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I didn't even know any of that and still didn't intend to read it because the recommender was being condescending as hell.
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Also, REAL WORLD Economics don't really reflect the economic forces on Golarion for all the reasons mentioned above. And Abadar would know that so likely, despite the currency being called Gold pieces, silver pieces, and copper pieces, the value isn't necessarily on the gold standard or tied to the value of those metals.
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I don't think this is a helpful tangent to keep going on for the second time in this thread, Ed. I also suspect you're not going to get much support for Rothbard on these forums, given who he was - deeply misogynistic right wing ghouls with a love for KKK members aren't the most popular here, I suspect. I certainly can also say that I found What Has Government Done To Our Money to be a waste of perfectly good paper and ink, from an economic perspective.I mean thankfully were aren't use the gold standard anymore, so what it means in more practical terms is that "precious" metals will become less precious and thus less costly. Which will hurt some businesses, but won't destroy the world economy (probably, I'm not an economist) compared to suddenly getting an influx of gold if our currency were still based on it.Clearly you're not an economist. As for going off the gold standard meaning the price of gold goes down, exactly the opposite of that has happened. You need to read [i]What Has Government Done To Our Money by Murray Rothbard. It wouldn't hurt to go on and read Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action by Robert P. Murphy, either. The first book is free at that link, the second is $21.95, or 0.262 grams of gold at current prices.
Also the poster I think misunderstood the context of my post (although I was potentially unclear too).
I was saying that in the event we suddenly started getting a huge influx of precious metals (via asteroid in the case of the post of quoting) that the value of precious metals should go down.
I wasn't saying that the price of precious metals went down because we went off the gold standard.
Also, Ed Reppert you're post is incredibly condescending and I zero interest in following up on anything you said as a result.
I didn't even know any of that and still didn't intend to read it because the recommender was being condescending as hell.
That was not my intent.
I was saying that in the event we suddenly started getting a huge influx of precious metals (via asteroid in the case of the post of quoting) that the value of precious metals should go down.
I wasn't saying that the price of precious metals went down because we went off the gold standard.
Also, Ed Reppert you're post is incredibly condescending and I zero interest in following up on anything you said as a result.
You were definitely unclear then. And I agree that an influx of a commodity will result in lower prices for that economy.
I maintain my position that we should be very much the opposite of thankful that the bankers and politicians have taken us off the gold standard.
As for "incredibly condescending", well, either two people independently read it that way, and if so I apologize, or you're jumping on Captain Morgan's bandwagon, which seems like a poor excuse for your zero interest.
Why is it that the left always has to paint the right with the "evil" brush?
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As for "incredibly condescending", well, either two people independently read it that way, and if so I apologize, or you're jumping on Captain Morgan's bandwagon, which seems like a poor excuse for your zero interest.
Why is it that the left always has to paint the right with the "evil" brush?
For the record, "Clearly you're not an economist" come off to me as "incredibly condescending" before I even read Captain Morgan's post.
Why is it that the left always has to paint the right with the "evil" brush?
Murray Rothbard opposed egalitarianism and the civil rights movement, and blamed women's voting and activism for the growth of the welfare state. He promoted historical revisionism and befriended the Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes. He used racial slurs in private. He advocated for selling children. He advocated that parents should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate there children and they should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation.
I can go on. If you see that as an "evil" brush, Murray Rothbard is the one that picked it up: you don't have to be "left" to point out who/what he was and what he stood for.
PS: if your comment wasn't about Arcaian's post about Murray Rothbard, then I'm not sure what it's referencing.
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Like it should be clear that "pegging the value of your currency to a supposedly scarce resource" is perhaps a bad idea when the resource turns out to be a lot less scarce than you expect it to be. Whether this is because of alchemists, or wizards opening a portal, or robots mining metal-rich asteroids.
Like the assumption that gold remains valuable and will always be valuable is just that- an assumption.
I always felt like gold should be the, well, gold standard for magical reagents. You'd literally burn up your coins to conduct rituals or craft magical items. They already did it with diamonds and resurrection, why not gold? Or all the coin currencies. Just make silver 10% as efficient as gold for magical energy and copper 10% as efficient as copper. You'd divorces it from the scarcity questions raised in this thread. Precious metals (and gems and such) now have an in-narrative reason to be valuable. It simplifies various ritual costs while at the same time making the idea of the materials less abstract. Parties can utilize their treasure immediately instead of needing to haul it to town. And any dwindling supply issues can be explained by mining from the elemental planes and such.
