How do you make a gold piece based economy actually make sense

What

>>50236199
you...make gold the currency people buy things with?

>>50236199
Have there be shit ton more gold in that world or just make it so that Dragons don't have an obsession with fucking piles of loot. Aside from that, nothing really keeps gold from being used as currency.

You have a centralized bank system that controls the supply of gold so that gold units have an established value by them in the exchange of goods and services.

>>50236199
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dungeonomicon_(DnD_Other)/Economicon

TLDR: Weak magical items can be purchased with gold, but beyond a certain point, nobody cares. Powerful magic items, on the other hand, require actual XP from high-level characters, who want something more valuable than gold in exchange.

Either you have to fuck with the rarity of gold so that it's much more common and less valuable, or you do what Europe did. Gold is the currency of nobles and huge business transactions, while small folk use much smaller denominations for stuff or live in local economies where they can trade in kind.

>>50236199
Gold would have to be a lot more common if you're talking about using gold coins for common purchases like in a lot of RPGs.

But then you get into the fact that gold is fucking HEAVY and the party is carrying around how much again? And how much weight can your backpack hold? Man all that jingling coinage must be really loud, Mr. Rogue.

File: Craft-lawrence-wolf-and-spice.jpg (51KB, 704x400px) Image search: [Google]

51KB, 704x400px

>>50236857
>mfw people think it'd be common to carry gold instead of replacing it with high value low weight commodity like salt/spices contracts for the exchange of merchandise at another city with an affiliated merchant's guild

Anon pls, you can't possibly be this pleb.

>>50236666
Shhhh, super satan, logic has no place in htis thread.

>>50236199
>Make sense
Fuck you.

I always wondered, what would realistically happen in your average pseudo-medieval country if adventurers start using the tons of coins the dragon they killed accumulated in centuries.

Total inflation? Starvation rampant?

>>50236898
I'm talking about if OP wants the economy to run like The Elder Scrolls where you hand the bartender a dozen gold coins for a bottle of shitty wine. Of course that shit wouldn't actually work that way in any world designed by anyone who even heard of economics.

Seriously, though, how much fucking gold does your average PC carry? That shit would be heavy and loud, but any time you try and point that out to PCs they throw a fit over it being "Autistic" to even think about that. Yet they'll argue with me all night about the melting point of their fucking sword.

If you want all of the coins to be made from gold, you could do them in several shapes. Really thin rings would be the least valuable since they'd have the least gold, then onto the coins with a big hole in the center and the normal solid coin, that would probably also be bigger and thicker.
Just making the coins different in size would be impractical since it's to easy to lose the small ones and the big ones are too large and unwieldy.
Using different compounds was generally considered cheating, and since you're talking about all-gold...

I hate this recent attitude of everything having to be justified just to satisfy autism. Can you people not just go with stuff anymore? None of this stupid shit matters.

>>50236199

You guys really need to take an introductory microeconomics course. If there's one thing that /tg/ gets wrong on a regular, stubborn basis, it's economics in game worlds.

Economies are remarkably resilient, and the laws of microeconomics hold up perfectly well under a very wide range of conditions. In fact, some degree of property rights and some degree of free choice of transactions is really all that's required. Economics isn't a system imposed from without, it's the dynamics that a social system tends to fall into by default.

>>50237171

A brief period of inflation, followed by a return to normalcy. In other words, as the supply of gold goes way up, prices would go up. Not because that stuff was getting more valuable, but because the gold that backs the currency was getting less valuable. That includes salaries, because of course that's just the selling price for labor.

That's the immediate short run. Following that, there would be an out-flow of gold to neighboring cities/villages/regions. The supply of gold would go down and the supply of the things that gold buys would go up. Prices would in very short order drop back down to their original levels, with everyone in the area slightly better off than they were before.

Look up how gold rush economies worked in the American West during the nineteenth century. Or the oil rush economies of the present day. Those were all far more severe as shocks go because A) they were bigger, and B) they lasted for much longer (the equivalent of finding many dragon hordes every month for several years). A few wagonloads of gold won't be anywhere near as big as either the gold rush or the oil emirates were.

>>50237171
They negotiate with the local kingdom exchanging the entirety of the horde for hereditary titles of nobility, trading privileges and large swathes of prime pastures and forests, of course the adventurers stash away the greatest jewels and special magical artifacts for themselves, but after that the kingom's intellectual elites take over and devise a method of dispersing the gold into the local economy to stimulate trade and facilitate the education of a new middle class that specializes in the manufacturing of high-tech commodities and specialization in a variety of crafts. The rest of the gold is used to bribe their neighboring kingdoms with alliances that ease trade and commerce, effectively exchanging a mass of practically worthless and potentially economically crippling gold for an investment on their country's future, ensuring a regional prosperity the likes of which had never before been seen.

>>50237367


For another clue, look to the American Civil War. Severe inflation plagued the Confederacy for its entire history.... except one brief episode. When the Union overran the South's printing presses, it took several months to get new ones online and printing money again. During that period, inflation screeched to a halt and the economy stabilized.

Then the printing presses were re-built and started up again. Immediately, inflation resumed and the economy fell apart again. It probably didn't decide the war, but it was one more example of confederate incompetence. And more importantly to this thread, it shows how quickly inflationary shocks and appear and then disappear and then re-appear based on events.

Whatever the economic impact of your dragon-slaying, a good DM should rule that it's mostly played out within a month, with a few very minor lingering issues lasting up to a year before it all goes back to normal.

