Just in case you missed it, the Australian to U.S. exchange rate shown in the video was a joke, we know it's not that bad. . . but it certainly feels like it sometimes ^_^ Also the weights and numbers given in this video are to demonstrate rough estimates, the size of gold coins in any given setting will also determine how heavy the coins would weigh. For instance if the gold coins were half the width of the ones we're using as place holders in this video, you could carry twice as many coins for the same weight.
This is what I call a financial stress. Btw in Warframe there is a mission (The Index) with the exact the same mechanics: the more points you carry the slower you are
I love that you brought up Skyrim. Lord forbid I carry one too many butterfly wings, but I can carry any amount of arrows and gold because apparently those are weightless.
I think they want to make it balanced for archers, so they don't have to worry about having too many arrows, and almost always have a reliable way of fighting. And if you are low I recommend the highly balanced stealth archery.
@@brickercustom If you want it to be more realistic you can get mods (or design them yourself if you're so inclined) to make gold and arrows have weight, it adds an interesting dimension to the game, but I recently got bored of Skyrim and uninstalled it for the first time since it was released (honestly, I was a pre-order so it was on the PC that I had when it came out, and then on my new one since it was built.) I'm sure I'll put it back on at some point, but I know too many tricks to making my character super over-powered so it gets boring rather quickly (and many of them don't even require cheats/mods/console commands.)
I love that I can run around with 1000 steel arrows. To be fair, the dragon bone arrows are probably pretty close to weightless as they should be very light.....
I think that's why generally currency systems like that have higher denominations, like low copper is 1 copper, high copper is 10, or they do platinum above gold, and mithril and adamantite coins. just because with mithril coins it's 100 gold to 1 and generally only used for like massive company or noble operations.
"Finding the stuff is only the first test - now it must be carried home." - the struggle is real when you have to decide what to take and what to leave behind.
Love that Tolkien referenced this indirectly by having the dwarfs bury the troll's treasure in the Hobbit as they wouldn't be able to drag it around on a adventure.
I've been thinking of that in games, instead of returning to "home base" every time you're full, have a system where you can bury/hide loot and come back for it later, BUT there's a chance, based on HOW you hide it and for HOW LONG that someone else might find it.
This is the reason the Templars created a credit system. Traveling with all your coins will make you a target. But if you give it to the Templar and he hands you a paper, once you reach the middle east you get that "value" in that currency in that region.
That's also how daggerfall did it you only carry a bit of gold dump the bulk off at a bank and they give you paper receipts that you can use in place of gold for large purchases like houses, ships and the higher end armor and weapons rather than lug 30k gold which had weight around with you.
Shad, you have just hit on exactly why adventurers always find chests of gold. None of them have been able to take the whole amount with them, so there's always some left for the next adventurers who wander into the dungeon.
Not around me. I used to play 2e AD&D and my characters always went for the portable holes, bags of holding, girdles of many pouches, and the ever popular girdles of giant strength. Whenever all other party members were so encumbered that they could not carry another coin or other bit of treasure, I swooped in and took the rest of the hoard and smiled my way to the counting house (bank). BTW, girdles of many pouches are great for Rogue characters to filch bits of treasure that the rest of the party hasn't noticed. They pay for themselves quickly. Also are great for Mage characters to keep material components in.
@@Rebelrocker69 This worked for me in 1st edition until the rest of the players noticed I was going up in levels faster than I should have been, and wondered where I was getting the extra exp... (1st Ed you got exp for acquiring treasure!)
@@jqbogus You should have responded that you were given exps for successfully finding and dismantling traps (assuming that you were a thief class). That was how my DM and myself handled it. Also, whenever we were returning from a dungeon raid, I would constantly be trying to hide in shadows. That constant practice pays off if given 5-10 exps per success. They stopped complaining when they realized that I was getting better at finding and removing traps, so less chance of them tripping any since I usually found most of them.
@@Rebelrocker69 Sadly, the character was a (larcenous) half orc fighter. If our party rogue explained his unusual level gain by saying he was getting bonus exp for successfully performing class functions, I'd wonder why my Cleric wasn't getting extra exp for healing people, or my fighter for engaging in melee.
To be fair, if historical warriors had classes, basically all of them would just be fighter. I suppose there might be the occasional rogue, ranger, or barbarian, too.
Vast majority of fantasy writers have no understanding of precious-metals and treat gold as it were copper lol (looking at you "roast chicken that cost 8 gold coins"😁FYI during the time of Charlemagne a pence/penny (~1.7g silver) could buy you "12x 2-pound loaves of bread, a sheep would be five pence, ten pence for a pig, twenty for a cow and thirty for an ox"). All the gold that have ever been mined in the history of the world can fit in ~6 US suburban houses...copper is >20,000x more common than gold, and silver is >7x more common than gold, out of the earth...maybe gold in their universe is as common as rocks lol hence seemingly every dragon sleeps on a mountain of gold...😅
Shad Fact: Shad has a large number of pets he regularly plays with. This includes 2 sand worms sometimes referred to as Shai-hulud. 3 beholders, 4 tarrasques, and two flights of dragons
Fun story. On a Pathfinder adventure, we encounter a group of Kobolds we wanted to befriend, and in that adventure they value copper over gold, just for the metal, and not the money value. Their layer was filled with raw copper ores, and lots of copper items they found or stole. So we actually went back to a city and exchanged 10-20 gold coins for the same value in copper, filling up a small chest to its max capacity ONLY with copper coins. We took that chest back to the Kobold layer and offered it as a gift, and it was super fun/cute to see them rejoy, grabbing handfuls of copper coins and just shower themselves with the copper, rubbing it against their scales and some even dig inside the pile of coins inside the chest like a cat, to "swim" in the coins. SO AMAZING and adorable!
sometimes awarding money for encounters can be ridiculous, had an encounter in a Pathfinder prewritten campaign where the loot was a chest full of copper coins... about 10,000. for a group of 15th level characters. who were on a basically one way suicide mission to save the planet from the Yellow King. ON HIS PLANET. we left it behind, we were like "what on Golarion are we supposed to do with like, 300 pounds of copper coins in a chest on an alien planet when theres a good chance we wont be going home??"
@@Ki113r210 Chances are the writer was either making that exact point, so it was basically a trap for idiots who want to grab any treasure no matter how small, or there is a point later in the adventure where having a huge amount of copper coins on you would be helpful. Maybe a smith or a mage needs copper for something, or dropping a heavy weight on a monster would be a good way to avoid a direct fight. Or you can cause a distraction or gain goodwill from a crowd by throwing handfuls of coins around. I imagine only the most honest and dutiful town guards would keep harassing your party and blocking their entry if the next wagon happens to accidentally drop a chest full of coins on the street and there is a riot as people rush to grab all they can.
"Say, do you happen to have any trash metal lying around, you know, gold and silver" "Sure sure, we have all this fancy human stuff (jewelry), including this dumb heavy hat (a crown)"
That's just the computer games, and the usual quest rewards. Most of the basic adventurer gear prices are in copper and silver, with only weapons and armor tending to cost gold, and magical versions cost lots. Been a while since I last checked the 3.5 prices, but meals iirc cost up to a silver depending on quality and rations for a day about half.
Really, standard coinage should be a lot of copper with some silver and the very, very rare piece of gold. We have historical documents which show an average soldier in Rome was paid about 2.3 troy ounces of gold for their entire annual salary, so view a single troy ounce of gold as being about 5 months wages of a soldier's salary. If gold coins were around the size that has been used quite frequently historically, then a bit over 4 of your average gold coins would equal to a troy ounce, so your typical gold coin (slightly less than .25 troy ounces) would be a bit over about 5 weeks worth of wages for the average soldier.
I mean copper and silver coins were used too. Gold was just the higher end and is worth alot more than copper and silver. So I'm not surprised a low ranking soldiers pay is one gold during service until he's actually gone up the ranks and such
Your DM creates the economy, but you shouldn't be paying for ale in gold coins, nore pay for armour in copper. If your DM is not sleeping, he'll have you robbed for showing off high value coins in public places. Many peasants have never even seen a real gold coin.
Old school D&D focused more on encumbrance and gave weights for every treasure horde in published adventures. Figuring out how to get the loot out of the dungeon was as much a part of the adventure as slaying the big bad, possibly even more so.
The sad part is aside from the diversity of classes, Old School, 2nd edition D&D was probably the best and most fun ruleset. There was really no min/max'ing god tier multiclass/race combos and it was more about how clever you were as a player that determined your power level.
The US also mints real gold coins, whose face value is "$50", but nobody actually exchanges them for $50. Currently those coins are worth $1,788 for the gold alone, tho can go for higher on account of them being backed by a state.
When I was a kid it was a fun test to put Canadian quarters in US arcade machines (they are the same size, weight, etc.). Turns out Canadian ones have more magnetic metal in them, and block up the arcade when the coin gets stuck to the magnet.
Bars hate ccx when I pay my tab with them. I bust out a small treasure box and count me out. My boss owns a car wash and I'm a pirate so it all works out.
@@109Rage I don't know what you're talking about. It sounds like the gold standard where you can trade in money for gold but that was abandoned in the 70's. Our current money isn't backed by anything. it's worth something because we believe it is.
@@MrMarinus18 No, Jeremia is referencing the time US coins were minted in silver and gold. In the past, the US even had a gold $1 dollar coin, back around the era of the California gold rush. This wasn't the gold standard because you can't redeem gold for gold, the coin was legal tender and only worth it's own denomination to the banks. But because there's not enough gold in the world to make gold coins viable as legal tender, they dropped the concept. It was also made illegal to own gold in 1933 in the US. Much like the US dollar, gold is only worth something because we believe it is, if the world thought gold was blasphemous or cursed, it would immediately lose value. I myself own a collection of silver quarters and dimes, but I only value them for their silver content, not for any collector's value. The problem I have with modern silver and gold coins is that their always minted in 1oz denominations, which make them large and unwieldy and would be hard to barter with in emergencies. One of the reasons gold is so valuable now is that it's supply has been vastly outstripped by the population, so you'll never see gold 1$ coins ever again. There's just not enough gold in the world for it's value to be so low anymore.
in the early days of D&D, half the game was exploring dungeons and fighting monsters, and the other half was getting your loot and gold back to town. Horses, laborers, and wizards to cast tenser's floating disk were required fare.
I heard one party just set up a metal foundry and just melted all the coins in a huge dragon hoard. They scraped off gold and silver and left the rest.
The reason septims (gold coins) probably doesn’t have much value is because anybody with sufficient alteration skill and a ready supply of silver or iron ore can make as much gold as they want thus rendering gold less valuable.
@@prime_optimus this is why some alchemists in history had hits put on them because rulers were afraid of what would happen in commoners could turn lead into gold.
In regards to a pouch full of coins, stuff a piece of cloth on top, it helps prevent the coins from rattling around and falling out, it also may annoy pick pockets. A piece of cloth does not add much weight and has a lot of possible uses.
Yeah I was going to say this. It is pretty much a given that in most fantasy settings, all adventures have a 100% weight reduction coin pouch with unlimited capacity.
reminds me of "order of the stick", where the party rogue had something like 16 bags of holding. it was recently revealed that she keeps her Arrows in one of them.
Someone already mentioned this, but in D&D 5e (and for this example I will extrapolate this for other fantasy systems) a coin has a set weight. From the PHB: "A standard coin weighs about a third of an ounce, so fifty coins weigh a pound." This is set as a standard not just for mechanical ease, but also as an in-world standard, it makes the minting of such coins easier to make sure they retain the same value. This becomes *very* important when it comes to what a fantasy adventurer would carry. Using multiple denominations, such as copper, silver, gold, and platinum, it is easy to have a conversion (in D&D it is a factor of 10, again for mechanical and narrative ease) so that a merchant or traveling adventurer can carry less while having the same value. A run-of-the-mill commoner will most certainly be trading in silver or copper; the adventurer full of coin is going to convert it to gold for the ease of travel. Remember, all the coins weigh the same, so for this to be true, each coin will have a different, shape, thickness, diameter, or other characteristic (while still standardized per coin). This will most certainly mean that the lesser valued ones will be larger or thicker, meaning they take up more volume for the same mass--very inconvenient for your adventurer on the run. I did the math, and to spare you from the details, a gold coin of this mass/weight, given a thickness of 2mm would be about 55mm in diameter, or about 2.5 in across. making it a generous 4mm thick would make it about 39 mm, or approx. 1.5 mm, across. Dimensions like this would greatly impact the practical amount of coinage one would want to carry (in gold at least) before converting to something else. This does present the interesting opportunity for Banks to exist and charge a conversion fee--to the chagrin of the players. Interesting enough, when you measured 100 coins to be about .9 Kilo, and 1000 coins to be the practical limit at 9 kg (~20 lbs), this lines up with D&D rules. If 50 coins weighs 1 lb, then 1000 coins (again of any denomination) would be 20 lbs. Looks like your real world currency has the approximate mass of a fantasy one!
I'd like to see a video where you figure out the weight of the standard explorer's pack from D&D (bedroll, backpack, mess kit, tinder box, 10 torches, 10 days worth of rations, waterskin, 50 ft of hemp rope) and maybe go hiking with it, because having lived out of a pack while hiking before, I can tell you it's hard to get your pack to weigh less that 40lbs
I suppose rations may change with setting as well. It may be ten days worth of jerky (as in the Mongols), or smoked and salted fish, for example rather than a modern idea of a square meal.
The neat thing about dnd currency: it has a literal weight conversion, at least in 5e. 50 coins of any type equal one pound. Which naturally means Gold Coins are much smaller than most others.
If memory serves correctly, 1st and/or 2nd Edition AD&D also listed masses and diameters of different coins, so players and DMs would know how many GP a PC could carry without becoming overencumbered.
@@williamriven Are those 3E, 3.5E, or 5E gold coins? I seem to recall in 1st or 2nd edition that they were listed as 1/10 of an Imperial pound (1.2oz each) and roughly the same diameter as a Eisenhower Half Dollar IIRC. I'm not 100% certain about these weights because it's been forever since I last played AD&D...
euro adaptation of the measurements: the volume of the gold coin would be close to a 2 cent coin (461.11 mm³) while weighing about 3x as much (the 2 cent is 3.06g) while the weight would be close to a 2€ coin (8.5g)
@@williamriven The Krugerrand is minted in one, half, quarter and tenth of an oz coins. Following your logic the D&D coin is probably the 1/10oz version that is worth about $180.
Now that you have determined a comfortable weight, what would that 2 kg of gold coins be worth in the medieval world? The medieval florin was roughly 3.5 grams, meaning you could have around 572 gold florins. How much was that worth at the time? One could buy 20 suits of plate armor, or one suit of plate armor gaudy enough for a duke. Perhaps you'd like 17 well bred Knights war horses, or otherwise 200-300 draft horses? Maybe the same number of cows. You could send 80 people to monastic school, or 50 people to university for a year. Buy about 150 books for your library. You could rent a decent row house in York for 40 years. You could build and establish an artisan guild hall in London, or maybe just a decent church. It's not quite what a baron might make in a year, but more than what an average knight with a typical thousand acre fief might obtain.
I think at that point one really has to appreciate medieval money-lending and the rise of Banking in the Renaissance. A checking account would be really useful for an adventurer. That way you could just deposit your loot in a vault someplace and write a check when you needed to buy some obscenely nice sword or suit of armor.
@@LawlessNate The Milanese armor manufactories of the day were selling full suits of ready made plate armor for roughly 8 pounds in the late 1300s, which equates to around what I stated. This was decently made armor, for a reasonable price in the day, and came with all the fittings. Later on the price dropped to around 6 pounds. Not sure what armor you are referring to that would cost that little, but it's around the cost of a good suit of brigandine or breastplate, pauldrons, gauntlets, and maille. Both of those were common gear for foot infantry, and could be had for 1-2 pounds.
Okay legitimately this has been my biggest video game question from Skyrim because there is no way you wouldn't be encumbered carrying around 20,000 gold coins
I think it's just for gameplay reasons. If they really really really wanted it to be realistic then the player would be picking up copper and silver mostly, with the gold coins being bunch more uncommon. You can get mods that add weight to the coins but it's not convenient to the player to have you deposit at the bank all the time.
Daggerfall actually had weighted gold so that was a mechanic at some point in the series. This was balanced out by being able to buy a horse and cart for portable storage and banks for safekeeping your coin, as well as letters of credit because Daggerfall basically wanted to simulate life lol, so it wasn't as annoying as you think.
Shad: "In my fantasy novel, the world that I've created and worked on for years... I have no clue about anything..." Me: "Yep. Typical writer problem."
