Fixing Money

[FabulousFizban]

what would the price of various items be if the currency ratio was 100/1 instead of 10/1. so 100 copper equaled 1 silver, and 100 silver equaled 1 gold?

[Brother Oni]

what would the price of various items be if the currency ratio was 100/1 instead of 10/1. so 100 copper equaled 1 silver, and 100 silver equaled 1 gold?

Assuming you didn't mean a simple shift from a 100-10-1 copper:silver:gold ratio to a 10000-100-1 copper:silver:gold ratio where you just convert all current prices to their copper equivalent and divide by the new ratio, it depends on how the value of a coin is determined in your setting. Is it an arbitrary value (ie the value stamped on the coin is what it's worth) or is it based on the metal weight (a silver coin is worth 1 silver is it weighs this many grams of fine silver)?

Historically, coins have been valued by both methods - Edo-era Japan had a type of silver 'coin' which was just a lump of silver with the exact weight minted on it; they also had a major issue when they shifted to an arbitrary value and de-valued their silver coinage from 80% fine silver to 20% fine silver, resulting in a four fold price increase in imported goods as the foreign traders wanted payment in fine silver.

Finally a side effect of such a change would be make silver and gold mines far more valuable (10 times and 100 times more respectively), so economic and hence political power would shift towards those territories with them in.

[Anymage]

D&D economies don't make much sense anyways, so you'd just have to decide whether to use the cp (the most common unit of trade) or the gp (the most common adventurer currency, and if you're using 3.5 the basis for wbl) as your base. From there you can just apply a straight multiplier through everything.

I will note that, in the real world, that would be the equivalent of only having pennies, dollar bills, and hundreds as available denominations. While mathematically that can work, in practice people who carry their money around tend to prefer more intermediate denominations. Just because having to carry around hundreds of coins gets heavy.

[Jay R]

Welcome to the club. Many of us have tried to improve the D&D money system. I once tried to replace the major coins with pounds, shillings, and pence. A friend once tried to build a system that used actual ratios between the values of copper, silver, and gold.

Every attempt I’ve ever seen has eventually led to the realization that tracking money isn’t an exciting part of the game, and that we think in base ten.

So the best system is a completely transparent and unambiguous one in base ten that we already know, so that we can finished dealing with money and get back to exploring the wilderness. And that’s what the rules give us.

Back to your specific question: I suspect the most likely result would be for silver prices to stay the same, gold prices to be divided by ten, and copper prices to be multiplied by ten. The only actual effect would be having to translate the price when reading the books, and confusion when talking to NPCs.

DM: That’ll be twenty gold.
Player: Do you mean 20 new gp, which is 200 old gp, or 20 old gp, which is two new gp?

More complications, for no particular benefit.

[False God]

Welcome to the club. Many of us have tried to improve the D&D money system. I once tried to replace the major coins with pounds, shillings, and pence. A friend once tried to build a system that used actual ratios between the values of copper, silver, and gold.

Every attempt I’ve ever seen has eventually led to the realization that tracking money isn’t an exciting part of the game, and that we think in base ten.

So the best system is a completely transparent and unambiguous one in base ten that we already know, so that we can finished dealing with money and get back to exploring the wilderness. And that’s what the rules give us.

Back to your specific question: I suspect the most likely result would be for silver prices to stay the same, gold prices to be divided by ten, and copper prices to be multiplied by ten. The only actual effect would be having to translate the price when reading the books, and confusion when talking to NPCs.

DM: That’ll be twenty gold.
Player: Do you mean 20 new gp, which is 200 old gp, or 20 old gp, which is two new gp?

More complications, for no particular benefit.

This was my experience when attempting to integrate different currencies (even if they all used GP) and international exchange rates. It just takes time away from the game and dedicates it to accounting, which is only fun for that one guy at the table who's a CPA IRL.

[jjordan]

I have found the price lists in D&D to track pretty well with historical examples. Not perfectly, of course, but close enough. The discrepancies I've found have usually been based around modern assumptions. But since we're playing a fantasy game, that doesn't really matter.

The suggestions I've seen have been:
-Do whatever you want with your coinage in terms of lore/fluff.
-But you'll probably end up falling back on tracking everything in terms of GP unless your players enjoy the fluff a lot.
-So make it easy to convert your lore/fluff back to standard GP.

