The Copper Standard

Now, a new proposal: moving to a Copper Standard in coinage.

A small bag of gold pieces is nearly worthless. You can't buy much with one. People have recognized this and moved to a silver standard for pricing and for XP. In my own Treasure Hunters Prolix, we use tin farthings, copper pennies, silver shillings, gold pounds and gold crowns, where shillings are the unit of basic measurement. The denominations are in the old LSP money more or less (even though there were very few pound coins ever minted in real life and the five-pound sterling coin is speculative at best.)

But that still leaves silver nearly worthless and requires vast amounts of gold to buy anything of substance. On the other end, copper pennies are basically a trap. Worse than worthless by weight. In fact, considering the value copper pieces have in D&D, there would be no economic reason to mine copper in the first place!

So let's take the valuations and recalibrate them again. 1 cp becomes our basic unit measuring price, replacing the gold piece. 10 cp = 1 sp; and 10 sp = 1 gp.

Furthermore so we can more easily imagine what the coins are actually worth, we will imagine that 1 copper piece has the same buying power as 1USD ($1). Then we can clearly see a dinner in the inn might cost 2sp and a nice suit of plate armor might cost 120gp with all the bells and whistles, while you could get a beat suit off the rack for maybe 40gp - the same price as a medium war horse. 

There's folks online that are working on the copper standard and other folks who have good price lists from various times and places written up in modern money. Putting two such resources together should yield a great alternative monetary system and price list for all manner of gear. This list will have the advantage of having prices that are easy to grasp. The system will have the advantage of making all coins valuable. 

The thing we will have to adjust is the treasure tables and treasure amounts in the dungeon, and the XP for treasure: 1 cp = 1 XP now.

 CONCLUSION

Writing this post and getting some feedback from folks has helped me understand the matter better and really get to the root of what I'm trying to do here.

1) I want to get rid of the "worthless" money. In the mid- to late-levels, even gold is worthless.  The things that have value require an infeasible number of coins. Scrooge MacDuck swimming pool amounts of coins.  

How we do this is "move the decimal point." Make copper the coin of the Realm instead of gold. Make each kind of coin worth 100x as much as it does now. This necessitates two critical adjustments however.

a) award XP for copper pieces. 1cp = 1 XP. and

b) reduce the numbers of each coin by a factor of 100. Otherwise the players would have access to 100x more buying power!

2) The second thing I want to do, now that the money system makes more sense and the cash economy doesn't require porters lugging wheelbarrows around to buy loaves of bread is to re-set the values of common staples of both everyday life and of the adventuring life. This should be relatively easy now that we can see a clear relationship between the copper penny and the USD. Even if you live in some strange foreign land such as California, you should have some idea what 1 USD can buy.

By finding good information, usually secondary sources of historical prices, you could even set "realistic" medieval prices for gear for the era your campaign tries to emulate. Or you could eyeball everything, it's up to you. I bet there's even guys online somewhere who have already written such lists out, that you can take them and tweak them like you like.

One more note: if you need to keep crappy little coins as well, try out the tin farthing. A farthing is 1/4 cp.  It was struck and minted in medieval England because a pitcher of beer sold for four to a penny, some lightweights didn't want to buy four pitchers of beer at one time.