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D&D

They Got Me By Mentioning D&D

Gold hoarders are funny. Link

Would gold really pay off in the event of a calamitous social disruption? I'm really not sure that it would.
...
First of all, gold has always had a lot of limitations as a medium of exchange. Most notably, it is relatively easy to steal. To realize this, all you have to do is look at games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons, or the original Final Fantasy. In those games, gold is the money, and you often get gold not by doing an honest day's work, but by running around and beating people up and taking their gold. In other words, the entire world of modern fantasy role-playing is a subtle joke on gold's unsuitability as a medium of exchange.

I object to that. There's nothing wrong with beating people up and taking their gold. Some of them deserved it. They were trying to destroy Chumera. But without a magic mirror that holds all your shit, you're gonna end up over-encumbered and then your movement's going to get decreased to 6 and then just forget about getting into the fight before it's all over.

But cereally. If the world sinks into a financial apocalypse (probability of that happening increases if Larry Summers gets put in charge of the Fed, btw) and governments become unstable, what the hell good is gold going to do you? Food, clothes, medical supplies - that's what will be the new currency.

In the days when people carried around gold doubloons and whatnot as money, you had a global political system characterized by pockets of stability (the Spanish Empire, or the Chinese Empire, or whatever) scattered among large areas of anarchy. Those stable centers minted and gave out the gold coins. But in the event of a massive modern global catastrophe that brought widespread anarchy, the gold bars buried in your backyard would not be swappable for eggs or butter at the corner store. You'd need some big organization to turn the gold bars into coins of standard weights and purity. And that big organization is not going to do that for you as a free service. More likely, that big organization will simply kill you and take your gold bars, Dungeons and Dragons style.

By min | August 1, 2013, 10:27 AM | D&D | Link



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