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Friday, November 9, 2012

Breaking Down Metal Prices

Once in a while I get these questions in my head that I can't shake.  The one that's been bouncing around in my head had been price values of different metals.  Since I use a silver standard in my game I'm wondering how many 1oz silver pieces would be equivalent to a 1oz gold piece using today's prices?

Google research time.  I found at the time of my search gold is selling for $1730.50/oz.  Wow.  But then I watch shows like Gold Rush and think about how much they have to spend to get at the gold.  What a pain. Current silver prices are at $32.58/oz.  Wow again.  What a gigantic divide between values.  Using today's it would take 53.11 silver pieces to equal one gold.

I can see using this in game.  Round it to an even 50 silver and it makes for easy conversions.  Here's why I like using the silver standard.  It makes gold valuable.  When you make gold the standard it devalues the silver.  Since I only use a 3 metal coin system for sanity sake it makes sense to make silver the standard.

ERROR FOUND and Fixed...I think
Now let's take a look at the lowly copper piece.  The given price for copper is in pounds not ounces.  For one pound of copper you'll get handed $3.43 which works out to about .21cents/oz.  It would take 155 copper to make a silver.  I would round it again to 150.

So using today's metal prices the conversion rate would look like this.



Copper
Silver
Gold
Copper
1
1/150
1/7500
Silver
1/150
1
1/50
Gold
1/7500
50
1


Let's say you like platinum in you game.  When I looked up its price I found something surprising for a gamer who always thought platinum was 5x more valuable than gold.  Not so.  Today's market will write you a check for $1559.40/oz.  Almost $200 less than gold.  Oh how the lofty have fallen.  That means platinum is only worth 47.86 silver pieces.  Over five silver less than gold.  Do I really need two metals that are almost the same value?  Not really.  So platinum gets the boot.  Maybe make it the 'gold' of another land.  Who knows.

And for my final calculation I thought it would be interesting to see how much tin, coal and iron ore are going for.  I think those are the three mines I usually set up in my game.  The prices in metric tons.  Tin came out way fricking ahead at $23,233.70/metric ton (for those unaware like me, a metric ton is about 2200 pounds).  Which gives it a price of $1056.07/lb and $66/oz.  Tin is more than twice the value of silver.

Coal comes in at $81.44/metric ton.  About 4 cents a pound.  And an ounce is not worth bending over to pick up.

Iron Ore is valued at $113.95/metric ton.  You can get a 5 cents/pound and again for an ounce it might be better to kick with your shoe.

I'm not sure exactly how knowing this will help me the the development of my campaign world, but its good to have a baseline.  Because it is a fantasy medieval setting I am thinking the prices for coal and iron would be high and the tin lower.  Either way what it shows me is tin barons would be hell of a lot wealthier than their coal counter parts.  Just interesting I think.

If anyone sees a problem with my math let me know.  As I've said.  I used the prices of the moment.  Since I wrote this gold went up to $1731.

11 comments:

  1. I'm glad it was you doing all that math and not me. :)

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  2. Ha, I bet Trey. Boris has got to be good at math to keep track of how many shells he has left.

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  3. Okay, so it's not just me that thinks about this stuff then?

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  4. I think this is super cool -- it could actually become the basis not just for economics, but for adventures too. Guild X wants those caves explored for veins of such and such; Guild Y is raiding Guild X's storehouses; Guild Z is trying to outbid Guild Y to become the iron supplier for the king's armories; meanwhile some unscrupulous merchant is manipulating the markets, and some rival wants him assassinated, etc.

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  5. Scary Bard, that is exactly what brews in my head when I see that.

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  6. Nice. I've been thinking about replacing platinum with mithral.

    Long live the silver standard!

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  7. Bear in mind, modern prices are very much skewed because people have been buying gold like crazy because of all the debt most of the Western world is in.

    It would be better to look at a time where the world was on a gold standard, as opposed to fiat money.

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  8. I agree with Jeremy. Modern prices are horrifically skewed in comparison to the middle ages.

    The high price of tin compared to iron is based on both supply and demand. Tin is used for electrical solder and to plate steel to make cans for food (both high demand activities at the moment). Iron is far more common than tin too (Iron is the 4th most common element in the earth's crust and tin the 49th).

    It might be interesting to look at the living wage you want a farm laborer to have and go from there.

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  9. I found a site with all sorts of historical charts and data of precious metal prices. Could be useful to y'all...

    http://www.kitco.com/charts/

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  10. Cool! I, too, use a silver standard. I also like the idea of looking at historic prices over time.

    Also, minting coins at different masses allows a GM to rationally defend any conversion value they want in their game.

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