I'm starting a brand new Dragonlance campaign soon, using the Key of Destiny book. I'll be using DCS, Age of Mortals, and KoD, which a group of people who've never played in Dragonlance before. AFAIK, they haven't read any of the books, either.
Is there anything I should be worried about here? Anything I should look forward to? I noticed that the steel/copper/silver conversion isn't as straight forward as ordinary dnd, so that'll be a tad difficult to explain. Anything else I may have trouble with?
Thanks for the help.
Miles.
They tend to come up with *But wasn't it like this...* questions and drive me poor DM totally mad.
To be honest, this was a reason why I started using Taladas as my principal setting: There is nearly no way they could know more than I just because there's not so much stuff available.
Really, how many of you read ALL the novels and know EVERY story behind a random location?
*enjoy playing with the rookies, that will give you storytelling oportunities like nothing else*
Generic D&D to Dragonlance Money Conversion Chart:
Copper Piece = Copper Piece
Silver Piece = Silver Piece
Gold Piece = Steel Piece
Just don't worry about Brass/Iron/Bronze Pieces and you'll be fine.
-TRRW
My players are so used to the common coins as gold, silver, copper, I never really saw the reason to switch over to the official steel. As I said before, to me its just annoying.
Unfortunately I slip almost every game and say "You just earned (blank amount) of gold pieces" and then my players say something along the lines of "Don't you mean steel?"...
I guess that's what comes of being a rookie DM :embarrass haha
Try not doing that and I think you'll do just fine in DMing your KoD game..
On page 196 of the DLCS, it says that 20 silver = 1 steel In DnD, it would be 10 silver = 1 steel/gold. Also 5 steel is worth 1 plat, instead of 10 steel being worth 1 plat. ... see, the conversion is different.
Miles.
pp = Five dollar bill
stl = One dollar bill
ip = Fifty cent piece
bp = Quarter
gp = Dime
sp = Nickel
cp = Penny
(actually...the gp might be lower than the sp...I can never remember which is higher)
I could even get past that stuff, but 2 of my players are fairly new and read straight from the PH and its so much easier just to say gold and keep everything the same for me. Saying a steel peice instead of a gold pieice doesnt add anything to my campaign, so I just got rid of it.
I can see how people can stick with it, but I don't see any point. Its one of the only things i'm not a stickler for to keep my campaign "Dragonlace-y" or whatever.
Originally posted by True_Blue
I just never liked the steel piece thing in the first place. I never knew how it worked exactly, but I can just imagine PC's wanting to melt down swords and such into coins. And then you get into the "is it the same quality" and if people can tell.
I had this same problem (melting down those sword and armour). Found a great explanation to it to from one of my friends:
Weapons and armor are made from IRON. Masterwork swords etc. are made from STEEL. This would suggest that about 250 steel pieces are needed to make a masterwork longsword. Even masterwork sword is not made totaly out of steel (very, very, highquality might be), but some non-metalworked iron is added to it.
Now you can tell your players that if they find a masterwork longsword they can take it to the blacksmith and ask him to melt it down, separate iron from it and hammer down some steel coins from the rest of it. Players might get something like 200 stl from this (- blacksmiths fee). Now if they would just sell that masterwork sword they would get that same amount right away... no more melting swords in my game.
But, I never took the time to figure out the exacts of it just because I think it confuses more new people than anything else. As I said in my above post, two of my players are fairly new and readign straight from the PHB its easier to just go with the gold standard. Or you turn into a situation like Loren Stronghilt said and you might say gold piece and the players say "uh you mean steel" or they slipa nd say gold piece and I say "you mean steel...". To me it isnt a big deal. Especially since the steel piece is the exact equivalent of the gold piece in the PHB.
Originally posted by Perkele
I had this same problem (melting down those sword and armour). Found a great explanation to it to from one of my friends:
Weapons and armor are made from IRON. Masterwork swords etc. are made from STEEL. This would suggest that about 250 steel pieces are needed to make a masterwork longsword. Even masterwork sword is not made totaly out of steel (very, very, highquality might be), but some non-metalworked iron is added to it.
Now you can tell your players that if they find a masterwork longsword they can take it to the blacksmith and ask him to melt it down, separate iron from it and hammer down some steel coins from the rest of it. Players might get something like 200 stl from this (- blacksmiths fee). Now if they would just sell that masterwork sword they would get that same amount right away... no more melting swords in my game.
Uhm - if you have 80% iron in your steel - just what exactly is the other 20% made of?
If you had your iron, all you would need to make it into steel is the soot collected from yonder FREE alder branch and a sufficient heat source.
Steel is an alloy of Iron and Carbon. The carbon content in steel ranges from .003% (typical) to slightly less than 1%.
For the kinds of steel we are talking about in medieval era, the carbon content is low .005 or so - a pinch of soot added to the iron, essentially.
Sorry- we went through this in an excruciatingly detailed thread on dragonlance.com last month and the math behind steel coins simply does not work and never did.
As a fantasy game though - do what you'd like - by all means.
But melting down swords and armor, unfortunately, does work.
Would this work:
Regular stuff would be made from iron and masterwork from iron that has been metalworked to steel. Now you make it so that transforming iron to steel is very expensive (dont know yet how much?) and difficult to do (blacksmith DC 25?) so that its too expensive to melt down iron weapons and forge them to steel coins.
Now only problem are those masterwork weapons and other stuff that are made from steel. One solution would be that steel coins were so large and heavy that about 250 of them would be enough to make a greatsword or other large stuff. Better would be that prices of those items would be much higher and in balance so that masterwork shortsword would reguire much less steel than greatsword and so it would also cost much less.
Still I love the idea that steel (or other weapon metals) are in great value. Think about it so that when things get rough and evil on you what would you choose to have: 5000$ in your pocket or that AK-47 with a full mag?
Originally posted by iltharanos
Steel-based economies as unrealistic?
Yeah...that's dumb...that'd be like having paper as a currency. Oh, wait...
I don't see a steel piece as really being steel at all. It's called a steel piece because when it was created in the early to mid 4th Age, the currency piece was backed by stock piles of steel. Much like our currency (US for sure...I assume other countries as well) back our money with gold (and some silver...I don't quite understand the process...but mostly it's gold).
So see...the Steel piece is most likely made out of something else...nickle perhaps. Steel was way to valuable to be turned into coins. And gold, while not worth as much as steel, was still worth enough that it would be counter productive to use it as a representative currency for steel. So, kingdoms and the like manufactured a cheap coin made from a readily available material...perhaps nickel...and used it to represent the amount of steel they have in their stockpile.
After a while, it pretty much became the standard...with most all governments using some form steel backed currency. This of course means that there would have to be exchange rates...but that can be added in or ignored as one would see fit. Mostly I would just say that a country either accepts completely or not at all the currency from another region.
That's my two nickels...uh I mean steel. heh heh