The US has dollar coins. We have several different designs of 1$ coins currently in mint, some of them gold, as well as a couple older ones still recognized as legal tender. In fact, we have 5$, 10$, and 25$ coins as well, though they are rare and meant to be used as bullion or collector's pieces rather than coinage.
I was going to say, working in a gas station, I get several of the dollar coins every other day. Get half dollars and $2 bills plenty of times as well.
Due to air travel law you can only fly with so much money in your bag. Some people get around this by minting some very expensive coins with precious metals and marking them as 1 or 5 dollar coins. Funny enough, even though they are listed as official currency in one or two states, nobody has ever used one to buy something, almost like they’re worth a lot more….
Yep, our $1 coins used to be pure silver (collector's versions are still made but are no longer legal tender) and our $20 coins were pure gold. The gold coins went away during the depression (on account of Lord Roosevelt outlawing the ownership of gold and purposefully devaluing the U.S. Dollar from $20 per troy ounce of gold to $35 per troy ounce) and silver was replaced by either clad coins or alloys depending on the denomination in 1965.
This reminds me of how in the Hobbit they buried almost all the gold they found in the Troll Cave. It's literally the same scenario this video addresses. Yeah they had it, but they would be 'over-encumbered' so to speak. So they had to come back for it later.
To be fair, that is probably why in all those pirate legends and adventures, there are treasures buried or hidden in various places. I think there is a common patern among those stories. A person lives far away from towns and villages and could be easily be robbed in the way, so carrying a ton of money is out of question, that person is collecting high amounts of valuable items and money which he or she cannot use, because it's hard to do so without standing out, and they are piling up making them hard to move and since that person is greedy, for all this to happen in the first place, he or she decides to bury those somewhere and when he or she can get them out he or she will come back to get them but that usually didn't happen hench the birth of those legends.
Fallowing the mechanics in D&D there are roughly 50 coins to 1Lb, and your coin pouches had 1.3kg (2.6kg doubled to equate for the weight of gold) roughly 5.5-6Lb per coin pouch. So roughly between 275-300 coins per pouch....
I was going to comment this, glad someone else did. I also wanted to put out there that this would be what merchant scales are for, even adventurers or mercenaries may carry around a collapsible scale on them, even if it could only weigh up to 3-5 pounds at a time (or an equally pretty number in kg), it means instead of paying out 1 by 1, though it still takes a minute, you just slap a pile of coins on the scale and go "oh look, its 3 pounds, thats 150 coins, now I will just count 15 to round it out" type thing.
and to boot, according to a quick google search an Australian dollar coin weighs exactly 9 grams or .31 oz, which compared to the dnd coin being about 0.36 oz these are a pretty close comparison (ignoring the x2 multiplier he is adding), and if he were carrying around some of the higher denominations like Platinum or precious gems and you could carry a serious chunk of cash for 250 coins. especially considering that a gold coin is basically the equivalent of a $20 (using the dnd price of a gallon of milk at 2 silver pieces vs $3.60)
@@harozuken Seriously. Any time he mentioned how it would weigh "twice as much", I wanted to shout at him for being an idiot, since it's already the weight of a D&D 2e+ / PF 1e coin, and he'd actually be able to carry twice as many
This episode reminded me of a chapter in The Hobbit where they find treasure chests in a goblin cave before they get captured. They had already lost their ponies because they were in the mountains so they smartly decided to bury the chests for later upon their return. Makes me think that in a fantasy setting saturated with old, forgotten ruins everywhere there would also be--by extension, a lot of buried treasure. So not only are their professional adventurers, there could also be professional or aspiring thieves that specifically go after adventurers' buried treasure.
This is the kind of thing that actually happened in dark ages Europe. Even in the modern-day people are still finding hoards of gold and silver coins, jewellery and ornaments that were buried in the ground by some dark ages person who found themselves in possession of a great deal of money but not able to carry or store it safely. Presumably, they intended to return and reclaim their wealth but were either unable to find it later on or too dead to make the journey
shockingly yes, pirates and the like did bury treasure unfortunately this was usually temporary like in the hobbit, and would most likely be gathered again unless accidentally lost (unlikely) or the owner died with no trace of where the treasure is (a lot of people died, so get your shovels)
@@WhichDoctor1 not at all so common. Most coins found in fields where lost without intention and heaps of it often tend to be in areas of old settlements or garrisions... The burried treasure thing is for the most part a myth... yes there is the occasional find of a vase full with coins, however, it is verry verry rare and most finds are a handful or single coins that got lost by the user.
@@pemo2676 nope. pirates did not burry treasure. also a myth. 1. most of the time they did not find treasure but trading goods -which got sold at the next market 2. burrying treasure on an island is risky and needs not only time, but renders the burried thing useless... Most coins acuired where probably split up by the crews and rather fastly spent drinking etc...
@@BlackDragonWitheHawk hi! they did bury treasure, but only temporarily. this was to reduce the weight in ships, as going back and fourth constantly to get all that weight off the ships was far too much, instead they would hide or bury it, continue the exhibition, and come back later- it's actually a myth that they DIDN'T bury treasure we also have PROOF as multiple times, people have discovered abandoned treasure hoards because a pirate had died or been captured before they would return and i'm not just saying they dug a big hole in a beach and hid it, this could be in caves, in walls(in one real case), under foliage e.c.t. they couldn't carry everything all the time, gold is far too heavy, and they can't always make it to a port to spend it. we do actually have records of pirates doing this, as anyone who could write would account as much of their travels as possible, including dumping their money off as they go and coming back later
Ooh Shad! Video idea! How realistic would it be for an adventurer to carry potions, assuming that they are glass bottles with cork stoppers Different sizes for different healing amounts of course! And how quickly could you consume one in a pinch!?
A homerule that I use in dnd is that if you take an action you get the max health of the potion. If you use it using a bonus action then you use the roll. The way it's flavoured is that by using an action you're drinking it more carefully so you don't spill any
We do still have dollar coins in the US… They just aren’t used that often but if you’ve ever worked at a grocery store you’ll see quite a few of them come through
There are also half dollar coins as well, however they're in a similar boat to the dollar coins, and are even more rare. They're also larger than the dollar coins by quite a bit.
This video makes me really want to see you explore the real world equivalent of currency in the Witcher 3 setting and explore just how ridiculously cheap it would be to hire a Witcher to risk his life fighting a terrible monster based on rewards from hunt quests
I mean, tbh as long as you have a good sob story, he'll probably be willing to get off with a lesser reward, if no reward at all (or maybe thats just how I played it)
I've always thought that it would make it way more sense if he made most of his money selling various parts from the monsters to mages and alchemists, but Sapkowszki didn't think his own setting through to that degree.
but witcher's purpose of life was to kill monsters anyway so the reward was just some extra for his costs and sometimes cost of spending winter in a witcher's castle
So fun fact, and one of the few things I miss from earlier Elder Scrolls: In Daggerfall, gold DID have weight. So how did they handle having tons of it? There were banks, and at those banks you could exchange your gold for letters of credit, that could then be used to purchase items.
Not to mention that game made it so your character could own a wagon or a ship to load their gold and assorted loots onto while away from town. I always enjoyed the logistics of heading back to the entrance of a dungeon just to dump gold and the like so you could resume exploring, instead of having to decide on dumping stuff or heading back to town to unload.
@@UtushoReiuji yeah but Navigating a Daggerfull dungeon without using "Mark" and "Recall" spells and the quest jump location cheat using that insane 3D Map was an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE
In one old D&D campaign I created, the massive treasure in one particular dungeon was 100,000 one-ounce copper pieces. That's about three tons. They spent more time arranging for transport and escorting the resulting wagon train than they did killing a dungeon full of monsters. They had to move it all to a fairly distant major city just to find a bank that could handle that much.
In Daggerfall money had weight, the banks allowed you to deposit it into an account with a letter of credit offered as an alternative to lugging arround 10,000 gold coins.
I miss Daggerfall...I actually bought a house...and got arrested for sleeping on the balcony....the game saw it as camping inside the city. I saw somewhere that it has been converted to play on the Skyrim engine...may have to check into that.
In DnD rules as written, a pouch can hold up to 300 coins (50 coins weigh about 1 pound and the capacity of a pouch are 6 pounds), so not far off from what you showed here. And as others have already pointed out, a gold coin is actually worth quite a lot. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go put a treasure hoard full of copper coins in my next dungeon...
Daggerfall was the oldest rpg game I can remember actually giving coins weight. So instead of carrying around alot of them you would get a letter of credit from the bank.
@@Astraeus.. I was just so surprised how a game made before I was born (1996) felt so in depth almost like d&d on the desktop. Nowadays rpg games are more streamlined, less complex and they make every player made character feel oddly the same. The elder scrolls 2 did it well Characters with high strength could carry more but they lacked points in other skills. While wizards may have a low score and have to rely on wagons or pack animal to carry stuff. It definitely made a difference in my characters story. Just ask all of the wizards that had to backtrack through labyrinthine dungeons because they were loaded down too much, just to find a mummy wrap.
@@MortalKombat033 The older Fallout games had a pretty good system for characters too. For instance, if you made a character with extremely low intelligence in Fallout 1 & 2, it completely changed the way the game would play, drastically altering a lot of the dialogue choices and giving you a very different experience (as compared to character with mid-level or higher intelligence). In Fallout 3 it's less prominent and doesn't alter gameplay that much, but even there if you make a character who's dumb as a box of hammers, it does still make quite a few changes to dialogue overall. But it's like you say, RPG's (especially Western RPG's) have been getting more "simplified" as time goes by, to the point where it almost doesn't matter what you do with your characters, the experience ends up being more or less the same overall. But we live in a world where "FIdget Spinners" are a thing that exists and that people actually buy, so that right there should tell you how "complex" people want things to be....
I'll admit, I never played much. But that part did always surprise me. That, and the fact that shopping meant browsing the shelves. Which let's face it, we're not used to, as in pretty much every RPG ever, not just all the Elder Scrolls games, but other franchises, buying/selling always happens via the merchant themselves. And yeah, actually HAVING a bank is unusual too, as again the standard is the player having a nice big pouch that could hold literally MILLIONS of gold, all at once. Ok, Fable 3 shakes things up with how the Sanctuary works. But that's the exception, not the rule.
Your videos have been a great help with writing my novel. I just came back to re-watch this video when I was working on the logistics of carrying money around. I remembered your video working out all of this and came straight over. I did do many calculations of my own, but this was a great reference point to move me in the right direction. Thanks a bunch!
In DnD, the gold coin = around 100 dollars thing tracks pretty well. 15 Gold for a battle ready longsword. Sounds like a lot, but 1500 dollars for a longsword you could trust in a battle for your life? Kult of Athena seems to match that rate for their blades.
seeing as the longsword was the medieval equivalent of a pistol, and most modern pistols are (in the us at least) somewhere in the hundreds range I am pressing x to doubt on a DnD gold coin being equal to hundred dollars.
@@shadowofhawk55 aside from Z-bytes comment what you also forget is the lack of mass production lines. guns are easier to produce on a mass scale than to make a quality sword on a mass scale in that time period. weapons like that would be more expensive because labour is expensive. if anything a spear or club would be the readily affordable and available weapons. throw in the bow as well. a sword though is expensive to make because it is difficult to make unlike the others listed.
I can't help but wonder how practical they would actually be to use. I can't tell you how many pieces of gear seems like a great idea at first only to have it be worse than useless when I actually try using it in the wilderness.
...baised on the joke that Shad made at the start of the video. You are literally why people hate going into the comments section and why we can't have nice things. Let's review shall we? Shad made this video, and at about 2:27 into the video he jokes that this amount of gold is worth about $25 in U.S. money. There is a comment that he put somewhere saying that this was a joke, and that it isn't really that bad. Then I saw the comment about an alternative title for this video, which I apparently misunderstood as a joke. ...so I went along with Shad's joke about it only being worth $25. So now here I am, seeing Shad joke about something, and I went along with that joke, and now you are giving me a hard time for it. Am I just not allowed to make jokes? Am I not allowed to make comments on anything anymore?
@@matthewwriter9539 lmao tl;dr If my short comment was enough to get you to type several paragraphs and make you want to avoid making further comments on UA-cam, then the internet might not be the best place for you to hang around. Just saying. Lighten up, champ.
@@JCavinee...I am autistic, as such it feels like no matter what I say or what I do, it feels like everyone takes it the wrong way. I feel like I am playing a game with two sets of rules, and nobody will tell me what they are. Imagine that you were to play the game "Life" with someone who had never even heard of the game before. Everyone else had the rules read to them, they know how to play, yet nobody told me the rules. I have to guess what the rules are from watching all of you. ...however there are two different sets of rules. One set for all of you, and then a different, harsher set for me. Any time that I even try to tell a joke people act as if I were waving the Nazi flag and saying that we should reduce the over population problem by eating babies...or something. ...I am literally not allowed to make jokes. My younger brother once told a joke, and 2 or 3 weeks later I told the exact same joke, and the look I got ...well from everyone's reactions it would have been better for me to have been waving the baby eating Nazi flag. ...when I went to college I was involved with the theater program...I was painting one of the set pieces with another student. Suddenly she tells me that if I don't back away from her, she will cut off my balls and skin me like a deer, and that she can do that because she goes hunting all the time. I was of course surprised by that reaction. ...and that seemed far too harsh a punishment for being too close to her. I extended my arm to measure the distance and found that I was 1 arm's length minus half a finger length away from her...I had been told years ago that a personal space bubble was about an arm's length...so basically this young woman was threatening my life over the length of a finger... ...I took 2 or 3 steps away from her anyway.
I've been creating an RPG since 2001 and I can't stop improving it. This year, I listened to your videos and you inspired me a lot for certain mechanics. Among other things, the mechanics of travel, weapons, armor and the range of weapons. I even created my Ranger class inspired by your description. You are a source that I appreciate. Keep up the good videos and good work.
I just consider "gold coin" as a standart price that can measure different metals and value. For example, "you found 456 gold coins" can also mean "you found one coin from very fancy metal (or exaptional rarity) that is worth 456 gold coins".
Plenty of games that I've played just use "gold" as the currency - without specifying coins or anything. Looted 739G from an enemy, found 1,682G in a chest, can carry a max of 9,999,999G...other names, like pg, work the same way. As a result, unless it's shown to be coinage or bullion, I just view it as essentially a debit card.
Shad, I think you forgot to tare/zero/calibrate the scale before placing the bowl on it. It measured the weight of the coins AND the bowl, when you really just want the weight of the coins. It wouldn't have prevented the error (unless the bowl was exceptionally heavy), but just something to keep in mind for future reference. Unless it was already calibrated to the bowl's weight? And same thing with the pouches, though I think we can count their weight as negligible, especially given that the coin to gold ratio is also approximate.
In old-school D&D (3.5e and earlier, I don't play recent editions), it was explicitly stated that coins were 50/lb. Thus, in my past calculations, assuming all coins (regardless of metal) were 1 mm thick, they would have the following diameters and weigh approximately 1/50 lb. Copper: 35.9 mm Silver: 33.2 mm Electrum: 28.8 mm Gold: 24.4 mm (almost 1 in.) Platinum: 16.4 mm All in all, not terribly unrealistic dimensions for a coin. Edit: Don't know how I miscalculated the gold diameter in Imperial. Must've been a mistype on the calculator way back when.
Yup, in 5E is still 50/lb I use banks and checks in my campaings when we bother to be mindful of weight. In the case of noobies, for example, i don't usually bother and let them carry 2000 gold pieces without problem, just tell them "Be somewhat realistic, don't try to carry 8 swords and 3 full plate armors in a backpack.
There is an underlying misconception that this video is based on, and makes it sadly way off if compared to historical coins. By about four times. This discrepancy is mainly because of the thickness, an AUD coin is a whopping 3 mm thick. An Australian dollar coin weighs 9 grams, and if it was minted in gold it would weigh around 18 grams according to the video. The byzantine gold coin (solidus/bezant) used in the Eastern Roman Empire weighed approximately 4.5 grams. (72 coins per 1 roman pound of gold at around 96% purity) That means the calculations in this video is off by a factor of 4. You could carry four times the amount of gold coins, if they were real life gold coins, compared to the numbers in this video. Or even more, as later mints around the 10th century, in Greek speaking and Arab regions, weighed around 4 grams (and were lower in purity) just as the gold franc did when introduced in France in the 14th century. The bezant/solidus was used extensively, standardized in purity and weight, and minted in this standardized form from the 4th century until the 12th century. It is the most iconic gold coin, and what one would refer to as archetypal. Of course, I mean no disrespect by this comment, and I really appreciate Shad's work. Just remember that modern coin sizes aren't necessarily representative of a fantasy setting, and most certainly not of historical sizes.
