One of my pet peeves with D&D is its currency system. First of all, one gold piece weighs 1/10th of a pound (around 45 grams). A modern gold coin like the Krugerrand weighs around 34 grams. So I can see that they just rounded up to get the easy 1/10th of a pound figure. The problem is when you consider how low the value of gold is in D&D compared to the weight of the coins. A one ounce gold coin today can be worth up to $1000. D&D gold isn't anywhere near as valuable. The easy way to help fix the problem of heavy, cheap gold is to simply make the coins smaller. For example, this real-life roman gold coin only weighed 8 grams. This comes out to around 56 coins to the pound. Round that down to 50 coins to a pound and you have a much smaller gold coin that makes more sense value wise and is still easy to figure out encumbrance.
Ok, that fixes the weight problem but the value of gold is still too low to be realistic and it also makes silver and copper coins almost meaningless. I could increase prices or greatly reduce treasure amounts, but both of these ideas require a lot of work. I'd have to rework price lists, wages, treasure generation and treasure given out in modules. Meh... that's just too much work for too little return. The better solution for me (YMMV) is to just forget about the other coins all together. No silver, no copper, no electrum, no platinum - just gold. Hell, this is how it works in almost every computer rpg I've ever seen. In every D&D game I've ever played in, the players just automatically converted all their treasure to gold pieces after they got it anyway, so why not just start with that in the first place? Yeah, it takes a bit of work to convert some treasures to gold but not much. And anything that costs less than 1gp in the price lists? It's free. That's right - free. As long as your character isn't a hobo we can assume he can afford a club without having to worry about digging for the pennies to pay for it.
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While I couldn’t care less that the gold have a realistic weight and worth (doesn’t really matter to my games that it be any different), I can agree with cutting out the other kinds of coins. Often enough it just ends up that at higher levels you want stuff in platinum to carry less coins around, but any coin worth LESS than gold has always been annoying. Especially at the early levels where they regularly seem to be part of treasure. It’s so annoying.
I have never enforced the weight of coins on my players. It’s a fantasy game, I’m not about to bog it down with and take the fun out by saying they can’t carry out the treasure horde of coins that I the DM put in place. I like what WotC did with Eberron in introducing a banking system and letters of credit. If you were worried about weight, this system did away with the concern.
Regarding the worth of a gold coin, you can’t really impose our modern pricing system on a fantasy roleplaying game. It’s a system and the pricing of other items has been based on that.
I do agree with cutting out the other types of coins, after all what’s electrum?
How about you do away with coins and go with the values of the weights of metals? It’s similar to what the Vikings did in terms of hacksilver, e.g. everything is valued by weight of precious metal.
This way, you could have coins from different places (or times) being different masses, and you just tell them about how much it weighs. Jewelry has a much more reasonable value then (a necklace worth 10,000 gp? Bah, it weighs about one and a half pounds, it’s worth what it’s worth), and so forth.
In higher levels, specially epic, you’ll ditch gold pieces altogether. Expect platinum became your gps at 16+, and astral diamonds at 25+.
Nevertheless, I agree with you on ditching silver and copper. Usually they are useless.
I think the other coins are useless only to adventurers, who are hyper-wealthy for the setting. I recall that one silver is something like a week’s worth of labor for a skilled craftsman. So it’s not a trival sum to the average person – just to adventurers, who plunder dragon hordes left and right and quickly outgrow their ancestral swords.
I wish they’d pick a standard and stick with it. They clearly expect you to hand out AD and PP at higher levels in lieu of gold, but all prices are given in gold regardless of level. The net result is that it’s most convenient to track your wealth in terms of gold, and it’s easy to accidentally mess up the math when you add PP or AD, particularly if you’re in a swamp of 0s.
All that said, with respect to the intrinsic value of gold…
1: I think this is much ado about nothing.
2: Your values may be heavily distorted. I’ve heard it said that a sword– not even a particularly nice one– would have cost the equivalent of a year’s salary for a soldier in medieval times. So 10 or 15 gold or whatever a longsword goes for might not be that far off from what it may have cost in real life.
3: You’re assuming that gold is approximately as common and approximately as valuable in [fantasy world of choice] as it is on Earth, and there’s absolutely no reason to assume that.
Deflate the coinage. Make *silver* the standard measure of value – as it was in the medieval period – and say that gold and platinum worth ten times what they are by the book. That means a chest full of gold remains a big deal for longer, and even a handful of silver gets the respect it deserves.
Astral diamonds? *meh* We already have the gemstone and magic item economies…
In 4e coins are 50/lb.
Wow, 4e actually did something right.
I’m amused to see that the google ads on the site have all changed to ads about buying gold since I posted this. I’m very tempted to post something about the random prostitute table in the old dmg just to see what ads come from that.
Oh, and I see now that 3e does 50 coins per pound as well.
The entire coin economy of D&D and a lot of other game systems is mucked up. Mostly because people don’t want to be scrapping for the coppers since focusing on that doesn’t seem to be fun for most people (I’d enjoy the touch of realism, but that’s me). The real distortion isn’t the cost of items in the books or the weight, it’s how freely it’s all handed out. It’s expected that the ‘adventurers’ are going to be uberwealth but the environment isn’t designed to quite handle that. It would be like a team of Trumps or worse rolling through a small town and trying to pay for their beer with $1,000 bills.