Tin
Lead
Iron
Nickel (found in deposits of platinum & palladium)
Aluminum (the mining/refinement process for this metal may not be feasible for a medieval culture to use this)

Alloys, alloys, alloys: Along the ideas of debasement, as well as a new "penny," but certain metal-mixtures may work for common currency, lower-value currency, etc.

Billon: a copper-silver alloy in which there is a higher content of copper than silver.

Red gold: gold alloyed with copper

Electrum: the famous gold & silver alloy

Whitegold: gold alloyed with either platinum or palladium (IIRC, IRL palladium is worth more than gold, but less than platinum)

Brass, Bronze: common copper alloys

Pewter: a tin & lead alloy

There are many more alloys, but those are a few that I know of offhand.

IMHO, I'd think that materials that may be needed for tools & weapons (like iron/steel) wouldn't be the best metal for coins, since there'd be temptation to melt down the coins for other uses (unless that's a cool idea for you, but that brings in counterfeiting issues). Metals that can severely corrode (like iron & tin) wouldn't be good choices for coinage either.

Here's a possible coinage system, still using a sort of decimal system for the values:

Pewter piece: $0.001
Zinc piece: $0.01
Brass piece: $0.05
Nickel piece: $0.10
Copper piece: $0.25
Billon piece: $1
Silver piece: $5
Redgold piece: $10
Electrum piece: $20
Palladium piece: $50
Whitegold piece: $100
Gold piece: $200
Platinum piece: $500

Of course, this is WAY too many coins for one system--but you can sort of get an idea.

FYI, here's some info I found on values for precious metals & the like:

1 ounce Gold = 72.3589 ounces Silver

1 ounce Gold = 2.06027 ounces Palladium

1 ounce Platinum = 2.01751 ounces Gold

This site provides conversion info. Click on "Money," then select the denominations/values of your choice.

However, this is all going on the idea that the rarity of these metals in the specific fantasy setting matches the levels of rarity for the metals on Earth. Gold and silver could be more common in those worlds, & thus their values as coins reflect this.

 

[Particle_Man]

Just as D&D doesn't worry about physics too much, it doesn't worry about chemistry too much either.

The way I see it, in D&D worlds copper, silver, gold and platinum have exactly the same density. Thus coins of equal size weigh the same (1 / 50th of a pound) regardless of which of the four metals they are composed of.

That is just the way it is.

Oh, and gunpowder doesn't work either, barring variant rules.

 

[dulsin]

If you realy want to blow peoples minds .... use the old english monitary system.

Pre-decimalisation, the Pound was divided into 240 pennies rather than 100, though it was rarely expressed in this way. Rather it was expressed in terms of Pounds, Shillings and Pence, where:

£1 = 20 shillings.

1 shilling = 12 pence.

Thus: £1 = 240 pence
and a penny was further subdivided at various times, though these divisions vanished as inflation made them irrelevant:
1 penny = 2 halfpennies and (earlier) 4 farthings.

The standard way of writing shillings and pence is

5/6 for 5 shillings & sixpence
5/- for 5 shillings only, with the dash to stand for zero pennies.
As the symbol, £, for the pound is derived from the first letter of the Latin word for pound, the libra, so the old abbreviation for the penny, d, was derived from the Roman denarius, and the abbreviation for the shilling, s, from the Roman solidus. The shilling was also denoted by the slash symbol, also called a solidus for this reason. The English penny was derived from a small silver coin minted by Charlemagne which was in general circulation in Europe during the middle ages. The weight of this coin was originally 1/240th of a troy pound, a weight known as a pennyweight - around 1.555 grams.

The pre-decimalisation coins with exact decimal equivalent values continued in use after 1971 alongside the new coins, albeit with new names, (eg the shilling became the 5p coin). Some, such as the 6d, were withdrawn after a short time but others remained legal tender until they were replaced by smaller coins in the early 1990s. Pre-decimalisation shillings were used as 5ps, with many people calling the new 5p coin a shilling, since it remained 1/20 of a pound, but was now worth 5p instead of 12d.

Slang
Some pre-decimalisation coins became commonly known by slang terms. Perhaps the most well known being bob for a shilling, and quid for a pound. A silver threepence was a joey, a sixpence was a tanner and a half crown was a half dollar. Quid remains as popular slang for one or more pounds to this day in Britain

And we can't forget Crowns, Gold sovereigns, Thruppence and Groats!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_coinage#Pre-decimal_system

 

[LazarusLong42]

Huh. I'd no idea that my ramblings at 2 in the morning when I was procrastinating from grading chemistry papers would lead to such interesting discussion. Lots of good stuff here. I should ramble more often.

 

[Steverooo]

Also...

Just to obfusticate matters more, there are not (or weren't, since I haven't run the calculations since 3e) 50 coins in a pound, only 48... D&D rounds it off!

Egar the Fastidious...

 

[Umbran]

I am reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, and there is a part where two of the characters are haggling in a market to buy a prism from a merchant, and it was rather long and complicated, involving only a handful of small denomination coins - and it involved extensive discussion about the origin and probable value of each of those coins, including their condition and apparent trustworthiness. It was utterly fascinating (Stephenson did his research on this) and it made me realize just how all of that is totally glossed over in D&D.

And there's been some criticism of Quicksilver about how draggy it gets with such stuff.

There's a reason we don't have stuff like this in D&D. It is boring. A glance into the complexities of ancient times may be academically interesting once. However, how would you like to do it every time the character buys something? Want a new dagger? Crap, it'll take 15 minutes of haggling over the blasted coinage!

There is no action, no drama, no character development in dealing with details like that. Just buy the bloody thing, check off the value, and get on with somehting that makes the story interesting

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

I'm a bit bothered about the size of the "standard" coinage for D&D, especially at the 50 coins = 1 pound exchange. I'm thinking of using a 500 coins = 1 pound exchange as a possibility (BTW, what would the coin dimensions be for that?).

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