Shaving coins

[Stormborn]

The 3rd book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, System of the World, is all about coining, both legitimate and illigitimate. The earlier books paint an excelent picture of the truly rotten state of England's currency as mentioned earlier in this thread. The books are huge, so its not like you can just skim through one to find what you need. However I highly recommend them for anyone interested in the subject.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

Thamlin - that was the first thought I had too. What do they do with the shavings? New dies would have be contructed to match the exsisting coinage (or find a place that would simply buy the gold shavings and hope they don't ask where they came from...). Of course ancient coins would be pretty primitive so the PC could always claim the (unmarked or crudly stamped) coins made from his shavings were part of some ancient treasure hoard.

I can't see the profit in this - obviously it was done in the real world but how did they use the shavings? Something tells me they didn't remint it into new coins. If you could do that I would just melt down 100 gold coins and remint them as 125 - just use a little less gold in each and it would have the markings of the original. This really isn't a fast way to make money, imo.

 

[Jondor_Battlehammer]

I read this in a fantasy book, so I have no idea how legitamate it is. The process was called "skimming". A coin would be heated up just to the melting point, one face would have some material scraped off, the pressed with a die to replace the face. This would lead to a thinner coin, which would probably be less noticeable.

 

[Iron Sheep]

The 3rd book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, System of the World, is all about coining, both legitimate and illigitimate. The earlier books paint an excelent picture of the truly rotten state of England's currency as mentioned earlier in this thread. The books are huge, so its not like you can just skim through one to find what you need. However I highly recommend them for anyone interested in the subject.

I'd second this recommendation, but it is a massive undertaking to read the complete series.

From the game point of view, you need to do a little world building to work out how money works in your game.

If counterfeiting is easy and common, then merchants will be very suspicious of all coins (particularly those old coins that adventurers keep on finding in ancient dungeons), and what will really matter is how much precious metal the merchant thinks is actually in the coin, rather than what the coin claims to be. Some coins may have more intrinsic value because they are known to have been well-made or are hard to counterfeit. Coins may commonly be broken into parts to pay fractional amounts of the worth.

With a more advanced society, coins will have things like milled edges to prevent shaving; hard to copy designs, and precisely known weights with certain tolerances. High magic can add to this things like magical merchants scales which can detect lead slugs or other counterfeits, or arcane agents of the king (or perhaps priests of a god of commerce) who specifically use divinations and similar spells to track down those who would debase the currency.

From a game mechanics standpoint, I would suggest that Forgery is probably the most appropriate skill, unless you want to introduce a new Craft (coinsmith) or Profession (counterfeiter) skill. Shaving the coins so that they do not appear to be shaved is probably a Forgery check. If the character is going to take the gold dust and turn it into new coins, they would need to make another Forgery check to make the moulds for the new coins, and probably use an appropriate Craft skill (and a workshop) to actually produce the coins. When passing the coins, perhaps a Spot, Search or Sense Motive check against the Forgery check might be made for a merchant to notice the shaving or forgery. Set the DCs as you feel appropriate for the way you want money to work in your game.

Corran

 

[painandgreed]

If you've got the time and the inclination, i also suggest the Neal Stephenson books.

I'd say it would be a fairly easy forgery check. Perhaps even DC 5-10 because the total weight is not being altered, but rather just subtracted. It wouldn't fool anybody with a set of scales and time to check the weight. Since coinage in D&D just has the value of the raw material, the shavings are as valuable as their wieght and don't even have to be put back into coin form. He just has to find somebody with scales and the interest to excahnge his gold dust for coinage (another 5% loss?).

Which brings us to the real crux of the matter, if he's going to be counterfitting coinage, then skip the shaving of coins. He should take his gold add in another base material such as silver or even tin and then recoin it with the less pure gold. He would be making nice looking coins with little clipping so they'd pass pretty freely to those not inclined to check them too well. That's where biting gold coins came from. In a fantassy world, old coinage from forgotten empires and kingdoms is pretty common, so the forgery check to make new coins probably wouldn't even be that high because he could make coins that aren't even in circulation much anymore.

