Gold, Silver, and Copper Coins

[Flights of Fantasy]

I've seen this adjust made to other servers and think it would be a nice addition to BG especially with the cost often charged for those rare +4 items. For those who haven't seen it, this replaced the Gold count with your inventory with three icons that represent copper, silver, and gold coins.

10 coppers = 1 silver
10 silvers = 1 gold

So if you had 563 gp in your inventory, it would show up as 5 gold coins, 6 silver coins, and 3 copper coins. Why do this you might ask? Well, while I know the wiki is not the best source of information, I'm assuming it's good enough for some basic information. And according to this article, 50 gp is equal to 1 pound in the later editions. (Though in earlier editions, it seems only 10 gp weighed one pound.)

With this knowledge in mind, think about some of the prices you've seen players asking for in the auctions or in person. I recall one price being 50 bags of gold for mithral armor (Or maybe it was 500,000?), which is equal to 50,000 gp.

50,000 gp / 50 gp per pound = 1,000 pounds of gold!

That's literally a ton of gold. I know there are a lot of builds out there that can barely carry more than 100 pounds in their inventory. Yet we apparently have to carry around a literal ton of gold to buy the rarer items? That's immersion breaking.

Now if we start using coppers and silvers, that 50,000 gp is reduced to 500 gold coins. That's only 10 pounds of gold to be carrying around. So not would this change make the weights more realistic, it also adds value to gold. As things stand right now, the gold coin in game is pretty much worth less than the American Dollar.

NPC dialogues will need to be adjusted and there might be some confusion at first for the players, but I think implementing this money system would substantially add to immersion of the server and at least reduce the appearance of the crazy inflation on it.

Let me know what you guys think.

[Blackman D]

i think this is one that keep coming up here and there

but this is one of those things were is usually better to not over complicate the money system, while it may make perfect sense, ultimately what would be the point? money is weightless so that part hardly matters and you can split 1000g up into silver and copper all you want but you still have 1000g

it would only affect things staff side where pricing would have to be altered everywhere to make things cheaper (using silver and copper) if it gets added

[aaron22]

i think this is one that keep coming up here and there

but this is one of those things were is usually better to not over complicate the money system, while it may make perfect sense, ultimately what would be the point? money is weightless so that part hardly matters and you can split 1000g up into silver and copper all you want but you still have 1000g

it would only affect things staff side where pricing would have to be altered everywhere to make things cheaper (using silver and copper) if it gets added

it would not have any game side effect at all it is more an RP idea put in place

rex has 1234 coins that would be
12 gold
3 silver
4 copper

the price of full plate is 1135 at the store (made this up) that would be
11 gold
3 silver
5 copper

it is not a matter of script at all but a change in idea surrounding the number that quantifies your coins you carry.


side note... 2,000lbs is a ton.

edited to fix spelling mistake

[chad878262]

Some players talk in bags of gold (1 bag = 1,000 gp) or in 'trade bars' (1 trade bar=1,000 gp). Honestly you can RP it however you want, at the end of the day it is the currency of the server and I personally would rather our Devs work on about 1,000 other enhancements before working on a mechanic that splits gold in to silver and copper.

Also, would having silver and copper equate to MORE coins, not less? Wouldn't it make more sense to convert every 10 GP in to 1 Platinum piece?

In any case, I understand the sentiment, but just consider it such a low priority as to be pointless to focus on.

[Zanniej]

No, current GP would be seen as coppers. Hence your current 100 GP would then only be worth 1 Gold coin.