Like the historic reason that people made coins out of gold is that it's a soft metal and very easy to work with and the coins you made from it tended to last. There's no other intrinsic value of it as currency, other than "some people seem to want it" which is also true of "Pokemon cards" and "PNGs of cartoon apes for some reason."
So I think whether your fantasy work uses hard coinage or paper money is largely a function of "what feels right for the sort of game you're running".
Like the historic reason that people made coins out of gold is that it's a soft metal and very easy to work with and the coins you made from it tended to last. There's no other intrinsic value of it as currency, other than "some people seem to want it" which is also true of "Pokemon cards" and "PNGs of cartoon apes for some reason."
So I think whether your fantasy work uses hard coinage or paper money is largely a function of "what feels right for the sort of game you're running".
I agree. The fact that societies transitioned from bartering to a "resource" backed currency and then to FIAT currency is honestly all kind of incredible.
At the time that resource backed currency (e.g. gold) came into use, gold didn't really have much practical application. It wasn't particularly strong, so it wasn't suited to making things out of for "work" purposes, compared to iron. It wasn't as plentiful as bronze. You can't eat it. It's main purpose until electronics came around was for decoration/jewelry.
How is is that societies came to value such a thing that didn't have practical uses? That is I'm sure a complex question that I don't know the answer to. And then going from that to paper money (which was theoretically backed by that gold). And then later to an economy in which the paper money stopped being backed by gold, and instead is backed only by the "good will and existence" of the government that supports it. The whole thing is actually quite crazy.
All our money only has value because a majority of people have collectively agreed that it does.
Fiat currency is why we have a national debt 20% higher than our GDP. That and thinking that a committee of bankers can control a free market.
"All our money only has value because a majority of people have collectively agreed that it does."
That is true. And people all over the world are beginning to view the US dollar as having at the very least less value than it used to have.
There's a story about Ludwig Von Mises, who was an economist: seems he and a businessman friend of his were out walking one evening in Vienna, between the wars. As they were walking past the Austrian Treasury building, where they could hear the printing pressing going full bore printing "money", the friend asked Mises "how can we help the economy?" Mises pointed at the Treasury building and said "Stop that".
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Bartering is seldom seen in recorded history. Good will, credit, and coinage date way, way back. Sometimes it was plain silly money IMO, like cocoa beans, shells, and several ton stone "coins". So the transition to fiat money isn't so ridiculous; the innate ridiculousness of trade practices themselves precedes it by millennia.
"All our money only has value because a majority of people have collectively agreed that it does."
Yep, so it's long been. And the same could be said of everything society values beyond survival needs, i.e. morality, status, Kardashians. It can be a hard pill to swallow that our societal foundations lack objective grounding beyond the society's will itself. Work in progress, with us the workers, since time immemorial.
Like gold has practical applications (it's a good conductor) but this doesn't constitute most of its value. The value of gold (in both the real world and the fantasy world) is exactly the same as that of fiat currency - people collectively agree that it is valuable.
Backing a paper currency with something less useful in day-to-day life than paper currency is frankly nonsensical in this day and age. Like if you offered me 1 oz of gold for a crisp $20, I would just keep walking since one of those two things can buy me lunch and it's not the one that got pulled out of the ground.
The Theory Of Money And Credit, by Ludwig von Mises
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"All our money only has value because a majority of people have collectively agreed that it does."
Yep, so it's long been. And the same could be said of everything society values beyond survival needs, i.e. morality, status, Kardashians. It can be a hard pill to swallow that our societal foundations lack objective grounding beyond the society's will itself. Work in progress, with us the workers, since time immemorial.
And of course since "the meaning of words" is something constructed through intersubjective consensus, basically everything else has its meaning constructed through a similar process, including "the value of money."
I just have my characters paid in Ningis.
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I just have my characters paid in Ningis.
I first read "Ninjas", which was pleasantly puzzling. :-)
President
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Reminder: Discussion of real-world economic theory should be moved to Off-Topic.
-Jim
Back to OP:
in my mind Yes, Gold coins are made of gold.
i dont see any problems with that
How do they keep their gold coin and other coin intact when they're fighting and moving around? Unless the minting of these coin are alchemical, they would be kind of bang up from that much activity.
