Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Asmor" data-source="post: 3784259" data-attributes="member: 1154">One of the things I really liked about Keith Baker's City of Towers (the novel, not the D&amp;D source book) was the fact that the main characters were, frankly, poor. They had to tell white lies just to secure a room and were forced to eat the artificer's tasteless gruel because it's all they could afford... Getting a job that paid a couple hundred GP was big for them, and frequently the offer of a good, free meal made an otherwise undesired social encounter palatable (pun intended).I really like the idea of the PCs being poor and really having to scrounge for niceties. I'm not, however, quite so interested in a low-magic game, so just giving them 1/10th the money or whatever isn't going to cut it.One idea I had was changing the ratio of coinage... Instead of denominations differing in value by a factor of 10, make them differ in value by 100. So...1 silver = 100 copper1 gold = 100 silver = 10,000 copper1 platinum = 100 gold = 10,000 silver = 1,000,000 copperCopper stays the same value, and adventuring items are all based on the &quot;copper&quot; standard... An item currently worth 2,000 gp is converted to copper (200,000 copper) and then translated back to the new system (200,000 copper = 2,000 silver = 20 gold).Commoners still earn coppers for their piddly craft checks, and the gulf between the rich and poor increases dramatically.Niceties like noble clothing, fine elven wine, lodging at a luxury hotel, etc, keep their prices. So if tickets to a show at a nice opera house cost 50 silver previously, they still do cost 50 silver, but that's now the equivalent of 500 coppers. A bottle of aged elven wine that previously cost 1 gold (100 copper) now costs 1 gold (10,000 copper), etc.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Asmor, post: 3784259, member: 1154"] One of the things I really liked about Keith Baker's City of Towers (the novel, not the D&D source book) was the fact that the main characters were, frankly, poor. They had to tell white lies just to secure a room and were forced to eat the artificer's tasteless gruel because it's all they could afford... Getting a job that paid a couple hundred GP was big for them, and frequently the offer of a good, free meal made an otherwise undesired social encounter palatable (pun intended). I really like the idea of the PCs being poor and really having to scrounge for niceties. I'm not, however, quite so interested in a low-magic game, so just giving them 1/10th the money or whatever isn't going to cut it. One idea I had was changing the ratio of coinage... Instead of denominations differing in value by a factor of 10, make them differ in value by 100. So... 1 silver = 100 copper 1 gold = 100 silver = 10,000 copper 1 platinum = 100 gold = 10,000 silver = 1,000,000 copper Copper stays the same value, and adventuring items are all based on the "copper" standard... An item currently worth 2,000 gp is converted to copper (200,000 copper) and then translated back to the new system (200,000 copper = 2,000 silver = 20 gold). Commoners still earn coppers for their piddly craft checks, and the gulf between the rich and poor increases dramatically. Niceties like noble clothing, fine elven wine, lodging at a luxury hotel, etc, keep their prices. So if tickets to a show at a nice opera house cost 50 silver previously, they still do cost 50 silver, but that's now the equivalent of 500 coppers. A bottle of aged elven wine that previously cost 1 gold (100 copper) now costs 1 gold (10,000 copper), etc. [/QUOTE]

Verification