Today I want to talk about a subject that is near and dear to adventurers. Yes, we’re talking about money. Money is a medium for exchanges. It is accepted in payment for goods, services and debts. Different cultures handle money and currency differently, however, and what is accepted as currency can change with time, so let’s do a little digging and see what we turn up.
The typical unit of trade in a D&D game is the GP, or gold piece. 1 gold piece is equal to 10 silver pieces, 1 silver piece is equal to 10 copper pence. This is a nice, regular decimal breakdown of value. Historically systems of coinage are sometimes rather more interesting. For example, the pre-decimal English system was based on a standard that went thus: 4 farthings made up a penny, 12 pennies made up a shilling, and 20 shillings made up a pound. There was also the guinea, a unit of account made up of 21 shillings, and in use even after 1799, when the coin was no longer being struck.
What does this mean to an enterprising GM? Well, say a party of adventurers finds some ancient platinum coinage in a dungeon, and they bring it back in sacks. Will the cabbage-seller in the market accept coins that he no longer recognizes? Spending your loot can be a bit more difficult if you have to go all the way to a major city to find an assayer and money-changer and get those platinum pieces broken down into spendable coin that tradesmen and burghers will accept.
What will adventurers say if they find a hoard of shining metal discs in a lost dwarven ruin, and then find out that the coins were minted from zinc, not silver?
There’s another aspect to coinage that many GMs elide or ignore. Weight. Precious metals are all quite dense. It isn’t so bad if someone’s carrying around a small purse of silver and copper pieces, but an ancient vault of gold pieces might actually require pack animals to transport out of the ruin once the monster-slaying is all said and done. A heist game may have to take that into account as well — how are PCs going to empty out that bank vault full of gold pieces without getting caught? Let’s hope the thieves in question have a bag of holding or portable hole to hand.
While nitpicking about arrows, rations and coinage can often slow down a game, such a fact may clue PCs in to say, a sophisticated coin forgery operation, or the widespread debasement of currency in the form of clipping and shaving. If the coin’s value is based, after all, on the weight of precious metal it’s made of, then what happens when a coin has been shaved to the point where it’s half its minted weight?
A campaign could be made out of a group of PCs recruited by the royal treasury to hunt down counterfeiters flooding the market with forged coinage stamped from adulterated alloys or base metals. Or, if the players prefer rather less law-abiding PCs, they could play the forgers instead and risk grisly executions. This installment can’t quite cover the existence of non-metallic money, gift and fiat economies, and paper money, because it’s too much to cover in 600 words. Stay tuned for Part II, where I’ll discuss money that doesn’t come in the form of coinage.
contributed by M.W. Simmes
Photo by Jonathan Brinkhorst on Unsplash
The typical unit of trade in a D&D game is the GP, or gold piece. 1 gold piece is equal to 10 silver pieces, 1 silver piece is equal to 10 copper pence. This is a nice, regular decimal breakdown of value. Historically systems of coinage are sometimes rather more interesting. For example, the pre-decimal English system was based on a standard that went thus: 4 farthings made up a penny, 12 pennies made up a shilling, and 20 shillings made up a pound. There was also the guinea, a unit of account made up of 21 shillings, and in use even after 1799, when the coin was no longer being struck.
What does this mean to an enterprising GM? Well, say a party of adventurers finds some ancient platinum coinage in a dungeon, and they bring it back in sacks. Will the cabbage-seller in the market accept coins that he no longer recognizes? Spending your loot can be a bit more difficult if you have to go all the way to a major city to find an assayer and money-changer and get those platinum pieces broken down into spendable coin that tradesmen and burghers will accept.
What will adventurers say if they find a hoard of shining metal discs in a lost dwarven ruin, and then find out that the coins were minted from zinc, not silver?
There’s another aspect to coinage that many GMs elide or ignore. Weight. Precious metals are all quite dense. It isn’t so bad if someone’s carrying around a small purse of silver and copper pieces, but an ancient vault of gold pieces might actually require pack animals to transport out of the ruin once the monster-slaying is all said and done. A heist game may have to take that into account as well — how are PCs going to empty out that bank vault full of gold pieces without getting caught? Let’s hope the thieves in question have a bag of holding or portable hole to hand.
While nitpicking about arrows, rations and coinage can often slow down a game, such a fact may clue PCs in to say, a sophisticated coin forgery operation, or the widespread debasement of currency in the form of clipping and shaving. If the coin’s value is based, after all, on the weight of precious metal it’s made of, then what happens when a coin has been shaved to the point where it’s half its minted weight?
A campaign could be made out of a group of PCs recruited by the royal treasury to hunt down counterfeiters flooding the market with forged coinage stamped from adulterated alloys or base metals. Or, if the players prefer rather less law-abiding PCs, they could play the forgers instead and risk grisly executions. This installment can’t quite cover the existence of non-metallic money, gift and fiat economies, and paper money, because it’s too much to cover in 600 words. Stay tuned for Part II, where I’ll discuss money that doesn’t come in the form of coinage.
contributed by M.W. Simmes
