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I think it makes the value of gold more consistent with Earth, maybe, but the big problem I have with it is that it further reduces the impressiveness of dragon hoards. All dragon hoards just got reduced to a tenth of their previous size!
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1) It makes silver, and to a lesser extent copper, relevant beyond level 3.
2) It's more consistent with Earth valuing gold due to its rarity.
3) It's more in tune with 99% of the inspirational material the game is based upon.
And I'm happy to finally see it.
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.
A couple hundred pounds of silver is way better.
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.A couple hundred pounds of silver is way better.
Well, since we're basically cutting prices by a factor of 10, one could be paid for that item in 2000 lbs of copper; 200 lbs of silver, 20 lbs of gold, or 2 lbs of platinum. At the very least there's a "nobody's going to throw their back out carrying the loot sack away" option.
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I'm annoyed at how obvious it is that the conversion was simply lip-service. Most of the prices are still noted in Gold Pieces instead of Silver (which would make more sense for a Silver-Based Economy), or Platinum (which would make more sense if the goal was to collapse the big round prices into smaller numbers).
Regardless, using SP and GP as they are is simply making it seem like certain things are less expensive than they really are.
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I'm annoyed at how obvious it is that the conversion was simply lip-service. Most of the prices are still noted in Gold Pieces instead of Silver (which would make more sense for a Silver-Based Economy), or Platinum (which would make more sense if the goal was to collapse the big round prices into smaller numbers).
Regardless, using SP and GP as they are is simply making it seem like certain things are less expensive than they really are.
Well, it also makes it feel like if you get a sack of gold, you're actually rich
to new players especially, I've found the way gold is so easily spent really puts them off.
Given that my own background when I was new was mainly video games(Which only have 1 currency), I just easily rolled with it myself.
Now the prices just seem pretty weird and arbitrary at some places. I also think this encourages a more "Loot" mindset. Newer GMs might need to start shaking down their Rogues who walk away clinking pants.
More to the point, this could mess with rewards. Silver is going to be your common pay now. Don't know about you but I'd be miffed if I went into the dungeon, killed the monster, saved the mayor's daughter and got a bag of Silver. Really?
That and if handled poorly by GMs, any amount of gold gained looks to power spike even more if it's worth so much(Refer back to Rogue taking anything not nailed down and the nails).
I mean I understand the intent but in practice... well this is why we playtest. But first GM to give out Copper as the quest reward because it's worth more now is going to have probably a miffed table.
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.
Or a small handful of gems, or some letters of credit. I mean, if the merchant has the liquid capital to buy this level of stuff in the first place, its generally assumed they've found a way to actually facilitate said transactions and we're just glossing it over in easy to reference mechanics.
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.Or a small handful of gems, or some letters of credit. I mean, if the merchant has the liquid capital to buy this level of stuff in the first place, its generally assumed they've found a way to actually facilitate said transactions and we're just glossing it over in easy to reference mechanics.
Problem with the "small handful of gems" or "letters of credit" approach is that we expect the PC's money to spend the same everywhere and for every merchant to be able to make appropriate change. So we have to assume the lizardfolk village on the other side of the planet takes letters of credit from banks in Absalom, or that every fruit vendor can make change for a 1000gp gem.
"Smaller numbers" is a more easily applicable solution I think.
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Problem with the "small handful of gems" or "letters of credit" approach is that we expect the PC's money to spend the same everywhere and for every merchant to be able to make appropriate change. So we have to assume the lizardfolk village on the other side of the planet takes letters of credit from banks in Absalom, or that every fruit vendor can make change for a 1000gp gem.
"Smaller numbers" is a more easily applicable solution I think.
Its just a level of abstraction.
I know in my group, especially during APs, we stopped caring about the fancy descriptions of art objects and even the actual loot long, long ago. The AP might give a paragraph long description of an art object worth 500gp, but nobody writes down "Gold hair pin in shape of dragon with emerald set eyes", we just add 500 gp to liquid capital because screw it, nobody wants to waste table time haggling with a shopkeep and trying to sell things one item at a time.
