Some of the treasure hoards as calculated in the DMG can have hundreds or even thousands of copper pieces. This is a huge pain for the characters to transport and convert into gold. How do people here handle that? Do you let any random shopkeeper accept payment in hundreds of copper pieces, or do the PCs have to visit a money-lender or bank to cash in their hoard? If I'm being realistic there would be an exchange fee, but that just seems mean when you're already dealing with an inconvenience like this. I'm curious to hear how other DMs have handled this.
Some of the treasure hoards as calculated in the DMG can have hundreds or even thousands of copper pieces. This is a huge pain for the characters to transport and convert into gold. How do people here handle that? Do you let any random shopkeeper accept payment in hundreds of copper pieces, or do the PCs have to visit a money-lender or bank to cash in their hoard? If I'm being realistic there would be an exchange fee, but that just seems mean when you're already dealing with an inconvenience like this. I'm curious to hear how other DMs have handled this.
I've done both. For small cities or villages where the concept of a Bank may not exist, I allow shopkeepers to accept any amount of and type of standard currency. When the city is much larger, and the concept of money lending may be prevalent, I try to get the players to go, during downtime and with a hand wave, to get them to exchange their currency for significant dominations as the shopkeepers may be more snobbish about the money spent.
Then again, shopkeepers want to make money, so as the saying goes, "Shopkeeper has wears if you have the coin."
I just ignore it and let people pay in cp. Or just don’t even bother giving them cp, unless I them want to hear how they carry it all. Otherwise, unless there’s a story reason, I don’t know why I’d penalize the characters (exchange rates would be a penalty) for a random roll I made on a treasure table.
Mostly those crazy amounts of cp on treasure tables come from 1e days. But then you were expected to have a number of hirelings following you around to carry your stuff. It was actually one of the few uses for cha, was how many hirelings you could have working for you. Without those pack mule type flunkies, it really just screws the characters to give them piles pf cp.
But then money in general isn’t as useful in this edition without homebrewing, so maybe they just leave it on the ground.
I've always just had stores accept copper in any quantity, regardless of location. However, we play on roll20 which automatically calculates the weight of coins, so my players usually try to convert all their currency to gold whenever the opportunity arises... and occasionally convert gold into Platinum just to make it easier to carry. I have banks and coin exchanges in city's and larger towns, but in remote villages if the players attempt to convert coins into other currency I generally just set a limit on how much they can convert based on what feels logical to me in that setting.
Some of the treasure hoards as calculated in the DMG can have hundreds or even thousands of copper pieces. This is a huge pain for the characters to transport and convert into gold. How do people here handle that? Do you let any random shopkeeper accept payment in hundreds of copper pieces, or do the PCs have to visit a money-lender or bank to cash in their hoard? If I'm being realistic there would be an exchange fee, but that just seems mean when you're already dealing with an inconvenience like this. I'm curious to hear how other DMs have handled this.
Honestly, think about the story implications of such a hoard. Can the PCs physically handle that amount of coinage? How are they going to transport it? Do they have to make like Skyrim and head back to town before clearing the rest of the area?
Being truthful though, if they players are going to a shopkeep of any kind the shop's primary motivation is making money to feed themselves/their family. They will to my mind take coin however it is offered. Now if it's a big city or town where there are some higher class shops, the shopkeep may refuse to take a certain type of coinage but that's not all that common. Most of my towns and villages operate on a hand to mouth kind of basis. Most people in the world are taking the money the earnt today to pay for their food for tomorrow, so it's not like most shopkeepers have larges stashes of cash on hand. Because of that I usually have players experience the problem on the other end. 'Oh I'm so sorry, I don't have enough change for that gold piece...' That opens out a choice, either the PC has to overpay for an item, perhaps getting something extra for their trouble like an extra day's ration or something, or just the goodwill of the shopkeeper in future. Their other option is to refuse to pay and leave without the item they want.
I tend to mix it up though on the fly. Sometimes I won't be tracking the exact denominations of coin the PCs have on their person and just assume the right change is given. Other times for story purposes I'll make a thing out of it to add some colour and depth. Inconsistent I know, but it introduces a touch of diversity into what could be quite a 2D world sometimes.
