DnD: Paying for magic items

[5ColouredWalker]

As sometimes happens, I decided to look at trade goods for gold storage, and I decided to take a closer look at silk.

In DnD, 1 Square yard of Silk=10 gp.
1 square yard of silk weighs roughly .0625lb.
Silk is incredibly thin.

Many people have brought up the absurdity of buying magic items in a coin economy, because you're going to need to bring literal wheel barrels of precious metals, how absurd would it be to be be hauling around rolls of silk?
I don't know much about silk but given that a 6.25lb roll [Which may or may not be enough silk to cloth a village.] could buy you a +1 weapon, and while larger smaller is much easier to imagine being carried around than 20lb of gold.

Edit:
Further math, based on Silk density of 1.31g/cm%3, eventually gets us a cubic volume of .7feet^3.

Now for the tricky part, Bag of holding eficiency:
Type/Size/Weight
1: .012/gp .1/gp
2: .014/gp .1/gp
3: .020/gp .13/gp
4: .025/gp .15/gp

So, Type 4 is most efficient. I thought so, but always good to know.
Now, Silk is 160gp/lb [1/.0625*10], and 14.3gp/ ft^3, so size is going to be the limiting factor, not weight, [Like I thought].

Given the price per cubic foot, a full type 4 bag of holding contains 3571.43gp [2dp due to copper] of silk.

And now I sigh, it turns out it's still impractical, as that type 4 bag is almost enough to buy a +2 weapon, but looking at bag weight that's a huge bag, so instead you'd take a wheelbarrow or two of bags of holding filled with silk instead of a legion of barrows filled with gold... But, it's still many times more practical than gold.

[Karl Aegis]

You just pay for everything with cartloads of masterwork daggers.

[5ColouredWalker]

Finished the math above.

The problem with the daggers is that they sell for half the price they're worth, so every time you use them as exchange you're getting shafted.

Edit: Or shived, as is more appropriate.

[Scheming Wizard]

In the epic level handbook they resolve it by saying that at epic level the economy is based around favors. Favors are pieces of paper that can be redeemed for spell casting. Favors are numbered 1-8 if I remember for what level of spell they are good for. 8 being worth more than 1 obviously. This is intended to get around the problem with giant mounds of gold being traded every time someone wants a +6 long sword.

Gems are a way of dealing with the problem at lower level. One gem can be worth ten thousand gold pieces and is still fairly light.

[Uncle Pine]

Shrink Item can make the whole process more efficient.
Wouldn't salt be better to transport high amount of sums? A cow weights between 1.000 and 1.800 lbs (1.500 lbs on average), so any 11th level Druid, Sorcerer or Wizard can transport between 5.000 and 9.000 gp (7.500 gp on average) as easily as he could transport a cow.

EDIT: To avoid having said Druids, Sorcerers and Wizards destroying the economy, a sufficiently advanced society could accept only specifically marked cows as a payment method.

[Milo v3]

In my campaign it was solved via a fabrication based custom item that added the worth of gems of the same type into a singular gem, but custom items aren't exactly allowed in many campaigns.

[Saintheart]

EDIT: To avoid having said Druids, Sorcerers and Wizards destroying the economy, a sufficiently advanced society could accept only specifically marked cows as a payment method.

Tier One classes breaking the economy is rather a lesser concern than breaking the entire plane, or reality at large, as is their wont. :smallwink:

[Story]

Why not use platinum coins? It's still impractical at high levels but it's 10 times better than gold.

[Segev]

Gems are actually your best bet. At a minimum, there are 5000gp gems that show up as random treasure, and they're on the same scale as coins. If you assume that they exist in values at least large enough to fuel spells which call for them as material components, 25,000 gp diamonds must exist somewhere. Those probably are still easily placed in any bag, let alond a bag of holding (of any type). Even if a 25,000 gp diamond is the size of a softball, that's still only 4 softball-sized objects to buy the most expensive magic item in the SRD (a mirror of life-trapping).

This table (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/treasure.htm#tableGems) shows gems and right below it are art items, which go up even higher in value.

So adventurers probably carry around some very fine art as decoration and currency.

[Trasilor]

Even if gems (or art objects) are not normal currency in your campaign, you have this misconception about the volume that gold and platinum take up.

Per RAW, all coins have the same lb per coin ratio - 50 coins per pound. Now this was probably done for convenience, but gold and platinum are very dense metals. And, per RAW, unless otherwise stated, physics in the game world are the same as physics in the real world (i.e. the density of gold and platinum in the real world are the same as that in the game world).

That means, for 50 gp to equal 1 lb, they must have a very specific volume.

Converting to grams, every coin weighs approximately 9 grams. Density of Platinum is 21.45 g per cm, which means a platinum coin has a volume of .42 cubic centimeters (gold is a little bigger - as it is less dense - at .47 cubic cm per coin).

What does this mean?

Well a portable hole is listed at six feet in diameter and 10 feet deep or 282.7 cubic feet (pi*3^2*10) and there are 28,316.8 cubic cm per cubic foot. Multiplying that out (282.7*28,316.8/.42) you end up with 17 million platinum pieces - more than enough to pay for the +6 weapon (or 10, +10 weapons).

Of course it weighs 340 thousand pounds, but who cares? Portable holes are weightless. :smallbiggrin:

The 72 hundred platinum (amount for a +6 weapon) pieces would weigh 144 lbs and take up approximately, 3045 cubic cm - or 2 2-liter bottles of soda :smallamused:

Your type I bag of holding can easily carry this around.