The actual GP values, at least in my games, are abstracted to the point where you might say you paid 500 gp for something, but in reality you're not handing over 500 individual coins, you're handing over some coin, some gems, bartering in some art objects, etc. If its a big purchase, maybe that +2 dagger you "sold" last time is still on your person and that was part of the trade for this big item. Stuff like that.
Just no one I know finds that level of shopkeeping enjoyable, so its a lot easier to just say "You pay him 500 gp and you get your stuff" unless there's an actually good reason to stop the rest of the game to haggle.
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Somewhat related to the whole "Shopkeeping" issue Edymnion brought up...
Should players upgrade their silver to gold? Or should they downgrade the gold to silver pieces?
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.A couple hundred pounds of silver is way better.
That's an impressive amount of willfully obtuse to pack into one sentence.
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Now the prices just seem pretty weird and arbitrary at some places. I also think this encourages a more "Loot" mindset. Newer GMs might need to start shaking down their Rogues who walk away clinking pants.
I'm not sure that's even possible. Most players in my experience already have a murder-hobo mindset, I don't forsee it getting even worse. :-) Besides, it's not the job of the GM to stop players from stealing from one another, it's the job of the players to let each other know if they're stepping on the fun at the table by stealing from one another.
More to the point, this could mess with rewards. Silver is going to be your common pay now. Don't know about you but I'd be miffed if I went into the dungeon, killed the monster, saved the mayor's daughter and got a bag of Silver. Really?
If a player goes into it with a PF1 mindset, then of course; however, when you realize that this bag of silver could buy a Magic Staff, which a single low-level reward could not ever do before, and that most magic items are repriced to fit within this new system, that mere bag of silver is worth quite a bit and by comparison makes an actual reward of gold or platinum quite valuable.
Plus, it stretched the bounds of credulity when someone had to have a HALF MILLION gold pieces to afford top-level magic items. Cutting it by a factor of ten makes it feasible to pay that much, unless your PCs were dealing in bank notes, and even then, a single person having a half-ton of platinum to transport from bank to bank is mind-boggling, unless you get into high-level wizards teleporting gangs of 20 STR fighters from point to point to move loot. Then there's the question of there simply being that much platinum existing in one place -- To quote one source, "...so rare, in fact, that all of the Platinum ever mined [In earth's history] could fit into your living room..."
...and that's just for one high-level item, let alone the several that most high-level PCs have.
Our group started handwaving the economy long ago, and just assumed people were walking around with the equivalent of modern credit accounts, because to actually think about the logistics of such a thing got really silly. Now, we don't have to!
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Yeah, either it doesn't affect anything, so there's not really much to object to, or its more realistic and immersive and an improvement. I've not seen any convincing arguments against it.
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That's an impressive amount of willfully obtuse to pack into one sentence.I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.A couple hundred pounds of silver is way better.
Not really.
If you have a problem with "Carry a bunch of precious metal around", then changing from gold standard to silver doesn't fix the problem. Assuming the prices of things get scaled down to the new standard as well, all you've actually done is lost some low end granularity and gained some high end consolidation.
If it took 1,000 gp to buy something in 1e, and now that same item costs 1,000 sp, nothing has changed. Sure, you could pay in 100 gp, but you could have paid in 100 pp in 1e as well.
now you can pay in 10pp. Still less metal to carry.
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now you can pay in 10pp. Still less metal to carry.
Still goes back to PossibleCabbage's point of "Fruit vendors that can break a 1,000 gp gem".
I mean, I kinda agree with a silver standard, simply because copper and silver were pointless before. This does add some use for the lesser coins, but it doesn't solve the "giant piles of rare metals in neatly pre-stacked piles" problem.
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If it is a design intent (as the blogs seem to indicate) is to carry on in the Golarion through which we've been adventuring for the last decade, and to actually tie the rules more closely to the setting (I believe James Jacobs talks about this a bit in his "ask anything' thread), then the switch from gp to sp seems jarring and unnecessary.
I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.
I mean, my homebrew settings mainly use paper currency anyway, so it's usually just "here's your roll of thousand-gp bills". Now it'll be "here's your roll of hundred-gp bills".
Actual gold/gems I typically reserve for old dungeons and some monster hoards.
Don't really understand the benefit of the change, but I don't think it damages the game either. Just another change, hope it makes designing easier. I would like for all the gold-priced items to have prices listed in silver though. Easier to process and compare for me. Then again, I can always just annotate the end result if the change doesn't happen.
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You know, thinking about it, this change is going to hurt low level characters.
It does away with copper, so anything that costs copper now (in 1e) is going to have to be rounded UP to the 1e silver.
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You know, thinking about it, this change is going to hurt low level characters.
It does away with copper, so anything that costs copper now (in 1e) is going to have to be rounded UP to the 1e silver.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Do you mean PF1 prices will have to be rounded up in PF2? A lot of items have been repriced, and in the case of some really cheap items (e.g. torches) they just bundled more together for the price. Just like you wouldn't go the store and buy 1 egg, or one napkin, the items are so cheap the purchase price is more items for the basic denomination.
luckily, your character is assumed to have a home, a day job and a decent sized wardrobe of clothing appropriate to their station. means lifestyles can go the way of the dodo.
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What was the reason for changing from the gp standard to a sp standard? It just seems an unnecessary alteration that really doesn't do anything for the game.
Honestly I really like the change. It felt really weird that peasants had gold pieces to pay for things. Going to the silver standard makes a lot more sense for the feel of it. Where peasents with copper pieces could still use those effectively to buy stuff they need. When everything is based on GP as default then copper pieces are basically useless.
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I like it a lot.
Joe the Farmer's son having a few dozen silver coins to buy equipment when he starts at level 1 feels a lot more believable than gold. Likewise looting goblins or orcs for silver.
In the old system even beggars sniffed at copper pieces for being not worth the time
Like the English had the pound, which was the "sovereign" gold coin, broken up into 20 silver shillings. Did anyone ever use gold coins? Very rarely, most people just used shillings and pence (copper), but it still was a gold standard (though high class places would quote prices in guineas, which were 21 shillings, not 20)
Random historical trivia here. That pre-decimal system sounds very odd - 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound, until you factorise it - you get (2 * 2 * 3) * (2 * 2 * 5)
Meaning 1 pound could be split evenly between 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12... etc, etc people / shares
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I'm not sure that's even possible. Most players in my experience already have a murder-hobo mindset, I don't forsee it getting even worse. :-) Besides, it's not the job of the GM to stop players from stealing from one another, it's the job of the players to let each other know if they're stepping on the fun at the table by stealing from one another.
Sorry, but my own groups greyhawk stuff, not rip anything that can be sold off the wall, including the wall if possible. I forsee more "Can I sell this" being asked.
If a player goes into it with a PF1 mindset, then of course; however, when you realize that this bag of silver could buy a Magic Staff, which a single low-level reward could not ever do before, and that most magic items are repriced to fit within this new system, that mere bag of silver is worth quite a bit and by comparison makes an actual reward of gold or platinum quite valuable.
Plus, it stretched the bounds of credulity when someone had to have a HALF MILLION gold pieces to afford top-level magic items. Cutting it by a factor of ten makes it feasible to pay that much, unless your PCs were dealing in bank notes, and even then, a single person having a half-ton of platinum to transport from bank to bank is mind-boggling, unless you get into high-level wizards teleporting gangs of 20 STR fighters from point to point to move loot. Then there's the question of there simply being that much platinum existing in one place -- To quote one source, "...so rare, in fact, that all of the Platinum ever mined [In earth's history] could fit into your living room..."
