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FabulousFizban
2019-11-20, 09:23 AM
so platinum is usually just used as a weigh to reduce weight. why carry 500GP (ten pounds of gold!) when i can carry 50P (1 pound) instead.

I had a different idea for its use. i wanted to give my campaign setting a sense of depth, of history. so i had the idea to use platinum as the currency of an older kingdom. Think if you went treasure hunting and found a cache of roman coins: to a collector these would quite valuable, but the average business isn’t going to accept them as payment.

I like the idea of the party looting an ancient tomb and finding a cash of coins, then trying to spend them only for the merchant to say, “i’m not taking that. what the hell is that?” Eventually the party realizes, “oh man, we have to find an artifact dealer or something!”

It places an extra barrier between the party and their money, but creates great gameplay opportunities in my experience.

the first session i presented this idea in, the party immediately started trying to spend their treasure in town and no one would take it. they had to go around and find someone who actually wanted it and could afford it. thus it became quickly known in the town they were in that this group of people was carrying around a small fortune in ancient artifacts. this attracted the attention of other adventurers who thought they could score an easy pay day by stealing the PCs loot. So I got another adventure out of the first adventure: the PCs trying to protect their loot from other adventurers while finding somewhere to sell it.

I’ve found nothing gets a party hotter than when somebody else steals their loot.

False God
2019-11-20, 09:38 AM
The only issue I see here is that the PCs live in this world. Wouldn't the PCs know that PP aren't "current" currency and that they couldn't spend them?

Like, if someone gave me a bag full of gold dubloons I'd know I couldn't just walk into WalMart and buy a new TV with them. Because I know they're not our currency, heck, if someone gave me a bunch of Rubles (Pussian currency) I couldn't walk into a WalMart and spend those either!

I mean, great that you got an adventure out of it but...

I kinda feel like you pulled a "gotcha!" on the party by not informing them your setting operates differently, and purposefully not providing them with information their characters should (IMO) have reasonably have known.

Keltest
2019-11-20, 09:40 AM
I think its entirely possible to do this without making the coins a relic. Imagine trying to pay a hot dog vendor in a $100. Even if they had the change for it on hand, theyre still probably not going to take it because it would take everything they had just to break it for you. Same idea here. Most vendors simply don't have the capacity to trade in platinum coins over things that cost silvers.

Your solution also raises the question of why this older civilization uses platinum coins, and why people stopped using them. Which can be interesting in its own right, but is something else that should probably have an answer.

Altair_the_Vexed
2019-11-20, 09:53 AM
If you handle this well, with the PCs knowing that there's something odd about the treasure they've found, then this is a cool idea. I like that it drives the PCs to find specialist dealers and merchants.
Even today, it is typcial for a small store in a village to ask you for smaller currency units - they can't make up the change you need if you try to use a £20 note to buy a £1 muffin. You can't get a £1 bus ride with a tenner - or at least, the driver will glare at you while they count out the change.

If we think of the PCs as never having seen this sort of coinage before, then it's still reasonable for them to think "These are coins, like I usually use, but different. I should be able to spend them like the other coins I use, but I don't know how much they're worth." It's not like most D&D games are based in societies with multiple state-backed currencies using nominal tokens.
My point here is that the coins in D&D are valuable because of their material worth, not like the state-backed currencies of our modern age: 1 gp is worth 1 gp, no matter what nation minted it.
So a coin of metal is worth its material value, whether the PCs know what that is or not. Merchants in the same area who have never seen platinum before might try to fleece the players by claiming it's worth the same or less than a copper (because they figure it must probably be worth more) - or they might refuse to take it, because they don't know its value.

GloatingSwine
2019-11-20, 10:01 AM
Your solution also raises the question of why this older civilization uses platinum coins, and why people stopped using them. Which can be interesting in its own right, but is something else that should probably have an answer.

Platinum is hard to obtain and refine, it's usually got other things in it. So an ancient civilisation when things were more advanced and magical than now could have had techniques for purifying it that the current ones don't.

(That said, quasi-medieval societies probably wouldn't care much about platinum anyway, it's the sort of thing that acquires value because it's rare and difficult, and so a civilisation that doesn't have a handle on how globally rare it is will probably not place a particularly high value on it because, frankly, it's hard to distinguish from Silver by sight)

King of Nowhere
2019-11-20, 11:16 AM
Platinum is hard to obtain and refine, it's usually got other things in it. So an ancient civilisation when things were more advanced and magical than now could have had techniques for purifying it that the current ones don't.