[MintyNinja]

I've used the Silver Standard in my latest campaign and it seemed to work pretty well. 100 cp = 1 sp, 100 sp = 1 gp, and 100 gp = 1 pp. This just meant that all base prices that were written in gold pieces in the books became silver pieces to our setting. Copper stayed copper, but if something was listed as silver in the books, we'd just add a zero to the end and that was the amount of copper it would cost.

What this did was illustrate the socio-economic differences a bit more clearly to the players. Coppers were for poor folks and working peasants, Silver for tradesmen and merchants, and Gold meant large deals or nobility. They seemed to enjoy it and I plan to keep using it.

[Tvtyrant]

I like wealth checks from D20 Modern. They simplify things a lot; your check ia a combination of loans, tracking down the item successfully or not, and actual price.

[Mordaedil]

I once had an idea for a system of hard separation with no conversion.

So commoners and every day services traded in copper coins. You can't buy your daily services in anything but copper. Silver? No use. Gold? Too much trouble. Everything is just traded in copper on this level.

Merchants and the like trade in silvers amongst each other. Silvers in this setting denote an agreement of value. Purchasing goods or performing trade of livestock? Silvers are all that count. Coppers aim too low and gold attracts too much attention.

Nobles trade in gold coins. Property, luxury items and magic are all traded with gold. Nothing else will do.

Royalty trade in platinum. Only when you need to purchase favors from other kingdoms will the platinum see any use. They attract a lot of attention and require hefty approval for trade. Only a handful of these coins are in circulation and minting new ones require approval from the banks and are almost ceremonial in nature.

In play? Nobody liked this idea. It became troublesome being unable to trade silver for copper for services that adventurers use daily. Players started to feel poor despite having a lot of gold or silver. Silver became virtually useless for the adventurers in short order. Platinum became almost a curse.

It felt like a good idea, but practice was difficult. It made copper more attractive, but I had to allow them to trade the coins at some kind of hub, which meant I had to make a sort of bank that can transfer trade of units. And even then, it didn't solve anything, just made things complicated for no benefit.

Recommendation? Never use electrum, forget platinum exists and stick with mostly gold and copper. Even silver is mostly useless.

[KaussH]

I always liked my set up. Values stayed mostly the same but flavoured the names to give an idea of use and history. Gold orbs as opposed to gp (early coins too pure for the stamp, so were more lopsided than round. Tradition to make them look that way now to attest to purity) silver pieces (keeping the classic) in most towns thats the 50 dollar bill of the economy. Copper pennies ( 1/10 the size of other coins) used for day to day. And iron drabs ( pig iron bits, worth 1/10th a copper, begger and poor money set by the church, given by them and taken by their shops. Often merchants will take it as well for things like scraps)

On the high end, platinum plates. Normal value and weight, pressed very flat, high end use only when a note of credit would not apply.
Gold crown heavy miled coin used by the dwarves but since milling keeps it sliver theft proof, used by a number of high end merchants as their gold standard and storage.

And i wanted to keep the electrum so... its the electrum lucky. Used by traveling merchants and gamblers. Its often part of trades in good faith " and a lucky " a good luck charm " i keep a lucky in my boot" and the like.

I also have diffrent locations using widely different service prices. Food and room in a smaller village.. sp gets you a great room and eat your fill, but we cant make change for your orb.
In the capitol city near the sovereign's mansion, 1 orb gets you a shared space and whatever is in the stew pot.

The names semi stick, i find using the non money half helps players remember.
Plates, crowns, luckys, orbs,pieces, pennies, drabs

[Max_Killjoy]

I find myself stuck between my worldbuilding / immersion addiction, wanting to have a host of currencies and old coins and rates of exchange and distrust of coins from countries known to debase and so on... and the overhead that puts on players. I have to remind myself that the minutia don't appeal to all other gamers the same way that minutia so deeply appeal to me.

[HeraldOfExius]

Currency is one of those things that helps the game most when you don't have to think too hard about it. It's generally assumed that whatever money you find while adventuring can be spent, and you won't have to worry about merchants not being able to make change for your gold/platinum. At most you'll have to go to a bigger city where you can buy more expensive things. Changing the conversation rates between coins without shifting away from everything meant for PCs being priced in gold doesn't really do anything except make the PCs lug around ten times as many silver pieces from when they get change for something, and even more copper pieces than that.

