Gems & Jewellery Headaches

I was just discussing an impromptu survey of D&D players through twitter and social media, answering the question, "What would you like to see on an equipment table that isn't usually there?"  The reply came back overwhelmingly, jewellery.

Okay, so this is an enormous headache.  There are several resources in the original DMG that have plagued me since I began running the game ... and since I'm deep into equipment, now's a good time to talk about them.  Let me reproduce the relevant sections of pp.25-26 first, then a piece of p.219:

Wow, did I waste a lot of time with these tables!

While we can handwave ourselves through gaming by randomly rolling a goblet, arbitrarily determining that it's made of gold, with gems, and that it's worth 5,000 g.p., there are considerable issues with this system.  Given that the average roll for jewellery is 2,910 g.p., that's awfully high for any party less than 6th level; it doesn't tell us what gems the goblet has, so these have to be assigned.  The table doesn't tell us how much of the value is gold and how much is gems, or what gems there are or how many.  Yes, we can arbitrarily assign these things, but if we're left having to arbitrarily assign most of the details, how are we aided by having the dice assign one detail and an outrageous total g.p.?  Why is it more than six times as likely to find jewellery worth more than 1,000 g.p. than pieces of that amount and less?

Yet in my infancy I used this table for more than a decade, willfully rolling the amounts and then arbitrarily adjusting them as needed, until finally I grew up and recognized that it was easier to assign every detail and screw the die rolling.  Which I hated.  But then I built a trading system and pricing table that would allow me to exactly define the cost of the gold by weight, the cost of the 18 amber gems set into it, using specific gravity to define the weight vs. the size of the gems and the cup, etcetera.

Not that this helped me one damn bit.

Start with the variety of gems shown.  Gygax includes 54 varieties of gemstone.  My pricing system has 65, counting all the varieties I've stumbled across that are worth including.  Each has a unique value, as they come from places scattered across the globe, which for my system defines the price of the gem based on its relative type (ornamental, fancy, semi-precious, lesser precious and greater precious).  On top of this, because my system isn't random, gems come in 8 general sizes:  pea, marble, cherry, almond, walnut, plum, peach and apple, each size corresponding to the number of cubic inches associated with an object the size of a pea, marble, cherry and so on.  If you're interested:

• pea-sized: 0.016 cub.in.
• marble-sized: 0.061 cub.in.
• cherry-sized: 0.251 cub.in.
• almond-sized: 0.655 cub.in.
• walnut-sized: 1.031 cub.in.
• plum-sized: 2.015 cub.in.
• peach-sized: 3.936 cub.in.
• apple-sized: 8.646 cub.in.

The comparative objects were picked to offer familiarity of proportion, and the cubic inches determined by researching the number of cubic inches in a pea, standard marble, cherry and so on.  It's difficult to picture a diamond weighing 56 carats; quick, tell me what that is on the list above.  That's an awfully big diamond.  The Hope Diamond is 45.52 carats.  A diamond is 3,510 carats per cubic inch.  A diamond that's 56 carats would be the size of a pea.  That's all.  An almond-sized diamond, the sort that's often depicted in the movies, such as the one in Titanic, would be 2,317 carats, 2/3rds as large as the biggest UNCUT diamond that's ever been found, the Cullinan diamond.  Cut diamonds are never that big.

But forget the digression.  For a fantasy game, we can easily propose a diamond as large as a walnut.  Poof, one exists.  The bigger issue is that the varying sizes of gemstone means that not only are we picking the type and the number to go on our goblet, we're picking the size too.  Not to mention that we're also free to decide if the gold is 14K, 18K or 24K, each deciding the amount of actual gold in the metal—though if we want to use the cup, 24K is too soft.

Very well, if we want four types of gems in our cup, for colour you understand, and large and small sizes, and 14 carat gold, we'll still need a volume of gold for the goblet itself.  A 6 inch tall glass goblet weighs half a pound, or 0.23 kg.  However, glass has a specific gravity of 2.8 grams/cub.cm; 14K gold is much denser than that, so our goblet weighs 2.48 lbs.  Of course, that's arbitrary too: what about a goblet 7 inches high, or 8 inches?  What about a wider goblet, or one where the gold is thicker?  Are we going to built tables for that?

Finally, all this is entirely academic.  This one goblet of this one size and material, with this one collection of gems, is just ONE POSSIBLE object of an infinite combination of various things a jeweller, lapidary or metalsmith might make.  Any list of jewellery created for an equipment list (which is where we started), couldn't possibly account for all the jewellery possibilities a character may wish to advantage.  Suppose, for arguments sake, we want to take each object on the jewellery and items list described: 35 items.  We make each object in copper, pewter, silver, gold and white gold.  We're up to 170 items.  Let's say we make versions with gems and without gems: 340 now.  And let's say we make versions with gems of the five orders: ornamental, fancy and so on.  That's 1,700 jewellery items ... and in toto, only six of those are "earrings."  That's it.  You want a ring, you have six choices.

In fact, we could easily fill a splatbook (well, it wouldn't be "easy," it would be brain-crushing repetitive work, but ignore that) with all the types of jewellery a player might buy, with 3 columns of 30-50 items (some would need more than one line) over 200 pages, with 24,000 items, and players still wouldn't feel they had enough choice.  What, there's no silver tiara here encrusted with black coral?  THIS BOOK IS SHIT!

