Money (Treasure), the OD&D Economy & Equipment 004

Some of the coin names I am kicking around right now are Farthing, Halfpenny, Penny, Quarter Shilling, Fourpenny, Half Shilling, Shilling, Half Crown, Crown, Noble, Royal, Half Sovereign, Mark, Guinea, Sovereign, Double Guinea, Double Sovereign, and Treble Sovereign.

I am most likely for simplicity to go with these:

Penny (Copper)(or Brass or Bronze)
Shilling (Silver)

These will be the common Coins that everyone uses and with the ration of 100 Pennies equals 1 Shilling that allows for the minimum price to be one Penny and no further divisions are needed.

Crown (Gold)
Sovereign (Platinum or Palladium)

These coins are both rare and not in general circulation, being used almost entirely by royalty, the nobility, rich merchants and high echelon adventurers. About 99+% of things that the PCs could buy will be priced in Pennies or Shillings and only high end things, such as, a ship or building a stronghold would be paid for with Crowns or Sovereigns.

While these are all subject to change and not in final form yet, these are my current thoughts on how to fun the money system. While I could also come up with different names for each countries coins, in practice I will not since any changes need buy in from the players. Just calling CP - Pennies, SP - Shillings, Gold Pieces - Crowns and Platinum Pieces - Sovereigns is not too big of a change and the buy in should be smooth. Where having dozens of coin names would not be smooth or easily done. Especially not when we play once or maybe twice a month, for about four to six hours at a time. And bitd when we played 20-28 hours per week, we would not have wanted to do anything complicated because it would get in the way of playing D&D. A more complicated system is fine for books, but not for games.

Again to be clear this is not to imply that there are Adamantine or Adamantite or Osmium or Iridium or Mithril coins, this is just to show the relative value and rarity. Think of the values as follows:


Penny equals 50 cents
Shilling equals 50 dollars
Crown equals 50,000 dollars
Sovereign equals 50,000,000 dollars

Mithril Piece equals 50,000,000,000 so if you want Mithril Armor you are not going to buy it, you need to impress the Elven elders as being a true Elf Friend and maybe, just maybe you have a slim chance of getting some.

Adamantine/Adamantite/Osmium/Iridium Piece equals 50,000,000,000,000 dollars so if you want something made with these materials you need to do something like save an entire dwarven community from a horrible death, (more than once :)) and maybe if they have ever obtained any they might make you something or you need to go deep, deep, deep into a dungeon and live to tell the tale and having a slim chance of finding some. 

That is how rare platinum and the other precious metals are in the world, very rare.