By that I mean that the sheer number of coins that are expected to buy pretty much anything at mid-to-high levels is so absurd that it makes the old imagery of treasure chests full of the stuff feel not only underwhelming but burdensome.

If 50 coins equal one imperial pound, as the rulebooks typically state, you could just about melt down and hammer out a house or a boat approximating the prices in the book for such things. It gets even sillier when magic items are so obscenely priced yet at the same time a typical adventuring party picks up so many of them that they could, materialistically speaking, pull a Mansa Munsa on any quasi-medieval economy if such items are really priced that highly where a hand-me-down magic protection ring could set up a peasant in endless luxury for life.

I don’t try to fix all of that mess, but I do tend to use a house rule where coins have as much written buying power as 100x the listed prices for most things, and the coins found in a listed lair are reduced by to 1/100th of the listed values, which also keeps coppers, silvers, and electrum relevant a lot longer. As long as all the players remember the conversion tables and don’t forget them in a way that fucks up the bookkeeping, it works pretty well.

How about the rest of you? :d20:

  • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    IIRC the origin of the odd pricing/weights of coins is in trying to make encumbrance matter. Nobody uses encumbrance rules anymore so you can just ignore the weights.

    I don’t play D&D but in my home fantasy GURPS games we run 250 coins to the pound, 1:10:100 value for copper/silver/gold. With the alternate prices in GURPS, this makes gold feel really valuable; eg a greatsword would be 8gp, and a full set of heavy plate around 120gp, while a big gold ring that weighs 1/4lb is worth around 90gp.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      It still weirds me out how a bag full of solid gold coins could set up most peasants for life, yet because of the rules as written you’d need millions of dollars worth of gold’s contemporary value to buy a small cottage or a little boat.