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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6124293" data-attributes="member: 58197">Interesting question, that. Smaug's hoard is described thusly:No size is given for Smaug himself; I suppose we could go off his boasts that his claws are like spears and his teeth swords, which would put his teeth around 12 inches at the absolute minimum. A T-rex is 50 feet long and has 6-inch teeth (give or take) so let's say Smaug is 100 feet long. If he coils up, and his tail loops halfway around again, that'd give us a circle about 20 feet in diameter. But the hoard "stretches away" across the floor, so it's got to be substantially bigger than Smaug himself. Let's say 40 feet across. That's still pretty darn small given the description, but I'm trying to be conservative here.Now, how tall is it? The hoard is high enough that when Bilbo, standing at its edge, spots the glint of the Arkenstone, it's "above him." On the other hand, Bilbo is not exactly the tallest person around. Let's figure it's maybe 3 feet deep at the center, tapering evenly toward the edges. Apply the formula for the volume of a cone, and we come up with just over 1,250 cubic feet.Again assuming 40% of that volume is empty air, that'd be 45 million gold pieces if it were all gold. Yow. However, Tolkien gives us an out by mentioning "silver red-stained in the ruddy light." If we change the hoard to mostly silver, we get 25 million silver pieces (gold is a lot denser than silver). That's 2.5 million gold; split among a party of 5, you've got 500K per character, which is an enormous haul but not necessarily game-wrecking. You just need to provide some suitable outlets, like castles and armies. If you adopt the 4E convention of 100 silver to the gold, it's only 50K per character, which is almost stingy.To convert to a silver standard, we could go one step further, swap out silver for copper, and have 21 million copper pieces, or 2.1 million silver (210,000 under the 4E convention). This makes sense when you think about it. If copper is the most common coinage in use, then surely it ought to make up the bulk of a dragon hoard.So, I have to concede that as long as you don't feel the need to make it all gold, you can in fact give out a Smaug-sized dragon hoard without destroying the economy. However, you can also do it under the silver standard. Of course, the real issue is that the weight of metal involved is simply staggering, as Smaug is at pains to point out to Bilbo*. Hauling all that money back to civilization would be an adventure in itself... but to me, that's a feature rather than a bug. Nothing should ever be easy. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />*At 50 coins to the pound, you have 100,000 coins to the ton. So a copper hoard would weigh 210 tons, a silver hoard would weigh 250, and an all-gold hoard would come in at a whopping 450 tons.</blockquote>

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