The golden problem of Cidri
 

The jobs table is way off. Roman soldiers made 9 gold aureus a year (comparable to Cidri's gold coins), while an army regular in Cidri makes 375 gold coins a year. (Not counting living expenses in either case)
Make the jobs table (and cost of living) monthly, and have 25 silvers to the gold coin and you get an annual salary of 36 gold coins which is still very very high (fnording gold debasing greedy dwarves!), but not totally insane.

Starting gear is refactored down to $250 (10 gold coins).

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Why should the economics of Earth's Rome be coin-for-coin comparable to Cidri? How much did the Romans pay for a short sword or weekly room and board costs?

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

I prefer a 100:1 silver-to-gold ratio.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Apparently, all the dungeons full of treasure have provided gold to devalue the gold coin (compare the Price Revolution in early modern Europe when a substantial increase in the supply of gold led to increases in the amount of gold required to buy goods and labor- the gold had been looted from Aztecs rather than from undead, but the principle is the same).

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

What is the source of all this inflationary precious metals?

1. Dwarves mine gold with their superhuman mining abilities.
2. Dragons pick up the gold pieces one at time in their claws and fly them off to their lairs.
3. Humans shoot the dragons with crossbows and seize the gold. (Dwarves try to do this, but first they haven't got any trees to build crossbows with and second they can't hit a target the size of barn.)
4. Dwarves ask for the gold back, but the humans have already melted it down into new coins with the names of human kings on it, so no dice.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Who needs wood when you have spring steel?

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

I thought that TFT based value of a silver piece to be $1 in the late 1970's. The table costs of items were loosely based upon that. I know that I read that somewhere either in Classic or Legacy ITL but I can't find it. Perhaps, it was explained in a subsequent publication. I have seen it discussed on either this forum or on Discord.

If this is the case, the cost and wages in TFT are OK. They are not really dependent upon any other time frame or specific period of Earth history.

I assumed that it was explained that way so that everyone could have a reference point for the value of a silver piece. Since that was established over 40 years ago and inflation in our real lives has marched on, it has been a hard reference to keep straight in our minds.

Per an inflation calculator at https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ , $1 in 1980 now requires $3.60 for the same buying power.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Silver Thursday in TFT: https://www.hcobb.com//tft/legacy_first.html#Thursday

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

That's the reference.

I thought that I saw it in text elsewhere in the literature and not in this link. I may be mistaken on that.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

I don't fault Evil Stevie for failing to write about the event before it happened. So it's a hindsight driven insight.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

I have read that from the time of ancient Rome, all the way up until late Medieval times, the silver-to-gold ratio was relatively stable, usually from ~10:1 to ~12:1 or so (give or take a few silvers in either direction).

More extreme ratios came much later in history. And according to both Google and Bing, the current (August 2022) ratio is 87:1.

Not that any of those figures really matter. Your worlds may vary.

For whatever it's worth, I use 12:1 — partly because it works well with Troy ounces, and also with the pound-shilling-pence currency system that I like to use, but mostly just because 12 is my favorite number.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

I always preferred the ratios in ITL because it causes less confusion to me. It's somewhat metric.

10 coppers = 1 Silver Piece
10 Silver Pieces = 1 Gold Piece

The Gold Bar seems to vary based upon overall size of the bar. Unless otherwise stated, I default to the Death Definition of 1 Gold Bar = 100 Gold Pieces = 1,000 Silver Pieces.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

A one pound gold bar is massive and weighs as much as five daggers.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

By massive, are you referring to size/volume?

I agree that gold is heavy but it is also very dense. Therefore the volume (size) of the bar doesn't have to be large to accommodate its weight.

In TFT, if I were presented with a gold bar that has only been described by its weight, per the prior stated references and my preferences, I would be compelled find the value of gold by weight in 1980 and extrapolate or interpolate as needed. That would be the starting point and then I would probably round to the nearest $10 or $100 to keep the value itself simple. That may keep it scaled properly with respect to the values stated in the various tables in ITL.

Of course I'm all ears on this one. I leave it up to the GM to tell me what a Gold Bar is worth. But as GM, I would default as stated. If the weight of the bar causes encumbrances that is out of balance with its size or value, you will probably hear complaints from players.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Another issue is that SJ was writing during a time of rapid inflation. Gold went from $580/pound in 1970 to ten times that much in 1981. (Cidri has a pound of gold at $1000 in silver coins of course.) Even a halfling ought to be able to waddle out of DT2 with two dozen one-pound bars. (The DT2 simple encumbrance rules seem to be around 5 pound bars to be comparable to weapons.)

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

24k gold has a density of 0.697979 lb (avdp) per cubic inch. So 1 pound of gold has a volume of only 1.432707 cubic inches.

That's a "bar" with dimensions of 0.5" thick, 1.25" wide, and ~2.3" long.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Thanks for adding actual dimensions to my previous assertion.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

I concur. The value of gold and the double digit inflation of the late 70's really shifted people's perspective on the associated buying power.

I can remember buying a large Hershey's chocolate bar for 25 cents. by the early 80's it was closer to $1. In the early 70's, my mother would buy 5 full 80 lb. paper sacks to feed a family of 5 for $25. By 1980, those same groceries cost ~$125.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

The low price of gold and silver on Cidri is because the Mnoren like gold and silver and made sure there was lots of it about. I wonder, though, whether the supply of gold on Cidri, ample as it may seem, is finite.

On Earth we expect to exhaust mines, find new mines by exploration or by improving our mining technology, run as fast as we can to stay in one place and hope we don't stumble.

On Cidri none of that is happening: societies have been around a while, technology isn't really improving. So we should be running out of valuable and easily accessed ores. Unless there are Mnoren machines still making more?

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

Easy to forget today, but when TFT was originally written, there was no Internet. Any research on ancient monetary systems and values involved either being lucky enough to know someone that knew or journeying to the local library and spending hours or days researching the subject.

Or you could just make something up that was fairly simple and get on with writing the rest of the game.

On the inflation thing, I remember as a kid adjusting my candy purchases to keep under the amount where sales tax kicked in. About 8 cents IIRC.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

One of the byproducts of Alchemy's Philospher Stone is turning base metals into gold. So there would be a low quantity of gold being 'created' all the time.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

That's what I ended up settling on as well.

The handwave / in-setting justification I used is that the silver-to-gold ratio was originally 10:1, but then shifted over time to 100:1, with 'gold' coins becoming more and more debased until they were less than 10% gold, with the remainder being close to equal proportions of silver and copper. Then caches of "old" gold coins were discovered and started to circulate at a ratio of 100 silver to each old-gold coin. The debased coins started to be referred to as 'electrum' pieces, and new, un-debased gold coins started to be minted with a face value of 100 silver dollars.

Re: The golden problem of Cidri
 

In Etan, my TFT game world, there are natural super-natural processes that do this. In my other worlds, alchemists are able to transmute silver into gold (and back again) at whatever that world's silver-to-gold ratio happens to be fixed at. E.g. where the silver-to-gold ratio is 20:1 it takes 20 ounces of silver to alchemically produce 1 ounce of gold.

Which is why the silver-to-gold ration is fixed at whatever ratio: When excessive amounts of silver come on the market, lowering the price of silver relative to gold, then alchemists profit by transforming the excess silver into gold. And vice versa when there's a shortage of silver, raising its price relative to gold.

(This also occurs in Etan, but it's a much less important process there.)