>>50236199
i have a god making currency and placing them on monsters and in the wilderness

>>50237355
Cause economics is interesting?

>>50237526
I'm not saying you can't run a fantasy economics simulator at your table. That's your thing. But I will judge you for it and call you a boring twat.

You boring twat.

>>50237355
Personally I like it a lot when an author takes the time to explain the aspects of his world in great detail and doesn't take it for granted that I'll just fill in the blanks with what tolkien and friends have told me. Having a world that doesn't fall apart under scrutiny makes the entirety of the story feel that much more whole and allows me to immerse myself in it.

I'm not above just enjoying a quick and dirty fantasy world with no real logic to it either though. I consider the above to be the author going the extra mile.

>>50237564
Alright, enjoy your game and odd, pointless annoyance at mine.

>>50237587
this
this is what separates great fantasy and especially sci-fi from enjoyable but mediocre ones

>>50237624
>Stop having fun wrong

FTFY

>>50237587
Yes, I absolutely love it when an author spends a few dozen chapters discussing the deep and involved economics of his setting. I also adore when the GM takes time out of our busy games to spend a couple of hours explaining the price fluctuations of gold.

Detail is nice, but there is such a thing as too much detail.

>>50237702
>author spends a few dozen chapters discussing the deep and involved economics of his setting
>GM takes time out of our busy games to spend a couple of hours explaining the price fluctuations of gold
noone ever does that, while people build incoherent worlds without any internal logic by skimping on detail all the time. if you have the attention span of a 10 year old and can't handle 5 minutes of worldbuilding, just play a vidya or watch a shitty action flick

>>50237853
>noone ever does that
One look at any worldbuilding thread on this board shows me that you're wrong. Hell, this very thread and the people advocating for this amount of justification proves your argument is bullshit.

The reader/player is not stupid. They can extrapolate things on their own without you explaining every single little thing to them.

>>50237367

Good suggestions, but I would say that you're downsizing what epic loot in fantasy would amount to.

I mean, I'm still on the impression that Smaug's treasure was at least 5 years or something of Gondor's GDP, considering the line Gandalf had about Bilbo's chainmail's worth (more than the entire Shire).

Though yeah, it would be really crippling/historically relevant only it the country X does see a lot of adventurers looting for some time. Still, I think it would be interesting if they return to a region and people have not-so-found memories of their economic boost to the local activities...

>>50237898
the worldbuilding threads here are just discussion though, and autistic discussion at that
any non-irredeemably shit GM won't spend 30 minutes explaining the economic system

>>50237964
So we're in agreement then?

>>50238013
yes
most arguments between two reasonable people usually come down to semantics or minute details

>>50236838
I like this guy's train of thought.

Make silver the common money and gold the currency of the nobility

Gems can also be added but that would be the currency to deal with exteriors

>>50237898
>They can extrapolate things on their own without you explaining every single little thing to them.

Therein lies the difference between a good author and a shit one. You don't need to explain something you'd expect your reader to already know, but when your world/setting has something that makes it different and you can't possibly expect your reader to know it just from extrapolation, that's when you go ahead and splurge on a page or two of details that let the reader get a clearer picture of the world you're trying to create.

The reader is never stupid, but he might be misinformed or uninformed regarding some of the more intricate details of a particular subject. If the author is an engineer then I'd expect his story to include beautiful descriptions of all the machinery and the underlying principles that govern them. If the author has a background in economics he might take the time to paint a picture of how goods flow and the power structures that govern his world. The same for an author with a degree in chemistry or physics or an author who happens to be a veteran.

it's not that I need everything laid out for me, but the author might be able to lay things down in a way that I as a reader didn't expect or never thought of before.

>>50236199
By being closer to reality and making actual gold coins the realm of extremely wealthy aristocrats.

Crassus, one of the richest romans in history, was said to have estates worth 200 million sestertes - small silver coins, worth about 1/100 of an Aureus - a gold coin.
So one of the richest men in history had a total wealth of 2 million gold coins.

You can imagine how few gold coins that makes for actual spending money. IIRC, he had about 6000 annually. Again: One of the richest men in history.

Your average (PC) adventurers would be lucky to get 100 gold coins a year.

>>50236199
Because magic is a thing wizards used to make literal mountains of gold copper and silver.
The Mage council has put an end to that but the hyper saturated economy of those metals remain, this was a long time ago but it is why you can use gold coins to buy relatively cheap things

>>50236199
>>50238115
>>50236838
Well the currency we have now is a decimal system, so if you used gold like in a pre decimal system similar to that of Britain before 1971 (or harry potter). You could make the most worth coin or amount of money be very rare so gold could be used as the other anons said for the very wealthy. This way you could make the money system seem more flawed than the decimal system while still having some form of sense to it.

>>50236199
I think the better question is why you care so much about shit that exists to buy shit that actually matters.

>>50236337
>>50236666

My thoughts right away.

>>50236199
Are you ok OP, you need to go to doctors? Your brain not working?? Do you have fever?

>>50239315
A couple of games do this. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Song of Swords both use the Carolongian pound. 1 gold coin is twenty silver and one silver is 12 copper. Warhammer somewhat ruins the fluffy monetary system by having everything be in gold pieces anyway, but Song of Swords uses mostly smaller coins. It's sometimes a bit of a hitch to learn at first but people can learn quick.

And let's be honest here. My group and I play Song of Swords. We're autistic enough to deal with pre-decimal pounds.

