How do you handle money in your games? Do you actually keep track of each coin and denomination...

This must be how everyone else feels when they look at Bongland and the US still using Imperial units.

No it's
>1 guinea = 1.05 pounds
>1 pound = 4 crowns
>1 crown = 2.5 florins
>1 florin = 2 shillings
>1 shilling = 12 pence
>1 pence = 4 farthings
There's also a bunch of doubles, halves, thirds and sixes based on the above.

The UK is mostly metric by this point. It's just miles on roads and a few products, and the younger generation mostly use metric anyway.

I mostly run Burning Wheel and MonsterHearts. The prior has a resources stat which is rolled to obtain items, the latter has no mechanic for obtaining items so it's entirely fiat.

the good and old gold coins

Definitely a wealth system where the player can just roll for it. Keeping track of coins is boring as fuck. I don't wanna play an accountant.

>In 5e every copper is important,
Cause it's a shit system

I have never played a game with abstract wealth. Really curious about how it would play out in practice.

My favorite currency system in an RPG was the use of ammo as currency in Mutant: year zero. Obviously not workable in most settings, but in this case it fit very well.

When I'm creating treasure hoards and the like, I'll go into an obsessive level of detail about what gets found. The group I'm in includes a CPA and an IRS enforcer, so they enjoy going through this kind of stuff. Sometimes I'll replace [X coins] with material goods-- 78 pounds of semi-precious stones, two bunks of ebonywood, a small gilded paperweight in the form of a squirrel. Stuff like that.

>The group I'm in includes a CPA and an IRS enforcer, so they enjoy going through this kind of stuff.
You'd think they'd leave that shit at work. Are they really into doing the same kind of thing they do all day at work when they're playing their fantasy adventures? Strange.

Yeah, agreed, it totally depends on the system and setting. And group, some players love all the micromanagement and inventory. There's something to be said for very abstract systems though.

>I have never played a game with abstract wealth.
Highly recommend checking it out, if only to see if you like it. One of the FATE based games I played (sci-fi something or other) did a really neat take on this, treating wealth in a parallel way to an HP bar that takes "attacks" when you make purchases. The relevant defense stat was based on a character's actual wealth, so very rich characters wouldn't be likely to take "wealth damage" from purchases that might bother normal folks.

I know a lot of Fate implementations do something similar with material possessions, basically letting players just roll for the likelihood that their character might be carrying a particular thing when the need for it comes up. IIRC there were even some gimmicky character concepts built around being that Mr. Pockets type character that always has the right tool for any possible situation.

>You'd think they'd leave that shit at work.
I think it's just personality types. They're not auditing retailers in the game, they are counting their own gold coins. Bit different. I can tell you from direct experience that engineers don't stop thinking like engineers just because they're roleplaying, for instance.

I stick with coins being dealt with by weight. 1/25th of a pound of cold is 1/25th of a pound of gold, no matter what's stamped on it. As long as it's pure, anyway.
Yes, this forces players to keep value in magical items instead of heavy coinage.

>Bongland and the US still using Imperial units.
The US, you mean. Here in britain, we just keep imperial measures around as legacy compatibility.

Literally the entire world laughs at america's use of metric, especially when their probes crash due to errors.

Is this basically how abstract wealth is done?

It was a Kingmaker campaign-- the party was building their own little chunk of the world. Certain goods were rare, expensive, or totally unattainable in the local region. Many of the quests and adventures they went on were to help build up resources and/or political points. The treasures were often tailored to the local region.

Sort of. Some simply work by treating it like any other skill check. Roll for it and if you pass, you can afford it, if you fail, you can't. Simple as that.

that doesn't sound very fun at all.
>i want to buy this 10gp axe
>rolls too low to buy
>later in same session
>i wanna buy that 500gp sword
>wins roll

unless I'm missing something. you can even replace the gp totals with other units of worth, like relative power of the item.

Abstract Wealth tends to be more like this:
>You have a Wealth rating of (for example) 3
>Anything that costs 3 or less you can buy without trouble
>Anything that costs 4 or more requires you roll dice against a difficulty
>The higher the difference between the cost of the item and your wealth, the harder the check. Buying a 7-Cost item is much harder than buying a 4-Cost item.
>Depending on how well you roll you might (1) buy the item without any problems, (2) buy the item but lose 1 or more Wealth, or (3) be unable to buy the item at all.
>Lost Wealth levels may return over time, or you might need to seek adventure and fortune to get them back. It depends on the circumstances and the system.

So in your example the simple axe might be 2-Cost, while the masterwork sword is a 5-Cost item. Your character with Wealth 3 can buy the axe without rolling, but if they wanted the sword they'd have to roll and likely temporarily lose a point or two of Wealth.

Note that some system may not involve dice rolling, but this is the more common example I've seen.

that makes a lot of sense. i might try this in my next campaign.

Copper silver gold, 10X value increment. Coins are considered weightless until you have a hundred, then 1 weight unit per 1000 (characters can typically carry 10-15 weight units). None of the games we've run have had players have anywhere near that amount of coins, except for one time when they decided to rob a mint but it turned out that they only pressed copper coins. For the sake of ease, we assume that when they go to the shops, they end up with the most efficient coinage, unless there's good reason to think that the shop keeper wouldn't have the money to do so (IE, no swapping out 300 silver for 30 gold in a shitty bar in a shitty farming village with a few hundred people)

I'm not a fan of abstract wealth systems, mostly because Dark Heresy left a bad taste in my mouth with its requisition system. It's workable, but not as written. I'm sure other systems do it better, but it's just one of those things that makes me go "Bleagh"

er, weightless up to a thousand, rather

Well, one time I ran a campaign set in a world that hadn't invented money yet, so the players had to mostly barter for everything.

The group seemed to enjoy it but it was too much work for me as a GM, so I probably am never doing it again.

>Well, one time I ran a campaign set in a world that hadn't invented money yet, so the players had to mostly barter for everything.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but why? What were you hoping to gain from that?

Apparently it worked out. Besides, probably wasn't the only thing that wasn't invented yet. Maybe they were playing a paleolithic RPG?

Mostly because that was the setting (early Bronze Age) and it made sense that there wouldn't be money in general use, made the world much more alive and immersive for the group. It was that kind of game overall, not a standard dungeon crawl.

They enjoyed it, I didn't because I had to come up with and roleplay a shitload of NPCs.

>made the world much more alive and immersive for the group.
Fair enough.

Dude, they had currency even back in the stone age. Why do you think they found so much evidence of handaxes being mass-produced? It was used as currency.

For starters, currency and money are different things. Additionally there was no standards (like gp are standardized in DnD, for example), so if you traveled anywhere at all, it just became barter again. Also, some bronze age societies operated on debt, in some laborers (for example in Egypt) were paid in kind. Even when some form of money or currency actually existed (oxhide ignots, for example) it wasn't exactly available to regular people and barter was pretty much the order of the day for a lot of people.

Point is, just like you can find some forms of currency or money dating back to the stone age, similarly you'll find that a lot of societies even up until the bronze age where large sectors of the economy relied on barter (even if they didn't literally carry kilograms of grain or a goat to the market).

I just use "coins". Coins are treated like dollar bills; you just count upwards. You don't have a bunch of gold, silver, or bronze you just have 1000 coins total. You can buy a lot of basic, cheap shit with just 1 coin.