> Medals & medallions may be awarded to a dwarf as a motivation booster with a particular feat, and these inherit a special status of a historical object once assigned and will follow the dwarf much like a family heirloom. Certain historical figures may also either already possess medals because of their position, or have medals bestowed upon them by hist-figs.
> Commemorative coins are abstract non-acceptable currency coins that are a craft object, usually detailing a event, dwarves like to aquire these. Multiples of these may be made out of one bar so they can easily fufill many dwarves needs if they have coffer/chest space
I don't see why minting coins would require any different skill from crafting a figurine. It's probably even simpler since you can mass produce them with a mold.Coins aren't molded, they are punched, pressed or stamped(whichever you would call it).
I don't see why minting coins would require any different skill from crafting a figurine. It's probably even simpler since you can mass produce them with a mold.Coins aren't molded, they are punched, pressed or stamped(whichever you would call it).
I don't see why minting coins would require any different skill from crafting a figurine. It's probably even simpler since you can mass produce them with a mold.Coins aren't molded, they are punched, pressed or stamped(whichever you would call it).
Bumber's point is still valid. Coins are fairly easy to mass produce.
"More skills" seems to be the direction that DF is taking. Like with "fighter" vs "swordsdwarf" skills, I imagine that both will matter for the task at hand, and both will gain experience from crafting coins.
I don't see why knowledge of the specifics of creating coins would make one qualified to write about The Economy, though. Maybe a lifetime of minting would reflect or bolster an interest in money, and thus also economics, but the two skills aren't really related.
If coins are to be made of metal only, then I think I would prefer it to be rolled into metalworking, which is the most underused of the metal-related skills. However, I would like to see coins made from any number of materials. Technically, a coin made and backed by the value of copper is worth less than one made and backed by obsidian.
I don't see why minting coins would require any different skill from crafting a figurine. It's probably even simpler since you can mass produce them with a mold.Coins aren't molded, they are punched, pressed or stamped(whichever you would call it).
Bumber's point is still valid. Coins are fairly easy to mass produce.
A coin with no fine inscription, date or anything is worthless in common currency as it is to bartering the percieved value of blank metal pieces. Metalworkers also cover a wide range of objects so freeing them up from coins would allow economic coin minting specialists to immigrate and set to work upon creating a stable economy for a fortress rather than tasking smithies present in normally every metal-bearing settlement to be begrudged with the distracting task.What's the difference between having a dedicated minting specialist versus an extra metalworker, other than the fact that you can't use the minter for other tasks? Migrant minters would become the new cheese makers. You can set up workshop profiles if you want a dwarf dedicated to minting.
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Migrant minters would become the new cheese makers.
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I've never understood cheese maker reference .. because if any skill/profession is heavily overrepresented when I play it is fisher...Cheese makers require milk, which can only be harvested from a limited selection of animals once every 17 days. It's a particularly painful industry to set up.
How often do most players use metalcrafters? I find myself using most of my non-weapons grade metal on furniture, which falls under the blacksmith skill. There's nothing I need to mass produce that isn't better suited to other materials. Just the occasional chain, instrument, or minecart.
I've never understood cheese maker reference .. because if any skill/profession is heavily overrepresented when I play it is fisher...
How often do most players use metalcrafters? I find myself using most of my non-weapons grade metal on furniture, which falls under the blacksmith skill. There's nothing I need to mass produce that isn't better suited to other materials. Just the occasional chain, instrument, or minecart.
How often do most players use metalcrafters? I find myself using most of my non-weapons grade metal on furniture, which falls under the blacksmith skill. There's nothing I need to mass produce that isn't better suited to other materials. Just the occasional chain, instrument, or minecart.I meant that out of say 20 migrants 5 are fisher-dwarves...I've never understood cheese maker reference .. because if any skill/profession is heavily overrepresented when I play it is fisher...Cheese makers require milk, which can only be harvested from a limited selection of animals once every 17 days. It's a particularly painful industry to set up.
I was tempted to say fish dissectors, but that's basically just a useless skill. More fisherdwarves could at least end up being useful in the future if the food surplus was nerfed. The problem right now is it's too effective.
Kind of off-topic, but theoretically, it would be simple to make the migrant skills match the percentage of skills gained in your player fortresses.Already implemented: it gives you professions you have lot of and little of in particular.
