Proposing the Copper Standard

[scottanderson]

A small bag of gold pieces are nearly worthless. You can't buy much with one. People have recognized this and moved to a silver standard for pricing and for XP. In my own Treasure Hunters Prolix, we use tin farthings, copper pennies, silver shillings, gold pounds and gold crowns, where shillings are the unit of basic measurement. The denominations are in the old LSP money more or less (even though there were very few pound coins ever minted in real life and the five-pound coin is speculative at best.)

But that still leaves silver nearly worthless and requires vast amounts of gold to buy anything of substance. On the other end, copper pennies are basically a trap. Worse than worthless by weight.

So let's take the valuations and recalibrate them again. 1 cp becomes the base unit of price. 10 cp = 1 sp; and 10 sp = 1 gp.

Furthermore so we can easily imagine what the coins are actually work, we will imagine that 1 cp has the same buying power as 1USD ($1). Then we can clearly see a dinner in the inn might cost 2sp and a nice suit of plate armor might cost 120gp with all the bells and whistles, while you could get a beat suit off the rack for maybe 40gp - the same price as a medium war horse.

There's folks online that are working on the copper standard and other folks who have good price lists from various times and places written up in modern money. Putting two such resources together should yield a great alternative monetary system and price list for all manner of gear. This list will have the advantage of having prices that are easy to grasp. The system will have the advantage of making all coins valuable.

The thing we will have to adjust is the treasure tables and treasure amounts in the dungeon, and the XP for treasure - 1 cp = 1 XP now.

[voyagingid]

I'm loving this idea. I use treasure spent as the main source of xp gain in my campaigns. With this change in place I could imagine characters leveling the first few levels with bags of copper pieces used to purchase mundane equipment and armor upgrades.

Any chance you could link the pages on copper standard and pages on prices in $ as referred to above?

[captaincrumbcake]

I have always contended, and received much flak for it, concerning the source of experience points gained simply by the hauling of gold (and lesser coin) pieces out of a hidey hole.

While I understand it is a game, I have always contended that, it can be a game as simple or complex as the group playing it desires, without doing so intended as an insult at the designers and creators of it. 

So, I earnestly recommend that all referees (and their players), do whatever the hell you want as long as all involved accept the  premise and its ramifications. 

[Deleted]

Oct 5, 2017 11:22:06 GMT -5 captaincrumbcake said:

While I understand it is a game, I have always contended that, it can be a game as simple or complex as the group playing it desires, without doing so intended as an insult at the designers and creators of it. 

Agreed. Even the game’s co-authors were (and still would be, if they were with us) the first to tell you to make the game your own. This was a pretty constant theme with both of them, as well as pretty much everyone in the original play-testing group.

It’s fun to bounce your ideas off other gamers, but in the long run you should do things the way that works best at your table.