On one hand, you are correct. On the other hand, the actual value of gold coins are often dictated by Weight, not number of coins. So whilst you could carry 4 times the amount of gold coins, the value you carry is the same. The other option is just quickly multiple the number by a value of 4, or whatever the ratio of weight per coin is, and suddenly you get approximately the number of coins you can carry. Approximately due to air spaces when stacking. Causing volume issues in pouches.
@@Santisima_Trinidad well yes, the weight is the same, but the video focus is on currency, so it does matter. When Shad is talking about adjusting the value in a fantasy setting, at least in this video, he isn't talking about changing the volumetric mass of a coin, he is talking about the market value of a standardized coin, based on either metal/material rarity and/or non-intrinsic value due to minting and control.
@@Adveloq fair enough. Again, assuming same density, you can just multiple the number of coins by whatever the weight per coin ratio is, and that gets the approximate number of coins. If the density isn't the same then the maths gets far too complicated for me to attempt to formulate, and so value adjustments gets annoyingly difficult to decipher, but thats the handy thing about fantasy money. You can make 100 gold coins buy you a room in the inn for a night, or it can buy you the inn, irrelevant of the volume and purity of gold..
Roman coins differed from the medieval standard wherein one sterling shilling was about 18g, as was a (~22K) gold pound. Of course, this varies wildly by the year as gold and silver coins became less pure.
I like a system I read about in a series one time, where adventurers/mercenaries actually converted most of their money into jewelry. It made it easier to carry, and if they had it in chain form, it was actually pretty easy to spend - just break off a few links from a chain and reclose it.
This was how it was done in Everquest. If you needed to transport large quantities of money, you bought gems or jewelry and then sold it back at a slight loss when converting back to currency.
something I always found interesting was the strings of coins that were used in various Asian countries, which also handled the issue of counting a 1000 coins out to purchase an item: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_(Chinese_coin)
"You'd need a pack horse to carry this much gold out of a dungeon!" We have one. It's called the Half Orc party member :) Side Note: In Pathfinder at least, there are tables for weight that you can carry based on how much your character weighs and the character's size, and though Gold may not have weight initially, it can be made to have it, and then you'd have accurate numbers to how much you could carry.
Coins do have weight in the rules as written, at least in PF1. *All* coins in PF1 weigh 1/50th of a pound (p.140, PF1 CRB). PF2's bulk system doesn't directly translate to weight as it's a mix of size and weight...
@@LordRenegrade Yeah, I double checked after I posted this, and I noticed that it was written. I am just used to that rule not being too heavily enforced.
Something worth mentioning was the Templars had a system whereby pilgrims going to the holy land would give them money in Europe and be given a writ that they would turn in once they got to Jerusalem to receive their money back. This meant pilgrims could travel with less money, reducing the weight and the odds of losing their money if they were robbed along the journey.
yes, they invented money, then they got wise and realized most people left most their money in the bank. So that is why banks now only need 10% in their vault to loan out, so if they have $1,000,000 they can loan out $9,000,000 to another bank, then they write up that extra $9m as "profit", and BINGO!!! new money is made, then that $9m can be loaned to another bank and $8.1m is "made" and on it continues, Also when you take a loan from a bank, you put up collateral and they put up "new" money, then they write up your new loan as new money. You are the only one who had something of value in the agreement. What started as a "convenience" turned into a .....well you know lol
@@mattymcsplatty5440 IIRC the reserve for US banks was lowered to 0% in March, 2020. A 10% reserve is an artefact of banking that was merely MOSTLY irresponsible.
@@mattymcsplatty5440 Are you saying that the elites can now make money on a whim and use the whole system to manipulate and control the masses, harvesting the results of our labor via taxes, fees, licenses, and charges in all their various governmental forms?! Oh, surely not! Hmmm, but then the Templars were absorbed into Freemasonry where they operate in the elite echelons today...
21:46 "The US doesn't have dollar coins, just dollar notes" The US *does* still have dollar coins and actually mints new designs for special occasions. However, they are just far more rare to see than regular dollar bills and are usually designed as collectors' items. There's nothing to stop you from paying for your groceries with them though.
Seeing as it's ONLY for special occasions now, no the US doesn't. Anymore they're old or one of those special coins. As you wouldn't use said special ones for buying random things, you guys don't mint new ones anymore. Do they still exist? Yes, but to say they're still minted, isn't really correct to say, since you don't do it on the norm anymore and haven't for quite a while.
14:20 Clarification, gold coins in Dungeons and Dragons are /not/ a dollar. In fact a gold coin is actually much closer to your estimation of a 100 dollars if you're using the economy of the book. Unfortunately a lot of DM's make everything cost 1 gold and basically just offhandedly equate 1 gp to 1 dollar in their campaigns, but as per the setting a single gold coin will get you a nice nights stay at a good inn; the same way a 100 dollar bill would that for you at a hotel in the US. Some things are impossible to make analogous because a medieval economy with magic is very dissimilar to a modern one with technology, so some coin amounts for certain things will not make sense. However, generally speaking a golden coin in D&D /is/ per 5e about as much as a 100 dollar bill.
Actually, technology is very similar to magic if you take into account the effects both have in every setting: doing something unordinary. The thing is, just like in real world, if something becomes more common it loses it's value. So, if, for example, on a D&D world, magic weapons are very common to find and buy, just like technology in real life, the prices would be very low. If the world has magic progressed as much as we have technology then, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a magic weapon, with common enhancements, for only a couple of GP.
I was going to mention the same thing. I believe the analogy I heard is 1 gold is enough to take care of a family of 4 for a day covering all expenses. They also have platinum which is 10 gold so they can carry more money for less weight
I actually had my NPCs take advantage of this in my DnD game. Shop owners knew that adventurers mainly dealt in gold even though the standard coinage was copper, so they would always set their prices to include as many of the lower denominations as possible (for example, a stay at an inn would be 1 silver and 1 copper per night), knowing that the adventurers would pay in gold and would usually tell them to keep the change in order to avoid dealing with 18 extra coins in their pouches. And my players did just that.
I always imagined fantasy gold coins to be tiny. Like I've seen gold coins from dark ages hoards in museums and a lot of them are the size of UK 5p pieces (that's about 14mm across) but also paper thin. After all if gold was soo ubiquitous that a solid gold coin the size and thickness of a dollar was a standard unit of currency it would have all sorts of other inworld consequences. Like everyone would be wearing masses of gold jewellery, people could cover their homes in golden ornaments even tile their walls in gold. Because why not, If it's soo cheap and abundant? Instead of a grimy, green and brown pseudo-medieval European setting that is so standard, you would end up with everything that didn't need to be hard-wearing could just be never tarnishing shining yellow and all the people would be walking around blinged up to the eyeballs!
Definitely I agree. Even the five pence comparison is too generous. The value would be calculated by weight, so even a half or a quarter of the size of 5p makes sense .
That's a really good point. If gold is so abundant, like in D&D or video games like Skyrim, why isn't every peasant wearing gold jewelry and gold clothing? The most logical answer is it's video game fantasy. I play Elder Scrolls a lot and most of the things in the game wouldn't happen or make any logical sense if that fantasy world were real.
You're the only guy other than Internet Historian who makes sponsor ads just as entertaining as the rest of the content, so I'm not gonna add the segment to sponsorblock
when I was in high school, I remember looking at D&D rules saying that there were about 50 gold coins per pound, and then looking up density tables, calculating random stable packing of coins (that part took some research), and figuring out the volume of a dragon's hoard and being highly disappointed.
With a spot price on gold of about $1800, that would put a DnD coin at about $570 per coin; or roughly a weeks pay for a modern "commoner." Sounds a bit low, but in the right ballpark.
I had to calculate molar mas for every element on the table when I was first year colege, and made the coment about D&D coins and said, "FUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!"
at the cons we used to call this a "reality check" and we would then load some one down with armor, weapons, packs, supplies etc etc and then check how fast they could move (great when playing D-n-D)
We do this with people at the shooting range as well, a lotta people talk about carrying lots of ammo and big powerful guns in an apocalypse. But when you've gotta carry your weapons, cloths, food, water (waters heavy lol) maybe some body armor, boots, medical supplies and many other things! We like to challenge them to do a 3 mile hike at a brisk walk with all of their gear that they WANT to take and then see what's really worth carrying.
In the dnd games I play with my friends, "gold pieces" is simply a numerical value we use for value. In the end, characters carry gems, jewelry, pieces of various metals and rare materials. We kinda handwaved that part for simplicity :P
That's pretty much how I handle it; I assume the adventurers spend some time "offscreen" converting their currency into more easily-handled denominations whenever they reach any sort of civilized area. I leave the specifics up to the players themselves, if thy want to go into detail, but I assume that there's several denominations of coins beyond the basic copper/silver/gold(/platinum/electrum), precious gemstones with a generally accepted cash value, paper money, and so on.
You just gave me a mental image of an offended social justice kangaroo with a side shave and purple dye job. One more thing that would never have occurred to me without the internet;)
LOL, years ago on PS2 I think, there was a fantasy fighting game that was loosely D&D based, had a Halfling, a Goblin, various wizards, a Dwarf... they all had a victory phrase they would speak after you won using the character. One of those victory phrases was "Feel my wrath!" To which some smartaleck in our group added "Go on, touch it, touch it". You gave me a trip down memory lane and a laugh.
Those are the most accommodating bandits I've ever heard of! Not only do they deliver your Hello Fresh foods, but they even cook it for you, even when you're shouting at them like a medieval Gordon Ramsay!
In 5e at least, 1 GP is roughly $100 US. A beer that would cost roughly $5 is 5 Copper. Well-crafted armor and weapons were expensive. Magical items that adventurers would dig up are nearly priceless.
5E is almost exactly the same as ADnD, peasants make copper a week, hireling soldiers cost only 1-2 gold a month. A basic meal is coppers, while a super fancy meal would be in silver. A world class chef's meal in a luxury restaurant is only a gold or two. Horses were expensive, but cows and the like were like 5 gold. peasants would save for years to get a new cow or cart, and most items were handed on generationally. Things like saddles and the like were seldom something a peasant ever bought... they don't even often eat at an inn. Anything they could craft themselves they would, and they would repair and repair and repair again as opposed to buying new. Even on the random treasure tables most treasure types are almost all copper and silver. They can be in the many thousands in hordes, but on individuals usually are just a few lower coins each. Random gold even from a dragon is usually 1-6 thousand GP, with platinum in hundreds, and you still have to roll it with the percentage chance being usually petty low for most treasure piles. In ADnD 10 gp was 1 lb (I changed it to 20), but it still adds up FAST. I run pretty strict realism games. people learn very quickly the value of carts and chests, or converting to gems (though you lose some value both directions on the exchanges). banks at the time were usually in the castle owned by the crown, and charged you to hold your wealth, giving you a voucher for the value you held there. He keeps mentioning DnD but it seems he hasn't done lot of RPGs and is basing his ideas a lot off of video games.
As a third edition brat all I can say is cost of living is fun in balance, insofar as craft and profession are balanced around NPC if you dig into the math not PC, and actually(mostly) adds up to the expected wage of NPCs. Problem is as you said, an NPC doesn't earn a lot. A single dungeon for a level 1 party is worth years of wages for unskilled labor and not much more for skilled. A common laborer in third edition can expect to earn around 1 silver a day, 3 gp a month, which is just above self sufficient in terms of cost of living. They basically repair and patch what they have and save up for months with emergency funds to replace items like shoes that become beyond their ability to patch. A skilled craftsman or laborer sees a much higher margin of living, but still well below an adventurer, but also with less chance of dying. You can generally assume that a professional would be able to earn around 8-10gp a month comfortably with periods of downtime to relax and splurge at the local tavern as a middle class. Meanwhile, frank was trained as a fighter by the guard and managed to loot some equipment from a goblin raid and joined a thief who totally wasn't wanted in the next city over for robbing several stores and an armory and a mage who has spent years paying tuition at a school and wrecked a camp of a dozen goblins claiming the loot of dozens of merchant caravan raids as there own overnight.
@@litadahl6806 Yeah, adventurers make no fucking sense in a standard medieval setting. The closest thing to them irl would be large professional mercenary companies in the late middle ages and early modern period. And the thing is, these were well, companies. Hundreds of men. In this regard mechwarrior of all things is perhaps the most realistic rpg around.
One of the few times that I DMed I had my party find an huge chest of treasure while they were stranded away from civilisation. I made it feel like it was a huge sum of money to them but actually by the time they would have split it and leveled up a few times (which they would have done by the time they had the opportunity to spend it) it would have put them on the expected amount of wealth for their level. I told them it was too much to carry without a cart but they could take a reasonable amount out of it and come back later to try to find it again, so I effectivly turned getting a large amount to treasure back to town into a quest. Unfortunatly the party was too paranoid - they thaught I was up to something and there was no way I would let them keep it so they didn't take anything from it, buried it and never came back... actually they ran away or attacked the npcs every time I tried to reward them >.< They thought I was out to get them but actually it was just that the previous DM hadn't been very generous and they were under-geared.
Dungeons and Dragons had designed a spell almost specifically for this situation since the wizard is almost always a weakling. "Tenser's Floating Disk" This spell creates a circular, horizontal plane of force, 3 feet in diameter and 1 inch thick, that floats 3 feet above the ground in an unoccupied space of your choice that you can see within range. The disk remains for the duration, and can hold up to 500 pounds. If more weight is placed on it, the spell ends, and everything on the disk falls to the ground. Literally just load up 500 pounds of loot to carry out the dungeon behind you. And it's only a 1st level spell compared to animate objects which is a 5th level spell.
@@Crizzly122 animate objects essentially gives autonomy to an inanimate object or objects, it does not clone anything. And anything that doesn't have legs (chair has legs, chest does not) will gain a flying speed with animate objects.
Fun fact: The Tenser's disk spell was apparently added by Gary because one of his kids wanted a spell like that. He himself wanted players to figure out the treasure transporting logistics themselves ;)
Now the real question when carrying all that gold is: "How fast could you flee from Ezio in AC2 before he lunges at you and hugs the coins out of your pouches?"
D & D as a dm I always make players deal with coin weight, so either they spend more money bag of holding. Or pack animals and care takers for them . Depending on the items they try to lug a spell caster may be burning his precious supply of mana to move stuff.
Dragon Age Origins had monetary system somewhat intiresting: Gold, Silver and Bronze coins were decimals of each other however the conversion was done automatically instead of exchanging coins for one another. That exchange part and added convinience would've boosted Gold and Bronze coin even further, their rarity would also boost it even further and make them an investment medium... I wonder if there's a fantasy setting counterpart to EVE Online with complicated economics that could've leverage that?
Why do you want another economy based MMO run by people who don’t understand how an economy works? The Eve devs purposely instituted stagflation, basically killing the entire economy of the game. That’s kind of an issue when the game is based around the economy. Honestly, I don’t think any MMO can have a functional economy for very long before gold farming bots and farming/griefing clans take over. Happened in Eve, and it’s one of the many things (if not the MAIN thing) killing OSRS at the moment.
Not a game, but if I recall correctly coin conversion is an important part of Spice and Wolf plot. (Call me a weeb if you want, but I think this is an anime that worth having a look at if interested in "realistic" depiction of medieval daily life...)
The real world Exchange rate for silver to bronze is like 1 to 1000 or there abour. But back in those Day it would be more like one to 100 or so Back in those days they probonlt would haver used rates of 6 12 or 20 in stead. Also they could probobly adapt the coin size to be a good fit. 1 gold would then be a out 12 silver (same volume, a bit lighter), 1 silver would be about 20 copper, that copper coins would be about twice as heavy. This would make the coins about the same size. You probobly would need like smaler coins to pay for every Day things. Like a bear at the pub ... would need to use like tinn coins to buy cheap stuff.
**Shad's rant on pouches/medieval clothing and lack of pockets** Me: "So what you're saying is that modern day women need to bring pouches back into fashion?"
historically "pockets" were flat cloth pouches worn tied about the waist. If you have not watched Bernadette's "Dumpster Fire pockets" episode you are missing out.
... this is why to justify being able to carry all those coins I've started giving enchanted coin pouches to players (each can hold up to 1k coins) with a set weight of 1lbs regardless of how filled they are. Because I do not wanna force them to go through calculating coin weight/storage (it's an optional rule, at least in dnd 5e).
I give them a bag of holding and say this is specifically the for the party fund no matter how large it gets, no player should have more than 500 pieces on their person... I'm not about to go deal with carry weight and gold dimensions, and spending an entire session figuring out what to do with the entire hoard from an Iffritis palace.
In 5e, you could theoretically carry the equivalent weight of an elephant and still swim like a dolphin if you don't apply the encumbrance rule. Sounds pretty funny to me: imagine a punch thrown by a person that heavy, it would probably disintegrate you to ashes. Wait, THAT'S WHY MONKS CAN ONESHOT PEOPLE WITH FISTS
Gems. That way, they only have to carry 50 coins. 10 CP, 10 SP, 10 GP, 10 PP, then we go to 10 100-gp gems, 10 1000-gp gems, etc. Gems are art objects, so they trade at full value. And if you don't care to track, you can just say that's what they do. No need for a magic item.
If I remember correctly, the best solution for this is carrying gems. One tiny rock can be worth many hundreds of gold and its much more convenient to carry. Though, there is an appraisal issue so you're never sure exactly how much you have at any time.
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Pirate films: Four chests takes a whole crew to move. Fantasy adventure: A party of four walk out with the four chests. Or, the one hero gets all four, no problem.
This aspect of D&D has been largely hand waved away in more recent editions, but it used to be a large part of the game to the point of many adventures ending with hiring peasants in a nearby town to aid in carting gold out of a Dragon's lair and back to town for a share of the profits. Magic items such as The Bag of Holding, Heward's Handy Haversack, and The Portable Hole have eased the issue too and acquiring one of these is often the first big milestone in any campaign.
Back in the day playing 2nd Ed AD&D with friends, we had a house rule that all coins of each denomination had the same standard weight of 1/100 lbs (Sorry US player haha). While characters could carry a fair bit of wealth, it did impose limits. In my campaigns characters also had to deal with issues when converting wealth between types. (Not to mention loved giving them electrum pieces which no one ever accepted)
Oh yeah, adventures back in 1st Edition were huge Indiana Jones expeditions with a full entourage, lots of porters, several torchbearers, and men-at-arms as guards. You'd set up a base camp and the actual adventurers would set off from there, and when you were done with any fighting the hirelings would go in and haul out the loot. The idea of it only being like 5 guys descending into a hole in the ground and coming out loaded with gold is more of a 3rd Edition invention. [Edit for spelling... "met-at-arms?" DOH]
Yea we play 5e but reduced magic so no handy haversack or bags of holding until very late game or lucky drop in dungeon. Typically i let players keep a couple hundred gold o. Thier person and the rest of the party's wealth is in the local bank which extends credit
@@jamesbates9038 notes of mark were a handy invention from banks, safer than carrying loads of gold but a small handling fee especially for transferring money from one area to another
"Is there anyone here muscular enough to join me on this epic adventure?" "I'll go!" shouts the young child. "I'm twice his size!" protests the apprentice scribe. "Well I'm twice yours!" interrupts the field wizard. "Well I'm twice yours!" echoes the butcher. "Well I can LIFT twice what you can." reasons the courier. "That's still not what I'm capable of!" argues the blacksmith. "Nevertheless, I'm the superior choice." calls out the professional strongman. "No, me!" booms his arch rival, who is also a giant. A short gasp eminates from the back of the crowd. Sunlight hesitates. Silence. Dramatic smoke. Dust disperses. The isolated clop of boot sole on cobble. A merchant approaches, arms exposed. Stands, and says nothing. Everyone else walks away.
I know that every DM I ever had basically said that as your GP increased, you weren't actually carrying more gold, but were switching up to more valuable items that could easily be traded - rare regents that wizards needed, valuable gems, promissory notes from nobles, and the like.
@@td1559 Pretty much. Without a bank, high value transaction are going to be in high value goods that are easily fungible. Real economies actually did use somewhat ceremonial weapons as goods of exchange in the past. A magical dagger that exists purely to be traded would make perfect sense as a 'coin.'
Promissory notes make the most sense, since in most worlds, the notes would be standardized, and thus viable at any real market. It might be interested to introduce that as currency, so the players would have to consider how much actual cash they had on them if they were in some rinky-dink village that didn't accept notes.
I think any "realistic" professional adventurer (i.e. reconciled with practical considerations) in fantasy would just have a mobile base of operations. This is even depicted in games like Dragon Age: Origins I think. You go on special operations / raids / recon expeditions with what you wear on your person, yes (like special forces people jump from planes festooned with gear for a 3-day mission), but you do have a supply train with carts and draught animals, and camp personnel (at least a squire per hero). When in cities, you'd rent a space to be your HQ as a mercenary/detective/hunter. That's where you store your money and spoils (if not depositing them to a local branch of a large bank). Just like an old-timey army was outnumbered by its supply train. Or like a tank that doesn't exist by itself: it has a load of trucks that carry its ammo, spare parts, and maintenance personnel, it has several fuel trucks, it has an armored tow mover, and it may have an armored reloading vehicle and a bulldozer and crane to build entrenched positions for good measure. Oh, and a mobile bridge-builder. And sponsoon vehicles. And whole AA screening units. And an NBC platoon. And general supply/cooking detachment )
I liked that part at the beginning.. Really made me remember that time i was playing skyrim with all my dragon bone armor and weapons and hundreds of thousands of gold and i just thought "why the hell am i able to walk" at the time i just broke it down to the fact that its fantasy stuff 😕
@@Pyxis10 Exactly why I installed a weighted gold mod for Skyrim. Then at some point I wondered why I was spending so much time trying to mod Skyrim into being Daggerfall and just stuck to playing Daggerfall instead lmao
Video-game physics/logic - it's like cartoon physics/logic where you can be standing in mid-air and won't fall as long as you don't look down 🤣 This is how we had to explain it to my nephew, who is high-functioning autistic, when he was getting frustrated at how a book or necklace had a weight and yet 100 arrows or gold didn't have any.
I used a few mods in Skyrim to fix this "problem". The Immersive Jewelry and Immersive Currency mods add 1/100 carry weight to money, so 10,000 septims would be 100 carry weight Of course, the mod also added bank notes of varying value you could exchange at certain merchants. They had money notes for 1k, 2k, and 5k gold, each weighing only 1/10 carry weight.
@@excalligator5529 I think there are mainly two considerations. The balance between game mechanics and realism, and whether you have a computer making the calculations or a human. A computer can make and track all sorts of calculations for very precise management, while if you have rules a human needs to keep track of, you want simple stuff. On the other consideration, if your game character is supposed to be able to perform all sorts of tasks at any given time and travel all over the world, you probably need a more lenient encumbrance system, if one at all. If you have more realistic flexibility and movement you can also have more realistic encumbrance.
I'm reminded of one of the forgotten realms books where they were going through a dragon's hoard and just picking out platinum coins, magic items and expensive gems/jewelry due to the weight and even then had a pack train of mules for a majority of it.
Yep, this was a vital part of early D&D. You killed the dragon, great. Its hoard is comprised of 45,000 copper; 25,000 silver; 5,000 gold; 1,000 platinum; 20 pieces of artwork (statuary, paintings, etc); etc. etc. How do you plan to carry all of that? It was common to ignore coins in favor of other, more valuable, things that are either easier to carry, or that have a much higher value-to-weight ratio.
I remember that scene too. It was from the novel Spellfire published way back in 1987. Coin weight was big deal in the game Everquest too. I remember one guy who made a killing exchanging copper and silver coins for gold an platinum at an exchange rate. It was also why almost everybody set their bind point to bank. Load up on loot until you can't walk, then recall and deposit it.
Old editions of D&D accounted for this in spades. This is why we always have hirelings come along to excavate and carry things while the party kills monsters
And mercenaries to watch the horses, a stableboy to curry and groom the beasts while the adventurers are plotting their delve with the henchmen peering over their shoulders. Hell, in a game I'm in, some of us have small armies that move with us, because it's necessary to survive.
Actually, we do still have dollar coins here in the US, and they're also gold in color. Ther replaced the silver dollar back around 2000, and since 2012 their actual cash value depends on the year and letter of mint and its condition, with those uncirculated being the highest value.
The wording on that is weird. Their cash value is always $1 regardless of their minting location or condition. Their intrinsic values vary wildly, that is the price that they have dependent upon their rarity and condition. As far as their cash value though it is $1. Interestingly enough some coins are worth more as melt metal than they are their cash or intrinsic value. Namely pennies and nickels are the biggest contenders here since they are made of metals that cost more than the coin itself. It is highly illegal to melt nickels and pennies for their metal melt value. Do not do this.
@@sirkana yeah because US currency is government property apparently (even though the Federal Reserve is privately owned). We can use it as legal tender but we can’t destroy it if we so choose.
@@LinkinMark1994 @Veetu Heiskanen No it is not illegal to melt coins or to do what you please with cash. It is illegal to amass pennies and nickels with the intent to melt them and remove them from circulation to sell their raw metals for profit.
@@Wolfie-gj9ch So this is why you can sell old silver dollars for above their cash value? Does that mean that it's not the actual coins that are government property but their place in circulation? How does this apply to money that has been legally slated for destruction at the end of its lifetime?
This is one of those things that makes me appreciate how much details was put in the inventory systems of Ultima Online where gold had weight up to the point that players with low STR (strength) wouldn't be able to carry thousands of gold coins without the help of a mule pack animal.
I would like to see him a video on medieval law enforcement and how to incorporate it into a fantasy setting. Like what is a minor crime versus a capital punishment and who can be arrested and who can’t. I would love that type of video!!
Just in case you missed it, the Australian to U.S. exchange rate shown in the video was a joke, we know it's not that bad. . . but it certainly feels like it sometimes ^_^
Also the weights and numbers given in this video are to demonstrate rough estimates, the size of gold coins in any given setting will also determine how heavy the coins would weigh. For instance if the gold coins were half the width of the ones we're using as place holders in this video, you could carry twice as many coins for the same weight.
Man I thought I was going to be rich if I went to Australia lol
It harkens to AvE calling the Canadian dollar the cannukstani koppek
This is what I call a financial stress. Btw in Warframe there is a mission (The Index) with the exact the same mechanics: the more points you carry the slower you are
Gold pieces should be revalued to reflect actual value. I can carry nearly 10,000 dollars on me with 5 coins
We’re doing our best to catch up to you
I love that you brought up Skyrim. Lord forbid I carry one too many butterfly wings, but I can carry any amount of arrows and gold because apparently those are weightless.
I think they want to make it balanced for archers, so they don't have to worry about having too many arrows, and almost always have a reliable way of fighting. And if you are low I recommend the highly balanced stealth archery.
@@brickercustom If you want it to be more realistic you can get mods (or design them yourself if you're so inclined) to make gold and arrows have weight, it adds an interesting dimension to the game, but I recently got bored of Skyrim and uninstalled it for the first time since it was released (honestly, I was a pre-order so it was on the PC that I had when it came out, and then on my new one since it was built.) I'm sure I'll put it back on at some point, but I know too many tricks to making my character super over-powered so it gets boring rather quickly (and many of them don't even require cheats/mods/console commands.)
That’s my favorite part of Fallout. Ammunition weighs nothing but your guns do.
I love that I can run around with 1000 steel arrows. To be fair, the dragon bone arrows are probably pretty close to weightless as they should be very light.....
I know you can make it more balanced by making it more realistic with mods. Have you tried role-playing?
Normal adventurer: "I'll just get a squire and a pack mule."
Shad: Carries a squire and pack mule on his back
The squire IS the pack mule
I think that's why generally currency systems like that have higher denominations, like low copper is 1 copper, high copper is 10, or they do platinum above gold, and mithril and adamantite coins. just because with mithril coins it's 100 gold to 1 and generally only used for like massive company or noble operations.
Any coconuts?
Note: If the mule were gold, it would weight twice as much
@@whoknows8264 Carried by swallows?
"Packs heavy laden with loot are often light on supplies"
-Darkest Dungeon
Great game
Excellent game, and great truthiness
I read that and my hoarder brain said “I need the Loot to get the Supplies!”
-2 Food, 25gp, and a handful of spiderwebs
"Trinkets and baubles...paid for in blood"
"Finding the stuff is only the first test - now it must be carried home." - the struggle is real when you have to decide what to take and what to leave behind.
Love that Tolkien referenced this indirectly by having the dwarfs bury the troll's treasure in the Hobbit as they wouldn't be able to drag it around on a adventure.
They kept the exotic weapons, though, like any true adventurer. 👍
I've been thinking of that in games, instead of returning to "home base" every time you're full, have a system where you can bury/hide loot and come back for it later, BUT there's a chance, based on HOW you hide it and for HOW LONG that someone else might find it.
This is the reason the Templars created a credit system. Traveling with all your coins will make you a target. But if you give it to the Templar and he hands you a paper, once you reach the middle east you get that "value" in that currency in that region.
Letters of credit and our modern paper money are literally the same thing with slightly different uses.
@@arifhossain9751 pretty much, except you can't exchange it for gold anymore
@@Sibula
Paper money is still backed by gold in some countries so maybe *they* can exchange it for gold?
True..and it still works a thousand years later.. Checks, money orders, plastic and so on.
That's also how daggerfall did it you only carry a bit of gold dump the bulk off at a bank and they give you paper receipts that you can use in place of gold for large purchases like houses, ships and the higher end armor and weapons rather than lug 30k gold which had weight around with you.
Shad, you have just hit on exactly why adventurers always find chests of gold. None of them have been able to take the whole amount with them, so there's always some left for the next adventurers who wander into the dungeon.
Not around me. I used to play 2e AD&D and my characters always went for the portable holes, bags of holding, girdles of many pouches, and the ever popular girdles of giant strength. Whenever all other party members were so encumbered that they could not carry another coin or other bit of treasure, I swooped in and took the rest of the hoard and smiled my way to the counting house (bank). BTW, girdles of many pouches are great for Rogue characters to filch bits of treasure that the rest of the party hasn't noticed. They pay for themselves quickly. Also are great for Mage characters to keep material components in.
@@Rebelrocker69 This worked for me in 1st edition until the rest of the players noticed I was going up in levels faster than I should have been, and wondered where I was getting the extra exp... (1st Ed you got exp for acquiring treasure!)
@@jqbogus You should have responded that you were given exps for successfully finding and dismantling traps (assuming that you were a thief class). That was how my DM and myself handled it. Also, whenever we were returning from a dungeon raid, I would constantly be trying to hide in shadows. That constant practice pays off if given 5-10 exps per success. They stopped complaining when they realized that I was getting better at finding and removing traps, so less chance of them tripping any since I usually found most of them.
That is 100% logical and now the only reason why I believe there is literal chest of gold in dungeons now.
@@Rebelrocker69 Sadly, the character was a (larcenous) half orc fighter.
If our party rogue explained his unusual level gain by saying he was getting bonus exp for successfully performing class functions, I'd wonder why my Cleric wasn't getting extra exp for healing people, or my fighter for engaging in melee.
"I'm not really on board with classes" then a picture of Karl Marx appears. That was absolutely gold.
"absolute gold"
i see what you did there ;)
Perfect
Winner 🏆🏆🏆
Funny considering he's not going to pay the crew of his short film
To be fair, if historical warriors had classes, basically all of them would just be fighter. I suppose there might be the occasional rogue, ranger, or barbarian, too.
Wich is twice as heavy.
I love the saying : " Silver is the currency between people, Gold is the currency between countries "
Vast majority of fantasy writers have no understanding of precious-metals and treat gold as it were copper lol (looking at you "roast chicken that cost 8 gold coins"😁FYI during the time of Charlemagne a pence/penny (~1.7g silver) could buy you "12x 2-pound loaves of bread, a sheep would be five pence, ten pence for a pig, twenty for a cow and thirty for an ox"). All the gold that have ever been mined in the history of the world can fit in ~6 US suburban houses...copper is >20,000x more common than gold, and silver is >7x more common than gold, out of the earth...maybe gold in their universe is as common as rocks lol hence seemingly every dragon sleeps on a mountain of gold...😅
The English lsd system for money is well suited for any fantasy
Shad Fact: Shad has a large number of pets he regularly plays with. This includes 2 sand worms sometimes referred to as Shai-hulud. 3 beholders, 4 tarrasques, and two flights of dragons
How many dragons are in a flight? Because the mental image I got is two airplanes full of dragons.
Wow 😣
Wonder how many sheep you feed the dragons? :v
You forgot the Pocket Behemoth and the Gibberling Farm in the back yard...
You must have an amazing vacuum 😂
"Bag of Holding" - the most important magic item ever invented!
That is _always_ my first choice when I'm playing D&D. If I can't get one of those, I get a donkey.
I'll do you one better: BEARD of holding.
@@kyltredragmire4939 All beards are beards of holding if you're a messy eater.
while a bag of holdings contents wont effect your personal weight, it still has a weight/size limit
Codpeice of holding
Fun story. On a Pathfinder adventure, we encounter a group of Kobolds we wanted to befriend, and in that adventure they value copper over gold, just for the metal, and not the money value. Their layer was filled with raw copper ores, and lots of copper items they found or stole. So we actually went back to a city and exchanged 10-20 gold coins for the same value in copper, filling up a small chest to its max capacity ONLY with copper coins. We took that chest back to the Kobold layer and offered it as a gift, and it was super fun/cute to see them rejoy, grabbing handfuls of copper coins and just shower themselves with the copper, rubbing it against their scales and some even dig inside the pile of coins inside the chest like a cat, to "swim" in the coins. SO AMAZING and adorable!
The cutebold is a proud tradition of wholesome fantasy
sometimes awarding money for encounters can be ridiculous, had an encounter in a Pathfinder prewritten campaign where the loot was a chest full of copper coins... about 10,000. for a group of 15th level characters. who were on a basically one way suicide mission to save the planet from the Yellow King. ON HIS PLANET. we left it behind, we were like "what on Golarion are we supposed to do with like, 300 pounds of copper coins in a chest on an alien planet when theres a good chance we wont be going home??"
@@Ki113r210 Chances are the writer was either making that exact point, so it was basically a trap for idiots who want to grab any treasure no matter how small, or there is a point later in the adventure where having a huge amount of copper coins on you would be helpful. Maybe a smith or a mage needs copper for something, or dropping a heavy weight on a monster would be a good way to avoid a direct fight. Or you can cause a distraction or gain goodwill from a crowd by throwing handfuls of coins around.
I imagine only the most honest and dutiful town guards would keep harassing your party and blocking their entry if the next wagon happens to accidentally drop a chest full of coins on the street and there is a riot as people rush to grab all they can.
That is adorable i love it
"Say, do you happen to have any trash metal lying around, you know, gold and silver"
"Sure sure, we have all this fancy human stuff (jewelry), including this dumb heavy hat (a crown)"
Weight aside, I’ve always hated how gold pieces are the standard coin in D&D rather than silver pieces.
That's just the computer games, and the usual quest rewards. Most of the basic adventurer gear prices are in copper and silver, with only weapons and armor tending to cost gold, and magical versions cost lots. Been a while since I last checked the 3.5 prices, but meals iirc cost up to a silver depending on quality and rations for a day about half.
Really, standard coinage should be a lot of copper with some silver and the very, very rare piece of gold. We have historical documents which show an average soldier in Rome was paid about 2.3 troy ounces of gold for their entire annual salary, so view a single troy ounce of gold as being about 5 months wages of a soldier's salary. If gold coins were around the size that has been used quite frequently historically, then a bit over 4 of your average gold coins would equal to a troy ounce, so your typical gold coin (slightly less than .25 troy ounces) would be a bit over about 5 weeks worth of wages for the average soldier.
I mean copper and silver coins were used too. Gold was just the higher end and is worth alot more than copper and silver.
So I'm not surprised a low ranking soldiers pay is one gold during service until he's actually gone up the ranks and such
Your DM creates the economy, but you shouldn't be paying for ale in gold coins, nore pay for armour in copper.
If your DM is not sleeping, he'll have you robbed for showing off high value coins in public places. Many peasants have never even seen a real gold coin.
Yeah even low level players make hundreds of times normal people
Old school D&D focused more on encumbrance and gave weights for every treasure horde in published adventures. Figuring out how to get the loot out of the dungeon was as much a part of the adventure as slaying the big bad, possibly even more so.
The sad part is aside from the diversity of classes, Old School, 2nd edition D&D was probably the best and most fun ruleset. There was really no min/max'ing god tier multiclass/race combos and it was more about how clever you were as a player that determined your power level.
If their are any barrels lying around you can just fill them with your loot and roll them out
*stares in rolled stat requirements for race, gender, and class*
That's specifically why they had the pack animals and hirelings, actually. :D
If I remember right, back in "red book" TSR days, maybe even for AD&D, weights were given in coins, not pounds
The US does have $1 “gold” coins. We just don’t use them very often. Lots of vending machines do accept them.
The US also mints real gold coins, whose face value is "$50", but nobody actually exchanges them for $50. Currently those coins are worth $1,788 for the gold alone, tho can go for higher on account of them being backed by a state.
When I was a kid it was a fun test to put Canadian quarters in US arcade machines (they are the same size, weight, etc.). Turns out Canadian ones have more magnetic metal in them, and block up the arcade when the coin gets stuck to the magnet.
Bars hate ccx when I pay my tab with them. I bust out a small treasure box and count me out. My boss owns a car wash and I'm a pirate so it all works out.
@@109Rage I don't know what you're talking about. It sounds like the gold standard where you can trade in money for gold but that was abandoned in the 70's.
Our current money isn't backed by anything. it's worth something because we believe it is.
@@MrMarinus18 No, Jeremia is referencing the time US coins were minted in silver and gold. In the past, the US even had a gold $1 dollar coin, back around the era of the California gold rush. This wasn't the gold standard because you can't redeem gold for gold, the coin was legal tender and only worth it's own denomination to the banks. But because there's not enough gold in the world to make gold coins viable as legal tender, they dropped the concept. It was also made illegal to own gold in 1933 in the US. Much like the US dollar, gold is only worth something because we believe it is, if the world thought gold was blasphemous or cursed, it would immediately lose value. I myself own a collection of silver quarters and dimes, but I only value them for their silver content, not for any collector's value. The problem I have with modern silver and gold coins is that their always minted in 1oz denominations, which make them large and unwieldy and would be hard to barter with in emergencies.
One of the reasons gold is so valuable now is that it's supply has been vastly outstripped by the population, so you'll never see gold 1$ coins ever again. There's just not enough gold in the world for it's value to be so low anymore.
in the early days of D&D, half the game was exploring dungeons and fighting monsters, and the other half was getting your loot and gold back to town. Horses, laborers, and wizards to cast tenser's floating disk were required fare.
it also meant a whole lot less horses were forgotten and died of neglect by wasteful parties thta cuoldn't be bothered to go back for them.
I heard one party just set up a metal foundry and just melted all the coins in a huge dragon hoard. They scraped off gold and silver and left the rest.
That's what portable holes were for.
@@ZlothZloth gonna still need that horse for the first 20k tho.
donkeys, trained donkeys, the kind that will kick a goblin to death if it sneaks up on the baggage train
The reason septims (gold coins) probably doesn’t have much value is because anybody with sufficient alteration skill and a ready supply of silver or iron ore can make as much gold as they want thus rendering gold less valuable.
Me leveling up my smithing and alteration at once
Damn mages messing up the economy.
Also, if you hadn't noticed, they're _thin._ You could probably stack 3 Septims to match 2 silver dollars
Lol holy shit I forgot I even had that spell in my roster. I have so many septims since I've literally never paid for a house ever.
@@prime_optimus this is why some alchemists in history had hits put on them because rulers were afraid of what would happen in commoners could turn lead into gold.
In regards to a pouch full of coins, stuff a piece of cloth on top, it helps prevent the coins from rattling around and falling out, it also may annoy pick pockets. A piece of cloth does not add much weight and has a lot of possible uses.
you can use it when nature calls and laugh at all the ppl bite testing the gold coins
@@viermidebutura 🤣😂🤣🤑🤮 ROFLMS. ( MS=myself sick)
username checks out !
i would say that most dnd characters have a “coin pouch” that functions as a bag of holding but is used solely for coins
They'd just store it in their bag of holding or handy haversacks (which would be standard equipment for any adventurer team above early levels).
Yeah I was going to say this. It is pretty much a given that in most fantasy settings, all adventures have a 100% weight reduction coin pouch with unlimited capacity.
reminds me of "order of the stick", where the party rogue had something like 16 bags of holding.
it was recently revealed that she keeps her Arrows in one of them.
Lazy gaming.
That's a quantum wallet.
The whole thing about burying a chest of gold and coming back for it later makes much more sense with this in mind.
Someone already mentioned this, but in D&D 5e (and for this example I will extrapolate this for other fantasy systems) a coin has a set weight. From the PHB: "A standard coin weighs about a third of an ounce, so fifty coins weigh a pound." This is set as a standard not just for mechanical ease, but also as an in-world standard, it makes the minting of such coins easier to make sure they retain the same value.
This becomes *very* important when it comes to what a fantasy adventurer would carry. Using multiple denominations, such as copper, silver, gold, and platinum, it is easy to have a conversion (in D&D it is a factor of 10, again for mechanical and narrative ease) so that a merchant or traveling adventurer can carry less while having the same value. A run-of-the-mill commoner will most certainly be trading in silver or copper; the adventurer full of coin is going to convert it to gold for the ease of travel. Remember, all the coins weigh the same, so for this to be true, each coin will have a different, shape, thickness, diameter, or other characteristic (while still standardized per coin). This will most certainly mean that the lesser valued ones will be larger or thicker, meaning they take up more volume for the same mass--very inconvenient for your adventurer on the run.
I did the math, and to spare you from the details, a gold coin of this mass/weight, given a thickness of 2mm would be about 55mm in diameter, or about 2.5 in across. making it a generous 4mm thick would make it about 39 mm, or approx. 1.5 mm, across. Dimensions like this would greatly impact the practical amount of coinage one would want to carry (in gold at least) before converting to something else. This does present the interesting opportunity for Banks to exist and charge a conversion fee--to the chagrin of the players.
Interesting enough, when you measured 100 coins to be about .9 Kilo, and 1000 coins to be the practical limit at 9 kg (~20 lbs), this lines up with D&D rules. If 50 coins weighs 1 lb, then 1000 coins (again of any denomination) would be 20 lbs. Looks like your real world currency has the approximate mass of a fantasy one!
"you get a discount, just leave me alone!" that was funny
I'd like to see a video where you figure out the weight of the standard explorer's pack from D&D (bedroll, backpack, mess kit, tinder box, 10 torches, 10 days worth of rations, waterskin, 50 ft of hemp rope) and maybe go hiking with it, because having lived out of a pack while hiking before, I can tell you it's hard to get your pack to weigh less that 40lbs
Hell, 10 days worth of rations would be heavy and cumbersome by itself. Think how big a simple packed lunch is, now 30 of those!
@@Vikingwerk Well food for travelling is typically chosen to travel well, more so than a packed lunch. Some foods are way more dense than others.
@@Vikingwerk can't wait to see the video where Shad works out how to fit 30 hello fresh meals into a bag.
I suppose rations may change with setting as well. It may be ten days worth of jerky (as in the Mongols), or smoked and salted fish, for example rather than a modern idea of a square meal.
@@DidMyGrandfatherMakeThis Or pemmican.
The neat thing about dnd currency: it has a literal weight conversion, at least in 5e. 50 coins of any type equal one pound. Which naturally means Gold Coins are much smaller than most others.
@@williamriven Did you have this info in your back pocket, or did you research expressly to reply to a UA-cam comment.
Either way, I like it.
If memory serves correctly, 1st and/or 2nd Edition AD&D also listed masses and diameters of different coins, so players and DMs would know how many GP a PC could carry without becoming overencumbered.
@@williamriven Are those 3E, 3.5E, or 5E gold coins? I seem to recall in 1st or 2nd edition that they were listed as 1/10 of an Imperial pound (1.2oz each) and roughly the same diameter as a Eisenhower Half Dollar IIRC. I'm not 100% certain about these weights because it's been forever since I last played AD&D...
euro adaptation of the measurements:
the volume of the gold coin would be close to a 2 cent coin (461.11 mm³) while weighing about 3x as much (the 2 cent is 3.06g) while the weight would be close to a 2€ coin (8.5g)
@@williamriven The Krugerrand is minted in one, half, quarter and tenth of an oz coins. Following your logic the D&D coin is probably the 1/10oz version that is worth about $180.
Now that you have determined a comfortable weight, what would that 2 kg of gold coins be worth in the medieval world? The medieval florin was roughly 3.5 grams, meaning you could have around 572 gold florins. How much was that worth at the time? One could buy 20 suits of plate armor, or one suit of plate armor gaudy enough for a duke. Perhaps you'd like 17 well bred Knights war horses, or otherwise 200-300 draft horses? Maybe the same number of cows. You could send 80 people to monastic school, or 50 people to university for a year. Buy about 150 books for your library. You could rent a decent row house in York for 40 years. You could build and establish an artisan guild hall in London, or maybe just a decent church.
It's not quite what a baron might make in a year, but more than what an average knight with a typical thousand acre fief might obtain.
I think at that point one really has to appreciate medieval money-lending and the rise of Banking in the Renaissance. A checking account would be really useful for an adventurer. That way you could just deposit your loot in a vault someplace and write a check when you needed to buy some obscenely nice sword or suit of armor.
Actually, about one troy ounce of gold was enough to buy a suit of armor. 2kg would be roughly 64 suits of armor.
@@LawlessNate The Milanese armor manufactories of the day were selling full suits of ready made plate armor for roughly 8 pounds in the late 1300s, which equates to around what I stated. This was decently made armor, for a reasonable price in the day, and came with all the fittings. Later on the price dropped to around 6 pounds. Not sure what armor you are referring to that would cost that little, but it's around the cost of a good suit of brigandine or breastplate, pauldrons, gauntlets, and maille. Both of those were common gear for foot infantry, and could be had for 1-2 pounds.
the most valuable piece of equipment for any adventurer would be a Horse-drawn Cart with a Squire guarding it!
carry all the loot u can possibly find!
GAGAGAGAGAGA!!! I want to cut my toe nails... NEVER! I am the feet UA-camr. Thanks for being a fan, dear zir
That would be pretty great. I value my followers in Skyrim a lot for this reason.
@@AxxLAfriku okay then to each their own I guess
bag of holding i think is better
@@shadowofhawk55 only in settings where magic exists.
Okay legitimately this has been my biggest video game question from Skyrim because there is no way you wouldn't be encumbered carrying around 20,000 gold coins
You should've crafted the Whiterun Wallet of lightness.
I think it's just for gameplay reasons. If they really really really wanted it to be realistic then the player would be picking up copper and silver mostly, with the gold coins being bunch more uncommon. You can get mods that add weight to the coins but it's not convenient to the player to have you deposit at the bank all the time.
I think my level 54 Khajiit currently has 90,000 gold.
If you play on PC, there are mods available that take care of this issue. That is, if you want the "realism" factor.
Daggerfall actually had weighted gold so that was a mechanic at some point in the series. This was balanced out by being able to buy a horse and cart for portable storage and banks for safekeeping your coin, as well as letters of credit because Daggerfall basically wanted to simulate life lol, so it wasn't as annoying as you think.
Shad: "In my fantasy novel, the world that I've created and worked on for years... I have no clue about anything..."
Me: "Yep. Typical writer problem."
The US has dollar coins. We have several different designs of 1$ coins currently in mint, some of them gold, as well as a couple older ones still recognized as legal tender. In fact, we have 5$, 10$, and 25$ coins as well, though they are rare and meant to be used as bullion or collector's pieces rather than coinage.
I was going to say, working in a gas station, I get several of the dollar coins every other day. Get half dollars and $2 bills plenty of times as well.
Also, Japan has a gold colored coin worth almost 5 usd (500 yen)
Due to air travel law you can only fly with so much money in your bag. Some people get around this by minting some very expensive coins with precious metals and marking them as 1 or 5 dollar coins. Funny enough, even though they are listed as official currency in one or two states, nobody has ever used one to buy something, almost like they’re worth a lot more….
Yep, our $1 coins used to be pure silver (collector's versions are still made but are no longer legal tender) and our $20 coins were pure gold.
The gold coins went away during the depression (on account of Lord Roosevelt outlawing the ownership of gold and purposefully devaluing the U.S. Dollar from $20 per troy ounce of gold to $35 per troy ounce) and silver was replaced by either clad coins or alloys depending on the denomination in 1965.
This is why gemstones were used so often in earlier edition in D&D.
This reminds me of how in the Hobbit they buried almost all the gold they found in the Troll Cave. It's literally the same scenario this video addresses. Yeah they had it, but they would be 'over-encumbered' so to speak. So they had to come back for it later.
but the Hobbit they were heading into the wilderness so not a lot of places to spend it up where they were going.
To be fair, that is probably why in all those pirate legends and adventures, there are treasures buried or hidden in various places. I think there is a common patern among those stories. A person lives far away from towns and villages and could be easily be robbed in the way, so carrying a ton of money is out of question, that person is collecting high amounts of valuable items and money which he or she cannot use, because it's hard to do so without standing out, and they are piling up making them hard to move and since that person is greedy, for all this to happen in the first place, he or she decides to bury those somewhere and when he or she can get them out he or she will come back to get them but that usually didn't happen hench the birth of those legends.
Fallowing the mechanics in D&D there are roughly 50 coins to 1Lb, and your coin pouches had 1.3kg (2.6kg doubled to equate for the weight of gold) roughly 5.5-6Lb per coin pouch. So roughly between 275-300 coins per pouch....
I was going to comment this, glad someone else did. I also wanted to put out there that this would be what merchant scales are for, even adventurers or mercenaries may carry around a collapsible scale on them, even if it could only weigh up to 3-5 pounds at a time (or an equally pretty number in kg),
it means instead of paying out 1 by 1, though it still takes a minute, you just slap a pile of coins on the scale and go "oh look, its 3 pounds, thats 150 coins, now I will just count 15 to round it out" type thing.
and to boot, according to a quick google search an Australian dollar coin weighs exactly 9 grams or .31 oz, which compared to the dnd coin being about 0.36 oz these are a pretty close comparison (ignoring the x2 multiplier he is adding), and if he were carrying around some of the higher denominations like Platinum or precious gems and you could carry a serious chunk of cash for 250 coins. especially considering that a gold coin is basically the equivalent of a $20 (using the dnd price of a gallon of milk at 2 silver pieces vs $3.60)
@@harozuken Seriously. Any time he mentioned how it would weigh "twice as much", I wanted to shout at him for being an idiot, since it's already the weight of a D&D 2e+ / PF 1e coin, and he'd actually be able to carry twice as many
fr the modern coins r SO MUCH BIGGER than the old gold ones lmfao
This episode reminded me of a chapter in The Hobbit where they find treasure chests in a goblin cave before they get captured. They had already lost their ponies because they were in the mountains so they smartly decided to bury the chests for later upon their return. Makes me think that in a fantasy setting saturated with old, forgotten ruins everywhere there would also be--by extension, a lot of buried treasure. So not only are their professional adventurers, there could also be professional or aspiring thieves that specifically go after adventurers' buried treasure.
This is the kind of thing that actually happened in dark ages Europe. Even in the modern-day people are still finding hoards of gold and silver coins, jewellery and ornaments that were buried in the ground by some dark ages person who found themselves in possession of a great deal of money but not able to carry or store it safely. Presumably, they intended to return and reclaim their wealth but were either unable to find it later on or too dead to make the journey
shockingly yes, pirates and the like did bury treasure
unfortunately this was usually temporary like in the hobbit, and would most likely be gathered again unless accidentally lost (unlikely) or the owner died with no trace of where the treasure is (a lot of people died, so get your shovels)
@@WhichDoctor1 not at all so common.
Most coins found in fields where lost without intention and heaps of it often tend to be in areas of old settlements or garrisions...
The burried treasure thing is for the most part a myth... yes there is the occasional find of a vase full with coins, however, it is verry verry rare and most finds are a handful or single coins that got lost by the user.
@@pemo2676 nope. pirates did not burry treasure. also a myth.
1. most of the time they did not find treasure but trading goods -which got sold at the next market
2. burrying treasure on an island is risky and needs not only time, but renders the burried thing useless...
Most coins acuired where probably split up by the crews and rather fastly spent drinking etc...
@@BlackDragonWitheHawk hi! they did bury treasure, but only temporarily. this was to reduce the weight in ships, as going back and fourth constantly to get all that weight off the ships was far too much, instead they would hide or bury it, continue the exhibition, and come back later- it's actually a myth that they DIDN'T bury treasure
we also have PROOF as multiple times, people have discovered abandoned treasure hoards because a pirate had died or been captured before they would return
and i'm not just saying they dug a big hole in a beach and hid it, this could be in caves, in walls(in one real case), under foliage e.c.t.
they couldn't carry everything all the time, gold is far too heavy, and they can't always make it to a port to spend it.
we do actually have records of pirates doing this, as anyone who could write would account as much of their travels as possible, including dumping their money off as they go and coming back later
Ooh Shad! Video idea!
How realistic would it be for an adventurer to carry potions, assuming that they are glass bottles with cork stoppers
Different sizes for different healing amounts of course!
And how quickly could you consume one in a pinch!?
Ceramic would work better than glass, cheaper probably too
Depending on size I could drink one in a gulp
A homerule that I use in dnd is that if you take an action you get the max health of the potion. If you use it using a bonus action then you use the roll.
The way it's flavoured is that by using an action you're drinking it more carefully so you don't spill any
I hope he makes a fantasy rearmed video on the effects of potions
@@Blandy8521 That's a good rule
We do still have dollar coins in the US… They just aren’t used that often but if you’ve ever worked at a grocery store you’ll see quite a few of them come through
Sometimes subway stations do as well
I work at a diner in the midwest of America and yeah i do see dollar coins get given to us for tips and the like.
There are also half dollar coins as well, however they're in a similar boat to the dollar coins, and are even more rare. They're also larger than the dollar coins by quite a bit.
@@gaming_ape1018 A fellow Midwesterner
@@eternalisolation6106 Yeah, they're so big that you can't use them in vending machines.
This video makes me really want to see you explore the real world equivalent of currency in the Witcher 3 setting and explore just how ridiculously cheap it would be to hire a Witcher to risk his life fighting a terrible monster based on rewards from hunt quests
Well peasants can afford his services.
I mean, tbh as long as you have a good sob story, he'll probably be willing to get off with a lesser reward, if no reward at all (or maybe thats just how I played it)
I've always thought that it would make it way more sense if he made most of his money selling various parts from the monsters to mages and alchemists, but Sapkowszki didn't think his own setting through to that degree.
but witcher's purpose of life was to kill monsters anyway so the reward was just some extra for his costs and sometimes cost of spending winter in a witcher's castle
So fun fact, and one of the few things I miss from earlier Elder Scrolls: In Daggerfall, gold DID have weight. So how did they handle having tons of it? There were banks, and at those banks you could exchange your gold for letters of credit, that could then be used to purchase items.
Not to mention that game made it so your character could own a wagon or a ship to load their gold and assorted loots onto while away from town. I always enjoyed the logistics of heading back to the entrance of a dungeon just to dump gold and the like so you could resume exploring, instead of having to decide on dumping stuff or heading back to town to unload.
@@UtushoReiuji and a horse saw someone playing that old game, said it was in unity now
@@UtushoReiuji yeah but Navigating a Daggerfull dungeon without using "Mark" and "Recall" spells and the quest jump location cheat using that insane 3D Map was an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE
In one old D&D campaign I created, the massive treasure in one particular dungeon was 100,000 one-ounce copper pieces.
That's about three tons.
They spent more time arranging for transport and escorting the resulting wagon train than they did killing a dungeon full of monsters. They had to move it all to a fairly distant major city just to find a bank that could handle that much.
In Daggerfall money had weight, the banks allowed you to deposit it into an account with a letter of credit offered as an alternative to lugging arround 10,000 gold coins.
That's so fucking neat
I miss Daggerfall...I actually bought a house...and got arrested for sleeping on the balcony....the game saw it as camping inside the city.
I saw somewhere that it has been converted to play on the Skyrim engine...may have to check into that.
@@EzekiesAcheron Also, 400 Gold Coins in Daggerfall weighs exactly 1 Kg
In DnD rules as written, a pouch can hold up to 300 coins (50 coins weigh about 1 pound and the capacity of a pouch are 6 pounds), so not far off from what you showed here. And as others have already pointed out, a gold coin is actually worth quite a lot.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go put a treasure hoard full of copper coins in my next dungeon...
Shad, your energy and enthusiasm in your videos is infectious. Always a fun and informative watch.
Daggerfall was the oldest rpg game I can remember actually giving coins weight. So instead of carrying around alot of them you would get a letter of credit from the bank.
I mean...that's legitimately how modern currency was started too....
@@Astraeus.. I was just so surprised how a game made before I was born (1996) felt so in depth almost like d&d on the desktop. Nowadays rpg games are more streamlined, less complex and they make every player made character feel oddly the same. The elder scrolls 2 did it well Characters with high strength could carry more but they lacked points in other skills. While wizards may have a low score and have to rely on wagons or pack animal to carry stuff. It definitely made a difference in my characters story. Just ask all of the wizards that had to backtrack through labyrinthine dungeons because they were loaded down too much, just to find a mummy wrap.
@@MortalKombat033 The older Fallout games had a pretty good system for characters too. For instance, if you made a character with extremely low intelligence in Fallout 1 & 2, it completely changed the way the game would play, drastically altering a lot of the dialogue choices and giving you a very different experience (as compared to character with mid-level or higher intelligence).
In Fallout 3 it's less prominent and doesn't alter gameplay that much, but even there if you make a character who's dumb as a box of hammers, it does still make quite a few changes to dialogue overall.
But it's like you say, RPG's (especially Western RPG's) have been getting more "simplified" as time goes by, to the point where it almost doesn't matter what you do with your characters, the experience ends up being more or less the same overall. But we live in a world where "FIdget Spinners" are a thing that exists and that people actually buy, so that right there should tell you how "complex" people want things to be....
I had completely forgotten that. Oh the memories.
I'll admit, I never played much. But that part did always surprise me. That, and the fact that shopping meant browsing the shelves. Which let's face it, we're not used to, as in pretty much every RPG ever, not just all the Elder Scrolls games, but other franchises, buying/selling always happens via the merchant themselves. And yeah, actually HAVING a bank is unusual too, as again the standard is the player having a nice big pouch that could hold literally MILLIONS of gold, all at once. Ok, Fable 3 shakes things up with how the Sanctuary works. But that's the exception, not the rule.
Excellent video Shad, now the question is... How effective would a durable sack of coins be as a makeshift weapon?!?
"Bludgeon time!"
Just slightly better than a nun chuck...
Your videos have been a great help with writing my novel. I just came back to re-watch this video when I was working on the logistics of carrying money around. I remembered your video working out all of this and came straight over. I did do many calculations of my own, but this was a great reference point to move me in the right direction. Thanks a bunch!
In DnD, the gold coin = around 100 dollars thing tracks pretty well.
15 Gold for a battle ready longsword. Sounds like a lot, but 1500 dollars for a longsword you could trust in a battle for your life? Kult of Athena seems to match that rate for their blades.
seeing as the longsword was the medieval equivalent of a pistol, and most modern pistols are (in the us at least) somewhere in the hundreds range I am pressing x to doubt on a DnD gold coin being equal to hundred dollars.
@@shadowofhawk55 The longsword was NOT a pistol. It was a battlefield weapon. Daggers and arming swords were the pistols. Longswords were the M16s
Inflation's a beast with that kind of thing too. The amount of gold in an old Spanish doubloon is worth a bit shy of $400 US right now.
@@shadowofhawk55 aside from Z-bytes comment what you also forget is the lack of mass production lines. guns are easier to produce on a mass scale than to make a quality sword on a mass scale in that time period. weapons like that would be more expensive because labour is expensive. if anything a spear or club would be the readily affordable and available weapons. throw in the bow as well. a sword though is expensive to make because it is difficult to make unlike the others listed.
That's pretty on par with a normal longsword in the modern day is it not?
the extra pouches look so awesome on shad, it completes the look
I can't help but wonder how practical they would actually be to use. I can't tell you how many pieces of gear seems like a great idea at first only to have it be worse than useless when I actually try using it in the wilderness.
Alternate title: Shad flexes his money in front of his employees for half an hour.
...to be fair, it was only $25 in U.S. dollars.
@@matthewwriter9539 I hope you're joking
...baised on the joke that Shad made at the start of the video.
You are literally why people hate going into the comments section and why we can't have nice things.
Let's review shall we?
Shad made this video, and at about 2:27 into the video he jokes that this amount of gold is worth about $25 in U.S. money.
There is a comment that he put somewhere saying that this was a joke, and that it isn't really that bad.
Then I saw the comment about an alternative title for this video, which I apparently misunderstood as a joke.
...so I went along with Shad's joke about it only being worth $25.
So now here I am, seeing Shad joke about something, and I went along with that joke, and now you are giving me a hard time for it.
Am I just not allowed to make jokes?
Am I not allowed to make comments on anything anymore?
@@matthewwriter9539 lmao tl;dr
If my short comment was enough to get you to type several paragraphs and make you want to avoid making further comments on UA-cam, then the internet might not be the best place for you to hang around. Just saying. Lighten up, champ.
@@JCavinee...I am autistic, as such it feels like no matter what I say or what I do, it feels like everyone takes it the wrong way.
I feel like I am playing a game with two sets of rules, and nobody will tell me what they are.
Imagine that you were to play the game "Life" with someone who had never even heard of the game before.
Everyone else had the rules read to them, they know how to play, yet nobody told me the rules. I have to guess what the rules are from watching all of you.
...however there are two different sets of rules. One set for all of you, and then a different, harsher set for me.
Any time that I even try to tell a joke people act as if I were waving the Nazi flag and saying that we should reduce the over population problem by eating babies...or something.
...I am literally not allowed to make jokes.
My younger brother once told a joke, and 2 or 3 weeks later I told the exact same joke, and the look I got ...well from everyone's reactions it would have been better for me to have been waving the baby eating Nazi flag.
...when I went to college I was involved with the theater program...I was painting one of the set pieces with another student. Suddenly she tells me that if I don't back away from her, she will cut off my balls and skin me like a deer, and that she can do that because she goes hunting all the time.
I was of course surprised by that reaction. ...and that seemed far too harsh a punishment for being too close to her.
I extended my arm to measure the distance and found that I was 1 arm's length minus half a finger length away from her...I had been told years ago that a personal space bubble was about an arm's length...so basically this young woman was threatening my life over the length of a finger...
...I took 2 or 3 steps away from her anyway.
I've been creating an RPG since 2001 and I can't stop improving it. This year, I listened to your videos and you inspired me a lot for certain mechanics. Among other things, the mechanics of travel, weapons, armor and the range of weapons. I even created my Ranger class inspired by your description. You are a source that I appreciate. Keep up the good videos and good work.
I don’t know if anyone has already acknowledged it, but Shad looks amazing compared to when he was starting out.
Puberty hit right.
1:30 "I'm not necessarily on board with classes" American viewership goes up, Chinese viewership goes down
I just consider "gold coin" as a standart price that can measure different metals and value. For example, "you found 456 gold coins" can also mean "you found one coin from very fancy metal (or exaptional rarity) that is worth 456 gold coins".
Plenty of games that I've played just use "gold" as the currency - without specifying coins or anything. Looted 739G from an enemy, found 1,682G in a chest, can carry a max of 9,999,999G...other names, like pg, work the same way.
As a result, unless it's shown to be coinage or bullion, I just view it as essentially a debit card.
Finding jewels, of a given value, was fairly standard in our games.
Shad, I think you forgot to tare/zero/calibrate the scale before placing the bowl on it. It measured the weight of the coins AND the bowl, when you really just want the weight of the coins. It wouldn't have prevented the error (unless the bowl was exceptionally heavy), but just something to keep in mind for future reference.
Unless it was already calibrated to the bowl's weight?
And same thing with the pouches, though I think we can count their weight as negligible, especially given that the coin to gold ratio is also approximate.
In old-school D&D (3.5e and earlier, I don't play recent editions), it was explicitly stated that coins were 50/lb.
Thus, in my past calculations, assuming all coins (regardless of metal) were 1 mm thick, they would have the following diameters and weigh approximately 1/50 lb.
Copper: 35.9 mm
Silver: 33.2 mm
Electrum: 28.8 mm
Gold: 24.4 mm (almost 1 in.)
Platinum: 16.4 mm
All in all, not terribly unrealistic dimensions for a coin.
Edit: Don't know how I miscalculated the gold diameter in Imperial. Must've been a mistype on the calculator way back when.
It's still 50 coins/lb
You're bad at math.
Gold: 24.4 mm (0.96 inch)
@@prototype3a he's not bad at math, just doesn't understand star spangled ding dong units.
Yup, in 5E is still 50/lb
I use banks and checks in my campaings when we bother to be mindful of weight.
In the case of noobies, for example, i don't usually bother and let them carry 2000 gold pieces without problem, just tell them "Be somewhat realistic, don't try to carry 8 swords and 3 full plate armors in a backpack.