(That said, quasi-medieval societies probably wouldn't care much about platinum anyway, it's the sort of thing that acquires value because it's rare and difficult, and so a civilisation that doesn't have a handle on how globally rare it is will probably not place a particularly high value on it because, frankly, it's hard to distinguish from Silver by sight)

To expand on this, platinum wasn't known to ancient civilizations. Some used it unknowingly because it can be found naturally alloyed with gold.
Platinum is now worth a fortune because it has some unique chemical properties that make it a very efficient catalyst for many chemical reactions. I doubt ancient civilizations would see it as much better than silver. Ancient spaniards purified gold from platinum and then dumped the platinum because it was worthless

GloatingSwine
2019-11-20, 11:27 AM
Ancient spaniards purified gold from platinum and then dumped the platinum because it was worthless

Not quite dumped it.

They used it to counterfeit silver sometimes. It's a lot heavier though so it's not a very good counterfeit.

(Also the 16th century isn't long enough ago to count as ancient yet).

Slipperychicken
2019-11-20, 11:38 AM
The whole "jump through hoops to complete basic buy/sell transactions" thing is just irritating really

If my GM tells us this stuff ("hey these coins aren't good for buying stuff, you know this because you live in the world and use markets") and just wants us to drop off the ancient coins and artifacts with an eccentric nobleman who will pay us in actual money, sure. That makes sense; treasure-hunters have contacts who buy this stuff off of them and move it all into the art/auction/museum ecosystem. This person could even be a questgiver.

If he doesn't tell us anything and thinks he's clever by giving us the runaround ("oh so you presumed you could spend these coins, which I did not signpost as unusable! How arrogant of you! Look how I subvert your expectations! Now you must try to guess what I want!"), then his game isn't going to last long for a variety of reasons.



I like the idea of the party looting an ancient tomb and finding a cash of coins, then trying to spend them only for the merchant to say, “i’m not taking that. what the hell is that?” Eventually the party realizes, “oh man, we have to find an artifact dealer or something!”

This is extremely bad GMing. The PCs, as inhabitants of the world, would know far in advance that the coins are not usable in normal transactions. It'd be like if I found a spanish doubloon or ancient chinese bank-note in my yard; I'd know that I couldn't hand this to the cashier at a supermarket. It's such basic knowledge that a GM should be outright telling the players.

GloatingSwine
2019-11-20, 11:56 AM
If you want to make treasure more interesting, then sure you can describe the wild and wonderful forms it comes in, just be up front with what the value of it is in common coinage.

If you want them to jump through some extra hoops, then you can say "this sort of stuff will be hard to get full value for unless you go to a big city like X".

Which they'll probably want to do.

Which is a good way to get them there for an adventure, if you want.

AdAstra
2019-11-20, 12:37 PM
To expand on this, platinum wasn't known to ancient civilizations. Some used it unknowingly because it can be found naturally alloyed with gold.
Platinum is now worth a fortune because it has some unique chemical properties that make it a very efficient catalyst for many chemical reactions. I doubt ancient civilizations would see it as much better than silver. Ancient spaniards purified gold from platinum and then dumped the platinum because it was worthless

Platinum absolutely was known by some, just by very few groups. Part of the reason why the Spaniards were running across so much platinum is because they were pillaging things from South America, where there was (comparatively) a lot of it. Some of the native peoples were making things out of it (well, technically an alloy of platinum-group metals), as well as platinum-gold alloys.

The Egyptians also used gold that had traces of platinum in it, but that could well have been accidental.

Imbalance
2019-11-20, 03:16 PM
This fits the basic rules for 5e. I had a similar thought, more specifically within the Faerun, that platinum coinage that is discovered as loot is almost exclusively ancient Netherese currency. My reasoning is that, while it's one thing to slice the top off a mountain, flip it over, and build a floating city on the flat side; doing business between cities or to and from the ground is another consideration entirely. No matter if you use flying beasts, airborne craft, or magic disks, if you're regularly traveling the skies and taking money with you it needs to be the lightest kind available. Being precious metal means that platinum coins would have been favorable to hoarders over the millenia, rarely seen by anyone besides collectors and those who rob them.

