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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 6483821" data-attributes="member: 893">Just to back up your point, though I'd actually say precious metals in D&D are vastly undervalued compared to the real world since the purchasing power of a given weight of gold in D&D is minuscule compared to what gold has been worth historically... If there are 10GP to a pound and we assume that said GP are pure gold then each coin is over an ounce in weight then things get all kinds of screwy if we compare anything in the real world to D&D values.There are 340 grams to an pound, so that means each D&D coin weighs 34 grams.  Now, using the ducat and the florin as examples, ducats weighed 3.5 grams, and florins weighed 6.5 grams.  That means that 5.2 florins are 'worth' about as much in gold as a single D&D gold piece and there are 9.7 ducats to a GP.  In other words, one of the finest gold coins produced during the middle ages would be 'worth' about as much as a silver piece in D&D, and I can guarantee you no-one it Italy was paying for a room at an Inn using ducats.For another example, the Medici's were the richest family in Europe during the Renaissance.  There are all sorts of numbers thrown around to guess as to how much the Medici's were actually worth, but most estimates put it somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 florins at the height of their power.  Translate that to weight we get 1300 kilograms of gold or 2860 lbs of gold.  At 10 GP to a pound this means that the vast fortune of the Medici familiy would have been 286 gold pieces...  A mid level D&D adventurer wouldn't even roll out of bed for a haul like that.To put things further into perspective Lorenzo de Medici estimated that between 1434 and 1471 his family spent 663,000 florins on "charity, buildings, art and taxes".  In other words he was basically saying "this is how we paid for the Renaissance".  Using the same math... we get 4300 KG, 9480 pounds or 948 gold pieces...  In other words the entirety of the Medici investment into the freaking Renaissance wouldn't even get a 1st level fighter up to 2nd level if he killed them and took all their stuff.Of course the real reason coins are weighted the way they are in D&D is because Gygax didn't like the idea of adventurers being able to carry thousands and thousands of gold coins out of dungeons in one go.</blockquote>

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