This may not be particularly novel to many of you, but for whatever reason, it's only recently occurred to me that D&D's coinage system can be equated fairly nicely to the US monetary denominations.
If one gold piece equals one US dollar, then a copper piece equals a penny (one cent), while a silver piece is a dime (ten cents). They're even the right colors!
As for the less common denominations, the electrum piece equates to fifty cents, which is a fairly uncommon coin in the US as well. The platinum piece, meanwhile, is like a ten dollar bill in coin form.
Cool, huh?
Too bad it doesn't work so well with NZ coinage. The lowest denomination here is a ten cent piece (cash transactions use the Swedish rounding system), and they use twenty cent coins instead of quarters, as well as gold $1 and $2 coins. Paper money starts at $5.
In the 19th century, there were actually coins (eagle, double eage, quarter eagle, half eagle, etc.) that had values of $10, $20, $2.50, and $5 - possibly even others.
There have been quite a few interesting (as coinage goes) coins circulated as US currency.
arderkrag wrote:
I've usually attributed the silver piece as the base ($1), going up and down from there...
I use bitcoin as the currency in my D&D games and roll randomly day to day to see what they are worth.
iserith wrote:
pukunui wrote:
iserith wrote:
I didn't mean that 1 gp should be *worth* $1. It was just a simple way to get my head around the relationship between the different denominations.
And I was only trying to say that I like to think of my game's economy based on a silver standard. Where silver is the common/base currency. Gold pieces and higher are "big bills" and copper pieces become "change".
So, like you would say something costs "twenty dollars", someone in my world might say it costs "twenty silver". If you happen to have two gold pieces, that's like giving someone two $10 bills.
That's all.
ChrisCarlson wrote:
I recently discovered that 1 gold piece at 50gp/lb means they weigh a little less than the current £1 coin.
Though probably a fair bit smaller given how dence gold is.
(I should probably maths that somewhen as well)
Coins in D&D basically weigh about 9 grams.
ChrisCarlson wrote:
Illithidbix wrote:
ankiyavon wrote:
OoftaMeg wrote:
OoftaMeg wrote:
I am with most people when it comes to coins, silver is fairly common, even if you make 1gp a week, your probably get paid in silver. It is when you get above 20 sp in cost that I say people start giving out a Gold coin, depending on who is doing that paying. For the most part, I tell players what coinage they find is worth, with the knowledge that its more then likely in silver coins. Coin weight is usually not enough to worry about untill you get into several 100 gp worth
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Does no one else use trade goods? Granted, I think the values given for the spices and things listed in the rules are absurd. Many of those substances were so valued that they were worth their weight in gold. Two gold for a pound of pepper? In the Silk Road days, pepper was one of the things more valuable than gold. Saffron is incredibly hard to harvest, and a pound is listed as fifteen gold. A pound of either of those things should be closer to gold itself, 50 G. Instead, they're 1/25th and 3/10ths as valuable.
OoftaMeg wrote:
Back in my 3e campaign, I crafted some coins of my own to use a "Hero Coins" in-game. It was actually pretty fun to make them!
1) Buy a bunch of roofing "tin tabs". They are small metal discs, two knuckles wide. These are the things they use to hold down the tar paper on a roof.
2) Clean them to get the grease off, then glue 3-4 of them together. I think I used something like 3M Spray Adhesive. This makes the coin have a good thickness.
3) Spray paint them! I used painted mine gold.
I filled a small leather pouch with these coins and had them at the D&D table. Players could earn them by doing "awesome stuff" and cash them in to do more "awesome stuff".
[quote="Cutlass"]IIRC U.S. silver and gold coins intended for general circulation were actually alloys containing 10% copper by weight. The reason for that being that pure silver and gold were too soft for use as a coin that could see a fair amount of use/abuse. I would imagine that other countries minting coins for general circulation would also take that sort of approach, and would not be surprised if that sort of thing had been the norm historically. [/quote]
True, except modern cash is backed by faith in the government, not the value of the coin. That was historically not the case.
Oh, and to answer another question, one of the reasons coins have ridges on their edge was to prevent people from trimming them down.
I think of silver pieces as a 10 dollar/pound note.
iserith wrote:
As for spices, I think gold in general is a bit more common in dnd and some fantasy settings then in real world. But thats just my general sense of them.
MechaPilot wrote:
Another consideration is that many people may never see more than the occasional silver, that they are instead paid in housing, food, clothing and basic necessities.
For examples, servants often slept in the hall/attic and ate all of their meals whereever they served.
OoftaMeg wrote:
My game uses pre-decimal British currency, with one silver equal to one shilling and all other costs translated based on that (basically divide all gp values by 2 to get their equivalent in pounds). And then, because I'm a horribly mean person, I make all battlefield bounties pay out in guineas (21 shillings).
7he_professor wrote:
iserith wrote:
pukunui wrote:
The best thing about the metric system is that you do not have to change your measurements everytime you have a King with different sized feet.
Melend wrote: