Give Money Weight

This is a great tip for virtual worlds with a pre-Victorian era setting.

If you have 100,000 gold pieces, that’s a lot of gold. Post-1982 U.S. 1 cent coins (pennies) weigh 2.5g; 100,000 of them would weigh 250kg, or about 550lbs. Coin quality gold is about 2.5 times denser than electroplated zinc. Moving that kind of mass is not easy without cheating physics.

When coin has weight, the act of transporting it is non-trivial. Someone who is rich in one city is not so rich in another. A local economy can therefore flourish because players can’t easily transport enough coin there to undermine it. It leads to a more stable overall economy. Objects genuinely do have different values in different places, and a career as a merchant suddenly becomes a possibility. Although giving coin weight gets in the way of trade, it also makes trade more interesting; it gives it gameplay elements that it didn’t have before.

Players can carry high-value items such as gems instead of coin, of course, but gems are like multiple currencies. Rubies are worth more in places far from ruby mines, and then only if PCs or NPCs actually have a use for them. You might be able to convert from coin to gems, but where you’re going you may find you can’t convert back, or that if you do you get a different amount of gold ¹.

A corollary to this is: No banks, no banknotes. For any world in a pre-renaissance setting, this is historically accurate; for any other world set prior to about 1900, it’s inaccurate for the very wealthy but is fine for the general population (who never saw banknotes nor visited banks). In Fantasy virtual worlds, banks are basically there as a convenience for players, acting as money teleports: You pay cash into one and withdraw it out of another. They’re effectively ATMs, and as such are somewhat out of place. It’s hard to imagine Gandalf visiting a bank in Lord of the Rings; likewise, it’s hard to imagine Elrond paying for a horse with a banknote.