If you're interested in the history of money IRL, I highly recommend "The History of Paper Money" series from Extra Credits on Youtube: https://youtu.be/-nZkP2b-4vo?si=3HMQXjwr-kX0Zj7Z
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Director of Brand Strategy
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How do they keep their gold coin and other coin intact when they're fighting and moving around? Unless the minting of these coin are alchemical, they would be kind of bang up from that much activity.
The same way one set of clothes is enough for all the travel and fighting and magic and everything else. No one has a change of clothes on their character sheet, and that's never impacted the game. The wear and tear of money is inconsequential and even easier to handwave than a PC wearing the same underwear forever.
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I always buy multiple pairs of socks for my PC. Nothing beats the feeling after a long day of fighting the undead in a haunted swamp than being able to pull out clean and dry socks from your pack once you're on dry land.
How do they keep their gold coin and other coin intact when they're fighting and moving around? Unless the minting of these coin are alchemical, they would be kind of bang up from that much activity.The same way one set of clothes is enough for all the travel and fighting and magic and everything else. No one has a change of clothes on their character sheet, and that's never impacted the game. The wear and tear of money is inconsequential and even easier to handwave than a PC wearing the same underwear forever.
Even my grungiest PCs typically have spare clothes! (Even if some seldom wear them because they're for fancy times.) So if we ever play at a table together, consider my PC pre-grossed out. You do at least buy them soap, right? RIGHT?!
I remember the first time it clicked for me that every time a character gets stabbed with a blade, they probably have a bloody hole in their clothes that isn't just going to heal itself up. Somebody needs to be washing and sewing these garments up after every fight if they're going to keep the adventurer look without buying copies of the same wardrobe in bulk.
In any case, don't forget that a portion of that coin is in silver, too. Also I think the ability of states to conjure or planeshift to/from the plane of earth to mine infinite gold is a bit overstated. Oprak certainly has the ability to organize such a thing if it wanted, but I don't think most wand of planar travel can be scaled up so greatly, and I'm not sure of there even are spells that allow you to create permanent valuable items currently...
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I think the point trying to be made, isn't that pcs don't have spare clothings but that there is not a mechanical incentive to do so built in to the game, because the developers have decided that level of detail does not add to the game. With the exception being specific style of clothing to deal with weather or social situations. Cantrips like prestidigitation even exist to give an out to those who do not want to keep that level of detail on their sheet without making the reality of the situation be that they are constantly wearing tattered unclean clothing.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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Exactly. If your table likes playing with a level of detail where the wear on the coins you're carrying generates fun, then by all means, play that out. But I think it's a fair assumption that a vast majority of players are uninterested in this type of minutia and just want to go kill monsters and take their stuff.
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How do they keep their gold coin and other coin intact when they're fighting and moving around? Unless the minting of these coin are alchemical, they would be kind of bang up from that much activity.The same way one set of clothes is enough for all the travel and fighting and magic and everything else. No one has a change of clothes on their character sheet, and that's never impacted the game. The wear and tear of money is inconsequential and even easier to handwave than a PC wearing the same underwear forever.
Maybe not in Pathfinder but in Starfinder, I do, we shirren like choice, I also collect concern t-shirts
My character sheet .clothing uniform (maintenance worker coveralls)
clothing party
clothing environmental desert
clothing every day (Bugspace T-shirt)
clothing every day (Top Down and the Strange Quarks t-shirt)
In one adventure buying a local concern t-shirt became an important part of trying to blend in with the locals to infiltrate a building, and led us to use the store I bought the shirt at as a meet-up point for someone we helped escape.
Maybe not RAW but concert t-shirts certainly fall under the rule of cool, depending on the band of course.
Can't wait for the first time a Pathfinder bard makes it to Starfinder and realizes they can make money selling concert t-shirts.
Pathfinder is in an interesting time RE: fashion since in actual pre-modern times clothes were very expensive because of the work involved in making clothes that would fit the uses that people had for them. In Pathfinder, while people still need clothes for farm work, etc. the fact that "magic" exists also makes it possible to combine this with fast fashion.
Like nobody in actual medieval times would want a t-shirt since that wouldn't last one season, and it would cost way too much to make, but if you can make them cheap and quickly then these assumptions would change.