In current prices each coin would be:
Copper: U$0.09
Silver: U$0.48
Platinum: U$20,68
Gold: U$35,59
There is an underlying misconception that this video is based on, and makes it sadly way off if compared to historical coins. By about four times.
This discrepancy is mainly because of the thickness, an AUD coin is a whopping 3 mm thick.
An Australian dollar coin weighs 9 grams, and if it was minted in gold it would weigh around 18 grams according to the video.
The byzantine gold coin (solidus/bezant) used in the Eastern Roman Empire weighed approximately 4.5 grams. (72 coins per 1 roman pound of gold at around 96% purity)
That means the calculations in this video is off by a factor of 4. You could carry four times the amount of gold coins, if they were real life gold coins, compared to the numbers in this video. Or even more, as later mints around the 10th century, in Greek speaking and Arab regions, weighed around 4 grams (and were lower in purity) just as the gold franc did when introduced in France in the 14th century.
The bezant/solidus was used extensively, standardized in purity and weight, and minted in this standardized form from the 4th century until the 12th century.
It is the most iconic gold coin, and what one would refer to as archetypal.
Of course, I mean no disrespect by this comment, and I really appreciate Shad's work. Just remember that modern coin sizes aren't necessarily representative of a fantasy setting, and most certainly not of historical sizes.
On one hand, you are correct.
On the other hand, the actual value of gold coins are often dictated by Weight, not number of coins. So whilst you could carry 4 times the amount of gold coins, the value you carry is the same.
The other option is just quickly multiple the number by a value of 4, or whatever the ratio of weight per coin is, and suddenly you get approximately the number of coins you can carry. Approximately due to air spaces when stacking. Causing volume issues in pouches.
@@Santisima_Trinidad well yes, the weight is the same, but the video focus is on currency, so it does matter. When Shad is talking about adjusting the value in a fantasy setting, at least in this video, he isn't talking about changing the volumetric mass of a coin, he is talking about the market value of a standardized coin, based on either metal/material rarity and/or non-intrinsic value due to minting and control.
@@Adveloq fair enough. Again, assuming same density, you can just multiple the number of coins by whatever the weight per coin ratio is, and that gets the approximate number of coins. If the density isn't the same then the maths gets far too complicated for me to attempt to formulate, and so value adjustments gets annoyingly difficult to decipher, but thats the handy thing about fantasy money. You can make 100 gold coins buy you a room in the inn for a night, or it can buy you the inn, irrelevant of the volume and purity of gold..
Roman coins differed from the medieval standard wherein one sterling shilling was about 18g, as was a (~22K) gold pound. Of course, this varies wildly by the year as gold and silver coins became less pure.
This is historicaly inspired fantasy setting.
I like a system I read about in a series one time, where adventurers/mercenaries actually converted most of their money into jewelry. It made it easier to carry, and if they had it in chain form, it was actually pretty easy to spend - just break off a few links from a chain and reclose it.
This was actually a thing historically. Shell money, manilla, trade beads, and hacksilver especially fits with this idea.
@@VladamireD I thought I'd heard of it before the books, good to know I wasn't hallucinating.
This was how it was done in Everquest. If you needed to transport large quantities of money, you bought gems or jewelry and then sold it back at a slight loss when converting back to currency.
Because a lot of trade was done by weight you see this in the 17th century and they have recovered “money chains” off the wreck of the Atocha
something I always found interesting was the strings of coins that were used in various Asian countries, which also handled the issue of counting a 1000 coins out to purchase an item: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_(Chinese_coin)
"You'd need a pack horse to carry this much gold out of a dungeon!"
We have one. It's called the Half Orc party member :)
Side Note: In Pathfinder at least, there are tables for weight that you can carry based on how much your character weighs and the character's size, and though Gold may not have weight initially, it can be made to have it, and then you'd have accurate numbers to how much you could carry.
Coins do have weight in the rules as written, at least in PF1. *All* coins in PF1 weigh 1/50th of a pound (p.140, PF1 CRB). PF2's bulk system doesn't directly translate to weight as it's a mix of size and weight...
@@LordRenegrade
Yeah, I double checked after I posted this, and I noticed that it was written. I am just used to that rule not being too heavily enforced.
Usually I skip advertisement, but I thoroughly enjoy these cooking parts. Nice job with those.
Shad “on average my character has 10,000 gold on me!”
Me a paralyze potion monopoly man “ those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those up.”
Something worth mentioning was the Templars had a system whereby pilgrims going to the holy land would give them money in Europe and be given a writ that they would turn in once they got to Jerusalem to receive their money back. This meant pilgrims could travel with less money, reducing the weight and the odds of losing their money if they were robbed along the journey.
yes, they invented money, then they got wise and realized most people left most their money in the bank. So that is why banks now only need 10% in their vault to loan out, so if they have $1,000,000 they can loan out $9,000,000 to another bank, then they write up that extra $9m as "profit", and BINGO!!! new money is made, then that $9m can be loaned to another bank and $8.1m is "made" and on it continues, Also when you take a loan from a bank, you put up collateral and they put up "new" money, then they write up your new loan as new money. You are the only one who had something of value in the agreement. What started as a "convenience" turned into a .....well you know lol
@@mattymcsplatty5440 IIRC the reserve for US banks was lowered to 0% in March, 2020. A 10% reserve is an artefact of banking that was merely MOSTLY irresponsible.
@@mattymcsplatty5440 Are you saying that the elites can now make money on a whim and use the whole system to manipulate and control the masses, harvesting the results of our labor via taxes, fees, licenses, and charges in all their various governmental forms?! Oh, surely not!
Hmmm, but then the Templars were absorbed into Freemasonry where they operate in the elite echelons today...
21:46 "The US doesn't have dollar coins, just dollar notes"
The US *does* still have dollar coins and actually mints new designs for special occasions. However, they are just far more rare to see than regular dollar bills and are usually designed as collectors' items. There's nothing to stop you from paying for your groceries with them though.
I fucken *wish* they were still prevalent. You always feel cool clanking coins together.
Seeing as it's ONLY for special occasions now, no the US doesn't. Anymore they're old or one of those special coins. As you wouldn't use said special ones for buying random things, you guys don't mint new ones anymore. Do they still exist? Yes, but to say they're still minted, isn't really correct to say, since you don't do it on the norm anymore and haven't for quite a while.
"It's not for sale"
5 seconds later.
"I already have buyers waiting."
Typical online seller
@@josephradley3160 Online seller, I'm going into battle, and I need all of your strongest onlines.
14:20 Clarification, gold coins in Dungeons and Dragons are /not/ a dollar. In fact a gold coin is actually much closer to your estimation of a 100 dollars if you're using the economy of the book. Unfortunately a lot of DM's make everything cost 1 gold and basically just offhandedly equate 1 gp to 1 dollar in their campaigns, but as per the setting a single gold coin will get you a nice nights stay at a good inn; the same way a 100 dollar bill would that for you at a hotel in the US. Some things are impossible to make analogous because a medieval economy with magic is very dissimilar to a modern one with technology, so some coin amounts for certain things will not make sense. However, generally speaking a golden coin in D&D /is/ per 5e about as much as a 100 dollar bill.
Actually, technology is very similar to magic if you take into account the effects both have in every setting: doing something unordinary. The thing is, just like in real world, if something becomes more common it loses it's value. So, if, for example, on a D&D world, magic weapons are very common to find and buy, just like technology in real life, the prices would be very low. If the world has magic progressed as much as we have technology then, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a magic weapon, with common enhancements, for only a couple of GP.
@Tuber Septis Players who don't read the rules should be banned in every game. They can ruin the fun in many ways.
I was going to mention the same thing. I believe the analogy I heard is 1 gold is enough to take care of a family of 4 for a day covering all expenses. They also have platinum which is 10 gold so they can carry more money for less weight
Comparing the value of weapons, armor, and most the other gear in the phb I would probably put the the value of a gold coin closer to $20
A fully furnished nobleman's manor is listed as 25,000 GP (chapter 6 of the DMG). Man I wish I could buy a mansion for $25,000 gold.
I actually had my NPCs take advantage of this in my DnD game.
Shop owners knew that adventurers mainly dealt in gold even though the standard coinage was copper, so they would always set their prices to include as many of the lower denominations as possible (for example, a stay at an inn would be 1 silver and 1 copper per night), knowing that the adventurers would pay in gold and would usually tell them to keep the change in order to avoid dealing with 18 extra coins in their pouches.
And my players did just that.
I always imagined fantasy gold coins to be tiny. Like I've seen gold coins from dark ages hoards in museums and a lot of them are the size of UK 5p pieces (that's about 14mm across) but also paper thin. After all if gold was soo ubiquitous that a solid gold coin the size and thickness of a dollar was a standard unit of currency it would have all sorts of other inworld consequences. Like everyone would be wearing masses of gold jewellery, people could cover their homes in golden ornaments even tile their walls in gold. Because why not, If it's soo cheap and abundant? Instead of a grimy, green and brown pseudo-medieval European setting that is so standard, you would end up with everything that didn't need to be hard-wearing could just be never tarnishing shining yellow and all the people would be walking around blinged up to the eyeballs!
Definitely I agree. Even the five pence comparison is too generous. The value would be calculated by weight, so even a half or a quarter of the size of 5p makes sense .
That's a really good point. If gold is so abundant, like in D&D or video games like Skyrim, why isn't every peasant wearing gold jewelry and gold clothing? The most logical answer is it's video game fantasy. I play Elder Scrolls a lot and most of the things in the game wouldn't happen or make any logical sense if that fantasy world were real.
You're the only guy other than Internet Historian who makes sponsor ads just as entertaining as the rest of the content, so I'm not gonna add the segment to sponsorblock
You obviously haven't watched Viva La Dirt League. For example: ua-cam.com/video/qpp7C_eTnPk/v-deo.html, also look at their World of Warships ads.
@@CarlKenner I hadn't heard about that channel before, thanks!
I hadn't heard about that addon before, THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!
when I was in high school, I remember looking at D&D rules saying that there were about 50 gold coins per pound, and then looking up density tables, calculating random stable packing of coins (that part took some research), and figuring out the volume of a dragon's hoard and being highly disappointed.
With a spot price on gold of about $1800, that would put a DnD coin at about $570 per coin; or roughly a weeks pay for a modern "commoner." Sounds a bit low, but in the right ballpark.
I had to calculate molar mas for every element on the table when I was first year colege, and made the coment about D&D coins and said, "FUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!"
at the cons we used to call this a "reality check" and we would then load some one down with armor, weapons, packs, supplies etc etc and then check how fast they could move (great when playing D-n-D)
We do this with people at the shooting range as well, a lotta people talk about carrying lots of ammo and big powerful guns in an apocalypse. But when you've gotta carry your weapons, cloths, food, water (waters heavy lol) maybe some body armor, boots, medical supplies and many other things!
We like to challenge them to do a 3 mile hike at a brisk walk with all of their gear that they WANT to take and then see what's really worth carrying.
@@destinytroll1374 I was shocked when I picked up an M1 Garand for the first time, and GOOD FUCKING CHRIST The M1 Garand alone is 9.5 pounds.
In the dnd games I play with my friends, "gold pieces" is simply a numerical value we use for value. In the end, characters carry gems, jewelry, pieces of various metals and rare materials. We kinda handwaved that part for simplicity :P
That's pretty much how I handle it; I assume the adventurers spend some time "offscreen" converting their currency into more easily-handled denominations whenever they reach any sort of civilized area. I leave the specifics up to the players themselves, if thy want to go into detail, but I assume that there's several denominations of coins beyond the basic copper/silver/gold(/platinum/electrum), precious gemstones with a generally accepted cash value, paper money, and so on.
Shad: "Touch my pouch!"
-The roos took offense to that.
You just gave me a mental image of an offended social justice kangaroo with a side shave and purple dye job. One more thing that would never have occurred to me without the internet;)
'Touch my pouch... Cup it!'
-Shad 2021
LOL, years ago on PS2 I think, there was a fantasy fighting game that was loosely D&D based, had a Halfling, a Goblin, various wizards, a Dwarf... they all had a victory phrase they would speak after you won using the character. One of those victory phrases was "Feel my wrath!" To which some smartaleck in our group added "Go on, touch it, touch it". You gave me a trip down memory lane and a laugh.
Those are the most accommodating bandits I've ever heard of! Not only do they deliver your Hello Fresh foods, but they even cook it for you, even when you're shouting at them like a medieval Gordon Ramsay!
In 5e at least, 1 GP is roughly $100 US. A beer that would cost roughly $5 is 5 Copper. Well-crafted armor and weapons were expensive. Magical items that adventurers would dig up are nearly priceless.
yeah... 1 gp is MUCH more than 1 dollar in any edition.
5E is almost exactly the same as ADnD, peasants make copper a week, hireling soldiers cost only 1-2 gold a month. A basic meal is coppers, while a super fancy meal would be in silver. A world class chef's meal in a luxury restaurant is only a gold or two. Horses were expensive, but cows and the like were like 5 gold. peasants would save for years to get a new cow or cart, and most items were handed on generationally. Things like saddles and the like were seldom something a peasant ever bought... they don't even often eat at an inn. Anything they could craft themselves they would, and they would repair and repair and repair again as opposed to buying new.
Even on the random treasure tables most treasure types are almost all copper and silver. They can be in the many thousands in hordes, but on individuals usually are just a few lower coins each. Random gold even from a dragon is usually 1-6 thousand GP, with platinum in hundreds, and you still have to roll it with the percentage chance being usually petty low for most treasure piles.
In ADnD 10 gp was 1 lb (I changed it to 20), but it still adds up FAST. I run pretty strict realism games. people learn very quickly the value of carts and chests, or converting to gems (though you lose some value both directions on the exchanges). banks at the time were usually in the castle owned by the crown, and charged you to hold your wealth, giving you a voucher for the value you held there.
He keeps mentioning DnD but it seems he hasn't done lot of RPGs and is basing his ideas a lot off of video games.
As a third edition brat all I can say is cost of living is fun in balance, insofar as craft and profession are balanced around NPC if you dig into the math not PC, and actually(mostly) adds up to the expected wage of NPCs. Problem is as you said, an NPC doesn't earn a lot. A single dungeon for a level 1 party is worth years of wages for unskilled labor and not much more for skilled. A common laborer in third edition can expect to earn around 1 silver a day, 3 gp a month, which is just above self sufficient in terms of cost of living. They basically repair and patch what they have and save up for months with emergency funds to replace items like shoes that become beyond their ability to patch. A skilled craftsman or laborer sees a much higher margin of living, but still well below an adventurer, but also with less chance of dying. You can generally assume that a professional would be able to earn around 8-10gp a month comfortably with periods of downtime to relax and splurge at the local tavern as a middle class.
Meanwhile, frank was trained as a fighter by the guard and managed to loot some equipment from a goblin raid and joined a thief who totally wasn't wanted in the next city over for robbing several stores and an armory and a mage who has spent years paying tuition at a school and wrecked a camp of a dozen goblins claiming the loot of dozens of merchant caravan raids as there own overnight.
@@litadahl6806 Yeah, adventurers make no fucking sense in a standard medieval setting.
The closest thing to them irl would be large professional mercenary companies in the late middle ages and early modern period. And the thing is, these were well, companies. Hundreds of men.
In this regard mechwarrior of all things is perhaps the most realistic rpg around.
plus when you play with encumbrance you're meant to carry around gems or at least platinum not piles of gold.
One of the few times that I DMed I had my party find an huge chest of treasure while they were stranded away from civilisation. I made it feel like it was a huge sum of money to them but actually by the time they would have split it and leveled up a few times (which they would have done by the time they had the opportunity to spend it) it would have put them on the expected amount of wealth for their level. I told them it was too much to carry without a cart but they could take a reasonable amount out of it and come back later to try to find it again, so I effectivly turned getting a large amount to treasure back to town into a quest. Unfortunatly the party was too paranoid - they thaught I was up to something and there was no way I would let them keep it so they didn't take anything from it, buried it and never came back... actually they ran away or attacked the npcs every time I tried to reward them >.< They thought I was out to get them but actually it was just that the previous DM hadn't been very generous and they were under-geared.
Admittedly, he mentions DND and I'm reminded of one of those DND greentexts where the wizard cast animate object on a 2-ton chest of gold coins lol
Dungeons and Dragons had designed a spell almost specifically for this situation since the wizard is almost always a weakling.
