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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 14, 2015 20:25:05 GMT
I've been pondering this morning the value of developing a prop for money. The idea being to make the party's wealth go from being a frequently changing number jotted on some notebook paper to something they could track with a physical token. The GM (me) would create some tokens for the different denominations (I'm thinking 1sp, 1ep, 1gp, 10gp, 100gp, 1pp, 10pp) and then act like the banker in a game of monopoly: doling out the cash and taking it back when the party buys something. The tokens could be wooden nickels, bits of color-coded cardboard or construction paper, glass beads, plastic bits, etc. Anything inexpensive that was easy to store and handle.
The question I'm having is if this would add enough to the game to make up for the added "overhead". The DM would need a "till" (though I prefer "treasure chest") and the players would probably need some form of purses, wallets, or strings (if you're going asian with your currency). It might make it easier for the players to track their wealth, but at a certain point it might get burdensome. This may make more sense when the PCs seldom carry more than 500gp at any one time, before they get up to 50,000gp.
I keep going back and forth. What do ya'll think?
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Post by rorrik on Jul 14, 2015 21:46:53 GMT
I've used the plastic coins common at Mardi Gras in the past. They come in many colors and I was able to get a supply for free just collecting them off the ground. However, I don't use them for the player's whole coinage, just if there is some reason a given coin is notable or something. I don't think it would be worth the effort unless you were playing a campaign where money was always short and you wanted to emphasize the pain of giving up even a single coin. However, if the players are going to have more than a dozen coins each at any time, I think the hassle would become too great.
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Samuel Wise
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Post by Samuel Wise on Jul 14, 2015 22:53:32 GMT
I, as a new DM, have not used money a lot in my games. Perhaps this is stupid, but I treat money almost like experience. It is a problem that I need to work on a little more. I use a couple pirate coins that I "won" from an arcade. I fluctuate the cost of things based on what is wanted to be purchased. If the players want super strong buff armor, they don't have enough money for it and would have to work/adventure in order to obtain that money. If it is weaker, then they might have enough money, but it they will have to use it all, etc. However I think solid currency, might not be worth the trouble. This is, of course, in my experience (which isn't that extensive). Unless you make your coins equal large sums of currency. I think... Here are my coins (because I give money out so scarcely, I only have fifty of these):  |
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 16, 2015 0:08:21 GMT
Thanks for the input!
I'm reckoning to bounce the notion off my players tonight. I already use tokens a fair bit (inspiration, hero points, initiative, status effects, etc) and it's worked pretty well for that stuff. I suspect it might work well for money too (with our group anyway) but I'll let the players decide if we give it a go or not.
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 16, 2015 15:24:49 GMT
Players decided not to go for it, at least for now. I'll be printing up some tokens (little heptagons with stars) anyway when we get around to trying out hero points, but none for the ol' gp.
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Samuel Wise
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Post by Samuel Wise on Jul 16, 2015 15:53:01 GMT
Players decided not to go for it, at least for now. I'll be printing up some tokens (little heptagons with stars) anyway when we get around to trying out hero points, but none for the ol' gp. That makes sense. Sorry, but I forgot to mention that I DM for players who have never played D&D. They are not even familiar with the prices of items in the PHB. |
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Post by joatmoniac on Jul 16, 2015 19:16:27 GMT
Obviously not cost effective, but it would have been hilarious to produce the actual number of coins that higher level campaigns get. You find a chest with 10000 gold, drop money out onto the table, table breaks.
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Samuel Wise
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Post by Samuel Wise on Jul 16, 2015 19:32:15 GMT
Obviously not cost effective, but it would have been hilarious to produce the actual number of coins that higher level campaigns get. You find a chest with 10000 gold, drop money out onto the table, table breaks. And, of course, make your players split the money evenly... all evening. |
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Post by rorrik on Jul 16, 2015 19:50:30 GMT
It would certainly make them appreciate the task their characters have to go through handling so much money. I really am tempted to craft a campaign where the players are consistently very low on resources and use some kind of coins (pesos?, soles?) to give them a sense of how much money they have and emphasize that cost of using it as they have to hand it over.
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 16, 2015 23:59:10 GMT
When we were playing 3.5 there were a handful of points where the party had over 60,000gp in cash. That's just how the character wealth was working out around level 12-15 or so. They had a heckuva time trying to carry all that around most of the time so they wound up opening an account in a dwarven bank. We had some fun RP out of that.
I suspect it's easy to forget that this number on a character sheet is meant to represent a tangible currency. That currency would supposedly possess properties like mass, weight, and volume. That can make for kooky situations when the characters start getting to Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth.
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andywmason
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Post by andywmason on Jul 17, 2015 1:07:03 GMT
One of the things I find challenging about this idea, although I do really like it, and this has been mentioned, is having 100,000gp in single coins would be ridiculous.