Changing the numbers and base unit can be a good way to change the feel of a setting if you do it right, like in MintyNinja's example, but it quickly becomes an annoying hassle if you make the system more complicated for the sake of realism, as plenty of other people have said here.

[MrSandman]

I once made a cool monetary system based on Europe's medieval currencies (penny as base coin, shilling and pound as counting units, some coins from foreign countries that had become common, something very elaborate...) I was very proud of it, but as soon as I finished it I decided that thenceforth if I game mastered, everything would be priced in pennies. In D&D speech that would mean that gp becomes the only currency unit. Anything below 1gp isn't worth tracking. Anything above doesn't warrant a new currency unit.

[HouseRules]

Gold Family: Copper -> Silver -> Gold
Platinum Family: Nickel -> Palladium -> Platinum
Iridium Family: Cobalt -> Rhodium -> Iridium
Osmium Family: Iron -> Ruthenium -> Osmium

10 Copper = 1 Nickel
10 Nickel = 1 Silver
10 Silver = 1 Palladium
10 Palladium = 1 Gold
10 Gold = 1 Platinum

Convert Princes into Silver Pieces before the conversion to the new metal currency would create a medieval price range.

Not sure how to put the other 2 families into the metal economy.
Iron is a cheap metal, and Osmium reacts with air and becomes Osmium Tetra-oxide a toxic gas.

Osmium has the closest density with Uranium, the highest density material.

[FabulousFizban]

Gold Family: Copper -> Silver -> Gold
Platinum Family: Nickel -> Palladium -> Platinum
Iridium Family: Cobalt -> Rhodium -> Iridium
Osmium Family: Iron -> Ruthenium -> Osmium

10 Copper = 1 Nickel
10 Nickel = 1 Silver
10 Silver = 1 Palladium
10 Palladium = 1 Gold
10 Gold = 1 Platinum

Convert Princes into Silver Pieces before the conversion to the new metal currency would create a medieval price range.

Not sure how to put the other 2 families into the metal economy.
Iron is a cheap metal, and Osmium reacts with air and becomes Osmium Tetra-oxide a toxic gas.

Osmium has the closest density with Uranium, the highest density material.

no one is going to mint in the iridium family. those three minerals are impossible to work with.

[GloatingSwine]

Almost certainly the way you want to do things to "fix" RPG money is to make things less complicated.

There probably aren't lots of coins of lots of different denominations, there's probably one in common use because most people won't have enough of that one at one time to get any of any others because 99% of the population is in a cash-light economy because they're farmers who pay taxes in produce. It's probably silver (and probably adulterated with baser metals).

So really just track value in one currency and when players get phat muns they don't actually get coinage they get items to a value tracked in that one currency (gems, artwork, jewellery, artifacts etc).

[TexAvery]

I once had an idea for a system of hard separation with no conversion.

So commoners and every day services traded in copper coins. You can't buy your daily services in anything but copper. Silver? No use. Gold? Too much trouble. Everything is just traded in copper on this level.

Merchants and the like trade in silvers amongst each other. Silvers in this setting denote an agreement of value. Purchasing goods or performing trade of livestock? Silvers are all that count. Coppers aim too low and gold attracts too much attention.

Nobles trade in gold coins. Property, luxury items and magic are all traded with gold. Nothing else will do.

Royalty trade in platinum. Only when you need to purchase favors from other kingdoms will the platinum see any use. They attract a lot of attention and require hefty approval for trade. Only a handful of these coins are in circulation and minting new ones require approval from the banks and are almost ceremonial in nature.

In play? Nobody liked this idea. It became troublesome being unable to trade silver for copper for services that adventurers use daily. Players started to feel poor despite having a lot of gold or silver. Silver became virtually useless for the adventurers in short order. Platinum became almost a curse.

It felt like a good idea, but practice was difficult. It made copper more attractive, but I had to allow them to trade the coins at some kind of hub, which meant I had to make a sort of bank that can transfer trade of units. And even then, it didn't solve anything, just made things complicated for no benefit.