"Tenser's Floating Disk"
This spell creates a circular, horizontal plane of force, 3 feet in diameter and 1 inch thick, that floats 3 feet above the ground in an unoccupied space of your choice that you can see within range. The disk remains for the duration, and can hold up to 500 pounds. If more weight is placed on it, the spell ends, and everything on the disk falls to the ground.
Literally just load up 500 pounds of loot to carry out the dungeon behind you. And it's only a 1st level spell compared to animate objects which is a 5th level spell.
@@michaelsinclair1343 Also very useful for transporting unconscious party members and their gear.
@@Crizzly122 animate objects essentially gives autonomy to an inanimate object or objects, it does not clone anything. And anything that doesn't have legs (chair has legs, chest does not) will gain a flying speed with animate objects.
@@michaelsinclair1343 I read the comment too fast lol I completely missed the point
Fun fact: The Tenser's disk spell was apparently added by Gary because one of his kids wanted a spell like that. He himself wanted players to figure out the treasure transporting logistics themselves ;)
Now the real question when carrying all that gold is: "How fast could you flee from Ezio in AC2 before he lunges at you and hugs the coins out of your pouches?"
"Not really on board with classes"
*shows Karl Marx*
This is exactly the high quality content I crave!
Marx is a bard who bums off his teammate Engels and likes to roll to seduce his maid.
@@ancapftw9113You rolled for Accuracy. A natural 20!
I was rather pleased with that as well (GURPS player).
Yeah fuck classes! Both in RPGs and IRL
Missed an opportunity to play a short 1-second clip of the USSR national anthem for a peak socialism meme 😂
D & D as a dm I always make players deal with coin weight, so either they spend more money bag of holding. Or pack animals and care takers for them . Depending on the items they try to lug a spell caster may be burning his precious supply of mana to move stuff.
Dragon Age Origins had monetary system somewhat intiresting: Gold, Silver and Bronze coins were decimals of each other however the conversion was done automatically instead of exchanging coins for one another. That exchange part and added convinience would've boosted Gold and Bronze coin even further, their rarity would also boost it even further and make them an investment medium... I wonder if there's a fantasy setting counterpart to EVE Online with complicated economics that could've leverage that?
Black Desert Online maybe. But nothing really compares to EVE
Why do you want another economy based MMO run by people who don’t understand how an economy works? The Eve devs purposely instituted stagflation, basically killing the entire economy of the game. That’s kind of an issue when the game is based around the economy.
Honestly, I don’t think any MMO can have a functional economy for very long before gold farming bots and farming/griefing clans take over. Happened in Eve, and it’s one of the many things (if not the MAIN thing) killing OSRS at the moment.
kinda like terraria?
Not a game, but if I recall correctly coin conversion is an important part of Spice and Wolf plot.
(Call me a weeb if you want, but I think this is an anime that worth having a look at if interested in "realistic" depiction of medieval daily life...)
The real world Exchange rate for silver to bronze is like 1 to 1000 or there abour. But back in those Day it would be more like one to 100 or so
Back in those days they probonlt would haver used rates of 6 12 or 20 in stead.
Also they could probobly adapt the coin size to be a good fit.
1 gold would then be a out 12 silver (same volume, a bit lighter), 1 silver would be about 20 copper, that copper coins would be about twice as heavy. This would make the coins about the same size.
You probobly would need like smaler coins to pay for every Day things. Like a bear at the pub ... would need to use like tinn coins to buy cheap stuff.
**Shad's rant on pouches/medieval clothing and lack of pockets**
Me: "So what you're saying is that modern day women need to bring pouches back into fashion?"
Look up the etymology of "purse".
I'm keen on satchels!
Not to brag or anything but if we are going to do pouches, we need to go all the way- Cod pieces! FR
historically "pockets" were flat cloth pouches worn tied about the waist. If you have not watched Bernadette's "Dumpster Fire pockets" episode you are missing out.
Pockets ruin the lines, maaaan.
... this is why to justify being able to carry all those coins I've started giving enchanted coin pouches to players (each can hold up to 1k coins) with a set weight of 1lbs regardless of how filled they are. Because I do not wanna force them to go through calculating coin weight/storage (it's an optional rule, at least in dnd 5e).
I give them a bag of holding and say this is specifically the for the party fund no matter how large it gets, no player should have more than 500 pieces on their person... I'm not about to go deal with carry weight and gold dimensions, and spending an entire session figuring out what to do with the entire hoard from an Iffritis palace.
A genius invention... For pickpocketers
In 5e, you could theoretically carry the equivalent weight of an elephant and still swim like a dolphin if you don't apply the encumbrance rule. Sounds pretty funny to me: imagine a punch thrown by a person that heavy, it would probably disintegrate you to ashes. Wait, THAT'S WHY MONKS CAN ONESHOT PEOPLE WITH FISTS
5 E still suck los tho
Gems. That way, they only have to carry 50 coins. 10 CP, 10 SP, 10 GP, 10 PP, then we go to 10 100-gp gems, 10 1000-gp gems, etc. Gems are art objects, so they trade at full value. And if you don't care to track, you can just say that's what they do. No need for a magic item.
If I remember correctly, the best solution for this is carrying gems. One tiny rock can be worth many hundreds of gold and its much more convenient to carry. Though, there is an appraisal issue so you're never sure exactly how much you have at any time.
This guy is hands down the master of the marketing. I never skip those sponsored sections, as opposed to the video of the other creators. Sadly I don’t live in Australia so I can’t try that hello fresh
Hello Fresh operates in North America and many parts of Europe too.
@@Seelenschmiede not in japan I’m afraid
I just tried it, Shad's HelloFresh link (and discount) work in the US.
@@quirelll maybe look into blue apron. Same concept as hello fresh
"I'm not on board with classes"
**shows Karl Marx**
made me laugh.
lol, damn commies!
thanks for pointing it out, I didn't even notice. Must have looked away from the screen at that moment.
Pirate films: Four chests takes a whole crew to move.
Fantasy adventure: A party of four walk out with the four chests. Or, the one hero gets all four, no problem.
Should have ate their pickles.
I don't think I have ever seen adventures lugging around limes.
@@RyuuKageDesu
It goes with the coconut that perhaps an unladen swallow brought over..
@@innocentbystander3317 African, or European swallow?
@@RyuuKageDesu
Depends, is this a test?
Ha! Not gonna trick me into saying, "I don't--"
[gets yeeted]
NOOOOOOOOOooooooooo........
I love how you’re including the theatrical bits now. Gives it all a nice bit of character.
This aspect of D&D has been largely hand waved away in more recent editions, but it used to be a large part of the game to the point of many adventures ending with hiring peasants in a nearby town to aid in carting gold out of a Dragon's lair and back to town for a share of the profits. Magic items such as The Bag of Holding, Heward's Handy Haversack, and The Portable Hole have eased the issue too and acquiring one of these is often the first big milestone in any campaign.
Back in the day playing 2nd Ed AD&D with friends, we had a house rule that all coins of each denomination had the same standard weight of 1/100 lbs (Sorry US player haha). While characters could carry a fair bit of wealth, it did impose limits. In my campaigns characters also had to deal with issues when converting wealth between types. (Not to mention loved giving them electrum pieces which no one ever accepted)
Even back then most people just ignored the carrying capacity rules.
Oh yeah, adventures back in 1st Edition were huge Indiana Jones expeditions with a full entourage, lots of porters, several torchbearers, and men-at-arms as guards. You'd set up a base camp and the actual adventurers would set off from there, and when you were done with any fighting the hirelings would go in and haul out the loot. The idea of it only being like 5 guys descending into a hole in the ground and coming out loaded with gold is more of a 3rd Edition invention.
[Edit for spelling... "met-at-arms?" DOH]
Yea we play 5e but reduced magic so no handy haversack or bags of holding until very late game or lucky drop in dungeon. Typically i let players keep a couple hundred gold o. Thier person and the rest of the party's wealth is in the local bank which extends credit
@@jamesbates9038 notes of mark were a handy invention from banks, safer than carrying loads of gold but a small handling fee especially for transferring money from one area to another
"Is there anyone here muscular enough to join me on this epic adventure?"
"I'll go!" shouts the young child.
"I'm twice his size!" protests the apprentice scribe.
"Well I'm twice yours!" interrupts the field wizard.
"Well I'm twice yours!" echoes the butcher.
"Well I can LIFT twice what you can." reasons the courier.
"That's still not what I'm capable of!" argues the blacksmith.
"Nevertheless, I'm the superior choice." calls out the professional strongman.
"No, me!" booms his arch rival, who is also a giant.
A short gasp eminates from the back of the crowd. Sunlight hesitates.
Silence. Dramatic smoke. Dust disperses. The isolated clop of boot sole on cobble.
A merchant approaches, arms exposed. Stands, and says nothing.
Everyone else walks away.
you had me on the edge of my seat. I had to scroll up to the line, so my eyes wouldn't glance down and spoil me.
That was a journey
That was a long walk to nowhere, buddy.
@@rhabdob3895 thats the whole joke
this was a better story than the final season of GoT ^^
That's why in older editions of DnD that Hirelings, particularly Porters and Mules were vital to an adventuring party.
I remember more than once the players had to hire a wagon train with guards and all needed personal to collect the treasure from an adventure.
Bag of holding
Unironically, the best part of the video, for me at least, was the comercial where they are just cooking on a bonfire and simply enjoying their food
agree and cooling is definitely the most important skill in adventuring, an adventurer have to eat everyday to maintain their stamina and energy!
It never fails to impress me how well Shad sneaks his sponsors in there.
Definitely giving Linus a run for his money
I know that every DM I ever had basically said that as your GP increased, you weren't actually carrying more gold, but were switching up to more valuable items that could easily be traded - rare regents that wizards needed, valuable gems, promissory notes from nobles, and the like.
The good old +1 sword based economy!
@@td1559 Pretty much. Without a bank, high value transaction are going to be in high value goods that are easily fungible.
Real economies actually did use somewhat ceremonial weapons as goods of exchange in the past. A magical dagger that exists purely to be traded would make perfect sense as a 'coin.'
Promissory notes make the most sense, since in most worlds, the notes would be standardized, and thus viable at any real market. It might be interested to introduce that as currency, so the players would have to consider how much actual cash they had on them if they were in some rinky-dink village that didn't accept notes.
@@NoodleKeeper "Republic credits are no good here."
I think any "realistic" professional adventurer (i.e. reconciled with practical considerations) in fantasy would just have a mobile base of operations. This is even depicted in games like Dragon Age: Origins I think. You go on special operations / raids / recon expeditions with what you wear on your person, yes (like special forces people jump from planes festooned with gear for a 3-day mission), but you do have a supply train with carts and draught animals, and camp personnel (at least a squire per hero). When in cities, you'd rent a space to be your HQ as a mercenary/detective/hunter. That's where you store your money and spoils (if not depositing them to a local branch of a large bank).
Just like an old-timey army was outnumbered by its supply train. Or like a tank that doesn't exist by itself: it has a load of trucks that carry its ammo, spare parts, and maintenance personnel, it has several fuel trucks, it has an armored tow mover, and it may have an armored reloading vehicle and a bulldozer and crane to build entrenched positions for good measure. Oh, and a mobile bridge-builder. And sponsoon vehicles. And whole AA screening units. And an NBC platoon. And general supply/cooking detachment )
I liked that part at the beginning.. Really made me remember that time i was playing skyrim with all my dragon bone armor and weapons and hundreds of thousands of gold and i just thought "why the hell am i able to walk" at the time i just broke it down to the fact that its fantasy stuff 😕
You mean unlike daggerfall where gold had weight?
In the mmo Warspear Online you can carry like 900 million gold coins
@@Pyxis10 Exactly why I installed a weighted gold mod for Skyrim. Then at some point I wondered why I was spending so much time trying to mod Skyrim into being Daggerfall and just stuck to playing Daggerfall instead lmao
bits and bites..
Video-game physics/logic - it's like cartoon physics/logic where you can be standing in mid-air and won't fall as long as you don't look down 🤣
This is how we had to explain it to my nephew, who is high-functioning autistic, when he was getting frustrated at how a book or necklace had a weight and yet 100 arrows or gold didn't have any.
I used a few mods in Skyrim to fix this "problem". The Immersive Jewelry and Immersive Currency mods add 1/100 carry weight to money, so 10,000 septims would be 100 carry weight
Of course, the mod also added bank notes of varying value you could exchange at certain merchants. They had money notes for 1k, 2k, and 5k gold, each weighing only 1/10 carry weight.
"Touch my pouch." This killed me!
But wow. I think we should overthink the carrying system of so many games.
Yes and no if you are going for real life accuracy then absolutely but for gameplay purposes I think they do their jobs pretty well
@@excalligator5529 I think there are mainly two considerations. The balance between game mechanics and realism, and whether you have a computer making the calculations or a human. A computer can make and track all sorts of calculations for very precise management, while if you have rules a human needs to keep track of, you want simple stuff. On the other consideration, if your game character is supposed to be able to perform all sorts of tasks at any given time and travel all over the world, you probably need a more lenient encumbrance system, if one at all. If you have more realistic flexibility and movement you can also have more realistic encumbrance.
I like to think that Shad and his mates wear that gear in their every day, common place lives.
I'm reminded of one of the forgotten realms books where they were going through a dragon's hoard and just picking out platinum coins, magic items and expensive gems/jewelry due to the weight and even then had a pack train of mules for a majority of it.
That is what we used to do, we left most of the gold, and the silver and copper for the townsfolk. They loved us, until inflation hit.
Yep, this was a vital part of early D&D. You killed the dragon, great. Its hoard is comprised of 45,000 copper; 25,000 silver; 5,000 gold; 1,000 platinum; 20 pieces of artwork (statuary, paintings, etc); etc. etc. How do you plan to carry all of that? It was common to ignore coins in favor of other, more valuable, things that are either easier to carry, or that have a much higher value-to-weight ratio.
I remember that scene too. It was from the novel Spellfire published way back in 1987. Coin weight was big deal in the game Everquest too. I remember one guy who made a killing exchanging copper and silver coins for gold an platinum at an exchange rate. It was also why almost everybody set their bind point to bank. Load up on loot until you can't walk, then recall and deposit it.
Old editions of D&D accounted for this in spades. This is why we always have hirelings come along to excavate and carry things while the party kills monsters
And mercenaries to watch the horses, a stableboy to curry and groom the beasts while the adventurers are plotting their delve with the henchmen peering over their shoulders. Hell, in a game I'm in, some of us have small armies that move with us, because it's necessary to survive.
Actually, we do still have dollar coins here in the US, and they're also gold in color. Ther replaced the silver dollar back around 2000, and since 2012 their actual cash value depends on the year and letter of mint and its condition, with those uncirculated being the highest value.
The wording on that is weird. Their cash value is always $1 regardless of their minting location or condition. Their intrinsic values vary wildly, that is the price that they have dependent upon their rarity and condition. As far as their cash value though it is $1.
Interestingly enough some coins are worth more as melt metal than they are their cash or intrinsic value. Namely pennies and nickels are the biggest contenders here since they are made of metals that cost more than the coin itself. It is highly illegal to melt nickels and pennies for their metal melt value. Do not do this.
@@Wolfie-gj9ch It's illegal to melt coins in the US? That's dumb.
@@sirkana yeah because US currency is government property apparently (even though the Federal Reserve is privately owned). We can use it as legal tender but we can’t destroy it if we so choose.
@@LinkinMark1994 @Veetu Heiskanen No it is not illegal to melt coins or to do what you please with cash. It is illegal to amass pennies and nickels with the intent to melt them and remove them from circulation to sell their raw metals for profit.
@@Wolfie-gj9ch So this is why you can sell old silver dollars for above their cash value? Does that mean that it's not the actual coins that are government property but their place in circulation? How does this apply to money that has been legally slated for destruction at the end of its lifetime?
This is one of those things that makes me appreciate how much details was put in the inventory systems of Ultima Online where gold had weight up to the point that players with low STR (strength) wouldn't be able to carry thousands of gold coins without the help of a mule pack animal.
EverQuest was the same way; it's amazing how much 'world' has been lost in MMOs to the 'game' aspects.
I mean, D&D also has weight for coins. And how much you can carry is also determined by your STR score.
It's just that most people ignore it
*Oh no.* My wizard has 8 strength- he can carry like 200 gold at best! Good thing he's got a mule and cart. And a barbarian.
This is why Profession (accountant) should be a barbarian class skill.
Never leave home without your barbarian
I would like to see him a video on medieval law enforcement and how to incorporate it into a fantasy setting. Like what is a minor crime versus a capital punishment and who can be arrested and who can’t. I would love that type of video!!