IMC, shaving of coins is taken into account and buying anything is a long process that involves haggling with the seller. Just as each item being sold is a different peice of art since we are far from mass production of identical goods, all the coins are in varied staes and conditions. Not only does the buyer haggle for the item he wants, but the seller haggles for the coins that he wants in return out of the ones offered. The seller refusing badly clipped and obviously counter fitted coins for better ones or offering slightly worse product for slightly worse coins. This process is assumed to take 1 minute per GP value of the goods being bought and in return the book value is assumed. If players wish to speed up the haggling process they may purchase something for 1 minute per 10 GP value by paying an extra 1d6X10%.

 

[nerfherder]

This is great information! Thanks! I think that the penalties alone are almost enough for him to give up, though.

Well, if your player thinks those punishments were bad, to try and restore confidence in sterling, in 1124, Henry I had 94 mint workers castrated for producing bad coins...

Cheers,
Liam

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[Ace]

Well, if your player thinks those punishments were bad, to try and restore confidence in sterling, in 1124, Henry I had 94 mint workers castrated for producing bad coins...

Cheers,
Liam

Ouch!

I always thought the Viking approach to coins was interesting-- silver was rated by weight -- infact they had something called hacksilver -- basically a thin piece of metal you could hack off a chunk of to use as currency

This necessates having a scale and maybe a metal cutter but hey what merchant doesn't have those things

D&D setting may have magic countermeasures or higher tech solutions like the milled edges --

There would also be magic purity detectors -- In the past one of th ebiggest problems with currency was less its weight and more its purity

Many governments duilted the currency to make it go farther -- A D&D example -- rather than the 9/1 ratio of a Greyhawk gold piece -- or the 50/50 ratio an electrum Lucky currency in the Flans might be 4/1 for gold and have
70/30 for Electrum pieces. This makes Flans currency worth less than Greyhawk currency and can be a nasty surprise for traders or folks who just looted a dungeon

Having older currency be more pure is well in genere too and a fun way to increase the value of the horse without increasing weight

It also lets Profession/ Minter, Knowledge/ Metalurgy Knowledge/ History or just plain Appraisal get a work out

 

[argo]

I remember seing an old coin scale in a mesuem once. The thing was contained in a little wooden box about the size of your hand so it was easy to carry around and inside was a small scale with weights that coresopnded to the weight of common coniage and a small, flat metal sheet with slots cut in it that matched the proper dimensions (length and thickness) of those coins. The idea was that if a coin had been cliped it would fit through the slot in the sheet but would be the wrong weight while if a coin was a slug (mixed with impure metals) it would weigh the proper ammount but be too big to fit through the slot (cuz precious metals are generally more dense than base). Prety clever no?


Anyway, I would call this an opposed forgery vs appraise check where the difficulty depends on how greedy the forger is. If the forger wants to clip 1/4 the weight of the coin (thus getting 1 coin for every 4) I would make it a straight check, if he wants to clip 1/10 the weight he gets a +4 bonus to the forgery check and if he wants to clip 1/20 the weight he gets a +8 bonus. Minting new coins would depend on if he wants to add impurities or not: adding 1/4 impurities (multiply the final take by 1.25) would assign a -4 penalty, adding 1/10 impurities would be a straight check and adding no impunities grants a +4 bonus (on the theory that most merchants probably don't give half a damn if the coin is forged so long as they are satisfied the it is real gold of the proper weight, espically is forgery is rampant in the campaign setting to begin with).

All this is opposed by an appraise check. Give the merchant a +5 bonus for using a specially designed tool like the one I described above. Passing the coin so that the merchant doesn't feel the need to make an appraisal in the first place is probably bluff or diplomacy vs sense motive.

Hope that helps.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed