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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Coherent805" data-source="post: 5317337" data-attributes="member: 95026">This thread is pertinent to my interestsThread necromancy!  I am interested in this thread because I feel strongly that gems are not equivalent to currency.  In my game, the quick sale of a gem nets only 55 to 65% of it's final value, although that can be raised by haggling.Think of it this way: if you offer goods or services in fantasy or the real world, are you likely to accept a slab of aluminum or an unrefined blob of platinum as payment?  How likely are you to accept a pretty rock that may or may not be a gem?  Are you, random merchant, a gemologist as well?You just don't know its value by looking at it, any more than you'd know how much a slab of aluminum is worth, or any random weight and purity of _any_ precious metal or stone.Gems are not currency any more than any raw materials are in the modern day.  People trust currency they know; this is why coins have pictures on them and counterfeiting is frowned upon, even in a metals based economy.  Gem assay is not a common or certain skill, and nobody wants to get burned by a fake gem.The longer you take to sell a gem, and the more careful of who you try to sell it to, the better the relationship you have with that person, the more likely you are to get the stated value.Of course, some institutions exist that _do_ have gemologists on staff, and they're much more likely to give you a better price due to their increased confidence in the real value of your pretty rocks.  Everybody else is taking a terrible risk, and will give you less in exchange because of that uncertainty.So I'm with blalien!P.S. I tend to give out too much treasure in my games, so it's not like my PC's are starving in the streets because of this.  It's just that it can be tricky to unload treasure sometimes when you're stuck in a strange land and nobody trusts you.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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