I have 100 000 gold, it weights zero and can fly.
ifupauline
Member Posts: 405
in Off-Topic
Say each coin is 10 gr it would weight 1 ton.
How come gold isn't counted as weight in your inventory, and how come nobody is carrying it?
How come gold isn't counted as weight in your inventory, and how come nobody is carrying it?
5
Comments
You can go at how this works in two ways, depending on your preference: 1) Everyone has a magic money pouch which renders coins weightless and has no upper cap on how many coins you can carry- like a potion case/scroll case/gem bag, but so large and ubiquitous that no one is without one. So one can't be bought/sold or traded because everyone already has one and extras are worthless/valueless. This only works because the Forgotten Realms are relatively magic-rich areas.
2) You go the medieval route. Some people do carry coins, but merchants and those with large amounts of money carry letters of credit instead of actual coins. These would be the "Credit Cards" of the medieval world. They also (at least in the real world) required that the merchants know each other, so they know that a letter of credit could be trusted. Medieval Banks grew out of merchants and moneylenders like this. Instead of traveling with pouches and sacks of coins, you travel with letters of credit. You can use them at any merchant (in-game), and when you are done spending and/or cash in the coins you are carrying with, the coins get subtracted/added to your "Letter of Credit" wealth. Your merchant writes out a new letter with your new coin total, and you go merrily (or not so merrily) on your way. Your characters do probably carry enough coin for meals, drinks and rooms at inns, but everything else is in letters/a letter of credit.
But of course, the real reason is: 3) Nobody wants to deal with these fiddly bits in the game, where the focus is on fighting monsters and staying alive. Nobody wants to deal with the moneylender, who changes the coins of foreign lands to local money and/or haggling over the price you get from the merchants for gems and jewelry (which in original D&D was capped at 25 to 75% of its actual value, based on your charisma and the level of your thief, who generally did such bargaining). Imagine getting only 25% of the stated value of a gem or piece of jewelry. Instead of that diamond being worth 1000gp, the merchant offers you 250, "Because I like the look of your face". The game plays with that in that reputation lowers/increases the purchase price of items, but in the pen and paper game, it was also that way with the prices that items sold at/for.
Of course, in the original game, you also had to pay for training to go up levels (1 to 4 weeks depending on how well you Roleplayed the character, at a cost of 1000gp per level per week of training). So if you RP'ed your character consistently and perfectly (according to the GM), and were going from level 9 to level 10, it would cost 9000 gp to train. And if you role-played abysmally, it could cost 36,000 gp. And if you're thinking it, yeah, old-school D&D kinda nickeled and dimed you to death.
And with this it would become finally relevant to own a "place" or "chest" where you could put your stuff, im not saying we need a banking system far from it, but so much items i just leave on the floor in ribald's store (which don't even disappear), even though there are useless, on a role playing perspective, they are rare and valuable artifacts.
(muahaha i subvert logic again!)
look problem solved
Probably the adventurers melt the gold down with fireballs and shape it into wheels. Then they just roll all that gold back to town!
Or perhaps boulders. Crushing enemies with a giant boulder of loot would be too much fun. Push a few precious gems into the gold when it is still soft to add extra pointy bits!
Ferret familiar, dragon eggs, halberds, gold, it all goes into the magic pockets.
Just saying...
The idea would have worked if the dungeons weren't all quite so big and crazy, and there wasn't quite so much valuable loot to tempt you. XD
Ignorance ia bliss
Or maybe D&D world law of physics is lil bit different from ours.
There were even calculations of how many coins you could fit into a chest - both stacked and loose!
I presume if you purchased your extra valuable stones from a reputable dealer, and carried proof of purchase with you, they would work as a kind of letter of credit - other merchants would accept the valuation of the stones.
This particular party did get right into the nitpicking. When we had to cross a large desert one of us actually worked out a very complicated equation to tell us how many mules we had to buy, how much water and feed for the mules we had to carry and how often we would have to kill a mule and eat it ... just so we could arrive at the other side with the two mules we'd need when we got there, and not need to spend extra money. She was an associate prof though and was seriously good at maths, so I guess it was just fun for her!
(note: I got these densities from my high school regents chemistry reference table. Gold is 19.3 grams per cubic centimeter, lead is 11.3, and iron is 7.87.)