>>50239446
>Warhammer somewhat ruins the fluffy monetary system by having everything be in gold pieces anyway
Sounds pretty dumb if you have a system in there and not even use it what was the point in making it?

>>50237367
This is on a much larger scale, though. Generally PCs of fantasy games are capable of outspending the richest of nobles on a whim. In DnD this is especially a weird quirk, since the city building mechanics used in 3.5 and 5e show plainly that adventurers have more money than the biggest cities. An adventurer can easily flood economies with four times the amount of money they usually have in one sitting, and that's ONE adventurer, when there's meant to be a party of four or more in mainline DnD. Even with the standard amount of rewards an adventurer can get, not with any modifications to give them more money than intended. 5e toned it down, but not enough, and the assumptions of how much a peasant makes in 3.5 disallows them from owning anything a peasant could be reasonably expected to own, IE livestock, farming tools, etc. Meanwhile, an adventurer can buy entire towns, or outspend minor nobles after one adventurer at level 2 or 3. At the worst, you're dealing with an issue where Adventurers completely unbalance and destabilize society as a whole by inflation on par with pre WWII Germany. At the best, money means absolutely nothing to adventurers at all.

>>50239659
TL;DR: This is utterly incomparable to the gold rush unless every single miner had more gross than New York.

>>50237898
I figure out the economics of my settings for my own notes to figure out who's got money and who's got power. That sort of thing.

It's just how I like to lay it out. It gives me a nice tense framework to push around, and my players enjoy when the results of their actions have logical in-game effects on the setting sometimes.

Why not just use fiat currency?

>>50236898
What spice or commodity would you buy, that would have a better weight/value ratio than gold?
Finely crafted jewellery?
You know the expression "worth its weight in gold" ?
Gold is worth... a lot.

>>50240597
Gold is also very heavy

>>50240597
At the end of the silk road nutmeg was worth more than it's weight in gold. In Africa salt was worth more than gold by weight. Even today many drugs are worth more than their weight in gold.

And so on and so forth, gold was only really particularly useful because a great many cultures started using it as an intermediary, but in a pure barter system there are better things to trade depending on local needs.

>>50240682
>>50240785
I sincerely doubt that anywhere, in any economy, salt has ever been worth more than gold. While gold may not have been useful, it has been a stable of coinage for ages.

A small real-life example of 15th-century England;
A daylaborer would make about a sixpence for a days work.
That would buy about - hold on now - 12 pints, or roughly 12 kilos of salt. If he cared to spend ALL OF IT on salt, for some retarded reason.

A sixpence is also the same as half a shilling.
And 20 shilling make a sovereign.
You know, one single fucking gold coin.

Don't spew this retarded bullshit. Salt has never been worth more than gold.

>>50240597

It's fantasy, anon. Gems are the thing.

Actually on this topic I liked how Exalted used jade.

pellet currency?
how much is a BB worth?
bounce tests to check if its real.
different alloys.

>>50241055
Do you have a source for this claim?

Also, while I'm not the guy you were arguing with, I have heard that roman soldiers were paid in salt rather than coins since salt was a universally sought after commodity for its role in preservation of meats and was therefore more valuable than gold in roman outposts where the local civilizations didn't recognize roman currency as holding any value.

>>50238161
Running a game is very different from reading a book, which I don't think is a big assumption to make on /tg/. I could have merchants haggle over every transaction. I could institute non-standard measures and differing face values of coinage minted by a ton of petty duchies. I could have a web of interlocking economic demand modifiers that require Excel spreadsheets to parse. Or I can be simple and have a fixed price list and cut the time needed for shopping drastically.

Some of this might be interesting to particular groups and GMs, but it's going to eat a lot of time and will inevitably be the focus of the game.

>>50236666
>you...make gold the currency people buy things with?
this,
Gold and silver was the preferred material used to make ACTUAL CURRENCY back in the medieval and ancient world, in fact, the paper bank notes we use today only got popular in the 1650's and it wasn't until the 1800s that it would outright replace gold and silver coins as currency.

So what's the problem?

File: stay salty.png (241KB, 241x462px) Image search: [Google]

241KB, 241x462px

>>50241055
Fine it wasn't "more than" it was approximately equal.

I read up on early capitalism and period works. The setting I DM is roughly based on the early enlightenment and the rise of the humans, so social-economic features prop up often. The fact that the Silberthaler(of the Maria Theresian variety) is by far the most widely circulating and stable currency to the point when international trade is almost exclusively conducted with them annoys other races to no end. Gold is only used as bullion for banking and significant transfers. The players found out that the entire reason behind this was an ingenious move by the emperors Fugger advisors to wage economic war on the heavy gold mining races like dwarves and elves, compared to the silver-rich Empire. This also greatly enables the mercantilist imperial policies, other races have to cut their prices literally just to be able to sell anything to human traders.

I also enjoyed being a little shit with numismatics. Gold is not just gold. Different coins have different value because of impurities and such, older money might be debased, devalued by inflation, a forgery, or sometimes even heretical to use(usurpers face on it) and if you want to get actual, functional money you can spend at a corner shop for food and supplies you have to take it to a money changer. I also ruthlessly enforced money having significant weight(gold is heavier than lead) because I really hate the fantasy trope of people running around with hundreds of gold coins.

>>50241269

Thats because western africa is historically one of the biggest gold producing area on earth, its very devalued there. The richest person in history Mansa Musa comes from there too. He was so rich, when he did his Hajj to Mecca his lavish gifts crashed the economy for decades.