Recommendation? Never use electrum, forget platinum exists and stick with mostly gold and copper. Even silver is mostly useless.

I would do something like this, but in a different direction and with only two tiers:k

Gold is used for mundane items, low-level magic (maybe up to generic +2 items). Silver and copper aren't tracked separately and are only referred to for items that cost less than a gold (a torch, a bag, whatever). This economy is meant to be used for early levels, but then comes...

<something>. I'm not sure what it would be (potential? literal power? phlebotinum?), but something so valuable no one would sell it for gold, and that's the currency if you want to bribe a devil or hire an angel, or buy a +5 sword or a pocket dimension. Once you get to that level, you can have as much gold as you want without affecting the plot. Steal the adamantium doors, loot a dragon's hoard the size of a small house, and it won't wreck the campaign by letting you buy your way out of high-level problems. Of course, you can only spend it in Dis or the City of Brass or the like, but if you have some to spend, you should be able to get there.

I think this does actually solve a problem, without having as many tiers to keep track of as your idea.

[NNescio]

I always liked my set up. Values stayed mostly the same but flavoured the names to give an idea of use and history. Gold orbs as opposed to gp (early coins too pure for the stamp, so were more lopsided than round. Tradition to make them look that way now to attest to purity) silver pieces (keeping the classic) in most towns thats the 50 dollar bill of the economy. Copper pennies ( 1/10 the size of other coins) used for day to day. And iron drabs ( pig iron bits, worth 1/10th a copper, begger and poor money set by the church, given by them and taken by their shops. Often merchants will take it as well for things like scraps)

On the high end, platinum plates. Normal value and weight, pressed very flat, high end use only when a note of credit would not apply.
Gold crown heavy miled coin used by the dwarves but since milling keeps it sliver theft proof, used by a number of high end merchants as their gold standard and storage.

And i wanted to keep the electrum so... its the electrum lucky. Used by traveling merchants and gamblers. Its often part of trades in good faith " and a lucky " a good luck charm " i keep a lucky in my boot" and the like.

I also have diffrent locations using widely different service prices. Food and room in a smaller village.. sp gets you a great room and eat your fill, but we cant make change for your orb.
In the capitol city near the sovereign's mansion, 1 orb gets you a shared space and whatever is in the stew pot.

The names semi stick, i find using the non money half helps players remember.
Plates, crowns, luckys, orbs,pieces, pennies, drabs

Aren't most of these names lifted straight from Greyhawk?

I would do something like this, but in a different direction and with only two tiers:k

Gold is used for mundane items, low-level magic (maybe up to generic +2 items). Silver and copper aren't tracked separately and are only referred to for items that cost less than a gold (a torch, a bag, whatever). This economy is meant to be used for early levels, but then comes...

<something>. I'm not sure what it would be (potential? literal power? phlebotinum?), but something so valuable no one would sell it for gold, and that's the currency if you want to bribe a devil or hire an angel, or buy a +5 sword or a pocket dimension. Once you get to that level, you can have as much gold as you want without affecting the plot. Steal the adamantium doors, loot a dragon's hoard the size of a small house, and it won't wreck the campaign by letting you buy your way out of high-level problems. Of course, you can only spend it in Dis or the City of Brass or the like, but if you have some to spend, you should be able to get there.

I think this does actually solve a problem, without having as many tiers to keep track of as your idea.

Souls? Either trapped in soul gems, magical iron, or as contract options. It's the basis of the currency system in Baator, after all.

Harder to justify its use among Celestials though. Maybe they just want to free them or convert the to their cause?

[Mordaedil]

There is actually a currency like that, Astral Diamonds. I think they are valued up to 10,000 gold per diamond or so. But they were introduced in 4e, and is a bit... Strange for an extraplanar trading unit, but I guess souls would be hard to sell on the upper planes.

If you do trade in souls, I always like to say that the experience value of the person in real life traced to gold is how valuable the soul is, when examined.

[Quizatzhaderac]

what would the price of various items be if the currency ratio was 100/1 instead of 10/1. so 100 copper equaled 1 silver, and 100 silver equaled 1 gold?

