Trade Bars

Leohand · Post by **Leohand** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 3:26 am

In the book, Thornhold, I read that in addition to your basic coins, there are also trade bare in FR. Have we ever considered using something like that as currency?

One silver trade bar, I believe, was worth 1000 silver. I'm not sure how much one platinum or gold trade bar would be though. It's just a thought.

Kirkus · Post by **Kirkus** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 3:30 pm

I know it has been brought up before. I think, but I am no expert, but that might be a pretty hefty change to a very large system. The really cool thing I found was that most large cities have their own kinds of coins. And so a waterdeep coin wouldn't be worth as much in Silverymoon as in Waterdeep and so on. But yeah just adding trade bars would be nice.

Leohand · Post by **Leohand** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:18 pm

Even if they just added, say, gold trade bars and platinum trade bars, and set the values at, say, 10 platinum and 50 platinum, it would in character make carrying large amounts of money more reasonable, for a money pouch, at least. You can fit so much money in those little pouches, certainly more then you could 'realistically' fit inside.

It was just a thought, and I won't push it more then that, I just didn't know if anyone had thought it up.

Kregor · Post by **Kregor** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:34 pm

Thing is, with a mineral-based currency system, coingage, trade bars and their values were based on weight. If you have a 50 gold piece trade bar, it will be 50 gp worth of gold, hence, it will weight just as much as the 50 gp. The purpose of the trade bars is just to make transport easier for the merchants who would deal in large volumes of coin.

Japcil · Post by **Japcil** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:45 pm

Why not use smelted ore as trade bars. Then to convert them to coins the bars must be taken to a certain merchants guild that has the "proper stamp" to make the coins this way we dont end up with every smelter in the kingdoms making their own coins.

Leohand · Post by **Leohand** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:54 pm

Kregor wrote:Thing is, with a mineral-based currency system, coingage, trade bars and their values were based on weight. If you have a 50 gold piece trade bar, it will be 50 gp worth of gold, hence, it will weight just as much as the 50 gp. The purpose of the trade bars is just to make transport easier for the merchants who would deal in large volumes of coin.

I see. So those silver trade bars that were said to be worth 1000 silver coins also would have weighed as much as 1000 silver coins? I see. Perhaps, then, there should be a place to exchange coin for trade bars, but only in the merchants guild? Well, that would probably be tough to code in though. Well, it was an idea. A bad one, maybe, but an idea still.

Japcil · Post by **Japcil** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:58 pm

Leohand the coding part really isnt that hard. Its only a few programs on a few mobs to exchange the coin for the bars.

When we make suggestions, lets not worry about the coding for the suggestion. If it is a good suggestion then no one will mind making the effort to change the code.

If it was decided off of difficulty of code change I don't think we would have had the new spell system ever.