400 year old carrot? Yum yum!!

Zloth

I smell a... wumpus!?
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After defeating Yorkle, the ancient, yellow dragon, I shoved his treasure pile aside to reveal an ancient door - sealed long ago by the Wizard of Yendor, leader of the Sleestak Wizards. I used the amulet I had stolen from the bedchambers of Queen Sassafras and opened the door, inhaling air that hadn't moved in 400 years, then took stock of the treasure therein:
  • One big, magical diamond - the object of my quest
  • 7385 gold pieces, painstakingly stacked and labeled in such a way that I could count them at a glance. Conveniently, the coins of the Sleestak Wizards' kingdom were remarkably similar to modern coinage, and just as light weight. Shop keepers probably wouldn't even notice the difference.
  • A robe of displacement. Thankfully, the robe had not served as the food source for generations of very confused moths that grew up learning to chew next to their food source instead of directly on it.
  • Five carrots and three fish. Should taste great after I boil them for a week or two?
Really, though, the games I've been playing lately are getting really lazy with their ancient rooms. Pillars of Eternity 2 was leaving all sorts of foodstuffs lying around in caves - even ones that were sealed generations earlier. Pathfinder: Kingmaker looks like it's going to do the same thing - though so far I don't think any of the meat has been lying around for more than a few weeks (I hope it was salted).

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey had a sealed, underground structure that you had to drop down into - splashing down into a man-made pool. The place had been sealed (with a few brief periods of opening) for a century or three. So how had the pool not evaporated? And how were fish still living in this stagnant pool with the nearest plant being on the other side of 200 meters of rock!?

I can deal with the money thing because, honestly, I don't want to have to adventure with a pack of mules to haul my cash around. I can't say I would be too excited about a quest to find somebody who will trade ancient coins for legal tender, either. But can we at least think about what would happen to things left in a room for a few centuries? Leather hardens and cracks, many metals corrode, and, unless this place is consistently very cold, food becomes unrecognizable.

You're in fantasy land so there's no problem putting "Tup Ah'rhare's Spell of Eternal Freshness" on the room - but you do have to actually bother to make note of it!
 
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So is this an actual game or an expression that carrots don't rot fast enough ? I mean there are like a zillion derivative of hack and one of them might really have a yellow dragon follow by queen what her name guarding a very nice carrot. Btw carrots are great - are you sure you really want them to rot faster ?
 
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I just made up the game. Yorkle is from the old Atari 2600 adventure game and the Wizard of Yendor (and his amulet) are from Nethack. Queen Sassafras because I was drinking root beer as I wrote it.

And yes, I do want them to rot in less than a century!
 
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Interestingly enough, the issue you have with the age of coins is remarkably inaccurate and, ironically, shows your lack of knowledge of historical coinage, lol.

Particularly with regard to precious metal coinage, which all western coinage used to be at one point, either gold or silver (though the romans did experiment with copper and the like). And the key exchange value was the weight of the coin, not what was printed on it, what was printed on it was just a quality stamp, it told the barer what the purity of the metal was.

As such, something as common as the common silver penny in England could still be traded with from as far a date margin as 757AD to 1650AD. Even in Roman times, coin collecting and taking interest in old coins didn't really become a thing until quite late in the Empire's reign and even then it was more of a nostalgia hobby of the extremely rich.

Money is a technology that relies on technology. Not much changed with regards to money for a very long time as a consequence of this and it's only really since about 1650AD that the pace of change in the content and production of money has sped up to the point now where money is quite regularly going out of circulation or becoming redundant quicker. Different metals/papers, different sizing conventions, different anti-forging tactics, and the like.

The only reason you might have a problem using 'old money' for trade in the olden days is if the person you were giving the coin to was unfamiliar with the stamp on the coin. A central banking house would not have that issue so much, but the guy selling you some potatoes on a farm in outpost nowhere might.

I liked your post though, good classical simulationist nitpicking. I apologise for wrecking some of it with counter nitpicking :D
 
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Particularly with regard to precious metal coinage, which all western coinage used to be at one point, either gold or silver (though the romans did experiment with copper and the like). And the key exchange value was the weight of the coin, not what was printed on it, what was printed on it was just a quality stamp, it told the barer what the purity of the metal was.
Ah, but my nitpickiness is a subtle thing! How would one base the value of coins on their weight when RPG coins are, in fact, weightless? ;)

But like I said later, the coin thing doesn't bother me much because fixing it would just be a pain for everybody. Magical clothing is fine, too. But simple, ordinary food ingredients?? That just makes me think the developers aren't reading their own stories.
 
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The weight issue I agree with. I remember playing a cRPG once that gave weight to coins, but for the life of me I can't remember which one it was it was so long ago. I thoroughly enjoyed that mechanic.
 
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Yea I remember that but which game was it - iwd? nwn? muds? dang I can't remember but it was early 2000's i think.

The weight issue I agree with. I remember playing a cRPG once that gave weight to coins, but for the life of me I can't remember which one it was it was so long ago. I thoroughly enjoyed that mechanic.
 
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In close relation to coin weight, I also think that the value of gold coins tends to be much too low in many games.
 
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Yea I remember that but which game was it - iwd? nwn? muds? dang I can't remember but it was early 2000's i think.

I don't know why, but I keep thinking it might have been something actiony even, such as Divine Divinity or perhaps it was a Dark Eye game like Drakensang: River of Time? It certainly wasn't the Infinity Engine games or NWN.
 
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Hmm, Pool of Radiance had weighted coins because I remember turning coins into gems when I could. Maybe all early gold box games?
 
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I'm still yet to try PoR, but I'm now convinced it was probably RoT that I remember, as you say, I seem to remember wanting to convert all the copper and silver to gold and RoT had a g/s/c coin system. Possibly gems as well.
 
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