The price of gold and silver is mostly the result of cultural things, and controlling for that it's a question of ratio of elements in the crust and mining technology. Most fantasy cosmogonies throw stellar fusion and geology out the window, so the elements ratio could be anything. As for mining technology, a lone dwarf with a pick-axe is often depicted as able to do more than a modern industrial boring rig.

Copper is one of the cheaper metals, so it's price is somewhat related to what it can be practically used for. Iron should be more expensive than copper, but not enormously for a medieval feel. If iron is too expensive, people start using bronze weapons. If iron is too cheap people would build out of it and other such non-thematic things. If you're going to reevaluate things pay attention to the relative prices of common goods and labor.

I'd recommend re-balancing things around copper because of this. If you re-balanced around gold, a 5e unskilled worker can afford to buy 200 lbs of copper with one one days work, you one would expect a lot of things to be lazily made with metal.

[darkrose50]

Harder to justify its use among Celestials though. Maybe they just want to free them or convert the to their cause?

This is how I always thought of it:
- Evil souls are punished by Celestials and this results in power. Taking power from the soul.
- Good souls are rewarded by Celestials and this results in power. Taking power from worship.

[darkrose50]

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product...Into-Gold?it=1

[Florian]

There's no special need to "fix money", once you consider that certain stuff is way above and beyond anything on the "for pay" market and firmly in the "for trade" market.

[Knaight]

I tend towards simplification - if I can get away without counting money precisely at all, I'm there for that. If I'm in a system that doesn't allow for that then for actual mechanical purposes your money is Coin, Cash, or Credits as far as the mechanics are concerned, and I mean that in the sense that I use only one of those words (for a fantasy setting it's almost always Coin) at a time.

In D&D terms 500 Coin would be like 500 gp. It's probably actually some combination of a much of different denominations in a number of different antiquated currencies, given the whole tomb robbing thing, with a smattering of gemstones on top of it, but as far as the mechanics are concerned that's 500 Coin. Now, if you really want to get into the meat of it you can make an exchange there. If the PCs are involved in debasing a currency for personal profit then fine, your 500 Coin are now 1000 Coin (Counterfeit Esheni Herdmark), which is harder to spend and has a very real possibility of turning into 300 Coin (Counterfeit Esheni Herdmark) if they bungle this. Maybe if the game is more economics focused you might see your 500 Coin turn into 475 Coin (No Counterfeit Esheni Herdmark) because somebody else did this, which presents a potential opportunity of some sort. Or an enemy to hunt down at all costs, depending on how vindictive the players are about their money.

[Brother Oni]

If iron is too expensive, people start using bronze weapons. If iron is too cheap people would build out of it and other such non-thematic things.

Depends on how easy it is to get tin and whether the culture in question has the knowledge/technology base to produce iron.

Unless you go for arsenical bronze, in which case the limiting factor isn't money or ore availability, but number of sane blacksmiths able to still forge the stuff.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

I ran a game awhile back set several generations after all of the major cities had gone full Tippyverse and thus effectively disappeared from the world. Under my house rules magic item construction required reagents that couldn't be magically duplicated so the post scarcity cities left a lot of mundane treasure behind. This caused all the money to be worth a fraction of its normal value with copper being useless as money and instead being melted down to make bronze.

Technology as well as magical sophistication were in decline in backwaters that hadn't gone Tippyverse. Bronze was actually the default weapon material with steel being masterwork. Anyway after the third session I was regularly forgetting to use nonstandard prices. The players totally got behind all the other idiosyncrasies of my world; reagent based item crafting, steel as a special material, spending xp to either level up normally or to gestalt, but the money was what didn't stick.

[dspeyer]

A campaign setting I'm constructing at the moment has General Purpose Tokens of Exchange ("GP" for short). They're a magic item that can merge and split on command into larger or smaller denominations, so you can carry any amount of cash in your pocket without looking up the encumbrance rules. And if you dump a mountain of gold onto the market, you crash the price of one obscure commodity, not the entire economy.

[Nightcanon]

Either you keep 1gp == 1gp, in which case silver is the new copper and no one with access to hold takes any notice of copper at all (if all you transactions are in $100 bills, you don't keep track of the pennies), OR you keep 1cp == 1cp, in which case silver is the new gold and gold is so uncommon in everyday transactions that it becomes functionally unusable.