I usually don't worry about currency conversion, but a copper piece isn't a penny (D&D prices are pretty random, but for typical goods it works out to somewhere between a quarter and a dollar per copper).
PCs killed their way to get keys to proverbial copper mine ... and sometimes managing money can be quite the literal burden.
I don't care for D&D's universal money system. A copper from an empire gone thousands of years ago literally isn't the currency of the present game moment. So yes, we do bulk currency trading in my games with merchants or counting houses with interests in exotic currencies. And these trades are done at a price and there's a negotiation system etc. In large metro's enterprising players can auction the coin to various interests (sorta like the way the DOJ and Treasury dept in the U.S. do with seized crypto assets).
Not for nothing, but it usually turns out in my game the major metro's thieves guilds tend to be the best deal in the metro for what you'd consider "banking services" ... of course you have to know how to find and then get through the fronts that grant you access to that economy.
What I'm saying, don't leave the coin at face value. Eventually money is largely meaningless to the adventurers beyond "points" with little utility once a certain material standard is met. However, if you look outside the simple RAW accounting, fantasy money is fun to play with.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
As for coinage from older empires of far flung regions of the world I just use the equivalent weight conversion. If 100 cp weighs a pound then a pound of the other cp equals 100 cp common.
Everyone else has told you how to find money changers. I go even farther. A professional money changer is part of a large widespread guild. His word is good. His rates are fare and set. He even has the ability to write you a letter of exchange, good for the face value written in any other money changers guild house.
Such as : 'this letter is good for 10,000 gold, signed by Larry Gee the money changer of Krypton' .Several seals would be attached to make it all official. He would also enter the exchange in to his records.
He would charge you a set percentage like 1% but its better than carrying huge sacks of cash.
By the way this was also the way nobles sent large amounts of money all over Europe.
As for the amount of cash a money changer has on hand I used the rule of 2 times the amount of people in the village or town he was located in expressed as gp, 1000 people equaled about 2000 gp.
Illegal money changers kept no records but charged everything the customer could afford. But he kept no records. Often associated with thieves and other criminals. And any trade with them came with its own special risks.
As for coinage from older empires of far flung regions of the world I just use the equivalent weight conversion. If 100 cp weighs a pound then a pound of the other cp equals 100 cp common.
Everyone else has told you how to find money changers. I go even farther. A professional money changer is part of a large widespread guild. His word is good. His rates are fare and set. He even has the ability to write you a letter of exchange, good for the face value written in any other money changers guild house.
Such as : 'this letter is good for 10,000 gold, signed by Larry Gee the money changer of Krypton' .Several seals would be attached to make it all official. He would also enter the exchange in to his records.
He would charge you a set percentage like 1% but its better than carrying huge sacks of cash.
By the way this was also the way nobles sent large amounts of money all over Europe.
As for the amount of cash a money changer has on hand I used the rule of 2 times the amount of people in the village or town he was located in expressed as gp, 1000 people equaled about 2000 gp.
Illegal money changers kept no records but charged everything the customer could afford. But he kept no records. Often associated with thieves and other criminals. And any trade with them came with its own special risks.
Letters of credit = yes. Just like letters of introductions make commerce part of playing in the world.
I'm a bit nuanced about commerce within the "official" and "underground" economies. There's good and bad actors in both systems, like official and unofficial economies today.
As far as ancient currency getting treated as equivalent by weight, the D&D default, sure that's pretty much the rules as written D&D monetary policy. But if you think about what happens to actual even medieval economies when you start flooding them with an influx of foreign, anachronistic or basically anonymous unsanctioned currencies granted arbitrary 1:1 exchange rates, coppers will make a town weird, silvers a city, gold possibly a terriotry and platinum could real upset the balance of power within a nation.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The whole concept of using four different metals for currency is quite ahistorical; most cultures that minted precious metal currency only used one metal (either silver or gold), rarely two. This is because the exchange rate between metals varies with time, so if you have an official exchange rate for coins, people will take advantage of the difference between official exchange rates for coin and market rates for metal to exchange the less expensive metal for the more expensive metal, resulting in losses for the mint. This does not apply to fiat currency (such as modern coin) where the face value exceeds the value of the metal in the coin, but such coin is generally made of base metal, not precious metal, and long-lost hoards of coin will only be valuable to collectors.
Personally I hand wave it, I hand out silver and coper in treasure hordes, or found looting dead enemies pockets, but I don't care about exchange rates or any of that. As for different ages, nations etc, I just say that gold is gold, doesn't matter where it came from (unless holding a particular nations coin makes you look like a bad guy in a nation in conflict with it, which is more of a plot point then anything).
Its not hard to melt down the metals and make simple ingots out of it. This is especially true in D&D since there is no face value to the coins.
The real tough treasures are those made up of artwork. Try flogging off the Mona Lisa in some 500 person mountain village. Or a hundred pound gold statue.
In the one game I've had that kept track of it, we had a donkey and a few henchmen to help with encumbrance and we ended up paying a fairly hefty exchange rate - maybe 20%? Once we leveled up a bit, it started to feel like copper just wasn't worth our time, which I don't think the DM anticipated.
All that copper can be hoarded speculatively for when the game world discovers non magical electrical transmission....
As for coin in game play, yes the RAW treats treasure broadly largely as simply point tally values with uncomplicated exchange. And that's fine, and if a DM wants to largely adhere to that with a little "world challenge" there is the encumbrance system. That said, treasure and simple money does present opportunities to make real life economic, trade, and simply "doing business" concepts interesting,
If you want the utility of melting down a hoard of copper into 10-25 gp ingots as a hefty utility currency, you can do that. But ingots also aren't "pure exchange" legally, socially, politically culturally. Real ingots aren't simply "pure metal in convenient bar form". They're stamped as part or complete statement of the ingot's provenance. Like uncut diamonds, a scrupulous "banker" or exchange type is going to be suspicious of the origins of "unmarked" ingots and is going to presume crime. Now of course IRL some financial institutions have historically and still presently de facto play part in the laundering the proceeds of war crime, kleptocracy and other very lucrative forms of organized crime ... probably at a premium over more traditional "legitimate" transactions as part of the institutions risk management and mitigations practices. it's money laundering (Full disclosure, in a prior career I did a bit of work investigating financial crimes or I'd say probably more accurately criminal use of financial systems from actual Hawaladar money movements to cryptocurrency that digitally operate on the Hawaladar principle of credit between network nodes, so this stuff is interesting to me, and I like making it interesting to others). Money is power, and if a lot of new power of unknown origin suddenly arrives and begins circulating in the systems, the powers that be are going to notice because they are literally upset.
In a D&D context of a game I'd run, "one does not simply walk into town with a hoard and proverbially high roll." "Where/how did they get that?" is a question often avoided by polite society but is a constant background noise in most social interaction and contact where there's economic difference, amplify that to dragon hoard proportions. Maybe as a matter of policy the local liege of a region beset by monsters has a "keep the proceeds of your kill" policy in place. Neighboring communities who have suffered losses due to the monsters otherwise unchecked in that region may disagree. It's a proto-text for D&D world building, so it's fair to remind everyone what The Battle of Five Armies (including the human v. dwarf siege) was actually about.
Provenance, restoration, restitution of "found treasure" can be a fascinating story to play out. Again, especially given money's otherwise lack of utility once PCs get to a certain material standing through their exploits. I talked about sorta big wealth disruptions and game world financial institutions being used in money laundering for vast hauls. But even a simple artwork of the 25gp and up range, one doesn't simply walk into a reputable art dealer and liquidate it. The provenance thing again. So if you want to exchange the art, you're going to need an actor willing to be a fence, and that's going to come at cost higher than the "clean exchange" rate, again because you're paying for fence's, now co-conspirator's, risk mitigation.
Treasure can be simple coin stacking accounting; I'm just highlighting the fact that it can also not be such a simple reward but a way to move the game's plot, particularly if your game is invested in a "political" game as many claim to be these days.
Its not money laundering unless your trying to hide its origin which is normally not a problem.
As for converting it to bars the local alchemist can test it. And if your baring up copper more than likely the local craftsmen will buy it at bulk prices. The same with silver.
As for flooding the market to the point you will change it. Thats not too likely unless your just handing it out by the bag. If your changing copper to gold the same value is in the market total so nothing is added. Just changed.
But yes local nobles will take notice and expect their tax.
All of this makes for adventure points. Trying to hide as much from the local nobles trying to find and getting to a city large enough to handle it. Trying to keep the bandits from getting. Then how do you protect it afterward?
