Coins

One lunchtime conversation people were talking about gambling. I tried gambling once. I got very excited, but I decided, like most vices I would be better off not exploring it too much. But I digress. One of the comments someone made was that they took the arms of slot machines and now you just pressed a button and that this change took all the fun out of it. The key observation here is that the physical act of pulling a lever added fun. This brought me back to my younger days when I wrote a dice program to make my Champions game go faster. Champions damage rolls tend to be around 10 six-sided dice. You end up spending a decent amount of time counting dice. From this time I got pretty quick at counting dice totals, but I recognized the loss of time and a wrote a program to automate it. But when I used it my players weren't that keen on it. People like to roll dice. They like the physical interaction with the objects.

While thinking about this I was also thinking about how to handle inventory management in D&D. I toyed with the idea of a program and may still make one, but I thought about how in many 'economy' type games you have little markers for money, i.e. monopoly money. Having this physical money handed around is part of the physical aspect of the game. So I thought for D&D instead of just writing downs numbers that are easy to lose track of, I would get coins and have the characters actually have a physical representation of their wealth.

First, I thought about using pennies and such, but in D&D at higher levels the money scales up quickly so using real money or even fake copies of real money wouldn't work. So I came across a site about making clay coins for hannukah. So I went out and bought 4 lbs of oven bake clay. I got a fairly cheap kind that was undyed. Originally, I though about getting multiple colors and have that represent value. But I went with volume over color options. This turned out to be a mistake...

So the clay was pretty easy to work with. I covered a rolling pin in plastic wrap and rolled out the clay into a thin layer on top of newspaper. I then used a lipstick cap as a mold to cut out small circles. I punched a hole through the top of the cap so I could put a skewer through and push out the clay. I tried a couple different ways of marking the clay with value numbers. I tried carving the number into the clay, writing the number with sharpie on both pre and post baked clay. Due to the carving being time consuming and sharpie not working pre baking, I ended up just writing numbers with a sharpie after the baking. It worked very nicely.

One thing I have seen in craft books was using molds and metallic glitter to make clay coins look real. I didn't bother with this, but it does have potential. One thing I wish I had done was buy the smaller packages of colored clay. Because I bought way, way too much clay. I have made over 200 coins and had barely used my big hunk of clay. I think it would have been much cooler to have brown, white, and yellow coins to represent increasing value and maybe even red and blue coins to represent various forms of residium.

One thing I would like to do in the future is get a nice dice bag for the players coins. Right now they sit in a plastic bag, which gives some nice visibility, but kind of breaks the medieval coin feel.