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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 6483350" data-attributes="member: 893">Replying to myself here but my thoughts went off on a bit of a different track.Say you want to create a system where you have multiple currencies with multiple values.  It honestly isn't that hard when you drill right down to it since ultimately the key component of any precious metal based currency is the weight of the precious metal in the currency.Step one in complexifying your coinage is to just figure out what your currency is based on.  This honestly doesn't matter in the slightest  just as long as you have an idea in your head of what type of shiny metal your players will most commonly get their hands on and how many bits of that shiny metal can be exchanged for a sharp object out of the PHB.  I'd honestly suggest just keeping the PHB prices pretty much as is and just reskinning the coins themselves.  If you really feel like going down that rabbit hole of rebuilding the D&D economy then check out <a href="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_reviews.php?products_id=13113&it=1" target="_blank">Grain into Gold</a> for a wonderful lesson on injecting feudal economics into an RPG.After that you decide on how much precious metal is in your coins.  In D&D 10 gold coins which we can at this point assume are pure gold since nothing has said otherwise weigh one pound.  This is silly, the Florin which was the most widely used gold coin in the middle ages weighed 6.5 grams.  That's the weight of 2 or 3 american pennies depending on when they were minted or about 70 florins to a pound. Again though you can have your coins weigh whatever you want since it only really effects how much PC's can physically haul around and how much actual gold you want floating around the world.  Personally I set my base weight at 100 to a pound just to keep the numbers logical.Now that you've figured out how much precious metal there is in your coins you can start modifying it.  One thing I did once in a game that used a silver piece standard (where the PHB prices were pretty much just changed from GP to SP) was create a coin called "The Shield".  It was a large silver coin worth 5 silver pieces and represented the weekly wage for a soldier.  It could be broken into fifths and used like regular silver pieces but it added a bit of character to the game, especially since it was a military focused campaign where the PC's spent a lot of time working as mercenaries, and hiring other mercenaries to work for them.In my Dwimmermount game I did a similar thing with the era's of the coins where the purity of the coin reflects the economic power of the government.  The City State of Adamas is comparably weak, and its coins are extremely debased making them worth much less than the pure Thulian gold pieces which translate most directly into Platinum.  Really though the possibilities are endless.  Maybe the Elves of your world only trade in silver, but their coins are so pure that a single silver coin of theirs is equal to a human gold piece.  Maybe the dwarves use tiny platinum coins that are small enough that a single dwarven platinum is equivalent in value to a human GP.  Heck, maybe you could go total viking and have currency based straight up on weight.  Precious metal is kept in armbands, rings and torcs, to buy something you hand over a piece of jewelry and the merchant literally hacks it apart to give you change.</blockquote>

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