...and that's just for one high-level item, let alone the several that most high-level PCs have.
Our group started handwaving the economy long ago, and just assumed people were walking around with the equivalent of modern credit accounts, because to actually think about the logistics of such a thing got really silly. Now, we don't have to!
Given the fact most players on the forum are indeed, coming into this with a PF1 mindset or at the very least, experience of X years of playing PF1. There's some things people are going to have to unlearn and the act of doing is going to cause problems. This is one of them. Now how wide of a problem it is who can say but I can't believe there's not going to be some tables.
Also, Why couldn't you give a Magic Staff out before? I have yet to see a good reason. Oh and let's not forget that most people didn't use Staffs in the first place not due to cost only but do to the usually being bad pick ups in the first place.
And Hello Fantasy. I'd very much like to Scrooge McDuck into a pile of gold if I want.
If you're cutting it by a factor of 10 and yet still paying the players in the format that asks 10 for 1...., well I might be bad at math but hang on. Ah here's a good one.
Ring of Energy Resistance - 245 gp.
But that's actually 2450. Because we're paying in silver.
Hang on let's try for something bigger.
Belt of Giant Strength - 4500 gp.
No. It's actually 45,000 silver. Because again, silver is probably going to be the way people get paid. If the manner to pay for that takes 10-1, did we really cut prices?
Whatever, if people really wanted to start carrying around silver that much, why should I stop them? Your adventuring team will still probably carry around way more than what's actually physically possible to have on our world.
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I like it. It makes coppers matter. And it means that, if you care about the weight of coins, carrying around a few platinum is now a small fortune. And there is no downside. Most of the complaints against it are "I don't like things changing" which isn't really an argument.
Okay. I'll bite.
What would you use copper to buy that you wouldn't use silver for? And from what I'm looking at, copper buys only matter when making your character and goes right out the window. And if it matters so much, my players shouldn't lynch me for paying out in copper right?
I invite you to try that on your players if you're so confident.
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I like it. It makes coppers matter. And it means that, if you care about the weight of coins, carrying around a few platinum is now a small fortune. And there is no downside. Most of the complaints against it are "I don't like things changing" which isn't really an argument.Okay. I'll bite.
What would you use copper to buy that you wouldn't use silver for? And from what I'm looking at, copper buys only matter when making your character and goes right out the window. And if it matters so much, my players shouldn't lynch me for paying out in copper right?
I invite you to try that on your players if you're so confident.
My point is that if Silver is your default currency, copper might actually see use in the game. When was the last time in PF1 that you bought anything that cost a copper? Only thing I can think of off hand is maybe a candle? I personally would rather see silver and gold be the common currencies, leaving copper for super cheap items and platinum for parties that care about carry weight. Rather than the current PF1 system which is basically write everything in gold unless I feel like converting it to Platinum for fun.
But I do agree with you that all item prices need to be the same type of coin, otherwise it will cause confusion.
Might isn't the same is will though. How many things "Might" be used only to be pitched off a cliff for any number of reasons.
Sorry I foresee copper going over that same cliff if Paizo doesn't make an effort to keep it relevant to a degree.
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I think the change I will be happiest for is when the party goes to a merchant to sell an unwanted magic item, and they are not paid in two hundred pounds of gold, implying the merchant just keeps it lying around in pre-measured sacks.
I think you're, if anything, understating the issue. At high levels we're sometimes dealing with 100k gold, a literal ton of gold for some things. Or 200 pounds of platinum if you convert. I've never seen weight for coinage actually counted because it gets absurd fast. And another thing that helps, they changed the coin weights to be non-absurd. In PF1 (as well as 3.5 and 3.0) one coin (of any metal) was 50 to the pound. Which is 9.07 grams. Now they list 1000 coins as one bulk. 1 bulk is listed as being between 5 to 10 pounds normally. So that would give one coin being 100-200 coins per pound, which is much more reasonable 2.27-4.54 g. Now that 100k of PF1 gold is equal to 100 bulk of silver, 10 bulk of gold or just 1 bulk of platinum.