Forge Cleric and Fabricate (much higher level) can take tens of thousands of coppers and turn them into a cart to hall the silver away.
But... coppers are pennies. How many pennies do you have to be find before you decide it is worth it.
100 dollars/gp is 10,000 pennies/cp. It weighs about 50-60 lbs. If I were to off you a 60 lb box full of pennies in order to clean my apartment, would you take it?
1,000 dollars/gp weighs 500-600 lbs. Would you accept that as payment for well... anything? Yes, it is a thousand dollars, but 500 lbs is not something I could lift. (No, bro, I don't even lift, I roll dice and argue about rules.
100 dollars/gp is 10,000 pennies/cp. It weighs about 50-60 lbs. If I were to off you a 60 lb box full of pennies in order to clean my apartment, would you take it?
1 gp is well over $1; we just think of it as a trivial amount of money because PCs are super wealthy.
Some of the treasure hoards as calculated in the DMG can have hundreds or even thousands of copper pieces. This is a huge pain for the characters to transport and convert into gold. How do people here handle that? Do you let any random shopkeeper accept payment in hundreds of copper pieces, or do the PCs have to visit a money-lender or bank to cash in their hoard? If I'm being realistic there would be an exchange fee, but that just seems mean when you're already dealing with an inconvenience like this. I'm curious to hear how other DMs have handled this.
I've done bo
I've done both. For small cities or villages where the concept of a Bank may not exist, I allow shopkeepers to accept any amount of and type of standard currency. When the city is much larger, and the concept of money lending may be prevalent, I try to get the players to go, during downtime and with a hand wave, to get them to exchange their currency for significant dominations as the shopkeepers may be more snobbish about the money spent.
Then again, shopkeepers want to make money, so as the saying goes, "Shopkeeper has wears if you have the coin."
I just ignore it and let people pay in cp. Or just don’t even bother giving them cp, unless I them want to hear how they carry it all. Otherwise, unless there’s a story reason, I don’t know why I’d penalize the characters (exchange rates would be a penalty) for a random roll I made on a treasure table.
Mostly those crazy amounts of cp on treasure tables come from 1e days. But then you were expected to have a number of hirelings following you around to carry your stuff. It was actually one of the few uses for cha, was how many hirelings you could have working for you. Without those pack mule type flunkies, it really just screws the characters to give them piles pf cp.
But then money in general isn’t as useful in this edition without homebrewing, so maybe they just leave it on the ground.
I've always just had stores accept copper in any quantity, regardless of location. However, we play on roll20 which automatically calculates the weight of coins, so my players usually try to convert all their currency to gold whenever the opportunity arises... and occasionally convert gold into Platinum just to make it easier to carry. I have banks and coin exchanges in city's and larger towns, but in remote villages if the players attempt to convert coins into other currency I generally just set a limit on how much they can convert based on what feels logical to me in that setting.
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I was also going to say, if the party has a forge cleric, their channel divinity really gets a chance to shine.
Honestly, think about the story implications of such a hoard. Can the PCs physically handle that amount of coinage? How are they going to transport it? Do they have to make like Skyrim and head back to town before clearing the rest of the area?
Being truthful though, if they players are going to a shopkeep of any kind the shop's primary motivation is making money to feed themselves/their family. They will to my mind take coin however it is offered. Now if it's a big city or town where there are some higher class shops, the shopkeep may refuse to take a certain type of coinage but that's not all that common. Most of my towns and villages operate on a hand to mouth kind of basis. Most people in the world are taking the money the earnt today to pay for their food for tomorrow, so it's not like most shopkeepers have larges stashes of cash on hand. Because of that I usually have players experience the problem on the other end. 'Oh I'm so sorry, I don't have enough change for that gold piece...' That opens out a choice, either the PC has to overpay for an item, perhaps getting something extra for their trouble like an extra day's ration or something, or just the goodwill of the shopkeeper in future. Their other option is to refuse to pay and leave without the item they want.
I tend to mix it up though on the fly. Sometimes I won't be tracking the exact denominations of coin the PCs have on their person and just assume the right change is given. Other times for story purposes I'll make a thing out of it to add some colour and depth. Inconsistent I know, but it introduces a touch of diversity into what could be quite a 2D world sometimes.
