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Repair Shop Morgue: Unclear Description: Cheap Gold Coins
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Unclear Description: Cheap Gold Coins get usage counts 
edited 4th Sep '12 12:38:58 AM by spacemarine50  No, the other one.
I don't see a significant problem with the trope.
A laconic would be something like what the title is. "Gold coins are cheap."
Gold coins are generally used as a currency in fantasy, where modern currencies don't exist. However, with a lack of research about how much a gold coin at that age would actually be worth, most creators use equivalent numerical values for whatever currency exists in their own country. That means they will use a higher number than what they would if they used the actual value of goldnote . It's not really more complicated than that.
One justification could be that gold is simply much more common in that world, but that's rarely the actual case.
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No, the other one.
I think Ridiculous Future Inflation is related. This is about an implied "inflation" of the past gold value. Not exactly an inflation, but it's a related concept.
Worthless Yellow Rocks is much more tangentally related, since at most it's a similar concept Up to Eleven, but has more to do with ignorance or simply explicitly different values (both cultural and material).
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 Fight It Out!
The main issue I see with the page, and it's a minor one, is that several examples compare with Real Life gold costs when the setting is explicitly not real life. Like the Dungeons & Dragons example.
A simple dagger costs two gold pieces. According to the Player's Handbook v.3.5 gold pieces are a third of an ounce. The current price of gold is over $1600 per ounce, which means that a simple dagger is worth about a grand.
Yeah... but your talking of a world where gold isn't nearly the most precious thing around, magic exists (including transmutation magic), and dollars do not. So whats the point?
No, the other one.
As I mentioned before, albeit just in a note, the actual price has varied a lot over the ages. In Fantasy, this is likely to vary a lot more. It is, however, rarely justified to the extent that a a gold piece would only be worth half as much as a dagger. Unless it was a Finely Crafted Dagger.
The actual current price of gold is irrelevant, and quite likely wrong in the context of the example.
Edit: I made a few small edits to the examples regarding this.
edited 4th Sep '12 6:03:17 AM by AnotherDuck Check out my fanfiction!
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edited 4th Sep '12 8:04:16 AM by zarpaulus Fight It Out!
@escher
And a normal 10ft chain is worth 5 gp more than a spiked 10ft chain. And a 10 foot pole cost more than a 10 foot wooden ladder made of 2 such poles. Leading to the much laughed scheme of players disassembling ladders for a profit.
Yeah, D&D economy is all sorts of fucked up. But that's beside the point, it still was an example of the trope. Just that the RL disgression is kind of meaningless.
(As for the feeding thing. 1 lb of wheat or a chicken is worth 1/10 of a silver (A copper). Meaning a laborer feeds himself and his family by making bread. (Then one wonders why a chicken is worth as much as a much lesser amount of grain than the one needed to raise said chicken, but that's another story).)
Though back on the example, it looks much better now.
edited 4th Sep '12 2:21:46 PM by Ghilz  even older skool
It strikes me that this may frequently be a form of Artistic License - Economics as well as perhaps The Coconut Effect. Gold-as-currency is a rather common aspect of the Standard Fantasy Setting (although not mentioned on that page), and it seems plausible that this is largely a result of writers that simply expect the audience to equate "gold = currency". Perhaps a sentence or two to this effect in the description could smooth over some of the issues with the page? The examples don't seem overly problematic, beyond perhaps a little arbitrary nitpicking and selective use of real-world history to blow things out of proportion.
 Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
No, the other one.
What would be a cause for renaming it, then? I don't think that name would increase the usage, which is probably the worst problem the trope has now. Properly crosswicking would do a lot more for its visibility. And it's not really misused in a way that the trope name would be to blame.
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 Another Wizard Boy
There are very little work examples, so crosswicking is definitively an issue. A rename won't help, methinks. It's rather straightforward, I think.
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(As for the feeding thing. 1 lb of wheat or a chicken is worth 1/10 of a silver (A copper). Meaning a laborer feeds himself and his family by making bread. (Then one wonders why a chicken is worth as much as a much lesser amount of grain than the one needed to raise said chicken, but that's another story).)
Obviously they don't grow chickens all year on valuable human food, but rather scraps, weeds from the garden, and whatever bugs and small animals they can catch in their pen/in the yard.
edited 6th Sep '12 11:21:34 AM by peccantis before the darkness arrives
 Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Another Wizard Boy
If that is the definition of the trope, it surely needs a rewrite - the current definition doesn't look like Fantastic Gold Standard at all.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
edited 8th Sep '12 4:14:05 PM by spacemarine50
Total posts: 31
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