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Old 04-30-2021, 07:36 AM   #34
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Grain-based local currencies in medieval fantasy games

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
The thing is there is no such thing as "handsome" payment in a medium that's poor in exchangeability, durabiity and portability. You could be paid more in grain than you could carry, comsume or that would last through the winter but what good is that to your PC?

No PC wouldd o this because grain money is as good as gold money. It plainly isn't. PCs who rescue the villagers in exchange for low level room and board and being paladin-like and not satisfying theri greed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Sure there is. If you, say, own a riverboat, getting ten tons of grain that you can take down river and sell is perfectly valuable. Most PCs don't have a real way of making use of large amounts of trade goods, though.
In a setting where adventurers often receive their rewards in goods (or scrip that's only usable locally) rather than "real" money, it behooves them to function as traveling merchants. At least one member of your party should have relevant skills (and possibly contacts, Merchants Guild membership, etc) in such settings. Indeed, even for more traditional settings, it's often worthwhile to have such a character in the party, to serve as the designated buyer and seller, getting what the party needs for cheap and selling whatever they find for as much as possible.

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
I've done that. I'm sure it wasn't the only case, but it was fun.

One that was even more amusing was an AD&D game where a vast treasure was all in copper coins. This was intended to annoy us, and it did, but we removed it anyway, and then kept quiet about it for a while. Then we sold it as bulk refined copper, by weight, and got about twice the coinage value, because that DM didn't check his arithmetic.
Was this because that edition actually had copper coins being worth less than copper of equal weight, or did the DM just screw up his math and have the haul weigh twice as much as it was supposed to?

And yeah, "it's all in copper" is only a problem if the characters don't have the ability to haul that much weight back to town, as in such settings it can typically be readily exchanged for more-convenient platinum, gems, etc.
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Last edited by Varyon; 04-30-2021 at 07:42 AM.
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