I've been thinking about handing out actual coins in my campaign, since I seem to have ample spare change lying around. The rub is that some of my players are young children, and I don't want to conflate in-game monetary icons with the real-world values of pennies, nickels, and dimes. On the other hand, if I match the exchange rate there might be educational merit. Does anybody else do this?

LibraryOgre
2019-11-20, 04:17 PM
I think its entirely possible to do this without making the coins a relic. Imagine trying to pay a hot dog vendor in a $100. Even if they had the change for it on hand, theyre still probably not going to take it because it would take everything they had just to break it for you. Same idea here. Most vendors simply don't have the capacity to trade in platinum coins over things that cost silvers.


This actually tracks with the AD&D money system.

So, WD&D went with 1 PP = 10 GP, 1 GP = 10 SP, 1 SP = 1 CP, whereas AD&D (and maybe other TD&D, but I don't know them as well) went 1 PP = 5 GP, 1 GP = 2 EP, 1 GP = 20 SP, 1 SP = 10 CP, which looks really weird... until you do the math. Because in AD&D, Gold was the odd one out. Because in AD&D

1 PP = 10 EP
1 EP = 10 SP
1 SP = 10 CP

Which means, by AD&D numbers, if 1 SP = $1, then an EP is like a $10, and a PP is like $100, and the GP? It's that ubiquitous $20 bill everyone can drop when it's time to split the check.

Aneurin
2019-11-20, 06:46 PM
This is extremely bad GMing. The PCs, as inhabitants of the world, would know far in advance that the coins are not usable in normal transactions. It'd be like if I found a spanish doubloon or ancient chinese bank-note in my yard; I'd know that I couldn't hand this to the cashier at a supermarket. It's such basic knowledge that a GM should be outright telling the players.

But it still works, so long as you accept the idea of adulterated currency. And it's a good motivational hook, that I fully plan on using in my games (though probably not for coinage).

It's "Okay, so you can't redeem these coins for their nominal value here. But you could redeem them for their metal value, which is a lot less. So you can either accept a smaller reward which you get right now, or explore options to make even more money - though possibly at the risk of getting horribly ripped off and/or robbed,"

And yes, not telling the players things that would be common knowledge isn't a nice thing to do. But not telling them things that might not be common knowledge is okay (sometimes) - if you're somewhere that uses a lot of different countries' coins, you might well not think twice about whether anyone would accept a particular kind.

Also, a quest giver that gave them the hook could have lied/been wrong about the vale. Which is another hook - tracking the contact down and expressing their displeasure in person.

King of Nowhere
2019-11-21, 05:46 AM
Anyway, regardless of what the players should be told in advance, forcing them to look for contacts to buy stuff looks nice on paper, but in practie it's a lot of hassle that nobody wants. Not even the dm.

We started that with my party, having to find different shops that dealt in different valuables and haggling all the time. We spent more table time to sell the loot than to adventure.
We gradually simplified, especially since the wizard learned teleportation. It is assumed that after encounters we'd spend a couple days teleporting through major cities and selling in various shops. The dm himself grew tired of keeping track of all the merchant in the various cities

GloatingSwine
2019-11-21, 06:06 AM
Anyway, regardless of what the players should be told in advance, forcing them to look for contacts to buy stuff looks nice on paper, but in practie it's a lot of hassle that nobody wants. Not even the dm.

We started that with my party, having to find different shops that dealt in different valuables and haggling all the time. We spent more table time to sell the loot than to adventure.
We gradually simplified, especially since the wizard learned teleportation. It is assumed that after encounters we'd spend a couple days teleporting through major cities and selling in various shops. The dm himself grew tired of keeping track of all the merchant in the various cities

Yeah, that level of granularity is pretty much not helpful.

Because what are you going to do as a GM if the players just keep looking forever? Say no forever?

No, you're not. You're going to let them sell the loot in the end.

It's enough to say "You'll need to be in a city X big to sell this", with no other obstacles.

Jay R
2019-11-21, 11:01 AM
Your solution also raises the question of why this older civilization uses platinum coins, and why people stopped using them. Which can be interesting in its own right, but is something else that should probably have an answer.

1. Because they had a big platinum mine.

2. Because it was taken over by a dragon, who is now sitting on a large treasure with lots of platinum.

These kinds of questions aren’t problems; they’re plot hooks.

