Medieval and other historical accounts and estimates and records are what most Western fantasy style roleplaying game currency is based on, and much research has been done on the subject, from deep scholars and historians, to armchair buffs checking Wikipedia. For a lot of gameplay, the acquisition of wealth, in money and items and maybe hirelings and magic and who-knows-what-else, is one of  the (If not the) main goals, and nothing can really give a player or GM as much of a quick, material indication of character wealth than knowing how many coins they have – this has led to a number of different games’ unique interpretation of currency systems, some fairly accurate, some seemingly without any basis in any period in history. The search for the perfect currency system is something that will likely continue for some time to come, maybe forever, and sometimes it even involves the players themselves ditching the rulebook’s ideas and sitting down and coming up with their own – various needs result in various solutions, so hopefully this site and this type of article can help in understanding the majority of issues and considerations necessary to formulate and understand rpg coinage and related aspects.

History of Money and Coins

Money – no matter what it looks like, how much it weighs, or what it’s value, in one form or another, money is a constant in every culture in history, because it allows one to represent so much wealth with so little material.

Barter (one good or service traded for another) and haggling were, collectively, the earliest form of “money” – two parties compromising on how many days’ worth of work was a fair deal in exchange for a cow, or how much salt you could trade for a pelt or some cloth, etc. The one thing in common all this had was practicality or usefulness. If you don’t need any pelts and you don’t want to go into business selling them, a fur trader might have no “money” to trade you for your cow – usefulness was not always a consistent measure, as conditions could change and different people needed different things. But a lot of things were generally accepted by anyone – a lot of people paid their taxes in chickens and goats, for example, so there is always the option of an animal-based economy. But all in all, everything had a fairly accepted commodity “use value”, physical items or labor.

But eventually, people began implementing the idea of “tokens”, in exchange for goods and services, usually as a form of credit owed to another person. Sometimes the token was a fairly common measure representing a quantity of something, while other times it was actually made out of what was, or would, be something quite expensive, such as gold. Shells, wampum, bits and pieces of metals, ingots and even jewelry were the segue into true money and the idea of coins.

Coin of the Realm

A coin had and has very little “use value”;  you couldn’t really do a whole lot with one, except potentially melt it down and form it into something useful like a nail,  but instead had a material value, abstractly representing a certain amount of “worth” with respect to goods and services. In the earlier tokens, rarity, beauty and other factors began to give some materials, mostly metals and gems, a certain higher place in the eyes of many and began to be ascribed more material value even if their use value was almost insignificant, while labor and practical goods didn’t lose any of their practical value to people. Tokens were still used, though less and less freqeuntly, for quite a while.

“Precious” metals began to become the norm to represent sums of any worth , with silver being arguably the oldest, most common and longest used metal for coins – present in, with a few possible exceptions, all cultures. Instead of irregular bits and pieces of metal or large unwieldly bars or ore, areas began developing their own consistent units of weights and measures, and forming precious (and base) metals into more practical shapes (small, flat, symetrical coins) and valuing them at different denominations based on their weight and size and composition, and later, stamped face denominations.

Lsd and A Few Pounds

Charlemagne, French ruler and creator of the Twelve Peers, or Paladins, at or around 800 AD, implemented exhaustive and visionary reforms of weights and measures, arriving at the familiar division of a Pound (French livre) as made up of 20 shillings or 240 pennies (pence), with 12 pennies to the shilling, basing the framework on earlier classical Roman and other cultures with similar denominations. This system, later abbreviated and known as the “Lsd” (standing for the original Roman Libra (pound), Solidus (shilling) and Denarius (penny) coins) system, with some variations here and there, would remain the dominant monetary breakdown for many nations and cultures for sometimes hundreds of years or even longer, such as into the twentieth century, though only silver pennies were struck during Charlemagne’s time – other coin types and denominations and metals would come later.For game terms, the penny  could be considered day’s pay (though some made 2d or 3d) for most peasants, farmers, workers and low-level soldiers and archers, while the shilling would be a day’s pay for artisans, craftsmen, merchants and capable veteran warriors, horsemen, etc.

And here is where things begin to go downhill somewhat. The “pound”, in France as well as most other cultures and nations, was a somewhat arbitrary measurement of silver in regards to both weight and number of uniform pieces into which it could be divided. The basic unit of currency was the penny, so that is what a lot of economic values were based on, including the actual weight of a pound – a pound, to some rulers,  was therefore however much silver that 240 pennies added up to. Additionally, since ancient times, pounds were also made up of ounces, but again, in some cases, a pound contained 16 ounces, sometimes 12, sometimes other irregular numbers.