File: smugkin.jpg (9KB, 300x225px) Image search: [Google]

9KB, 300x225px

>>50241347
True, but I never said anything about it always being the case, I even said "in a pure barter system there are better things to trade depending on [the local market]."

>>50241152
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/SPICES1.htm

This thing has some tables of equivalent commodity prices by day-labourer wages.
The "8d" and "6d" refer to "pence" which are abbreviated "d" for some reason.

>>50241269
Disregarding what a middle-school history book may say on the subject, actual economic history has quite a wealth of sources, particularly from England, who are historically good record-keepers.

Also, use a bit of common sense. Salt-deposits can be found along any coastline in the world, it washes up on shores, it is very, very abundant.
Gold is incredibly scarce. Like, insanely scarce.
Have you ever heard of a salt-rush?
If salt was worth its weight in gold, would the expression "salt their fields" ever have found its way to military history? Someone, just casually ordering something as valuable as gold to be ploughed into the ground?

>>50236762
> require actual XP
XP doesn't actually exist in-world. What's happening? Are blue numbers appearing over people's heads as a little glowing bar at the bottom of your HUD is emptied in payment?

What the fuck is actually supposed to be happening in the fiction?

>>50241434

To be honest, fields were never salted, it was an artistic embellishment.

File: shiggered nigger.jpg (8KB, 200x246px) Image search: [Google]

8KB, 200x246px

>>50236762
>DandDwiki

>>50237355
"you just have to turn your brain off and enjoy the movie"
I mean... Enjoy it maybe 10%, yes.

>>50241434
There are regions of Africa where salt is scarce and gold abundant, leading to a massive trans-Saharan trade culture that swapped gold for salt for centuries in West Africa. I cannot say anything about the relative value of one to the other. I also doubt that salt was worth more than gold by weight as well, but the trade was massive. Salt for gold created some of the wealthiest cultures in the world at the time.

>>50241068
Since you cant melt down jade, it seems a waste to turn it into small discs. That way, there's simply no way you can get nice big slabs of it to turn into statues or ostentatious tiles or what-have-you.

File: c9db09d440288eb2a43ea44db4e38ffb.png (213KB, 646x549px) Image search: [Google]

213KB, 646x549px

>>50241489

That is a page from Frank and K's Tomes, which are *relatively* reasonably written by 3.X homebrew standards.

>>50241637
The best D&D 3.5e homebrew I've ever seen was an overcomplicated mess with no sense of grounding or place within the game world; a slew of numbers and abilities deeply steeped in overly specific "once in a blue moon" conditional statements that often apply tiny +1 bonuses not even worth the effort of tracking.

When I try to imagine how very best 3.5e content I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot) would play out in a real play session, I get physically ill.

But hey, that's just me.

File: 1478549490499.jpg (22KB, 480x480px) Image search: [Google]

22KB, 480x480px

>>50241771
>The best D&D 3.5e homebrew I've ever seen was an overcomplicated mess with no sense of grounding or place within the game world; a slew of numbers and abilities deeply steeped in overly specific "once in a blue moon" conditional statements that often apply tiny +1 bonuses not even worth the effort of tracking.

3.5 casters, then?

>>50241434
Pence are abbreviated "d" because they're one of a pile of coins descended from the old roman denarius, which lived on that end of of the gold-silver-copper piece spectrum.

>>50241789
Literally the whole fucking system to be honest. But the homebrew, and if we're counting Pathfinder as 3.5e (I certainly do,) certain Paizo things worst of all.

>>50239706
TL;DR: DnD numbers don't make sense. Shocking.

>>50237171
>Musa made his pilgrimage between 1324–1325. His procession reportedly included 60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves who each carried four pounds of gold bars and heralds dressed in silks who bore gold staffs, organized horses, and handled bags. Musa provided all necessities for the procession, feeding the entire company of men and animals. Those animals included 80 camels which each carried between 50 and 300 pounds of gold dust. Musa gave the gold to the poor he met along his route. Musa not only gave to the cities he passed on the way to Mecca, including Cairo and Medina, but also traded gold for souvenirs.

>Musa's journey was documented by several eyewitnesses along his route, who were in awe of his wealth and extensive procession, and records exist in a variety of sources, including journals, oral accounts, and histories. Musa is known to have visited the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Al-Nasir Muhammad, in July of 1324.

>But Musa's generous actions inadvertently devastated the economy of the regions through which he passed. In the cities of Cairo, Medina, and Mecca, the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade. Prices on goods and wares greatly inflated. To rectify the gold market, on his way back from Mecca, Musa borrowed all the gold he could carry from money-lenders in Cairo, at high interest. This is the only time recorded in history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the Mediterranean.

>>50242063

Can't handle the swag of this nigga!

>>50242063

So basically this is an historical renactment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_Nqfi5T3AQ

>>50237355

Hope you enjoy it when a player with more than two brain cells breaks your shoddily-made game because you were too lazy to build the basic foundations of a decent setting.

Shit like the peasant railgun, bag of holding nuke, CODzilla, and fucking Pun-Pun are all due to glitches caused by D&D's wonky mechanics, and Gary spent far longer trying to regulate that kind of thing than you pal; for every setting like Eberron and TES that manages to use his mechanics to make a convincing world of their own, there are a dozen crappy homebrews that only remain functional when used against novices.

