If modern currency was handled differently, would that affect our perception of fantasy currency?

If modern currency was handled differently, would that affect our perception of fantasy currency?

To try and provide an example, think about how around 1950 in America you could get something like a loaf of bread for about ten cents, but today it'd be more like four dollars. Gold, silver and copper coins in the average fantasy setting work on a similar metric to those cents. If we saw copper coins as being worth more, as they had been in 1950, would our characters be using more copper and silver instead of coffers of gold?

In my setting, they do. Gold is mostly used in large-scale trade or in royal or noble reserves, most merchants deal in silver or electrum and petty day-to-day purchases are usually in copper. This is due to gold being exceptionally rare in the setting due to backstory reasons, it's worth far more than it should be relative to silver or copper.

Though, bear in mind in a medieval-renaissance era setting most trade would indeed be done in gold coins like florins.

What you’re talking about is a problem created by D&D in the 70s using GP as the standard unit of PC wealth. It has nothing to do with perceptions of real life modern currency at fucking all.

There’s plenty of games that use a copper/silver standard, but you’d know this if you played anything other than D&D.

>a problem created by D&D in the 70s
I'm fairly sure that the visual of piles of gold coins precedes D&D by quite a bit.

But surely developers themselves are influenced by what currency is like in their own times - they want the system to make sense to someone picking it up, after all. If they had made D&D in the 50s, currency probably would be handled differently.

>Is fantasy currency influenced by our currency?

Yes.. just like 90% of all fantasy mechanics.

There's a Mythras/Runequest setting that handles this quite well, Thennla I think. You mostly use silver and copper coins, and older silver coins have 2x the purchasing power of a normal silver since the % of actual silver in them is higher. There is also a gold coin worth 100silver, but it's rare and using it to buy things is unpractical, some merchants will keep some of the change as a exchange fee and others won't give you any change at all. there's also a nearby country where silver coins are slightly bigger and weight more and there are different prices for everything, so you could, in theory, play as a merchant and make a living just buying stuff in A and selling them in B even after taking into account the exchange fees, travel expenses and such

This is a "problem" brought about by D&D specifically, and perpetuated by Japanese CRPGs that were inspired by D&D.

D&D economies and CRPG economies don't make any sense if you stop and think about them, but the games are built on this money system and making changes to it is impossible without completely re-working the game. So your options are basically play another game that handles money completely differently or not care because they are not intended to be economic simulations.

Riddle of steel, 5 gold is a fortune, and you can buy a full plate for 15.

In my D&D games and pathfinder, I changed the usual 10:1 conversion to 100: to one conversion. So something that costed 500 gold, would now cost 5. While it doesnt seem like a big difference, it make big transictions eaiser to picture...Nobody need to handle someone five thousand gold coins, just 50.

This: Try playing GURPS.

Remember, the original premise of D&D was that the dungeon was a known feature, not some random jackoff hole in the ground. The PCs weren't the only people to try and delve it, not even the first. So you get a boom town that springs up around the dungeon, just like happened with mines in the gold rush.

Finish your thoughts, user.

These boomtowns trade in the resource handy, gold. They also rip off the PC's, because where else are you going to get a 10' pole if Crazy Olaf is the only merchant in town.

Have you tried not playing D&D?

>But surely developers themselves are influenced by what currency is like in their own times

So what you're saying is that back in the seventies it was ten cents to a dollar, most of the denominations that are bank notes nowadays where gold coins, and Gygax needed a half-full backpack of them for his weekly grocery run?

If your currency is made using stamina and/or magic, then you get some neato effects. You don't get any inflation with such a system because value must be produced in order for more coin to be produced.
Let's say that you buy some food to restore some stam, you would never be able to produce as much coin from that stam as the food costs.
Basically, all coin has it's roots in farmers and fishermen as they are the source of all stamina restoration. Think about it, starving people can't restore stam without lowering their max health.

Reminder: GURPS is the most awesome roleplaying system in existence.

