Friday, July 18, 2014

Differentiating Coins By size



I like playing about with money to differentiate one campaign from another. This drives some of the folks I’ve played with crazy, others love it.  Money is hardwired into the rules by pretty simple clear notation. But it’s no fun having every campaign the same, one scheme is to change the relations between coins, another is to change the common coin from the standard gold based default to silver or even copper based. 

One way to mix things up a bit is with sizes of coins. Different types of coins are and were found all over the worlds and an easy way to add more variety without changing everything is to introduce coin sizes. 

Here’s a suggested size scheme:
Tiny coin 10% the size of a standard coin
Small coin- 40% the size of a standard coin
Medium/standard Coin- standard value
Large Coin- x2.5 standard coin, 
Huge Coin- x4 a large coin (x10 standard)

Values of Coin by Size (in standard cp)
Size>
Tiny
Small
Medium
Large
Huge
Iron
0.02
0.08
0.2
0.5
2
Brass
0.05
0.2
0.5
1.25
5
Copper
0.1
0.4
1
2.5
10
Bronze
0.2
0.8
2
5
20
Silver
1
4
10
25
100
Norium
2
8
20
50
200
Electrum
5
20
50
125
500
Gold
10
40
100
250
1000
Orichalcum
20
80
200
500
2000
Platinum
50
200
500
1250
5000
Aethril
100
400
1000
2500
10000

Explanation for the extra metals:
Norium is a mix of Gold, Silver and Copper. In one of my campaign write-ups it is most common in the hyperborean lands of the far north and thus the name norium.
Orichalcum here is the fictional mountain gold that’s even better then gold and not alloyed mix used in the real world.
Aethril is valuable fantasy metal that isn’t unlike a silver finer than gold and nearly as strong as steel.

Putting that scheme together in play so it matters verisimilitude wise is to pick a few sizes and types of coins for a couple countries and only that size will be accepted at full value by local traders, others have to be traded in with coin-changers who skim 2 to 20% of true value when converting from foreign coins. Another coin changer trick is to charge an extra 2-5% when buying up to gold or better metals from cheaper ones. 

Some NPCs and monsters may be absolutely unwilling to use “wrong-sized” coins.  Giants counting out tiny silver pieces could prove troublesome and they may frown on anyone trying to pass off smaller sized coin; Pixies and other small folk may find all but tiny and small coins to be over-large and troublesome and refuse to accept more than one or two (if any at all). I figure the stereotypical dwarves would have specially calibrated coin counters to stack, count, and recount coins of all size however.

Encumbrance and different sized coins:  don’t worry about the size difference which is a little silly but if you don’t currently track coins by the coin weight doing it now would be even sillier, otherwise factor in weight based encumbrance by the value multipliers mentioned above.

2 comments:

  1. Well, the good news about encumbrance is that it's easy to calculate: A million standard cp of gold coins will weigh 200#[1] no matter if it's made up of 100,000 tiny coins, 1000 huge ones or 20,000 tiny+5000 small+2000 medium+800 large+200 huge.

    As for the dwarves: No, their machines would weigh first, (you think they _trust_ the other races to handle precious metals properly?), then sort and stack/bin for remelting and minting into proper coins.


    [1] Presuming 50 medium coins to the pound.

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    1. Thanks for noting the gold size relattive to a 50 coin base.

      Probably right on the dwarves but to when they are using the Dragarbank Dwarf-portable Pilfer Counter 1200, it's sprng loaded feed when properly adjusted at the selection tube with the proper metal selected would shift suspect coins over to an auxillary stack for later verification and weighing, which there would imdeed be before reminting.

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