As such, jewellery lists don't exist because it's a hole that produces no value.

Ideally, I'd like to build a list the players could use to make their own jewellery.  A sort of plug-and-play arrangement.  And still it is sort of arbitrary to do this in a universal equipment list, such as the poster, we might as well say the jewellery is a gold tiara "with gems" worth 1800 g.p. and have done with it.  Realistically, for most game worlds, jewellery will always be known by its price tag and not its substance, which is sad, don't you think?  I prefer a system that defines the object completely, and leave the players to wonder how valuable it really is, like a sort of D&D road show.  Knowing the price tag ruins that experience.

Pity.

No Price Tags

My father would tell a story of going down to Mexico, where he chanced upon a small rock shop in Chihuahua State.  Being a rock hound and having spent years in Colorado - which is a heaven for amateur gem enthusiasts - this was the sort of place my father liked to find.  He used to drag me into places like this and spend hours explaining to me all the different rocks and what chemistry they had.

This particular shop in Mexico had what all rock shops have, a bargain bin where ordinary rocks that are mildly interesting make their way ... and this particular bin had a rough yellow lump in it about the size of an egg.  My father asked about the price and was told fifty cents.  The owner had identified it as an ordinary piece of crystal quartz, and since quartz is ridiculously common in Mexico, of course it wasn't worth anything.  My father didn't try to correct the owner; he simply paid the fifty cents and cheerfully made that nice large piece of topaz his own.

To a neophyte, a piece of yellow quartz and a piece of yellow topaz look almost exactly alike.  Quartz is a common mineral, cheap, found worldwide, and whereas it polishes up so that its pretty, it can't be cut very well and so it doesn't serve as a precious stone.  Topaz, on the other hand, is very precious, and when it's cut produces a remarkable brilliance that makes it highly desirable for jewelry.  What's the difference?  Cleavage.  The quartz is a six-sided crystal.  The topaz crystal has eight sides.

I find it remarkable that players seem to think that the value of a given stone or piece of jewelry is completely obvious on sight.  In the movies, of course, ALL gems that are found in treasure troves are perfectly cut, huge and plainly valuable ... and there is a clear distinction between the value of such gems.  That one there as big as my fist?  That's worth a lot more than this one here as big as a robin's egg.

Everything about gems defies that sort of comparison.  To begin with, they are very rarely cut.  Historically, most gems, especially big gems, were at best polished, and that is how they remained for centuries after being found.  Diamonds can't be polished; there's no grit in existence that will wear a diamond down, so for most of history - until diamond-cutting was developed in the 14th century - diamonds were fairly worthless, used as grit to polish other stones.  A big, faceted jewel such as those commonly depicted by Hollywood in the caves of Arab Princes wouldn't have existed - a large, rounded, beautiful stone like that in Conan the Barbarian was the norm.

Moreover, a small, brilliant gem could be worth a great deal more than a large dull one.  If one had two gems of the same size, knowing which one was more valuable and which was less would have been a difficult proposition for anyone except a trained lapidary ... which party members aren't, generally.

Another point, about polishing.  Does it ever strike the reader that the gems list in the DM's Guide includes agate?  By and large, agate is a ridiculously common stone, in this day and age the sort of thing rock shops sell to children because it polishes up pretty and shiny.  Typically, you can get it for about a dollar a stone, and that's from the fantastic mark-up the shop adds.  Slip down to any stony beach anywhere in the world and you can find billions of small pieces of agate as large as the end of your thumb - agate is, after all, just quartz, and the world is virtually made of quartz.

Nowadays, to polish agate yourself you need only a few dollars to get yourself a little drum that powered by electricity, with sandpaper you put in the inside and which 'tumbles' continuously until your piece of agate is nice and smooth.  It's the sort of fun hobby that mystifies children, who never imagined something so rough could be turned into something so smooth.

Imagine doing it without the electricity.  Imagine a set of employees whose job it is to turn the drum, endlessly, day and night.  The value of the agate is not its commonality.  It's the amount of effort it takes to make the agate smooth and pretty, so that its translucence catches the light.  Moreover, different agates will produce different effects - dendritic agate has patterns that reflect the incongruities existent in the original rock; Cairngorm is grey and ghostly; tiger-eye is bright and featured with small distinctive 'eyes'.  These characteristics are visible before polishing only to the trained observer.

I don't tell my players what a particular gem is worth because I don't feel they automatically have that knowledge.  This does make it difficult for them to neatly divide up treasure; it means that occasionally someone in the party gets lucky, despite the very best effort of everyone in the party to be fair and balanced.  But 'balanced' gaming is bullshit; knowledge is power, and if the characters have no such knowledge, then I am not bound to give it to them.

I conceal a monster's hit points and no one questions the logic of that.  I conceal a monster's attacks, their special powers, they bonus toys they may happen to carry, and no one questions the logic of that.  Why should a player question the logic of denying them automatic knowledge of the value of things?

Ignorance of the environment is a critical, crucial part of the game's drama.  I wouldn't mess with that by slapping a convenient price tag on everything that's found.