The golden problem of Cidri

[hcobb]

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).

[phiwum]

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?

[TippetsTX]

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

[ravenfish]

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).

[hcobb]

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.

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by hcobb

What is the source of all this inflationary precious metals?

1. 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.)

Who needs wood when you have spring steel?

[FireHorse]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

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

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.

[Bill_in_IN]

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.

[hcobb]

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

[David Bofinger]

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?