File: Coins_Old.jpg (1MB, 1728x1152px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 1728x1152px

>>50237314
>Seriously, though, how much fucking gold does your average PC carry? That shit would be heavy and loud, but any time you try and point that out to PCs they throw a fit over it being "Autistic" to even think about that. Yet they'll argue with me all night about the melting point of their fucking sword.

Here's how I deal with it as a GM: Coins' weight isn't counted toward encumbrance until you have 1,000 or more, after which point it's 10 pounds (or 1 stone if using OSR encumbrance) for every full thousand. If you act like a cheeky cunt carrying 997 coins, I'll have a chuckle once you find enough to put you over. It just keeps things from getting too crazy.

You can also use gems or jewelry to store wealth more efficiently -a necessity if you get rich. You can get gems of basically any value you want, and each gem counts as a single coin for encumbrance purposes. You can trade a gem as you would trade a coin of equal value, typically using them for big-ticket items like houses and magic weapons. A money-changer will happily convert gems to coins, or vice versa, generally taking 10%. That is, you give him 100 gold worth of gems, he gives you 90 gold in coins. You may obtain a discount for a bulk transaction, or if the money-changer really likes you for some reason.

>>50242575
>Hope you enjoy it when a player with more than two brain cells breaks your shoddily-made game because you were too lazy to build the basic foundations of a decent setting.

Not him, but as a GM with multiple brain cells at my disposal, I am capable of telling my players "I hope you understand, I'm not going to let you use that because it's an exploit that breaks the basic premises of the game I'm running". Or in more extreme cases, "I don't think that this game is for you. Goodbye".

File: 1477604442054.gif (81KB, 400x225px) Image search: [Google]

81KB, 400x225px

>>50236199
make the gold magic

Does anyone have an archive to that thread on tg a few months back where someone tried to create the most needlessly complex currency system for his players
That kind of shit always cracks me up

>>50243504
Never mind I found it

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/47183895/#p47184189

Worth reading the whole thread. Funny stuff

>>50237355
>recent
What seems like a new trend to you is actually just the end of a long summer. Actually thinking about things from time to time is actually a fairly old /tg/ tradition.

>>50239592
Not that anon, but the main reason is anything bigger than a basic meal or small object like that (a weapon or armour or property, etc) is most used in the game, and costs more that 1 gp.

File: image.jpg (89KB, 640x640px) Image search: [Google]

89KB, 640x640px

How to avoid alchemy from making gold worthless: nigga gold is the king of metals, master alchemists study for decades just to git gud enough to transmute small amounts of that shit.

>>50236199
>How do you make a gold piece based economy actually make sense in a pesuo-medieval fantasy setting?
Get this, people mine gold, refine it, and then cast it into coins. They use these coins to pay for goods and services. Difficult or rare goods or services cost more than minor goods and services.
A suit of plate armour might cost so much that it would take a peasant farming family several generations of scrimping and saving to buy one. A magical suit of plate armour might be something a minor noble house is immensely proud of and hands down for generations, a very powerful suit of magical armour might be something a royal family has due to a favour from generations ago. The way I think of it as far as magical weapons
>+1 magical weapons are relatively mundane but expensive, can be reasonably bought with an assload of gold
>+2 magical weapons are extremely expensive and can only reasonably be traded for favours, a duke gets a suit of armour in exchange for making a wizard a minor nobleman
>+3 magical weapons are impossible to effectively buy due to the time and effort involved in making them as well as the skill required, getting one might require something like giving a wizard unlimited access to your treasury while giving him a duchy and marrying your daughter to him despite her being 14 and him being 70

>>50236199
Alchemy.

Not, not transmuting shit, I mean they basically wring out atoms of gold in various stones and can milk them for all their worth with relative ease.

Also, the gold coins are never bigger than a US dime.

>>50241152
>>50241269
salt ever being worth more than gold is a myth
one is one of the most precious and sought-after metals on earth the other is a fucking spice you can also use for preserving food for the winter
gold was always way more rare and valuable than salt

File: scale.jpg (24KB, 320x240px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 320x240px

Why is it nearly every major culture has loved gold? Is it just naturally appealing to the human brain?

>>50245534
It's pretty, rare, and easy to work.

>>50245559
and never rots

>>50236707
Gold being rare is actually good for a gold based economy, it raises it's worth

>>50238161
I mean, I agree with the general point you're making here - I don't have to explain a castle to a group I'm playing with, they know what the fuck that is, I should take a moment to focus on something new to them, like how dwarves value wood so much as a luxury item that they use it in jewelry instead of more common metal.

But while this might be all well and good to explain for an RPG, where my purpose as a Gm would be to make a realistic world for the players to immerse themselves in, a story has a more focused point - specifically, telling a damn story. Maybe with some meanings and ideas underlying that, but you can't take five minutes to go and just blab about the world's uniqueness unless it is somehow relevant to the story, or at least the tone you are trying to set. Beautiful descriptions of machinery could show what the engineer main character focuses on, or economic structures might be important for a brush with politics in a story of warring kingdoms. But don't just put it in 'just because.' A good author should be able to keep you on your toes without throwing exposition at you like a textbook.

>>50245559
it also looks different to most metals and can't be used for making tools or weapons

>>50245759
That applies the same way to lead.