So larger denominations would have to be commonplace, and maybe some kind of exchange system and bank for storage. Of course, a couple of options do exist, trade bars and gems.
For example, in 3.5e a pound of silver is worth 5gp or 50sp, and similarly a pound of platinum would be worth 50pp. Storing 100,000gp in platinum bars suddenly becomes a lot more manageable. Instead of 100,000 coins, or even 10,000 in platinum becomes 200 bars, now these could be a lot smaller than an actual 1lb bar of platinum so it becomes more manageable.
Then there's gems, gems can be worth many, many times more than any bar, a solid, clear diamond can be worth 25,000gp, so four diamonds is easily manageable. Using gem counters, clear for diamond, blue for sapphire, green for emerald and red for ruby among others, can be easily purchased from craft stores for very small amounts of real world cash.
Other options could be having one player be the party treasurer, keeping track of how much comes in and what each party member is allotted. This then allows for the issue of separating out physical coins to pass relatively unnoticed.
This does create more work for the DM though, as realistically you'd have to separate out the amounts of coin the party would discover as they go in an adventure.
Then there comes the problem of change. Sure you could have 100,000gp in the form of four, easily carry-able diamonds, but what about when the party tallies up the cost of what they want and it comes to 99,865gp, 3sp and 2cp, do you really then dig around for and 13pp, 4gp, 1ep, 1sp and 8cp. Of course, you could maybe provide a single gem worth 100gp, but that still leaves you with 3pp, 4gp, 1ep, 1sp and 8cp.
It is definitely doable, but you would need 2,500pp, 1,000pp, 500pp, 100pp, 50pp, 10pp, 5pp, 1pp, 5gp, 1gp, 1ep, 1sp, 5cp, 1cp at a minimum to be able to do it efficiently.
This coming from a guy who worked for 3 years at a bureau de change, counting money can lose it's appeal very quickly. But, if you're willing to put the effort in and your players like the concept, it could be great. I will probably road test it at some point, but as people have said, it'd be a far better system for when having coins is a rarity and having the physical representation can make the effect oh so much more...palpable.
Again, love the idea, but it needs some severe alpha testing.
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 17, 2015 4:24:47 GMT
I'd pictured denominations of 1 sp, 1 ep, 1 gp, 10 gp, 25 gp, 100 gp, and 500 gp. Platinum would probably have been added eventually but it doesn't tend to come up very much for us.
Ultimately I was thinking I would 3D print the coins, silver for silver, white for electrum, and yellow for gold. I'd further delineate the gp by changing their shapes. Though my wife kindly pointed out that the PHB has pictures of the currency and it's rather tempting to use those images as models. I can show denominations through numbers and/or size.
That would've been the end notion anyway. That's a lot of modelling and a lot of printer-time to use on a notion that hasn't been trialed. So for the beta I'd reckoned to print the coins out on cardstock and slice them out as little 1" squares. I have a punch I could use to make them .5" circles, but it seemed like the squares would be easier to handle. Half an hour of poking at the computer and 15 minutes of cutting paper and I could whip up enough currency to hold us over for the forseeable future.
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Samuel Wise
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Post by Samuel Wise on Jul 17, 2015 5:27:53 GMT
aI have a punch I could use to make them .5" circles, but it seemed like the squares would be easier to handle. Half an hour of poking at the computer and 15 minutes of cutting paper and I could whip up enough currency to hold us over for the forseeable future. Another idea that could be worth trying out for currency is to rely more heavily on trade. Though I have never tried this, I could see it having potential for being "in era". Currency would be rarely use (which would increase the value of the coinage) and most buying/selling is done through trading items. I'm not sure how well this would turn out, but I'll try to implement it into my low currency game... Every 3D printer needs this: m.youtube.com/watch?v=Viy928RLsdU |
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Post by Tesla Ranger on Jul 17, 2015 5:37:43 GMT
Truer than you know! Some of those prints are heck to get off the printbed. I hear tell of folk using spatulas and mallets to free their prints. Personally I suspect a short stint in a freezer (where the print bed and filament will contract at different rates) would probably work better for the really persnickety cases. So far I've been able to free my prints with the judicious application of some of my leatherworking tools. So far as commodities go, I'm pretty sure that the 5e PHB mentions most trade being conducted in commodities (metals, rice, textiles, etc) rather than cash. They even give some common prices for some of the more frequently traded goods. It could be a good place to start. My players seem to prefer avoiding anything that smacks of "inventory management" as much as we can or I'd consider giving it a go myself. |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 17, 2015 6:54:22 GMT
4e uses a currency called Astral Diamonds, which are 10,000 GP each. 500 astral diamonds weigh 1 pound. They typically were only used for megatransactions in extraplanar realms.
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