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Materials and currency in RPGs

Various metals
in Legacy

Various materials (usually metals) in games often serve as a quality indicator similar to the +n rating in D&D. Sometimes it's somewhat justified (blades made of harder metals stay sharp longer) sometimes it's just plain silly (adamantium bows that have better damage than… iron bows? Seriously?).

And then there's the the thing about mithril. Well, everyone knows that mithril is very light, right? That is certainly a huge advantage if you are wearing a mithril armor but how exactly is that handled? If mithril is twice as light as steel for example, you either have an armor with the same damage resistance as steel - but with only half the weight, or the same weight and twice the resistance. There's really no need to add any more special resistance modifier to mithril as simply being much lighter is a huge advantage on its own.

…or is it? Recently I've stumbled across an article (I think it was on TVtropes) where someone mentioned that mithril is really not suitable for blunt weapons because of its low weight.
I'm really not so sure about that - first, many blunt weapons are actually more like 'edged' weapons than bludgeoning instruments - real life war hammers for example (those fantasy dwarven hammers… not so much).
And second, (and I've never been too good at physics) from what I remember I think the damage inflicted by impact = weight × speed - and, in theory, if you have an object twice as light shouldn't you be able to swing it twice as fast? Or am I missing something here?

Although these precious metals are in reality (the in-game reality, that is) usually more valuable than gold, they are rarely used as currency. After all, it's perfectly reasonable not to waste weapon-grade materials by minting them into coins I suppose.

The economy in the majority of fantasy games is clearly broken and I realize it's really hard to make it work while at the same time let the players have fun and give them some valuable loot. Some of the "obvious" solutions are better, some are worse. (I really hate shopkeepers with limited amount of cash - if you find some great artifact which you cannot use and nobody is able to buy, you can literally just throw it away because, well, it's virtually useless and therefore worthless for you. Aside from being a very nice paperweight.) But I'm not going to write about economy here - what bothers me is the amount of coins used in these transactions.

The majority of modern fantasy games taking place in pseudo-medieval settings use gold pieces or something similar as currency. I mean, the minimal price of anything is one gold coin. And that's not the worst problem - imagine just hauling all these coins around, no matter what material they are made of. Let's say the cheapest thing is one sling bullet, basically a conveniently shaped pebble. So one bullet costs one gold piece. (In some games the shops sell these only in some minimal quantities but that's really just "shifting" the problem a bit.) Alright then, how much for an arrow? Let's say… 100gp? (It's really that much more work to make an arrow than to find a pebble somewhere.) How much for a pair of boots? 500gp? What about a basic sword? 5000? A suit of armor? 50000? As you can see here our "realistic" prices differ greatly from numbers usually seen in those games already and we didn't get too far. What about artifacts, ships or even real estates?

So let's have a look at some of the older games. In some of them you have only one type of coin but the weight of them adds to your encumbrance and sometimes it's possible to turn them into a letter of credit (Daggerfall).
In others you have more types (ducates, silver crowns and copper bits in The Realms of Arkania series) or actually quite a few (six in the case of Dungeon Master 2).
These things are quite easily implemented and I don't recall anyone really complaining about them as being too complex and making the game not fun to play. I suppose they got dropped in the process of dumbing everything down in the recent years.

Coin counters

In my opinion having a little more realistic currency makes the game more interesting and the gold you find is actually valuable again. And that's why I plan to include gold, silver and copper coins in my game system.