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I usually don't worry about currency conversion, but a copper piece isn't a penny (D&D prices are pretty random, but for typical goods it works out to somewhere between a quarter and a dollar per copper).
PCs killed their way to get keys to proverbial copper mine ... and sometimes managing money can be quite the literal burden.
I don't care for D&D's universal money system. A copper from an empire gone thousands of years ago literally isn't the currency of the present game moment. So yes, we do bulk currency trading in my games with merchants or counting houses with interests in exotic currencies. And these trades are done at a price and there's a negotiation system etc. In large metro's enterprising players can auction the coin to various interests (sorta like the way the DOJ and Treasury dept in the U.S. do with seized crypto assets).
Not for nothing, but it usually turns out in my game the major metro's thieves guilds tend to be the best deal in the metro for what you'd consider "banking services" ... of course you have to know how to find and then get through the fronts that grant you access to that economy.
What I'm saying, don't leave the coin at face value. Eventually money is largely meaningless to the adventurers beyond "points" with little utility once a certain material standard is met. However, if you look outside the simple RAW accounting, fantasy money is fun to play with.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
As for coinage from older empires of far flung regions of the world I just use the equivalent weight conversion. If 100 cp weighs a pound then a pound of the other cp equals 100 cp common.
Everyone else has told you how to find money changers. I go even farther. A professional money changer is part of a large widespread guild. His word is good. His rates are fare and set. He even has the ability to write you a letter of exchange, good for the face value written in any other money changers guild house.
Such as : 'this letter is good for 10,000 gold, signed by Larry Gee the money changer of Krypton' .Several seals would be attached to make it all official. He would also enter the exchange in to his records.
He would charge you a set percentage like 1% but its better than carrying huge sacks of cash.
By the way this was also the way nobles sent large amounts of money all over Europe.
As for the amount of cash a money changer has on hand I used the rule of 2 times the amount of people in the village or town he was located in expressed as gp, 1000 people equaled about 2000 gp.
Illegal money changers kept no records but charged everything the customer could afford. But he kept no records. Often associated with thieves and other criminals. And any trade with them came with its own special risks.
Letters of credit = yes. Just like letters of introductions make commerce part of playing in the world.
I'm a bit nuanced about commerce within the "official" and "underground" economies. There's good and bad actors in both systems, like official and unofficial economies today.
As far as ancient currency getting treated as equivalent by weight, the D&D default, sure that's pretty much the rules as written D&D monetary policy. But if you think about what happens to actual even medieval economies when you start flooding them with an influx of foreign, anachronistic or basically anonymous unsanctioned currencies granted arbitrary 1:1 exchange rates, coppers will make a town weird, silvers a city, gold possibly a terriotry and platinum could real upset the balance of power within a nation.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The whole concept of using four different metals for currency is quite ahistorical; most cultures that minted precious metal currency only used one metal (either silver or gold), rarely two. This is because the exchange rate between metals varies with time, so if you have an official exchange rate for coins, people will take advantage of the difference between official exchange rates for coin and market rates for metal to exchange the less expensive metal for the more expensive metal, resulting in losses for the mint. This does not apply to fiat currency (such as modern coin) where the face value exceeds the value of the metal in the coin, but such coin is generally made of base metal, not precious metal, and long-lost hoards of coin will only be valuable to collectors.
Personally I hand wave it, I hand out silver and coper in treasure hordes, or found looting dead enemies pockets, but I don't care about exchange rates or any of that. As for different ages, nations etc, I just say that gold is gold, doesn't matter where it came from (unless holding a particular nations coin makes you look like a bad guy in a nation in conflict with it, which is more of a plot point then anything).
Its not hard to melt down the metals and make simple ingots out of it. This is especially true in D&D since there is no face value to the coins.
The real tough treasures are those made up of artwork. Try flogging off the Mona Lisa in some 500 person mountain village. Or a hundred pound gold statue.
In the one game I've had that kept track of it, we had a donkey and a few henchmen to help with encumbrance and we ended up paying a fairly hefty exchange rate - maybe 20%? Once we leveled up a bit, it started to feel like copper just wasn't worth our time, which I don't think the DM anticipated.
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(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Eventually it is not worth the time to hull back thousands of copper coins. But I try to always have a nice amount to buy the small stuff.