Chests use blacksmithing.How often do most players use metalcrafters? I find myself using most of my non-weapons grade metal on furniture, which falls under the blacksmith skill. There's nothing I need to mass produce that isn't better suited to other materials. Just the occasional chain, instrument, or minecart.Gold chests for the rooms of nobles. :)
Chests use blacksmithing.
Depending on how eccentric he wants this to be, currencies were not always coins. Cowry shells and glass beads were also commonly used as currency. People joked about wool, but Viking Age Iceland did in fact use "Homespun" along with heads of cattle as currency. Vikings also used hack-silver, they would wear a bracelet made of silver and cut off a piece of it to trade for something. In D&D's Dark Sun campaign setting, where metal is ultra scarce, ceramics and gems are used as currency. Africa also used iron and brass to form many different shapes (http://www.hamillgallery.com/CURRENCY/CurrencyExhibition.html) for currency.
The modern notion of currency, that currency is backed by the power of the state, is a fairly modern concept (even younger than the USA is), and would be completely alien to most cultures around the 1399 tech cut-off. An improperly minted coin would absolutely still have its intrinsic value. I think the point of minting back then was more like a government certification that the coin was a particular weight of metal.
However does the very concept of currency have any meaning outside of the context of relatively modern times. Is 'whatever random stuff I can carry' really currency, or is that more like the absence of currency. Are we basically being anachronistic in using those terms at all?
Currency is whatever society agrees upon is an acceptable substitute for the value it represents in goods or labor.
A barter-based economy devoid of currency is built on the agreement of the two individuals on the value of the goods/services offered to each other.Currency is whatever society agrees upon is an acceptable substitute for the value it represents in goods or labor.
The presumption is that there is a numerical value without currency. If we think about how we trade in DF, we basically ignore the numbers that tell us how much everything is worth and simply divide things into need/don't need, but the rest of world does much, which is to our advantage.
The don't need things are our 'currency'. Point was, are our pre-currency societies simply doing the same?
A barter-based economy devoid of currency is built on the agreement of the two individuals on the value of the goods/services offered to each other.
Excuse me?A barter-based economy devoid of currency is built on the agreement of the two individuals on the value of the goods/services offered to each other.
No it isn't. A barter economy is based upon the fact that neither side actually needs what they are trading. It is very much quantity of surplus junk I have VS quantity of surplus junk you have.
The 'value' of the two sides surplus junk is always exactly the same. If I have 10 surplus tables and you have 1 surplus chair, your chair is actually worth 10 tables.
Excuse me?
Where do you get your information from?
If a blacksmith needs food in a barter economy he will either trade his goods or services to the baker, farmer or butcher in exchange for food, or he will do a barter-chain with other artisans in the town until he has something to trade for the food.
At one point in the evolution of society the barter-chain took too much time out of the day that some people found that they could make a living off of doing nothing but barter with people, they became known as traders.
Yeah, GC, you've ogtten it the wrong way around. A barter economy relies entirely on trading of actually useful good, while our decadent capitalist-pig-dog systems rely on trading value-tokens that we don't need, but which serve as a promise that we can get things we do need. The primary purpose of physical money is as a holder of value even more than a medium of exchange.
Why does the baker want ten hammers? Why is the blacksmith willing to trade ten hammers for one loaf of bread, when that's clearly an unfair exchange? He could probably find ten people who only really want one hammer, and could end up with more food as a result of dealing with all of them, rather than just the baker.
"Fairness" is something that's very firmly ingrained in human thinking. Even if you're trading only things you don't need for things you do need, you'll still try to think about if the exchange is equal. If it's not, you'll probably get upset and refuse to deal with the person who insists on an unfair trade.
Why does the baker want ten hammers? Why is the blacksmith willing to trade ten hammers for one loaf of bread, when that's clearly an unfair exchange? He could probably find ten people who only really want one hammer, and could end up with more food as a result of dealing with all of them, rather than just the baker.
"Fairness" is something that's very firmly ingrained in human thinking. Even if you're trading only things you don't need for things you do need, you'll still try to think about if the exchange is equal. If it's not, you'll probably get upset and refuse to deal with the person who insists on an unfair trade.
The baker does not want to have 10 hammers and that is what drives the barter economy to become more complicated that just a few people trading with eachother. Because the blacksmith's extra hammers are of no value to him, he wants to get rid of them and will give them away to anyone who offers the blacksmith ANYTHING that he wants. The key thing is that the abstract value of the items is irrelevant, if you have anything at all to offer that the other part wants, they will happily give everything that they don't need to you in exchange.
