Gold-Silver-Copper Standard: Difference between revisions

== Literature ==

* ''[[Harry Potter]]'' uses gold, silver, and bronze coins as money in the wizarding world; they're called [[Fictional Currency|galleons, sickles, and knuts]], respectively. Their relative values are not decimalized, but rather have 17 sickles to the galleon and 29 knuts to the sickle, presumably to make their system similar to the [[Old Money|pre-decimalized British currency]] (or perhaps as another way of making the wizarding world whimsical/whacky).

** ''[[Thinking In Little Green Boxes]]'' also deconstructs this, with Harry withdrawing a large chunk of his wizard account to buy "useful" real world things.

* ''[[Gor]]'' has gold and silver [[Fictional Currency|Tarns]], and silver and copper [[Fictional Currency|Tarsks]]. A still smaller unit of exchange is the "Tarsk-Bit". Gold double-tarns are mentioned at least once - in ''Assassin of Gor'', the hero offers to up the stakes in a street Kaissa game to a tarn of gold and of double weight if the blind chessmaster, who is losing deliberately, can find a win; and this represents more than a year's winnings for a Player.

 

== Tabletop [[RPGs]] ==

** In 1st Edition AD&D, the gold piece was more than the basic unit of currency. It was also the basic unit of ''weight''. All coins, including gold pieces, weighed 1/10 of a pound each, and all weights—the weight of a suit of armor, the carrying capacity of a character with 17 Strength, the strength of a ''telekinesis'' spell, etc. -- were given in units of gold pieces. (2nd Edition reduced the weight of coins to 1/50 of a pound each, and listed weights and weight-limits in plain old pounds.)

* [[Role Master]] has a long line of metal coinage, all with decimal exchange rates. 10 iron pieces are worth 1 tin piece, 10 tin pieces = 1 copper piece, 10 copper pieces = 1 bronze piece, 10 bronze pieces = 1 silver piece, 10 silver pieces = 1 gold piece, and 1000 gold pieces = 1 mithril piece. One has to wonder why they didn't just melt down the copper and tin pieces, mix them together, and sell them as bronze pieces.

* A science fiction game example would be ''Star Ace''. All money is "hard currency", coins made of different precious metals.

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Dark Age of Camelot]]'' has mythril, platinum, then the other three. Copper trades up to silver and silver to gold at 100:1, gold to platinum and platinum to mythril at 1000:1.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' uses gold, silver, and copper coins at a ratio of 100:1. These rarely appear by name, however; instead, pictures of yellow, gray, and brown coins appear next to the amounts, so a price of 16 gold 47 silver 33 copper would appear as "16 {picture of gold coin} 47 {picture of silver coin} 33 {picture of copper coin}". Exchanges between the various denominations happens automatically; if your character is carrying 90 copper coins and then picks up 20 more copper coins, his inventory will show 1 silver 10 copper (not 110 copper).

[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]

[[Category:The Gilded Index]]