All that copper can be hoarded speculatively for when the game world discovers non magical electrical transmission....
As for coin in game play, yes the RAW treats treasure broadly largely as simply point tally values with uncomplicated exchange. And that's fine, and if a DM wants to largely adhere to that with a little "world challenge" there is the encumbrance system. That said, treasure and simple money does present opportunities to make real life economic, trade, and simply "doing business" concepts interesting,
If you want the utility of melting down a hoard of copper into 10-25 gp ingots as a hefty utility currency, you can do that. But ingots also aren't "pure exchange" legally, socially, politically culturally. Real ingots aren't simply "pure metal in convenient bar form". They're stamped as part or complete statement of the ingot's provenance. Like uncut diamonds, a scrupulous "banker" or exchange type is going to be suspicious of the origins of "unmarked" ingots and is going to presume crime. Now of course IRL some financial institutions have historically and still presently de facto play part in the laundering the proceeds of war crime, kleptocracy and other very lucrative forms of organized crime ... probably at a premium over more traditional "legitimate" transactions as part of the institutions risk management and mitigations practices. it's money laundering (Full disclosure, in a prior career I did a bit of work investigating financial crimes or I'd say probably more accurately criminal use of financial systems from actual Hawaladar money movements to cryptocurrency that digitally operate on the Hawaladar principle of credit between network nodes, so this stuff is interesting to me, and I like making it interesting to others). Money is power, and if a lot of new power of unknown origin suddenly arrives and begins circulating in the systems, the powers that be are going to notice because they are literally upset.
In a D&D context of a game I'd run, "one does not simply walk into town with a hoard and proverbially high roll." "Where/how did they get that?" is a question often avoided by polite society but is a constant background noise in most social interaction and contact where there's economic difference, amplify that to dragon hoard proportions. Maybe as a matter of policy the local liege of a region beset by monsters has a "keep the proceeds of your kill" policy in place. Neighboring communities who have suffered losses due to the monsters otherwise unchecked in that region may disagree. It's a proto-text for D&D world building, so it's fair to remind everyone what The Battle of Five Armies (including the human v. dwarf siege) was actually about.
Provenance, restoration, restitution of "found treasure" can be a fascinating story to play out. Again, especially given money's otherwise lack of utility once PCs get to a certain material standing through their exploits. I talked about sorta big wealth disruptions and game world financial institutions being used in money laundering for vast hauls. But even a simple artwork of the 25gp and up range, one doesn't simply walk into a reputable art dealer and liquidate it. The provenance thing again. So if you want to exchange the art, you're going to need an actor willing to be a fence, and that's going to come at cost higher than the "clean exchange" rate, again because you're paying for fence's, now co-conspirator's, risk mitigation.
Treasure can be simple coin stacking accounting; I'm just highlighting the fact that it can also not be such a simple reward but a way to move the game's plot, particularly if your game is invested in a "political" game as many claim to be these days.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Its not money laundering unless your trying to hide its origin which is normally not a problem.
As for converting it to bars the local alchemist can test it. And if your baring up copper more than likely the local craftsmen will buy it at bulk prices. The same with silver.
As for flooding the market to the point you will change it. Thats not too likely unless your just handing it out by the bag. If your changing copper to gold the same value is in the market total so nothing is added. Just changed.
But yes local nobles will take notice and expect their tax.
All of this makes for adventure points. Trying to hide as much from the local nobles trying to find and getting to a city large enough to handle it. Trying to keep the bandits from getting. Then how do you protect it afterward?
Forge Cleric and Fabricate (much higher level) can take tens of thousands of coppers and turn them into a cart to hall the silver away.
But... coppers are pennies. How many pennies do you have to be find before you decide it is worth it.
100 dollars/gp is 10,000 pennies/cp. It weighs about 50-60 lbs. If I were to off you a 60 lb box full of pennies in order to clean my apartment, would you take it?
1,000 dollars/gp weighs 500-600 lbs. Would you accept that as payment for well... anything? Yes, it is a thousand dollars, but 500 lbs is not something I could lift. (No, bro, I don't even lift, I roll dice and argue about rules.
)
1 gp is well over $1; we just think of it as a trivial amount of money because PCs are super wealthy.
I Made THIS Magic item.