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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Altalazar" data-source="post: 1276119" data-attributes="member: 939">D&D vastly simplifies and dilutes the value of money, from a medieval perspective.  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.  Not only that, but the monetary value is vastly deflated - in medieval times, a gold piece could feed a family for a year (or more).  Most people probably never saw so much money.  Thousands of them seems unthinkable.  One thing I'd like to see is more realism with currency - just because I like trade to be realistic - it also allows players to get more involved in the trade in the world (as they build their own strongholds and perhaps even cities).  One protection against shaving was a ridged edge - like we have on some of our coins now - if you shaved it, the ridges would be shaved off.  Also, I like money to be more valuable - so a handful of assorted gold and silver coins ought to be enough to go rather far.  In the book, someone needs travelling money to go a long distance and they take a promissary note to a lender for a SINGLE POUND - which he gets in the form of a nice, silver coin.  And it does go far.  I rather like that.  It makes money more valuable and easier to imagine.  If you know a gold coin is a HUGE amount of money it isn't hard to imagine how valuable 20 gold coins would be - and 20 is a number you can picture in your head.  20,000 just blends into 200,000 as a really big number.  Of course, this is hard to do with published adventures, unless you just divide everything by 10 or 100, perhaps making up coins as you go (or dividing them as the case may be, into bits...)Has anyone else done strange and funky things with currency?  More realistic things?</blockquote>

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