Friday, December 3, 2010

Coin Sizes

It's an age old conversation in RPG land: How big are coins?

Well, good question. Lot's of games give us the handy answer of 10 coins to the pound which is sure handy for how much a coin weighs but just what size are those coins?

I was pondering that myself so I did a little research and looked up some math, probably got the math right and worked up some graphics to demonstrate the size of coins.

The rows of cubes for each metal show us what a bunch of 1cm cubes of copper, silver or gold would look like.

The three cubes to the upper right demonstrate how big a 1/10th pound cube of each metal is.

The rows of coins all copper, silver and gold show the relative size of coins. I have no reason why I picked a 38mm diameter for the fixed diameter 1/1oth lb coins, there is some math reason for this but it escapes me now while I'm posting.

The measurements were all done with almost 100% pure metals. Real world coins were hardly ever 100% pure so sizes would of course vary with the quality of the metal and the quality of the coining.


Click on the image to see the true to scale 72 dpi figure, where an inch is an inch and a cm is a cm.

3 comments:

  1. another frame of reference that i find useful is that 75 quarters weigh a pound

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  2. @graham, good reference point thanks for mentioning it.

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