>>50245783
lead is extremely heavy, poisonous and not as rare
also it doesn't look that different to other metals

>>50236199
Well Broseidon, gold is very heavy in large quantities so trying to carry several hundred pounds of it isn't going to work. If you did you could make yourself a real target for bandits, cause thats a lot of gold. WHAT IF....instead of trading the gold, we just trade around pieces of paper that are WORTH a certain amount of gold that are easier to carry and make large transactions easier because the gold can be obtained later! It's still there and you still own but you just don't have to physically have it with you. Shoot, you could just carry the gold coins around for day to day purchases or even ask for paper bits that are worth smaller amounts of gold that also can be traded in later for said gold. Ah, who am I kidding....that'll never catch on, paper for money?

>>50236199
Use Influence and Profit Factor.

>>50245534
>>50245559
What's interesting is that, until the computer era, it has no industrial use. Gold, Silver, and Copper are shitty materials to make items out of - copper less so than the other two, with their uses being in... Jewelry, embellishments, and coins. Copper needed Tin to become Bronze, an actually useful metal.
Which is why the ancient sumerians used them to make the first currency - it didn't take away from economically useful metals, but weren't as easy to forge, as say, carved wooden tokens.
And the backing for their currency? Wheat. Farmers were paid for their crop in these coins, which could be exchanged for other goods and services because the people you paid them in used them to get their wheat from the government granary.
As Sumeria began to dominate trade, their grain tokens, these coins of metals that were used in jewelry elsewhere, became valuable simply because of the issuer. And it began to be copied - both in the original form and to create the image of "I'm connected to Sumeria, I'm a wealthy fuck".

Gold, the world's first fiat currency. Why did Sumer use gold? Because a rare metal was a good metal to mint tokens that represented the grain output of multiple farms. Combine that with rarity and the image given by wearing jewelry or using items that have absolutely no use in combat or tool making (really the only exception is in cups, plates, and bowls, where gold is actually superior to any other metal because it doesn't tarnish and leaves very little flavor), and you get something that is valuable because people say it is, despite having only artistic use in times when you needed a food surplus to support the effort to mine, refine, and shape it.

>>50246142
>refine
>gold

File: 1478572590751.png (158KB, 400x400px) Image search: [Google]

158KB, 400x400px

>>50237522
> Log Horizon

File: nw-coast-knife-13.jpg (105KB, 660x880px) Image search: [Google]

105KB, 660x880px

>>50246142
Only thing I can really say against this is that, in the case of some Native American tribes (at least in North America), cold hammering of copper was common - it was a metal that was easy to find in natural deposits, and could be worked without heating if done correctly.

Sure, it's a shitty metal compared to bronze or iron, but when you can't melt metals down so that you can form an alloy, or produce enough heat to work a metal like iron, copper would be pretty much the best metal. It would be used for religious items and jewelry, but also for things like daggers and maces, and possibly even breastplates.

>>50245534

Pretty, inert, easily found and identified in nature, not that common, easily worked, when worked into jewelry denotes status.

Back then gold wasnt actually that rare, even cavemen found gold nuggets in streams and shit, just most of the worlds easily accessible gold has been cast into bullion and stored in banks.

>>50246165
You have to make sure there isn't any silver or mercury in it.

>>50247426

>You have to make sure there isn't any silver

They actually ADDED silver most of the time to make electrum. Pure gold is very soft and easily damaged especially when worked into coins.

>>50247456
Gold's usually found as electrum anyway.

>>50236199
USE CHEESE AS CURRENCY!

YOU DONT EVEN HAVE TO BUY FOOD ANYMORE!

AND IT ROTS AWAY THE INFLATION! HAHAHAHA

File: Salt_Farmers_-_Pak_Thale-edit1.jpg (3MB, 2481x1644px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 2481x1644px

>>50241269
>salt mines

They literally farm the salt from the dead sea. You dig ditches and use the sand as filter.

>>50247399
>when worked into jewelry denotes status
That isn't a property of gold, it's the result of people deciding that it's valuable.

Base the currency on something else and have gold a stand in for fiat currency.

>>50241472
You are selling a small piece of your soul.

>>50237355
>>50243313

In a role-playing game, the rules and the information the players are given about the setting are the only real means they have of influencing the world around them in a predictable way that's not purely at the mercy of arbitrary gm decisions. They know that if they hit something with a sword, they're going to deal however much damage a sword does to it. They know that if you wrote in the book that shoes cost 3 fantasydollars in the capital, and 1 fantasy dollar in the countryside, they might buy some shoes and make some money.

When you excuse shit rules or shit worldbuilding that leads to silly exploits with "oh come on stop being autistic" you're basically saying "I put all these buttons here as decoration but I didn't expect you guys to start pressing them" Every bit of information about the world you give the players is one more button they can press when given the opportunity to try to affect their surroundings.

Instead of putting information there and being pissy when people use it, just don't put it there, force the players to stick to what their characters know, it's the best way to curb excesses and raise immersion.

Playing the scholar feels a lot cooler when he's the only player who has seen a real map of the kingdom or know any of it's history besides what his parents told him.

The same could be said for any specific field. If you all sit down and agree that you want to play businessmen, then make a robust economical system (base it on a historical example to save yourself a bunch of trouble) and go to town with it. But putting a half-assed unworkable economic system in your setting just because you feel you have to is a waste of time and invites immersion breaking shenanigans.

>>50247574
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_mining

>>50247574
>>50241434

Not every place had as easy access to salt as that. In a world where trade and travel was a lot more costly and risky than it is now, local availability had a much larger impact on local prices.

Salt was needed to preserve meat, and in a lot of places preserved meat was how you lived through the winter, so it's not a luxury goods, it's something you have to have.

Not all of those places was conveniently close to an abundant source of salt, or coastline, and even then getting the salt was not just a matter of shoveling it into buckets.

