Microblog: Gold Coins, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down
In the predominant strains of DIY elf games, gold coins are the currency par excellence and often the most player-facing mode of advancement. In such games, gold coins are usually quite heavy and not very valuable. I am perpetually vexed by the way this clashes with how gold has worked throughout practically all of human history, where gold coins were usually small and fairly precious.
There are a number of solutions to this paradox, and none of them are particularly satisfying because so much of the creative infrastructure of the OSR seems to be built on TSR-era math designed for gameplay rather than verisimilitude. Tweaking encumbrance rules or price lists can help a bit with suspension of disbelief, but these changes don't address the fact that a level 2 character in most OSR games has accumulated the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in valuables.
The nuclear option is to devalue currency, using a silver or even copper standard to slow down the PCs' stratospheric acquisition of wealth. The problem with this is that it's kind of lame: it is more exciting to encounter a dragon with a hoard of 60,000 gold pieces than 600 (or 60,000 pathetic copper pieces).
Our reach for gold exceeds our grasp of it. When you picture Smaug's hoard, you are imagining millions of gold coins, an amount that cannot be realistically placed into any economy, no matter how speculative. Ultimately, the issue is one of disenchantment: we engage with gold because we are fascinated by it, but the more we engage with it, the more trivial and mundane it becomes.