4e:Small Change
Copper, silver and gold pieces are the basic currency of D&D. With most everything being priced in gold with the exception of minor trinkets, copper and silver coins don't see much use within any given adventure or campaign. That means that player characters must deal with large sums of gold coins, with even relatively low-level magic items being worth thousands. The following are a set of house rules to give some more weight to treasure, and give some actual use to copper/silver coins.
Rebalancing Value
As standard, there are ten copper pieces to a silver piece, and ten silver pieces to a gold piece, meaning one hundred copper pieces to a gold piece. It is akin to a simple decimal coinage system: 10 cents to a dime, 10 dimes to a dollar, thus 100 cents to a dollar.
To make this less weighted towards gold coins, increase the ratio: 100 cp to 1 sp, 100 sp to 1 gp.
| Before | After | ||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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In short, every price listed in gp is now sp, and every price listed in sp is now x10 cp. All two items with a price listed in cp (candles and empty flasks) remain as they were.
A level 10 magic item, formerly 5,000 gp, is now 50 gp. A level 30 magic item, formerly 3,125,000 gp, is now 31,250 gp. Player characters will be dealing with less bulk coinage overall.
Revised Currency Table
| ———————————— Exchange Value ———————————— | ||||||
| Monetary Unit | cp | sp | gp | pp | ad | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copper piece (cp) | 1 | 1/100 | 1/10,000 | 1/1,000,000 | 1/100,000,000 | 1/50 lb. |
| Silver piece (sp) | 100 | 1 | 1/100 | 1/10,000 | 1/1,000,000 | 1/50 lb. |
| Gold piece (gp) | 10,000 | 100 | 1 | 1/100 | 1/10,000 | 1/50 lb. |
| Platinum piece (pp) | 1,000,000 | 10,000 | 100 | 1 | 1/100 | 1/50 lb. |
| Astral diamond (ad) | 100,000,000 | 1,000,000 | 10,000 | 100 | 1 | 1/500 lb. |