But currency wasn’t entirely at whim – the extremely minute standards for weighing small but significantly valuable things (gems, metal, some powders and spices, other goods, etc.) included the grain, which was originally either one grain of wheat or barley (which weighed different amounts, so already divisions begin). Long story short, ounces could be weighed by the grain, which could lead to a consistent poundweight as well – however, since different pounds were made up of different numbers of ounces, this too really wasn’t able to solve anything.

Arguably, the answer came down to a combination of ease, politics, availability of materials and countless other factors, which lead to the eventual (very eventual) adoption by most of the West to the equivelant weight measurements which assigned a pennyweight (dwt) of silver a weight of 24 grains (specifically of barleycorn), and an ounce was assigned a total of 20 pennyweights.  This, theoretically, could be applied to a pound, which would be 240 pennies (and pennyweights), so 240 x 24 = 5,760 grains, with 15.432 grains in a modern day gram, so 5760 / 15.432 = 373.25 grams. 20 pennyweights (24 grains each, total of 480 grains), or one ounce, weighed 31.10 grams.

An Ounce of Dignity

But what about pounds that consisted of 12 or 16 ounces? That’s where things truly begin to split apart from one another.

12 of these standardized 31.10g ounces to the pound yielded 373.2 grams, the same total we got earlier, so obviously this standard was based on 12 ounce pounds. This turns out to be, with some variation through the years, what we know as the contemporary system of Troy measurements, and precious metals are still measured in troy ounces today, though the troy pound gradually faded out of common use.

16 troy ounces yields a total of 497.6 grams, a figure not seen now or historically, so obviously the troy ounce is not what is used to determine any other type of pound or weight, such as the modern Imperial or avoirdupois (or Mercantile)  pound.

The closest we find is Charlemagne’s earliest reformation of the pound as equating to 489.6 grams, and also made up of 12 ounces, which would make each ounce 40.8 grams, both a bit heavy as far as fine measurement is concerned. This pound weight was arrived at by Charlemagne essentially multiplying the original Roman pound, which was actually 327 grams (5,046.26 grains),  by 1.5.

But this original Carolingan pound was supplanted, in some areas like England, by the Tower Pound, likely named for the fact that the British King’s money was kept in the Tower of London, usually to also measure delicate items and precious metals, so an alternate to troy but not differing all that much. The English tower pound was in between the Roman pound and the troy pound, and much less than the Carolingan pound, being 350 grams (5,400 grains), though it also consisted of 12 ounces.

Lastly, as mentioned above, is the modern Imperial or avoirdupois pound, which began as the Mercantile pound because it was used to weigh heavier trade items and consisted of 16 ounces, for a total weight of 453.6g (7,000 grains).

Interestingly, with the exception of the strange Carolingian weight of 40.8g, the classical Roman, Mercantile (avoir.), troy and tower ounces all weighed within 4 grams of each other, so for whatever reason, the ounce remained fairly consistent throughout almost all systems of weight measurement, an average of about 29 grams. The pennyweight however, although in theory weighing 24 grains or 1.555 grams, as a base, varies from 1.36g to 1.9g (2.04g for the Carolingian ounce), so a silver penny could weigh anywhere within that range, and later with debasement and face values, even more.

So What?

Probably the hardest part of deciding on a money system is to choose a desired pound/ounce/penny system, which is why it is usually best, if not using one of the four above, to at least base your system on one of them. Historically, the Roman and Carolingan pound systems were the oldest but were replaced for the most part in the Middle Ages with the tower and troy pounds (and ounces), although people already used to it may want to just use the avoirdupois poound and ounce system rather than dealing with an entirely different pound and ounce system.

Or one could use one of the pound weights in grams given, maybe modify it a bit and then create their own divisions, exchange rates and weights for different coins – maybe 12 pence to the shilling is just too weird, it could be dropped back without much trouble to 10 pence per shilling instead of 12, then if you kept 20 shillings to the pound, you’d know there were also 200 pennies in it – simpler and without changing the system all that much. You could even fine-tune it by choosing the weight of a penny, which would then determine the shilling weight and finally the pound – in the preceding example, you could say a penny weighs 1.75g which would result in shillings of 17.5g and ultimately pounds weighing 350g, the same as the tower pound. Or you could make it even easier by assigning 2g pennies, 20g shillings, and 400g pounds, which lands somewhere between the 453.6g avoirdupois pound and the 373.2g troy pound. Alternately you could incorporate the metric system even more by following the standard of 1 lb. avoir. = 500g, making pennies weigh 2.5g and shillings weigh 25g.