Even today, with shipping and trade on a massive scale, anything from oranges to pork is going to cost way more where it's eventually sold than it did where it was grown, that's the whole fucking point in shipping it there.

>>50245534
It's a precious metal whose properties make it ideal for use as currency.

Go wikipedia gold and currency if you want a full explanation.

>>50248187
>it's simple,
>just perfectly foresee what players might do with everything
>also have absolutely pornographic knowledge of the tiniest details that don't even matter to the game
Maybe I'm not some kind of perfect universe-simulation robot, and instead I'm a human with life obligations trying to play a game with my friends to have fun.

Before I started GMing, I used to think like you do, that the GM was some kind of world-simulating machine who could have a perfect flawless world with no fiat ever if only he wasn't so lazy. If you ever start GMing yourself, I think you'll come to understand that it's not like that.

>>50249196
I am a GM thank you very much. I'm not saying have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything, I'm saying sit down with your players and talk about WHAT SPECIFICALLY you want to play around with, like
>We want to be traders!
or
>We want to be Knights at war!
or
>Hogwarts, but with blackjack and hookers!
And THEN you zoom in on what kind of world building and tools you need for that specifically.

Instead of writing down the complete world, but half-assing it, write down the part you're actually going to be using and whole-ass it.

I've run dungeoncrawl fests, but I've also run games that started with someone inheriting an arms manufacturer and dealing with competitors, industrial sabotage and logistics.

One is not better than the other, but they require different tools. I don't need to invent a trade network and where the best ore is from for a campaign where people just want to dungeoncrawl, just like I can't pull out my D&D rulebook when someone wants to be a medieval business magnate.

If you run a political intrigue game but use a system where the players can just kill everything and can never be assassinated because they're too badass, things go to hell.

If you run a dungeoncrawl game about leveling up and acquiring stuff, but give your players an endless money supply because your worldbuilding is shit, things go to hell.

>>50249196
>>50249417
Different person here.

Different views work for different groups and people at varying levels of success. My current group runs on the logic of "we all agreed to play this, so in exchange for not being crazy jerks, the GM will try to facilitate all of us as best he can."

Or in another breakdown:
>GM picks out a setting or kind of adventure that we all agree to.
>We make characters that at least remotely fits into that idea or is otherwise useful to the group.
>The GM caters the original idea to include things for us so we don't need to fly off the rails to get what we want.

The GM is not required to be fucking ridiculous in their planning in this fashion, but it does require some forethought on their part in order to make sure that we're all getting something satisfying to ourselves (because the agreed campaign type should be agreeable tot he whole). It also allows the GM to still control what game we play, just with some input from the players in order to prevent something that doesn't seem like everyone would enjoy it.

It's not just a two-way street, it's a table of people who are all collaborating together in a circle (or whatever shape your table happens to be).

>>50245630
Yes but if the value of the material becomes higher than the face value, your economy is fucked. There's a reason we print money on paper.

>>50236898
A piece of gold the size of half a dime is worth a used car.
Do you have an idea how much salt that is? Even when it was worth trading that'd be at least two sacks.

>>50237367
I liked how Fable 2 did it.
>You buy all the houses in a town, lower all the rents, people buy all the products with their savings, there's no stock for a couple days making prices spike. Then everything becomes more plentiful and cheaper.
>You buy all the houses in a town, raise all the rents, everyone is miserable, stores are stock full making prices plummet for a little, then restock with very little product at outrageous prices.

Then again this is a game where you can become the king by monopolizing real state which is the most legit underhanded coup I've ever seen in fiction.

>>50251936
>Different views work for different groups and people at varying levels of success. My current group runs on the logic of "we all agreed to play this, so in exchange for not being crazy jerks, the GM will try to facilitate all of us as best he can."

You make it sound like that's not how every sane adult approaches voluntary group activities done for fun.

>>50236199
You make gold common enough so that it's nearer the historic price of silver or copper. Gold coins are barely ever used except for large transactions.

>>50241068
Is it "profound jade", by any chance?

>>50246219
You literally just have to throw copper ore and tin ore into a fire. The theory is that the first bronze was an accident where someone threw copper ore and tin ore into the same fire.

>>50245759
>>50245783
>>50245810
Actually, gold is significantly heavier than lead, which is one of the things that makes gold easy to recognize and hard to fake. There are very few things as dense as gold and pretty much all of them were unknown until recently and a lot of them are also considered to be very valuable. So you can be sure that your gold coins aren't just gold-plated lead or whatever by testing to make sure they weigh enough. Until I think the 20th century, there was no cheap way to make a fake gold coin that wasn't easily detected by weighing it.

>>50257367
But you have to get the fire to the right heat, right? That requires something along the lines of bellows.

Then again, maybe because they learned how to cold hammer copper, they just never tried working with other metals or heating other ores.

>>50236199
By making gold pieces the means by which foods are exchanged

File: Eagle Nebula_free.jpg (334KB, 860x460px) Image search: [Google]

334KB, 860x460px

>>50236199

If gold is going to be a viable currency on the level we typically see in D&D books, it must be considerably more common than it is in the real world. This means that the game would have to be set on a planet with an uncommonly high density of heavy metals. That means that the proto-planetary disc that gave rise to the star system had to have been seeded by lots and lots of nearby super-novae, which isn't all that hard to imagine in a stellar nursery that happened to be a little denser than average and produced a lot of high-mass stars that burned out quickly.