In a cash economy things are different. Because every hammer has a monetery value, it therefore represents a given amount of money and money unlike hammers is always *in demand* as it were. This means that if someone does not give the blacksmith an equal or greater amount of money (or items equal in money-value to the hammers) he will sit on his entire stockpile of surplus hammers, while in a barter economy he would give the whole lot away for a loaf of bread if he was hungry and the other party wanted the whole lot.
This is why we should be wary of thinking of any surplus junk people trade as money. The game however presently does just that, it confuses barter economies (what the game mostly has) with how barter works in societies that are financialised.
But conversely, if the baker doesn't want or have a use for the hammers any more than the blacksmith does, then why would he trade for them? Even in a cash economy, having the hammers would require the baker to find a market to make good on his investment and he already knows the blacksmith wasn't able to find more than a gullible/merciful baker. It would make more sense for the blacksmith to offer maintenance services rather than prepared goods in your example, because surely the baker has some dull knives or whatever that could use professional care more than he could use a pile of hammers.
To my knowledge, making a coin with the face of your king or whatever on it didn't add any value. The coin was worth the metal it was made from, and the point of stamping it was basically the king's seal of approval that it was a specific amount of gold so you didn't have to weigh it for every transaction. Bankers would get in trouble for shaving gold from the edges of coins, because that decreased their worth.
So unless the coin is valued as a work of art, the original post idea that minting them badly devalues them is bunk. Maybe the merchants will want to weigh these coins themselves to be sure, but they are still worth the metal they are made of.
To my knowledge, making a coin with the face of your king or whatever on it didn't add any value. The coin was worth the metal it was made from, and the point of stamping it was basically the king's seal of approval that it was a specific amount of gold so you didn't have to weigh it for every transaction. Bankers would get in trouble for shaving gold from the edges of coins, because that decreased their worth.
That isn't true. Kings commonly devalued their coins by alloying the gold with increasing amounts of other metals. This did not effect what they were worth on the market, the effect of doing so on the economy was probably beneficial since it meant there was more coinage as the population increased and economy grew. The market worked on the number of coins, not the amount of metal in each coin.
The only situation in which the relative metal content was actually taken into account was when you were exchanging coins of one kind for another kind.
To my knowledge, making a coin with the face of your king or whatever on it didn't add any value. The coin was worth the metal it was made from, and the point of stamping it was basically the king's seal of approval that it was a specific amount of gold so you didn't have to weigh it for every transaction. Bankers would get in trouble for shaving gold from the edges of coins, because that decreased their worth.
That isn't true. Kings commonly devalued their coins by alloying the gold with increasing amounts of other metals. This did not effect what they were worth on the market, the effect of doing so on the economy was probably beneficial since it meant there was more coinage as the population increased and economy grew. The market worked on the number of coins, not the amount of metal in each coin.
The only situation in which the relative metal content was actually taken into account was when you were exchanging coins of one kind for another kind.
I'd have to study medieval economics much more than I want to get this absolutely right, but my understanding of the alloying is that this is either a secret, so that the people using the coins still think that the coins are as valuable as if they were pure gold, taking the king's stamp of approval that it is, OR, this was done to create smaller divisions of wealth, so if a coin's worth of gold is equivalent to 5$ and you want to pay someone 1$ for an ale, then you make a coin that is 20% gold alloy instead of 80% smaller.
I'd have to study medieval economics much more than I want to get this absolutely right, but my understanding of the alloying is that this is either a secret, so that the people using the coins still think that the coins are as valuable as if they were pure gold, taking the king's stamp of approval that it is, OR, this was done to create smaller divisions of wealth, so if a coin's worth of gold is equivalent to 5$ and you want to pay someone 1$ for an ale, then you make a coin that is 20% gold alloy instead of 80% smaller.
Yup, it's my understanding that alloying and other sneaky ways of devaluing the use value of money without affecting the perceived value was part of what led to the development of fiat currency, with the advantage that if you minted copper coins worth the same as a gold coin, you could keep the gold, spend that instead and as long as you never actually had to give anyone the gold that the copper coin was tied to, you were... golden! That's the entire principal that our modern economic system works under - There's far more digital money than real money, so when people all decide to trade their digital cah for real notes, the banks are suddenly buggered, everyone realises that the digital money isn't worth anything, and it drops it value to reflect this knowledge.