Precious Metals

Next is the question of material or metal of which coins are composed. As mentioned, silver was by far the workhorse, being used for the lowly penny, as well as the larger (monetarily and physically) shilling and occasionally larger value coins; in fact even farthings were originally silver, being a penny cut into fourths or quarters, though in some societies and later on, farthing coins were struck, sometimes of silver (making them incredibly tiny and light and easily lost), and sometimes (as  it also was with the case of pennies) of  base and utility metals such as copper, tin, iron, bronze, brass or even eventually steel – but most cultures for any eras represented in most RPGs were on the Silver Standard.

Gold supplemented the silver standard with less-than-one-pound coins worth multiple numbers of shillings, and even sometimes worth a pound – smaller denomination and value gold coins were struck here and there throughout history but for the most part, gold was reserved for high-ticket items, debts and merchant trading, meaning gold was fairly uncommon if you weren’t a noble or very successful merchant, etc. (and even then it was usually kept in personal coffers and not circulated like other coins)- most peasants and regular workers probably never even saw a gold coin in their lives, so it should be noted how much of a stir the sight of even one, let alone a handful of gold coins would cause among commoners and even some gentry – and even those accustomed to gold would likely wonder where a ragtag individual or group would come into such money, while miscreants would more likely wonder how to make them part with it.

Note that the average ratio of gold to silver was 1:10, making anything struck in gold worth ten times what the same coin weight would be in silver. Also note that it would have been much more common to have been given a paper  note of credit or debt in a certain amount, than to actually be given a gold coin, no matter who you were.

The most common (if there would be such a thing) gold coin would have been the Crown, pretty consistently across different societies, assigned the value of 5 shillings, or a quarter of a pound. Not many people had a crown at any time in their life, but they knew what they were and might have even changed them for other money or goods in rare situations.

The next more valuable coin was the Gold Noble, which historically varied between being worth 6 and 12 shillings – if used, it is probably easiest to simply assign it a value of 10 shillings, or two crowns. Naturally, these would be even more scarce than a crown, as these wouldn’t have been struck or minted in any great number or very often, and rarely if ever used as actual currency.

The Sovereign was essentially the ultimate gold coin, generally equalling a whole pound of silver, a truly unthinkable value for one coin, even gold, for most people, even nobles and merchants. This coin would be exceedingly rare and possibly released for use only among royalty or greater nobles and trade between nations.

Electrum is a natural (and also man-made) alloy of gold and silver, and was used in some specially struck coins in a few societies, though overall it would have been fairly unheard of, with it’s value and rarity being a matter of debate, though to make it simple, falling, of course, between gold and silver.

Platinum is a natural silver-white metal, often mistaken for silver, when it was even recognized, and even discarded as being worthless by medieval miners looking for silver or gold – it did eventually gain precious metal status in some cultures and nations and is now among the top metals, but there is arguably no record of it as being used in currency before the 1800′s, when it was “discovered”. If used at all and as anything more valuable than gold in an rpg,  it would probably be almost magical and as a coin, worth maybe multiple numbers of pounds of silver, possibly even some fraction of a pound of gold, though that would be a truly unique coin.

Base/Utility Metal coins (copper, bronze, brass, tin, iron, steel), when used, usually replaced at least farthings, with 4 larger and less expensive coins being used in place of tiny one-quarter-of-a-penny sized silver slivers, which effectively made each base metal farthing coin worth the same as a tiny bit of silver, in theory making up for the difference in size.

Size (And Weight) Matters

Although a fuller treatment of these aspects are outside the scope of this article, most coins, contemporary as well as historical, tend to vary between the following:

12 to 46 mm diameter,
0.72 to 3.525 mm thickness,
0.30 to 31 g (1 troy oz) and rarely, less or more

Most contemporary US coins range from 18 (dime) to 41 (modern bullion) mm diameter, 1.42 (dime) to 31 g (silver dollar or other bullion/ounce coin). Coins outside these ranges tend to be unwieldly, either too big or heavy or too small or light.

A simple formula to randomly determine coin sizes would be (3D6x2)+8 mm diameter, dia x .07 mm thick

Weight depends on the metal and it’s Rho (grams per cubic centimeter or density), coin diameter and thickness and figured area and volume values. Or you could determine the coin’s weight first and work backward, figuring out the volume, area and diameter and thickness based on that.

Remember that for the most part, medieval and similar coins and most rpg coins are mostly based on the idea of a bullion coin, meaning the coin is only worth its weight (usually a troy ounce)  in its metal (a one ounce silver coin is worth one ounce of silver), and while most struck or worked coins would likely be stamped or engraved with symbols and royal designs and identifying letters and mottos, they would, on the whole, not include a face value or denomination.

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This entry was posted by J P on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 6:38 am and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.