Quizatzhaderac
2019-11-21, 12:15 PM
I'd agree very much that you shouldn't use the players meta knowledge as a trap. Give them platinum and tell them what the characters know about platinum, or give them mysterious silver-ish coins. Whoever the buyer is, make it clear (including, "clearly nobody you know" as clear) and have a narrative goal in mind.

One narrative goal not mentioned here is maybe you want extra control of when the players wealth increases. They could stumble upon a hoard of platinum coins at point A (Where it makes sense to find it, like an already looted dungeon with all the "real" treasure taken) but then only find a buyer at point B (Like after doing something that wouldn't sensically produce treasure).

Willie the Duck
2019-11-21, 01:03 PM
Anyway, regardless of what the players should be told in advance, forcing them to look for contacts to buy stuff looks nice on paper, but in practie it's a lot of hassle that nobody wants. Not even the dm.

I don't know, back in the TSR days of gp=xp, figuring out how to liquidate all the weird foreign currencies and objects d'art and such made the process richer than a simple 'go into dungeon, get gold, haul it back to town.' However, this does bring up a good point: We already have a thing that serves the purpose that the OP is suggesting for platinum -- gems, jewelry, and art objects.

Jay R
2019-11-21, 01:38 PM
The proof is in the pudding.

If FabulousFizban can make a fun game this way, then great. There are ten thousand ideas that worked well in one DM's world and poorly in another's.

We've laid out the potential problems. Now run a game that avoids those problems and increases the challenges, roleplay, and interest of your players -- even if I don't know how to make it work for my players.

Rebonack
2019-11-22, 08:42 PM
This topic made me realize just how silly the idea of platinum coins are in the first place. No one in the ancient world ever used them, really.

But it occurs to me that if you're wanting to go for the 'currency of ancient lost civilization' vibe, there's an absolutely perfect metal for that.

Aluminum.

Before modern industrialization the stuff was considered more valuable than gold due to how rare native aluminum was; the technology didn't exist to smelt it yet.

But for some extinct lost civilization? Sure, they figured out how to smelt aluminum and used it for their money since it's plentiful and light weight. As an added bonus, it can be melted down to make crazy-light equipment that never rusts. Sure it isn't quite as tough as steel, but it's got some nice upsides as well.

Jay R
2019-11-22, 09:20 PM
If I were looking for a metal to make extremely valuable coins out of in a fantasy game, I would use mithril1. It is already known to be more valuable than gold.

——-
1 Yes, I am using Tolkien’s spelling, not the spelling D&D uses to pretend they aren’t copying his intellectual property.

Xervous
2019-11-25, 08:57 AM
On the topic of mithril (and let’s toss in adamantium for good measure) where do people place its processing difficulty at? Steel and platinum were beyond the reach of civilizations that couldn’t produce the temperatures required. In your head canon where does the barrier occur, melting point, chemical processing, magic?

Lord Torath
2019-11-25, 09:35 AM
On the topic of mithril (and let’s toss in adamantium for good measure) where do people place its processing difficulty at? Steel and platinum were beyond the reach of civilizations that couldn’t produce the temperatures required. In your head canon where does the barrier occur, melting point, chemical processing, magic?2E had a Crucible of Melting, which would melt any object you placed in it on command. So I'd say the limiting factor almost has to be chemical processes.

On the other hand, there's the psionic power Chemical Simulation, which lets you create chemicals (acids are specified, but you could probably create other chemicals) from your fingertips, and the 1st level wizard spell Metamphose Liquids for mass production of said chemicals (assuming you cast "Protection from Chemicals" on yourself first, since you must place a drop of the chemical you want to create on your tongue as part of the spell).

Jay R
2019-11-25, 09:42 AM
On the topic of mithril (and let’s toss in adamantium for good measure) where do people place its processing difficulty at? Steel and platinum were beyond the reach of civilizations that couldn’t produce the temperatures required. In your head canon where does the barrier occur, melting point, chemical processing, magic?

In the last game I DMed, they would never find any mithril that wasn’t already armor or a weapon, so the question didn’t exist.

Several years ago, I was in a game in which my character discovered a mithril mine. I needed to develop lost abilities in order to work it, and the game died while I was getting there. [The DM moved away.]