What does your first paragraph mean? First you disagree that minters might have used an alloy to mimic the proper make-up of coins so that they can make more money from the same stock , then you tell an anecdote about a king reversing his predecessors’ adulteration of currency?
The coin was worth the metal it was made from, and the point of stamping it was basically the king's seal of approval that it was a specific amount of gold so you didn't have to weigh it for every transaction.
Is it fair to say that not adding a minting profession would also debase the difficulty of the game? People say its more convenient to have metalworkers iron out coins for you but that's kind of against the spirit of DF in a sense to take the most direct route there when the core skill regarding coin-making can be removed from metalworking and moved into its own.
Right now it has no purpose as coins are cosmetic value boosters or reserved for adventurers to pick up and steal from player fortress sites, fair enough that metalworkers with nothing else to do other than craft metal can currently fufill this function.
At some point you may actually need to be paying mercenaries & bards for their time if they're not forthcoming to offer their services upfront or you need them in the fortress Now at a given time buying out every mercenary that comes through the door in anticipation of a goblin siege.
Or other things like just pumping up the bartering value artificially on trading wagons without exchanging so many goods, or paying off your friends & enemies with a fat stash of coins in chests that are easier to transport being hauled off site.
If my memory is correct, that is not exact. Minting money was a privilege of the noble of the fief, to be used almost exclusively in his holdings (people didn't travelled that much anyway) and in the case money was used in trade between the holdings of different nobles, it was usually melted and reminted.
It is also worth noting that in medieval era, coins didn't had "face value". They were worth their weight in metal and that's it ; they would be weighted before transactions. "Loading" your coins with heavier alloys was as close as you'd get to business malpractices
I've heard both versions claimed, and strongly suspect that it matters where you were and when. The middle ages spanned about 700 years and the disparate and many parts of the world changed culturally almost beyond recognition in that time.
I've heard both versions claimed, and strongly suspect that it matters where you were and when. The middle ages spanned about 700 years and the disparate and many parts of the world changed culturally almost beyond recognition in that time.
Well in the very early middle ages most of the large kingdoms that we know and love did not actually exist yet. Instead in lot we have a lot of petty kingdoms which presumably have the ability to mint their own coins. But at that point people don't really use money much anyway and the money they did use was mostly Byzantine money (so to most places foreign money) rather than their own.
The level of autonomy held by nobles tended to vary between places. In Germany they had the most autonomy, in England (post-conquest) they had the least autonomy and France is somewhere in the middle; also in France it depends where in France you are as well. Nowhere however did the nobles have enough autonomy to actually mint their own currencies and it is doubtful that many of them would have the resources to actually make us of that right had it been theirs.
The last French lord to have his own currency was in 1723.
[COIN_PRINTER]
[name:coin printer]
[MARKET_ONLY]
[PROFESSION_COMMON]
[RESTRICTED_WORKER] //disables migration except from requesting from holdings.
[NUMBER: 5]
[REQUIRES: 50]
The last French lord to have his own currency was in 1723.
Which lord was it? It actually matters because a lot of medieval kingdoms are very complicated because there is a division between the legislative area and the executive area. That is to say the French King (and vassals) control areas which legally speaking have their own Estates General and hence their own laws.
No, it is trivial to the discussion, which is 'should we have a seperate coin minter profession'.
The reason I brought up the right to do so being rare is because it would indicate that coin minting might be more likely to be a privilege that a fort gains as it grows into a barony or county. Who gives that privilege, whether it is the baron, count, king or a particularly authoritative fruit tree, doesn't matter. DF could proly randomly generate the rule, maybe even during the law and customs arc.
What is important is that it probably means there's no point to having a separate coin minter profession as your blacksmiths would not be able to mint proper coins until the fort is an official location for a mint. Coins don't even need more than a face value for this, traders can just deny the coins on the basis that they're afraid that the coins are not following the kingdom standards for coins.
Now what would be interesting to discuss is to introduce false money, but that'd be a seperate suggestion thread :)
In fact, it was the Principalty of Dombes, in Trévoux, until 1729; this territory used to be "land of Empire."Dombes (https://www.google.com/maps/place/01330+Villars-les-Dombes,+France/@44.284803,4.0318644,6.06z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x47f4a445d53aed53:0x268537bdd3322bd3!8m2!3d46.002114!4d5.029107)
ptw