Weight in Gold Pieces is Based, Actually

Author’s Note: This is a republished article, originally released on 2/23/21. It was lost to my site changes back in the day, but no longer.

This will be one of the very few old-school callbacks that didn’t come directly from Jeffro Johnson (whose OSR insights you should be paying attention to anyways), this actually came from a series Matt Colville did called “The History of D&D”. I pour over the series often, and one nugget (worth 1.5x its weight) was the concept of weight in gold pieces. I filed it away, as I’m wont to do, though I did check with Jeffro to see if he was using it in his ultra-faithful AD&D campaign (he was, good man).

I walked one of my players through buying some trade goods the other day, and in something of a spur of the moment decision, I decided to describe their relevant qualities measured in gold pieces. “Gunpowder is worth 10x its weight in gold. The opals and agates mined from the nearby Gercross Well are worth 4x their weight in gold.” It felt really, really freeing.

Weight in gold pieces acts as a force multiplier for the internal calculations my players are making. By saying “gunpowder is worth 10x its weight in gold”, the players immediately know two facts:

  • The item’s noteworthy weight is _.

  • The item is worth (half, 10x, etc) its weight in gold.

Very simple. Let’s say for a sec I want to make a stack of bullets, and the specific variety of bullets I’d like to make requires 1 unit of gunpowder. As we established earlier, gunpowder is worth 10 x its weight in gold. From here, the player has two extraordinarily quick cognitive paths to solve the crafting problem depending on whether they already have the requisite gunpowder.

  • Therefore, I must spend 10 gold pieces on the requisite materials.

  • Therefore, I must mark off 1 gunpowder (weight in gp) for this recipe.

We (by which I mean Gygax, but I helped, some few decades afterwards) just solved a major issue in harvesting, distributing, and bookkeeping multiple large categories of loot. Players kill a dragon, the game immediately turns into the part in monster hunter where they start carving it up (since it’ll never be as much fun as fighting the dragon in monster hunter). Your players are gonna ask you to collect blood, the teeth, scales and/or hide, the breath organ, any horns, claws/talons, extraneous organs, and more, and more, and more. You could come up with different measures for the various markers of craft-worthiness, magic-worthiness, trophy-worthiness, sale price, any intersection between the aforementioned, and any intersection between the not aforementioned. You’d probably settle on the closest incremental measures of size or weight, but still. Even those would be different! Gallons or liters for blood, pounds or kilograms for scales, feet or meters for hide.

Know what weight-in-gp does? That’s right, it reduces all of that down. The hide is worth 16x its weight, the scales are worth 20x their weight, and the blood is worth 14 x its weight. The DM now has their direct, practical pipeline into the worth of the objects harvested without this silliness about switching between measurements.

Oh, and on top of all of this, encumbrance has an easy-in for your game, because now a singular conversion exists for crafting, capacity, and sale price. You’re welcome.

Keyboard? Worth 23x its weight. Weight in gold pieces?

Priceless.

[this rapidly expanded past the scope of “thoughtbite”]