more nerd than you can shake a stick at

[rone]

I did a little math today.  Take the Greyhawk gold piece, which is depicted in the Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 Player's Handbook as having the same size as a half-dollar piece (diameter of 30.61 mm), and is listed as weighing one fiftieth of a pound (9.012 g).  If you assume it is 100% gold, that gives a thickness of 0.639 mm, or less than half the thickness of a dime.  Not quite foil-thin, but i suspect that it would lead to a lot of crumpled coins, and trying to mint something that thin is probably not very practical.

My only comfort is that some nerd somewhere figured this out as soon as the book came out, and sent Wizards of the Coast a nastygram about it.

Comments

[nyar.livejournal.com]

What in the name of Random D&D Campaign Deity prompted you to do this!?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Writing my story. I kinda got sidetracked...

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

Answer truthfully: it was that question in the Fantasy Author Quiz, wasn't it?

See, I got off light on that one. The sailboat I grew up on had a series of lead weights that we used to keep it balanced. (It was hull number one for its design, so it was a little off when it was built.) I was always having to move them out of the way in order to get at some damn thing or another out of the compartment where we had them stowed.

Gold has a mass density not that far away from lead. Our weights were just about the size of a brick. Heavy. Very heavy. (I never put them on a scale.) I always laugh when I see people in the movies handling gold bricks with one hand.

My NWN character is carrying around over 200,000 gold pieces. They seem to weigh nothing. Really, people need to cut the game designers some slack. Nobody wants to play SimFantasyHero™.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It's actually something i've meant to figure out for a while (ever since it was brought to my attention that, dude, gold is heavy), but never bothered until i recently got to talking with palecur about D&D economics.

Nobody wants to play SimFantasyHero, so i think it's up to the GM to improvise a semi-plausible solution to all those riches. Larger denominations, gems, etc. If players want you to preserve things like the dragon sleeping on his hoard of gold pieces, they'll have to improvise a way to get it out of the cave.

[khrister.livejournal.com]

I remember utilizing multiple Tenser's Floating Disk to haul a dragon hoard away back in the dawn of time.

[spiritualmonkey.livejournal.com]

We just stuffed it in our pockets, tallied up how many XP we got, and walked back to the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

Actually, I had a smart ass DM give me shit once when I tried to pay for an ale with a gold piece and he told me the "That's 5 coppers. The bartender pulls ahuge bag of 995 copper couns out from behind the bar."

And I actually carried the bag out the door...and got mugged and killed by an army of street urchins.

That campaign wasn't going anywhere, anyway.

[merde.livejournal.com]

this is what bags of holding are for.

of course, you have to be careful about those things, or your players will announce they're building a villa in theirs.