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Out of character
Letters to the editor
I'll buy that for a shekel!
T.S. Luikart's article, “You Do What for a Living?”
in your premiere issue was very interesting and informative
on a number of topics. However, his suggestions about the
dearth of both precious metals and coinage generally in ancient
times seem to me to have failed to recognize some history.
Perhaps this is because he is focused on Europe and does not
go earlier than Rome, but coinage was part of the system for
a very long time before that.
As I explain in my Gaming Outpost article, Game Ideas Unlimited:
Cash, there was an intermediate step between the early barter
economy and the use of minted coinage such as the Romans had.
This was the age of the shekel in the Middle East, but it
existed elsewhere as well. The shekel was indeed a coin, weighing
about half an ounce, made usually of silver, sometimes of
gold. It was treated very much as a barter item, in that merchants
were willing to trade goods for goods or for shekels. However,
a shekel was not worth its value because it was a coin, but
because of its weight. In a sale using shekels, the merchant
would produce a balance scale and place a weight on one side
as the number of shekels, each weighing about half an ounce,
that the buyer had to place on the other side. The coins might
have different weights individually, but when the scale balanced,
that was enough silver, or gold, to close the deal. This became
a common means of transacting business long before there were
empires, and these metals were apparently considerably more
plentiful than Mr. Luikart suggests.
As my article explains, minted coinage was an effort to get
beyond weighing the coins. The Roman government made coins
which it certified had a specific weight of metal of a specific
purity, and this notion of governments stamping their seals
on coins to certify their value by weight of metal remained
the standard until the mid-1960s, when the United States finally
stopped making silver coins.
Now, I am the first to admit that there are sometimes absurd
amounts of coinage floating around in my fantasy games, but
as my wife said when she read the article, who cares? The
amounts might not be strictly historical, but there is evidence
for ancient civilizations trading in vast amounts of precious
metals in the form of coinage, without the benefits of government
minting. I suspect that the treasure troves in The Arabian
Nights were envisioned to be this sort of coin from truly
ancient times; and those are the fantasies many of us are
playing, even if they've been strongly westernized.
I would like to commend T.S. Luikart on his otherwise excellent
and insightful article, particularly in regard to the inflationary
impact of treasure influx. I recall one of my players commenting
that whenever his party got around to dumping their silver
and copper on the market it was probably going to result in
a devaluation of the coins, so I think his ideas are quite
sound and worth considering.
Thank you for the wonderful e-zine, and I look forward to
the next installment.
GM se quois
Congratulations on the issue. I read all of the articles
with interest, but Eddy Webb's struck me in particular.
He says that a role-playing game is not a game. And yet,
a little later on, he says:
I would point out to Eddy that GM is, of course, short for
“Game Master.” If RPGs are not games, why should
the person running them be called game masters?
My point is not to be snide or even to disagree with him.
But, he seems to assume that we should just slavishly adopt
the terms used in one or another role-playing game, without
thinking that perhaps some of the other terms bandied about
are better. And, depending on the game, using a different
term for a GM might be intentional -- depending on the game,
there is a vast (and possibly important) difference between
Dungeon Master, Game Master, Narrator, and "Great High
and Mighty Grand Poobah."
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