OK, maybe let's ask about it from another side since many people mentioned it. Assuming there is no need for the second coin type at all (there are no these small wares), would you, as a player, still want it for the immersion purpose (the game is advertised the way it indicates increased level or realism/immersion)?[/quote]

I'm not sure exactly why but I have always preferred games with more than one currency. Theres something satisfying about moving from say copper to silver and finally gold. I don't really get the same sense of achievement from having yet another 100 gold in my bank. As for immersion? I do find it more believable (thats is having at least a secondary coin) because its what I'm used to when handling money in real life.

Any multi-precious-metal-coinage currency system must include Electrum or it's dead to me.

Anyway, if you wanted to be simple, you really could have an undivided currency. Japan uses the Yen, and that's its only currency (at least in common usage. I don't think they have a wonky, esoteric subdivision lurking anywhere). 80-ish Yen is about a dollar, so it's really not that bad a way to do a currency. This would not be wholly accurate in a medieval European setting, but it would be simpler.

Conversely, you could do currency by weight. Determine the price for an ounce of gold, and base the currency around that. Then you could have your characters carry around gold via its weight rather than discrete pieces, allowing for fractional quantities without breaking immersion. Just rationalize that you're splitting gold pieces as needed, and merchants are re-smelting them back into coins behind the scenes. Graphically represent things as piles of gold coins or little piles of gold dust/chips when the wallet starts getting bare.

Other thoughts are to have bank notes without automatic conversions. You go to a bank, you plunk down 10k gold pieces, they give you a note for 10k gold pieces. That could be traded for goods directly, assuming something cost 10k, or you could go to a bank and claim 10k gold pieces from them. This would be a far more realistic approach if you didn't have a magic heavy world to accomodate for instant transmission of knowledge (and thus banking networks with unified account balances like we now have).

Of course, this can all get very annoying for the player if money is too cumbersome to handle. Potentially. It could also be an interesting part of the game (I thought, in some way, currency having weight in EQ was interesting). However, you probably want to avoid goofy shit like players dumping mountains of gold on the ground because they'd become too overencumbered to act if they actually picked up money off of mobs.

Any multi-precious-metal-coinage currency system must include Electrum or it's dead to me.

Anyway, if you wanted to be simple, you really could have an undivided currency. Japan uses the Yen, and that's its only currency (at least in common usage. I don't think they have a wonky, esoteric subdivision lurking anywhere). 80-ish Yen is about a dollar, so it's really not that bad a way to do a currency. This would not be wholly accurate in a medieval European setting, but it would be simpler.

Conversely, you could do currency by weight. Determine the price for an ounce of gold, and base the currency around that. Then you could have your characters carry around gold via its weight rather than discrete pieces, allowing for fractional quantities without breaking immersion. Just rationalize that you're splitting gold pieces as needed, and merchants are re-smelting them back into coins behind the scenes. Graphically represent things as piles of gold coins or little piles of gold dust/chips when the wallet starts getting bare.

Other thoughts are to have bank notes without automatic conversions. You go to a bank, you plunk down 10k gold pieces, they give you a note for 10k gold pieces. That could be traded for goods directly, assuming something cost 10k, or you could go to a bank and claim 10k gold pieces from them. This would be a far more realistic approach if you didn't have a magic heavy world to accomodate for instant transmission of knowledge (and thus banking networks with unified account balances like we now have).

Of course, this can all get very annoying for the player if money is too cumbersome to handle. Potentially. It could also be an interesting part of the game (I thought, in some way, currency having weight in EQ was interesting). However, you probably want to avoid goofy shit like players dumping mountains of gold on the ground because they'd become too overencumbered to act if they actually picked up money off of mobs.

Ultima Online had gold with weight determining how much you could carry. They eventually added checks. "Check 100000" and if you had 100,000 gold coins(the only currency type) a check for 100,000 would be placed in your inventory/bank. These checks weighed the least amount of typical items so you could easily carry large amounts of gold in check form.

[quote name='PropheticEdge' timestamp='1317342742' post='4867409']
Any multi-precious-metal-coinage currency system must include Electrum or it's dead to me.

Anyway, if you wanted to be simple, you really could have an undivided currency. Japan uses the Yen, and that's its only currency (at least in common usage. I don't think they have a wonky, esoteric subdivision lurking anywhere). 80-ish Yen is about a dollar, so it's really not that bad a way to do a currency. This would not be wholly accurate in a medieval European setting, but it would be simpler.

Conversely, you could do currency by weight. Determine the price for an ounce of gold, and base the currency around that. Then you could have your characters carry around gold via its weight rather than discrete pieces, allowing for fractional quantities without breaking immersion. Just rationalize that you're splitting gold pieces as needed, and merchants are re-smelting them back into coins behind the scenes. Graphically represent things as piles of gold coins or little piles of gold dust/chips when the wallet starts getting bare.

Other thoughts are to have bank notes without automatic conversions. You go to a bank, you plunk down 10k gold pieces, they give you a note for 10k gold pieces. That could be traded for goods directly, assuming something cost 10k, or you could go to a bank and claim 10k gold pieces from them. This would be a far more realistic approach if you didn't have a magic heavy world to accomodate for instant transmission of knowledge (and thus banking networks with unified account balances like we now have).

Of course, this can all get very annoying for the player if money is too cumbersome to handle. Potentially. It could also be an interesting part of the game (I thought, in some way, currency having weight in EQ was interesting). However, you probably want to avoid goofy shit like players dumping mountains of gold on the ground because they'd become too overencumbered to act if they actually picked up money off of mobs.

Ultima Online had gold with weight determining how much you could carry. They eventually added checks. "Check 100000" and if you had 100,000 gold coins(the only currency type) a check for 100,000 would be placed in your inventory/bank. These checks weighed the least amount of typical items so you could easily carry large amounts of gold in check form.
[/quote]

Ahhhhh, cool! I didn't play much of UO, never saw the checks thing. Could you cash them back into gold?

My main realistic suggestions is to avoid generic names ("silver pieces", "gold pieces" etc.), not only because multiple coins can share the same metal, and even the same value, but to implement a system of actual coins and conventional units that have proper names, practical roles, precise relations and interesting stories.

For example, medieval England had silver pennies, silver halfpennies and silver farthings, not "silver coins". Shillings worth 12 pennies and pounds worth 20 shillings were natural and meaningful accounting multiples (pounds were one pound of silver); farthings worth 1/4 of a penny were the smallest subdivision normally needed; foreign gold florins worth 6 shillings were the right size for gold coins, and suitable for hoarding and large-scale trade.

Later English coins show typical flavorful complications:

• inflation, causing the appearance of silver shillings and a number of 5, 10, 20, 30... shilling gold coins;
• gold value fluctuations, leading to varying exchange rates between silver and gold coins and, particularly, gold guineas settling at 21 shillings rather than 20 as originally intended and surviving actual coinage as a traditional accounting unit;
• novel coin denominations, often short-lived, worth strange multiples of a penny, or with the same value as existing ones.

You know what would be interesting? Letting players mint their own money.

Select the material, select the mass, make a coin out of it. Name it when you make it, too, and see what happens. Eventually you might see popular coinage types (crowns contain 8 ounces of gold, which is worth 60 silver doubloons, each containing 2 ounces of silver, etc) bubble to the top.

Assuming this is an MMO, of course. If not, yeah, just make up coin names, or base them on historical names. Honestly, this naming business is just flavor anyway and the real meat is designing an economy that doesn't explode.