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:
I think it’s just the dissonance of trying to shoehorn capitalist economics into a feudal setting. In most feudal societies, the money economy, in the sense of everything having a monetary value and having few barriers to exchange that commodity for money and vice versa, isn’t fully formed but coexist among different forms of exchange like barter and feudal obligations. The money economy mostly exists within the context of merchants and traders.
Some peasant finding a valuable ring doesn’t mean much if they live in a feudal society where peasants can’t own personal property, meaning anything they touch automatically belongs to their feudal landlord. The peasant can’t quickly pawn off the ring since most merchants with that amount of coin aren’t wasting time in some shitty hamlet. And if the peasant somehow flees to a medieval city in order to find a merchant to sell the ring, well many medieval cities require papers in order to actually enter in the city as a precaution towards fleeing serfs among other things, so the peasant would have to either bribe the guard somehow or sneak their way in. And once in, the merchant would almost certainly offer a price much lower than what the ring’s worth since the peasant is in a completely precarious position by virtue of being a refugee.
In a weird way, the high fantasy imagery of some adventurer standing triumphantly over a huge pile of gold coin is just another example of capitalist realism. Gold coin is just a placeholder for money, and we associate money with wealth and power because in a capitalist society with a fully formed money economy, money is wealth and power. But this is not so in a feudal society, where the source of wealth and power is not money but land. The way to make it big in a feudal society is to be created a hereditary title through faithful service to your liege. That or be a warlord who’s able to integrate to polite feudal society through a strategic loveless marriage.