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

[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.