In fantasy games related to D&D the currency usually follows the 10 cp = 1sp, 10sp = 1gp pattern. This is convenient and fairly logical, but in my play throughs gold just didn't have much weight when finding treasure. Platinum pieces always got my attention when ever we found them, but I'm not sure if that was a matter of their value or their rarity.
I'm thinking of starting a campaign with a silver economy and raising the value of gold to 100sp = 1gp.
In terms of prepping it shouldn't be too difficult. The most I think I'd have to worry about is raising the value of gold jewelry by an order of magnitude. My worry though is that the 'wow' factor of gold won't be raised in any significant proportion.
Would this be an effective way to keep gold interesting, or are there cons that might make this a bad idea? Answers with reference to experience are preferred.
- The weight of coins is an important consideration in my campaign
since it revolves around exploration and dungeon crawling in
wilderness areas. Coins will have a weight of about 50 coins = 1lb.
So finding a pile of 10,000cp can be a logistical issue whereas
finding 10gp is not. - My campaign will take place far from large cities, so coin-conversion
to and from gold will be difficult and time consuming. So it would be
better to invest the coins locally or save them up for use back in
civilization.
Best Answer
I can't say whether this, on its own, will change your players reactions (at the end of the day, gold is just another number on their character sheets). Certainly, I know it wouldn't interest most of mine - They'd just think "Oh, hey, our riches are 90% easier to carry, now," because assuming easy access to money-changers, the only thing you're really changing is the weight of it. That said, this does make a single gold piece have more meaning and value in a player's mind, as it goes from being "about a day's living expenses" to "enough to feed and house the entire party".
Whether it changes their reaction to finding gold depends on the precise details of your implementation. For instance, if you keep the number of gold pieces per cache the same, but only give out gold caches 1/10th as often as you currently do, your players are more likely to treat each cache of gold as a rare and fabulous treasure; On the other hand, if you give out gold caches just as often, but give out 1/10th as many gold pieces in each one as you do now, players will see gold as a convenient but rare high-denomination coin.
Besides changing the value of coins, there are other things you could do to make gold pieces seem more special. For example, in one of my current campaigns, players generally deal in gold, silver, and copper, but almost never in platinum. This is because I've declared platinum to be so rare that it's almost never used by NPCs in the setting, and therefore they can't find anyone to change their smaller-denomination currency into pp. A platinum piece still isn't any more valuable than the standard 10 gp, but because players only ever find them in rare treasure caches, they have a tendency to hoard them and treat them as precious.
Another traditional strategy to make coins more interesting is to give them names and states of origin; There's more flavour in a bag of Linnish Sovereigns than in the same-sized bag gp, and if there's a single Avench Groat in there - well, there's surely a story behind that, right? In your case, you could declare that no gold coins are minted locally, and that all gold coins therefore come from some exotic foreign land. The novelty would likely wear off sooner or later, but it'd be a start.