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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9774899" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, I'm aware.  D&D has always assumed that precious metals are relatively abundant, occurring in large coins that suitably fill up vast chests that looks impressive in pictures and movies.  My take is that the intention was that the "silver piece" was meant in the system to be a day's wages for unskilled labor and was a roughly schilling sized silver coin.  A "gold piece" is to me a similar sized coin worth roughly 1 lb. of silver (or 20 silver pieces).  Silver pennies probably existed (10-12 to the silver piece) but governments more commonly seemed to take silver pennies out of circulation in favor of copper coinage "copper piece" that could be produced cheaply at below the value of the metal.  Peasants of course then want to be paid in silver but are forced to use copper for most small transactions.  Fortunately for the peasants, inflation doesn't seem to exist in setting, probably because it would make things too freaking complicated.Gygax then screwed things up by creating a "gold piece" standard for players in order to have his cake and eat it to.  He also wanted to have vast fantasy chests filled with gold coinage because well, rule of cool.  But he didn't want PC's to get ahead so easily so he priced everything he thought PC's would want to buy as if the gold piece was the standard of exchange, while retaining more historic and realistic price lists for food, commodities, and other things he thought peasants would want to buy as well as pricing taxes collected (but not taxes paid!) in silver pieces.  The idea was to make trade have profits in silver, while expenses would always be in gold, forcing the PC's to stay adventuring to pay the upkeeps.And while all of this has interesting gamest reasoning, it makes for dysfunctional economies when you start trying to do anything or having any situation Gygax didn't envision as being part of normal play.</blockquote>

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