9.07 g is a pretty heavy coin. The US Quarter is only 5.67 g (or 6.25 for the old silver ones). The big Kennedy Half-Dollars are 11.340 g, and the current Dollar coins are 8.100 g. So between the weight of those presidential dollars and a half dollar is a standard copper, silver, gold or platinum piece. For overseas players; a 2 Euro coin is 8.50 g and a 1 Pound coin is 8.75 g. So all coins were on the big side, especially when you were often carrying tens of thousands of them. The current coins would be closer to a US dime at 2.27 g and Nickel at 5 g, ten Euro cent coin at 4.10 g and a Five Pence piece at 3.25 g.
The original English Penny used to be a silver coin where 240 of them were one pound. And I think that was the only currency minted in England for centuries. I think it was a different pound than the current, but it kind of shows the difference in PF1 and real world coinage. The old Roman silver Denarius was 6.81g at it's introduction in 267 BC, fell to 4.5 g in 211 BC and down to 3.9 g by the early Empire. So I think the current weights are much more in line with historical examples as well as more reasonable to carry a sack of.
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If we look at today prices of copper,silver,gold and platinum and make a coin of same size(volume) and start with copper, then
silver is almost exactly 100 copper
gold is 145 silver, this can be minted in smaller coins to get ×100 value
but platinum is only 0,75 gold.
We can say that in middle ages or and d20 realm platinum is worth a lot more, but best solution would be:
1. Silver standard
2. One silver is 100 copper
3. One gold is 100 silver or 10.000 copper coins.
4. Gold coin is about 70% volume of silver/copper
5. If we take 9g for silver as standard we have:
Copper coin 7,7g
Silver coin 9,0g
Gold coin 11,6g(70% volume of other 2 coins)
or if we want same weight coins for calculating bulk, then we go with standard 9g per coin and we get
Silver(standard): 9g, 1× volume, or if we go with 2 euro coin that is 2,2mm thick as standard we get diameter about of 2,2cm
Silver: 9g, 22*2,2mm
Copper: 9g, 24*2,2mm
Gold: 9g, 16*2,2mm
My groups work the opposite - if you add a cool description the chances are vastly higher that someone wants to keep said loot for their own hoard instead of transforming it to cash. A pretty and attention-catching item is something people want to keee; "some fancy doodad worth X gp" is nothing more than money. If you want to sell it you get the money for it listed, no haggling required.
I know in my group, especially during APs, we stopped caring about the fancy descriptions of art objects and even the actual loot long, long ago. The AP might give a paragraph long description of an art object worth 500gp, but nobody writes down "Gold hair pin in shape of dragon with emerald set eyes", we just add 500 gp to liquid capital because screw it, nobody wants to waste table time haggling with a shopkeep and trying to sell things one item at a time.
That happens sometime in my group too. Although the player who did it most has since left. The one thing that really gets a lot of attention seems to be fancy furniture for some reason. Probably because the same players are big on owning property, so they like to furnish them as well.
I wonder if something else that might bear addressing, if we really are talking about modeling the kind of scarcity we see in fiction and our world, is the value of gems in Pathfinder. Real gems, to the best of my research, have never been worth hundreds, much less thousands of gold. It's always seemed a little silly and kind of gamey feeling to me.
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I wonder if something else that might bear addressing, if we really are talking about modeling the kind of scarcity we see in fiction and our world, is the value of gems in Pathfinder. Real gems, to the best of my research, have never been worth hundreds, much less thousands of gold. It's always seemed a little silly and kind of gamey feeling to me.
On the other hand, the Gems the Size of Your Fist are a fantasy staple. Maybe they come from the elemental plane of earth or something.