If I were running a game right now, it would require specialized knowledge, possibly restricted to dwarves.

It might also require either magical or dragon fire — whatever I had a good adventure built around.

[Hmmm.... There’s an idea. In the dragon’s hoard, a large pile of melted slag is discovered. Perhaps only dragon fire can smelt mithril from rock, but now any elite weaponsmith can work it.]

Xervous
2019-11-25, 10:49 AM
[Hmmm.... There’s an idea. In the dragon’s hoard, a large pile of melted slag is discovered. Perhaps only dragon fire can smelt mithril from rock, but now any elite weaponsmith can work it.]

Tempt the mind and it will wander... what if it’s a chemical process that occurs naturally in some magical beast and the old civilizations force fed the beasts to process the metal but a disease wiped the critters out...

ezekielraiden
2019-11-25, 11:47 AM
so platinum is usually just used as a weigh to reduce weight. why carry 500GP (ten pounds of gold!) when i can carry 50P (1 pound) instead.

I had a different idea for its use. i wanted to give my campaign setting a sense of depth, of history. so i had the idea to use platinum as the currency of an older kingdom. Think if you went treasure hunting and found a cache of roman coins: to a collector these would quite valuable, but the average business isn’t going to accept them as payment.

I like the idea of the party looting an ancient tomb and finding a cash of coins, then trying to spend them only for the merchant to say, “i’m not taking that. what the hell is that?” Eventually the party realizes, “oh man, we have to find an artifact dealer or something!”

It places an extra barrier between the party and their money, but creates great gameplay opportunities in my experience.

the first session i presented this idea in, the party immediately started trying to spend their treasure in town and no one would take it. they had to go around and find someone who actually wanted it and could afford it. thus it became quickly known in the town they were in that this group of people was carrying around a small fortune in ancient artifacts. this attracted the attention of other adventurers who thought they could score an easy pay day by stealing the PCs loot. So I got another adventure out of the first adventure: the PCs trying to protect their loot from other adventurers while finding somewhere to sell it.

I’ve found nothing gets a party hotter than when somebody else steals their loot.

I did a similar sort of thing (artifact coinage, rather than regular coins) with my group's first foray. They were digging up some very old ruins out in the desert, and along the way they came across a moderately-sized sack of coins. But these were old coins. Really, really old coins. Possibly a couple thousand years old. In theory they could have used those coins as regular legal tender, but they would get easily 10x their nominal value by seeking a collector or antique trader. They had to take a trip to another nearby city as antique dealers in the big city weren't available at the time (this, on reflection, may have been a dumb move on my part but I was a nearly-new DM so oh well). This led to other adventures and clues. It was a great way for the players to feel like the world had depth and complexity, and that they needed to really think about the treasure they found and what it might be worth--or, more importantly, whom it might be worth the most to.

Jay R
2019-11-25, 10:15 PM
Tempt the mind and it will wander... what if it’s a chemical process that occurs naturally in some magical beast and the old civilizations force fed the beasts to process the metal but a disease wiped the critters out...

The dwarves have spent centuries trying to find out how to get mithril out of the ore this creature eats.

All in vain, because the creature’s stomach is a portal to another plane. The dwarves can’t get it out of that ore because it isn’t there.

False God
2019-11-25, 11:59 PM
The dwarves have spent centuries trying to find out how to get mithril out of the ore this creature eats.

All in vain, because the creature’s stomach is a portal to another plane. The dwarves can’t get it out of that ore because it isn’t there.

So, you're saying that the party needs to find a while to simultaneously flay the creature open while also keeping it alive, and if they do so, they'll have a sustained portal to another plane, AND access to a ton of mithril?

I've played with some fairly disturbing players.

Jay R
2019-11-26, 12:19 AM
So, you're saying that the party needs to find a while to simultaneously flay the creature open while also keeping it alive, and if they do so, they'll have a sustained portal to another plane, AND access to a ton of mithril?

I've played with some fairly disturbing players.

No, I was following Xervous’s idea that the creatures are already extinct, and concluding that it is impossible to get more mithril now. That’s part of why it’s so valuable.

If I set up a world in which the creature is still alive, I would make it impossible to get mithril by cutting it open. Frankly, I think that’s as foolish as cutting open the goose that lays golden eggs, to get the gold.

You have a mithril-generating machine. Why change that fact?