So basically, you'd wind up with a world that might be a bit smaller and denser than earth due to the heavy metal content (meaning that the world map has a bit less surface-area than earth); a skyscape with lots of nearby nebulae and young blue and green stars, some of which would be of considerable brightness and magnitude; and possibly lots of nearby alien life and civilizations that could be easily contacted (if not reached) by a sufficiently leveled magic-user or cleric. Higher-than-usual radiation levels in such a region of the galaxy would also doubtlessly lead to an increased rate of mutations in flora, fauna, and other life-forms in the planetary system in question and all its neighbors.

>>50236199
they use letters of credit/gems for any amount over what can be carried.

>>50245814
Someone could fake notes unofficially
(((Someone else)))would print enough notes to make yours useless. Officially.

>>50260449
There are ways of doing paper money other than what we consider modern tender,

>>50259709
Good point.

>>50245522
salt has a ton of industrial uses too, not just food preservation and eating

but if you live on a coastline you can get salt very easily, and coastlines have always been popular places to live.

>>50259709
>increased rate of mutations in flora, fauna

So, monsters?

File: tlingit.jpg (17KB, 451x255px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 451x255px

>>50257367
>>50258832
While it's hardly high tech, it does appear to take more than just a basic camp fire. You also need copper and tin ores of course, the former isn't exactly common, and the latter far rarer still. The European bronze age required trade networks to stretch all over the continent for the tin ore or finished bronze to get around, otherwise it would have been copper to iron for most places.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uHc4Hirexc

Your lungs may substitute for the bellows, and IIRC some bloomery furnaces would also be "self breathing", so that should be possible for copper too, but it does place new demands on the furnace itself as we remove the need for forced airflow.

Making useful bronze would, assuming you can get your hand son the ores, be somewhat easier than copper due to the lower melting temperature, but I suspect it won't make that huge a difference in the technology needed. Might be more of a fuel consumption issue.

Metallic copper is also naturally occurring in some places, allowing for its use by cultures that have no metal smelting whatsoever. In the case of the Tlinglit for example they made copper blades using neolithic stone-tool making methods. This was then complemented with hard soldering, when colonial traders made solder available to them, and I guess some pointers on how to use it.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/piqepwsqc1x9va1/North_American_Metallurgy.pdf

>>50263632
Cancer.

>>50241472
You are literally fueling your magic by ripping out a piece of your soul to invest the item with great power. Originally in 2e and I believe 1e D&D you actually had to sacrifice permanent hp to enchant magic items. Then again I could be mixing it up with Palladium.

As far as what it would appear in words, something along the lines of extreme fatigue. The type of bone-jarring tired that causes the enchanted to pass out next to his workspace as his body tries to recover the energy he is pouring into the item. I say it wouldn't look impressive to those without some form of magic detection, but to those it lights up like a christmas tree. I would also place upon it a sort of hoarding curse for the enchanter. He really does not want to part with it. It's a part of him. The most intimate part of him. His soul. He will not give it up willingly or at least not to someone that doesn't respect what he did to create it. But that may just be me.

>>50236199
The reason the gold standard existed for so long was because it was a scarce material and you could easily find value in it.

Now, you could make it so that making artificial gold coins was illegal everywhere, because while it is possible to make artificial gold coins it can fuck up the economy so it's illegal. Magic Items have jack and shit to do with it.

Real-world answer: Use smaller gold pieces. Use gold dust, use sequins. Use coppers and tin coins.

>>50265796
>He will not give it up willingly or at least not to someone that doesn't respect what he did to create it.
At least, not to anyone he doesn't love enough to give his soul to.

>>50266580
Gold dust seems kind of shitty. It's the kind of stuff that's difficult to carry, and you might lose it if you sneeze.

>>50259709
I know this post is 15 hours old but I just have to let you know it's one of the best posts ever written on /tg

>>50236199
>How do you make a gold piece based economy actually make sense in a pesuo-medieval fantasy setting?
You need to articulate why you think a gold piece-based economy wouldn't actually make sense in a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting in the first place.

If we don't know what assumptions you are operating on, we can't smooth things out for you effectively.

>>50244441
I made it so alchemy actually ruined gold as the standard, and silver became the new standard. Why? Silver is an anti-magic metal; several magical creatures are immune to it and it is impossibly to synthesize with magic. It also became popular as an inlay for armor with wealthy warriors because of this fact. So it was a much better precious metal to base currency on, because it was fraud-resistant and had worth in-world besides being rare-ish. Gold was relegated to costume jewelry status, at best. Nice to look at, worthless otherwise. I suppose it'd still be useful in electronics if the world ever went full Magitech or something.

>>50267039
>several magic creatures are immune to it
I typed faster than I thought; several magical creatures are WEAK to it, and it is IMMUNE to magic.

>>50267039

I like it.

File: 1439881914203.jpg (10KB, 250x250px) Image search: [Google]

10KB, 250x250px

>>50237355

>>50252488

if you're using gold as your primary medium of exchange, the value of the material *is* the face value. This doesn't mean the "economy is fucked", it just means governments don't have access to seinorage or monetary policy

>>50267888
>it just means governments don't have access to seinorage or monetary policy
That's not quite true. The government can still say that official government gold coins with the king's stamp of officialness are worth one and a half ounces of gold, despite containing only one ounce of gold.

>>50269812

Yeah, that's what seigniorage is

>>50236857
That's why my character carries platinum :^)

We also have a safe at our base to put anything we don't want to carry in.