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Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Gold Coin sizes

How big is my gold coin?

It's a question that dates back pretty far in gaming, not the least of which is because D&D came along with 10 gold coins to the pound. A nice, heft, 1.6 oz hunk of gold that you expected to find, and dispose of, in the thousands.

But how big are they?

There was an article in Dragon Magazine, issue #80, which took a look at it.

"How Many Coins in My Coffer?" by David F. Godwin

In that article, the author came up with this for AD&D gold coins:

Weight: 0.1 lb. = 1.6 ounces = 45.36 grams
Diameter: 1 1/2" = 3.81 cm
Thickness: 0.1" = 0.254 cm = 2.54 mm
Volume: 0.177 cubic inch = 2.9 cc
Specific gravity: 15.66

I also recently stumbled across this chart:

Gold Coin Size Chart

I'm not sure how accurate it is for real-world use, but it could be useful for gaming. There are a lot of coin sizes each with gold purity, weight in ounces and grams, diameter, and thickness. It's probably not too hard to find a coin of the same size, and something of the same weight, for a chance to see and feel the size of the coins in your game.

Felltower's gold coins are 250/pound, which makes them fairly small - 0.064 ounces, and probably ~14mm diameter and 1.4mm thick. See, I probably should have gone for 50/pound like I've thought in retrospect.

8 comments:

  1. 1. AD&D 2e went 50 gp/pound.
    2. There was another really good article about this in issue 167 of Dragon, "Just Give Me Money!" by Peter Trueman, p. 62.

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  2. One thing I've done more and more is make hoards out of nonstandard stuff. That ancient dragon has a lot of ancient coins, gewgaws, and items. (100,000 adulterated falushin shekels, a Lorica +2 and a flaming khopesh!) The forgotten fane is full of amazing art about a deity that is so outlawed that you are legally required to destroy it. Those caravan raiders have a hoard of heavy trade goods. ($70,000 worth of cheese!)

    This is evocative, fun, and leads to interesting logistics. (Sir, the bearers have eaten 40% of the cheese and we're being followed by every giant rat in the tri-Duchy area!)

    Then I abstract the infuriating minutia of categorizing and selling it to a few merchant and connoisseur (etc.) rolls, because very few folks want to play Dungeon Pawn Stars.

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    Replies
    1. I do similar things, too, but I still like to know how big the coins are.

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  3. Adventurer Conqueror King had a similar suggestion to replace blocks of coinage with goods and other valuables.

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  4. There's a lot of historical gold coin out there that seems to come in at the 4-8 grams per coin range. That is... about 55 to 115 per pound.

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    Replies
    1. That's a size I think would work better for me, given my experience so far with smaller coins.

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  5. I can't believe I didn't see this post when it first went up, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that DFT1 addresses the "how big are coins" question in some detail, with tables, formulae, and SMs.

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