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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 2885573" data-attributes="member: 307">Yeah, they are probably much more fungible than most coins.In the pre-modern era, coins were notoriously lousy as a means of transaction. They were usually shaved, cut, dusted, and clipped. In many cases, they were made of diluted alloys. Just about every shopkeeper kept scales on hand to weigh the coins people brought in, which were valuable for their metal content, and not for the minted symbols in them. The "coin of the realm" was basically just a away to move silver around. Gems, being much harder to dilute and trim, hold their value pretty well in transactions.In RPGs, the fact that coins for the middle-ages were such a pain in the rear end to use is handwaved away for convenience, and rightly so (playing out the headaches of daily life in such a society is not what I call "fun"), but if you handwave the difficulty of using coins, what justification is there to screw with your players when they use gemstones?</blockquote>