>four dollars
>loaf of bread
Not a burger, this seems fucked up. I'm a leaf and bread is like 1.99 for fresh made whole wheat.

smaller loafs.

Burger here. My local ShopRite's weekly ad circular lists the following prices (inter alia)...
- ShopRite White Bread (20 oz): $1.50 (on sale for $1)
- Freihofer's/Stroehmann Bread (24 oz): $2
- Wholesome Pantry/ShopRite Bread (24 oz): $2 (on sale for $1.50)
- Pepperidge Farm Whole-Grain Bread (24 ounces): $3
- ShopRite 40-Calorie Bread (18 oz): $3.50 (on sale for $2.50)
- Arnold/Levy's/Beefsteak Rye Bread (18 oz): $3
- Three Bakers Gluten-Free Bread (17 oz): $5.50 (on sale for $5)

Get the Arnold rye, that shit is great.

What are the backstory reasons?

It involves a goddess who really, REALLY does not like to share.

There are only two edible breads, potato and sourdough.

I support using a silver standard with D&D. Coins still get relatively worthless obnoxiously fast, but it's 10x better than the gold standard that's... uh... standard. I don't do a copper standard because it becomes problematic once you start finding treasure with precious metals in it. If a gold piece is worth 100x a copper piece, and you find something made out of gold, then it should be very fucking valuable. So the silver standard seems to be the happy medium.

That range makes more sense. There's more expensive too, it just seemed odd that 4.00 us was
standard. Might just be the states is a big place, lots of variance.

>450g is 15.8oz
Oh. That checks out. Neat.

Pumpernickel was here, your breadfu a shit.

>D&D even ruined coin values
Is there any thing that D&D got right? I'm starting to wonder if the whole setting of tabletop roleplaying games would be better of without it.

To be fair the hobby wouldn’t exist without it.

>There’s plenty of games that use a copper/silver standard. In the interest of fairness, it's outright stated that most people in the D&D universe use copper or silver in their everyday lives. Adventurers are the ones who deal primarily in gold, because they tend to have a lot of money, so it's more convenient.

But the reason why PCs use gold instead of silver is exactly for that reason - convenience. It's easier to carry 500 one-ounce gold coins than it is to carry 5000 one-ounce silver coins, or 50,000 one-ounce copper coins.

4th supposedly managed to balance a lot of player options reasonably well, and...

Uhm...

...

That’s not quite what everyone is talking about here.

>Is there any thing that D&D got right?
They used dice to obfuscate dm bullshitting.

That's not the issue. People don't look at pennies and think "ah yes, a fantasy copper coin" or vice versa, so how many of either it takes to buy a loaf of bread is basically irrelevant. Similarly, most people don't know and don't need to know how much a (basic) sword costs.

With that disconnect, it's easy for things to get stupid when you look at them too closely, especially for petty shit that never influences the game otherwise. Who cares how many chickens a peasant can afford to eat in a week on a barley farmer's salary? Not your default set of adventurers, that's for sure, and that's who the prices are tooled for.

Every system from the period sucks, so early systems were destined to be shot anyway. The problem is grognards who won't move on from what they first played.

>Freihofer's

What's up fellow Northeasterner... I am trapped in the south and haven't had freihofer's in a decade.

I always thought the prices in JRPGs was based on yen since one yen is like a penny.

But putting the prices of everything into gold is like using hundred dollar bills as the foundation of your economy. The point is that a sword should cost closer to 6 gp (which is to say, 60 on the silver standard) than to 60 gp. Going by the rules, silver and copper pieces are next to useless starting out, and obnoxious rubbish once you've brought in a few treasure hauls. If you just convert all the prices and booty from gp to sp, you don't need wheelbarrows full of lesser coins to buy shit.

NE represent, Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies best cookies

To go along with this user, the idea that the rest of the world operates on silver while only adventurers operate on gold is total bunk in practice no matter what the book proclaims. Just look at the prices of everyday goods and services, the prices are all based entirely around GP being your dollar/pound/Euro and silver and copper treated like loose change.