this post was submitted on 30 May 2023
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I've always been annoyed with how undervalued a gold coin is in typical D&D/Pathfinder settings. (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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By that I mean that the sheer number of coins that are expected to buy pretty much anything at mid-to-high levels is so absurd that it makes the old imagery of treasure chests full of the stuff feel not only underwhelming but burdensome.

If 50 coins equal one imperial pound, as the rulebooks typically state, you could just about melt down and hammer out a house or a boat approximating the prices in the book for such things. It gets even sillier when magic items are so obscenely priced yet at the same time a typical adventuring party picks up so many of them that they could, materialistically speaking, pull a Mansa Munsa on any quasi-medieval economy if such items are really priced that highly where a hand-me-down magic protection ring could set up a peasant in endless luxury for life.

I don't try to fix all of that mess, but I do tend to use a house rule where coins have as much written buying power as 100x the listed prices for most things, and the coins found in a listed lair are reduced by to 1/100th of the listed values, which also keeps coppers, silvers, and electrum relevant a lot longer. As long as all the players remember the conversion tables and don't forget them in a way that fucks up the bookkeeping, it works pretty well.

How about the rest of you? :d20:

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Having to pay for things with a thousand of something kind of makes the logic of the world break down if you look at it too closely. Like, no one is counting those, you would need scales that are big enough to fit thousands of coins to weigh them + a huge set of counterweights, and this is in a world where things like Lighten Object exist. There is no way to make commerce make sense in a way that isn't very inconvenient to the players.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, you get what I'm saying.

"There's banks" but that just makes the mountains of gold to buy a boat or a house seem that much more like so much heavy inconvenient mass instead of treasure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

you would need scales that are big enough to fit thousands of coins to weigh them + a huge set of counterweights,

i mean you can always pay in 100 x 10 coins or 10 x 100 coins or whatever is required by the scales available. yes it's inconvenient, but it's not impossible like you're making it out to be lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There is no way to make commerce make sense in a way that isn’t very inconvenient to the players.

Unless the players aren't meant to actually be carrying around the gold :graeber:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There could be a common enchanted item that allows one to tally such quantities instantly, right? Just make it something a wealthier store will always have.

Then again, having a big set of scales would work just as well, especially if they are steel and have enchanted counterweights or something like that to not be a huge pain, but then that raises the issue of gold coins having a weight . . .

Daggerfall handles this surprisingly well by just having banks that distribute bank notes at a fee of +1% of the note's value. That way handling paying the price of objects becomes nearly as simple in the game as it is for the players of just writing down a value.