Why inflation is so prominent in many fantasy type novels. 9 out 10 novels has a serious problem with inflation where 1 gold coin has a cost of, at best 100 USD with modern purchase power.
probably something similar to idle games they need the amount to be small so that when the mc is rich he still needs to work hard for more so plot convenience
Since a lot of gold coins in these fantasy novels can be diluted down to lower and lower amounts of gold. As years pass they might not even have a fraction of the actual gold amount. There could also be a million other problems like monsters spawning and dropping gold. It’s fantasy which makes it defy common sense.
A hundred years ago a dollar bought way more gold than now (1000 dollars of gold now cost 20 dollares in 1915) so if youtake gold as a standart the dollar now has weaker purchishing power than 100 years ago, so we are the one with the inflation problem, the fantasy world have always used a gold coin can feed a family for a month since the begining of time https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart
It's rare to see a novel where gold > paper. In majority novels gold is just pocket money based on buying power of gold coin.
To begin with I'm not even sure the authors have some knowledge about economy, and also "fantasy novel" don't even bother, u will not find any sense in there
Probably most authors are basing the currency systems on those in games, where computer games generally take the inflation that started in Table-top RPGs & ran with it. Of course there is also the fact that it is very rare for an author to mention how much gold, silver, or whatever (or what purity) there is to a unit of currency (if a "gold piece" 1 troy ounce it is, in real-world terms, rather more valuable than a "gold piece" that weighs 1/10th of a troy ounce).
really? isn't a lot of them go with copper/silver/gold/platinum? so gold should worth a lot if 1s=100c.
then it is because a lot of author does not bother to consider the proper item price. I remember a novel where a gold coin can afford commoner family livelihood for a few months. or maybe it is because the mc is so rich that he is only strolling in the noble district where the price is a rip-off.
The point remains, that coins of given type do not necessarily contain the same amount of valuable material as those of another type. There is no inherent reason why a system where each step up (copper, silver, gold, platinum) was by multiples of 100 of the lower one would necessarily be coins of the same volume/weight at all steps, the silver coin might be the twice the weight of the copper, with the gold 1/25th of it, & the platinum basically a plating on a copper coin... Or whatever makes sense to the author (if they feel the need to define it all). As for the purchasing value of a "gold piece" being ridiculously low, I believe it is likely, if not necessarily directly, due to early games like D&D with their explanations (which I suspect was a lame justification for a strange decision, rather than the actual reasoning before the decision was made) like "adventurers dump a lot of gold & loot into a local economy leading to large scale inflation".
I'm not sure I like the use of words like "prominent" or "most" in this thread. While there are a lot of writers who don't give a damn about the economics of money in their stories, there are also a ton out there who do. Obviously, this is more likely in historical novels, but it's hardly uncommon even in fantasy novels. Hell, it's not even uncommon to see gold that's considered to be valuable in books which otherwise don't give a damn about world building. Really the only reason why gold had such low value in Dungeons and Dragons was because it was used more for exoticism than for realism. Also, the original D&D was weird in that it really wanted to limit just how much loot player characters could carry as a way of limiting these characters. It's cool to find entire chests full of gold, but that gold can't be too valuable or else it'd throw the game out of whack.
Well gold is worthless in some novels. Because now you have platinum gold or white gold. As if gold wasn't already the highest thing there is. Better yet, might as well go back to a bartering system. My luxurious diamond for some of your gold. Also in some stories. the only money was gold. It was just changed either in size or quantity. E.g. The bag sack of potatoes costs 1 medium Gold and 2 small Gold. (Money System: XL, L, M, S) or E.g. Merchant, "The short sword costs 50 Gold, the full suit of Armor is 150 Gold" Adventurer," Can I pay with loot?" (Money System: Just Gold)
You can take an example from ancient Rome. During Hannibal's siege of Rome, there was not enough gold to go around. There was not enough silver to go around. Their currency was silver and gold. They had no economy, no way of getting more gold. But people still need to be paid. So what did they do? They melted their gold and silver and mixed them with cheaper materials, and they tried to pass them off as the same coin. They suddenly had huge puchasing power, for awhile, and when they needed to pay people again, they remelted the gold again and increased the percentage of cheaper metals. People were wondering where the heck did these coins come from with Hannibal outside doing his best trying to kill or rob everyone going in and out of Rome. Then people wised up, and realized that these coins that were supposed to have been worth its weight in gold (or silver) were actually worthless. The smugglers couldn't make any profit because the coins were worthless. The price of everything in Rome jumped to the roof overnight. Good for them that they eventually defeated Hannibal, but their economy never truly recovered from that. And later emperors continued to devalue their currency because they want more money at the expense of inflation.
Sometimes the author just doesn't give it much thought and uses gold as their only currency... Which leads to this kind of weird thing. Personally speaking, if anything costs thousands of coins, I think there is a problem with your system... Because... Well, who will carry thousands of coins around? More often than not though, the coins themselves don't matter much, so the author didn't give it much thought. Which leads to the crazy inflation problem. I personally prefer when they use the Platinum>Gold>Silver>Copper system... More often than not the numbers are exaggerated and they have no historical accuracy, but it still serves the purpose of making the valuable coins look actually valuable.