[aaron22]

i think most people are misunderstanding this post. anyway..

it wouldn't be a life altering experience anyway to have this be the standard or not. i get the "realism" aspect runs a bit wonky when my 10 strength hin thief has 250k gold on her and is wearing skin tight leggings

[chad878262]

i think most people are misunderstanding this post. anyway..

it wouldn't be a life altering experience anyway to have this be the standard or not. i get the "realism" aspect runs a bit wonky when my 10 strength hin thief has 250k gold on her and is wearing skin tight leggings

Would 25,000 gold be less an issue? 2,500? Have you ever seen 2,500 quarters (or any coin, take your pick). It's a lot of coin and it'd be very heavy. Not sure there is such a thing as realism when it comes to coin, unless characters are limited to ~100 coins or so, but that doesn't sound like much fun, does it?

[Hidennka]

Personally, I justuse this lingo IC (but will follow it up with clarification):

Gold bar/Trade bar: 10k.
Bag of gold: 1k.

Because, the way I see it, carrying/offering more than 10 bags of anything is a bit of a slapstick ordeal.
I've seen people (I think maybe Endy?) use 'notes of credit', also. Just RP it how you see fit, imho.

[aaron22]

Would 25,000 gold be less an issue? 2,500? Have you ever seen 2,500 quarters (or any coin, take your pick). It's a lot of coin and it'd be very heavy. Not sure there is such a thing as realism when it comes to coin, unless characters are limited to ~100 coins or so, but that doesn't sound like much fun, does it?

here is 40,000 quarters.... have fun lugging that

Hidden: show

i use the bar, bag, plat, way of holding a lot of coin. i have even considered that a "bag" of gold is actually a currency note that is called a "bag". slang or common term similar to a US one dollar bill is called a "buck"

[chad878262]

Awww...it looks vaguely like a heart. Right back atcha big "A" <3

LOL, yeah, I don't care if your STR score is 50, at some point you just can't carry something that is too big/awkward for long distances. While a mechanical solution would be nice, as I said, my opinion is simply that there are a lot of other enhancements that would be even nicer to have in game.

[aaron22]

the iron golom polymorph can carry it. dragon form from druid can sleep on it

[V'rass]

Interesting idea but i never liked EverQuest's money system...

[metaquad4]

They did this system on another server. Its generally just a thing for immersion, for all the people who complain about all the money being unrealistic (and, of course, the PnP purist arguments as well).

The way they did it was give everyone gold, silver, and copper coins, as weightless items. These items would be converted into nwn2 gold upon interacting with a merchant, and would be converted back upon closing the merchant window. Though, with things like kemo auction hall, this would be difficult. Also, one could not make wands or scrolls on the fly, they needed a merchant window to access nwn2 gold.

A more simple way of implementing this system is via a DM ruling:

"1 NWN2 is equal to 1 PnP Copper Coin"

9 words on a fourm rule page, and it has the exact same effect. We wouldn't even have to implement silver and gold, but if we wanted to:

"X NWN2 Gold is equal to 1 PnP Silver. X NWN2 Gold is equal to 1 PnP Gold."

Nice and simple, and it gets the job done in an effective manner. Keeps the immersion intact. No real downside to it too. And it doesn't take much work to add to a fourm post.

Also, everyone gets a magic bag (retains weight, can hold all the stuff) in RP for all their stuff! Gold included!

[Tsidkenu]

Reminiscing on my childhood days spent playing Realmz, which was an early RPG for Mac which ripped off D&D bigtime. But they actually had all the currencies (copper, silver, gold) and coins had encumbrance! So when you successfully looted a dragon's lair you actually had to leave much of the gold behind (just taking gems/jewelery) and then go to the gem merchant, convert your gold to gems, and then go back and plunder whatever was left before the local orcs came along and took it all.

It would make much more sense to use gems as a tradable 'light' currency if dedicated gem merchants could be added to the game, charging a 2% to 5% fee for buying/selling respective gems (no appraise allowed).

[Flights of Fantasy]

To clarify, yes, this would be just a new way to consider what GP is. Though I do like the idea of real coins to carry around, the one I meant, as far as I could tell, was simply an adjustment made to the HUD that would show three icons for gold, silver, and copper coins with numbers for each instead of the regular GP display.

But yes, a DM ruling would suffice as well.