What's gold worth? Options

[Findar]

Anybody seen a value in SR3 or SR4?

[FrankTrollman]

In SR3, the value of alchemically useful Gold was 1 :nuyen: a gram (see p. 40 and 170, MitS), which indicates that the value of "normal" gold was even less. Presumably, someone found a huge supply of gold soemwhere between now and 2063, causing the value to fall down to that of milk, cheese, or any other commodity.

Yeppers, that's 10,000 :nuyen: for 10 kg of alchemical gold.

-Frank

[BishopMcQ]

[SL James]

One of the books mentioned that newly-awakened dragons and spirits with Wealth dropped enough precious metals and other valuables (e.g., diamonds) to significantly depress the market value.

[stevebugge]

From the NYMEX

http://www.nymex.com/GC_spec.aspx

Gold Futures

Trading Unit

100 troy ounces.

Price Quotation

U.S. dollars and cents per troy ounce.

[snip]

Ok I won't paste the whole thing here, since this is not a board on trading commodity futures.

Short version 1 Gram = .03 Troy Ounces

Todays Closing for gold was $517.10 per Troy Ounce or $17236.66
the Nuyen is around $5 so Gold should be about 3447.33 Nuyen per Gram.

So the SR value of Gold doesn't appear to have much bearing on reality.

However if you go back to the NYMEX page:

Gold futures contracts are also valuable trading tools for commercial producers and users of the metal. Commercial concentrations of gold are found in widely distributed areas: in association with ores of copper and lead, in quartz veins, in the gravel of stream beds, and with pyrites (iron sulfide). Seawater contains astonishing quantities of gold, but its recovery is not economical.

So perhaps recovering gold from seawater became economical at some point.

[stevebugge]

[SL James]

Hey, no one ever said anything in SR had to make sense; especially not economics.

[emo samurai]

So... how much gold and other stuff do you have to have to make 1 gram of orihalcum? Do you need to expend Karma?

[Darkness]

As per Magic in the Shadows, you need one unit (100g) of the radicals of each of silver, copper, gold and mercury (thats 400g in total) to refine 10g of orichalcum(the exact amount varies, depending on the outcome of your Enchanting test). The process takes 28 days to complete.
No Karma required.

[the_dunner]

[Moon-Hawk]

I agree with The Dunner, because he used the word 'stoichiometry'.

[Darkness]

And i forgot, to make those radicals you need refined materials of the four metals, which each weight 5 Kilos, which must be made out of raw materials (10 Kilo the unit for metals) in a 28 day alchemical process.

So effectively, you need 10 Kilos of every Metal involved to produce 10g of Orichalkum.

[stevebugge]

I agree with the Dunner too actually because when I redid the math I came up with the exact same numbers. Not sure what I did the first time.

So the correct math:
1 gram is about $16.81 or 3.36 NuYen

Still talking around a 70% decline in the price

However if you consider gold was down around $300 as recently as 2002 then:

1 Gram is about $9.00 or 1.8 NuYen

And was trading around $260 in 1999-2000

1g at $7.80 or 1.56 NuYen

[Mr.Platinum]

[Darkness]

Just ask the Wiki ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoichiometry

[Ancient History]

Lofwyr dropped a nice chunk of gold on the market when he bought S-K.

[emo samurai]

I thought dragons valued their treasure hordes as much as their most wonderful memories, because to them, their treasures WERE their most wonderful memories.

[emo samurai]

Plus, I heard that the cost of gold is artificially high; the supply is controlled very tightly because the amount of gold is used up at a much lower rate than what it's mined at. Once the institutions that control the supply of gold collapse, the market would then be flooded.

[Butterblume]

I will tell you the secret truth: in 2070, gold will be worth its weight in gold, if not more :D

[stevebugge]

[emo samurai]

[FrostyNSO]

One way or another, I'll bet the value skyrocketed when crash 2.0 hit.

[MaxMahem]

I wouldn't worry about its specific value (value per unit mass) to much unless there was specific reason to worry about the weight of gold that they had. If a player told me they wanted to convert so much of their wealth into gold I would make them find an appropriate broker, subtract 10%~15% of the amount as a brokrage fee, and have them mark it on there sheet. And then make evil plans to have their abode broken into. If it was during character creation I would shrug and say sure whatever, and ignore it.

If it the weight did come up during play (say they were stealing it from a vault or something, and need to know how much it weighed while trying to cart it away). I would just grab some numbers out of the sky, like say 10,000Y a pound, this is considerably higher than it's value today ~$8k a pound, but probably still short of what we reasonably might expect. It's price tends to rise with uncertiany, and so 2070 it's price is probably coming down after reaching a new all-time high after Crash 2.0. I would try and avoid letting players getting to much of it anyways. Gold is to valuable a resource to let players get there hands on in any kind of bulk. I suppose in 2070 it's all isotopicaly marked so it would be pretty hard to fence.

As for using it for fetishes and items and the like. I would just use the foci prices as a guidline and just wing-it. Gold might acount for say 25% of the cost of the foci. This would end up being a realitivly small (and to me uninteresting) amount. This should suffice until if/when Fan-pro publishes some more detailed foci rules, maybe in Street Magic.

-----

Hmm... thinking about it some more. I like my players to average about 10~20k per run, before expenses. Say a team of 5 players stole 50lbs of gold, a bulky enough quantity to be interesting (I forsee a footchase with such gold :D). That would be 500kY by my metric. Say they can fence it for 50% of it's value (reasonable enough), that would still be 50kY each, to much for my taste. Maybe they had to give half of there take up for the info to do the run? That would bring it down to just 25kY each, but there would be to much temptation to just take the money and run... I think it can work, but I'm fresh out of ideas. Any help?

[Jaid]

half of the gold is fake. the equipment needed to figure out if it's fake or not is very bulky.

as such, when they grab it, it's half fake, half real... and they don't know which half is which. when the people who own the gold need real stuff, they just run it through the test (have it take maybe a minute or two... really frustrating for a shadowrun, but if you plan ahead and are getting the gold legitimately, it is likely that 2 minutes is not that big of a deal... )

[FrankTrollman]

Real gold has a specific gravity of 19.8 g/mL. The equipment needed to test the veracity of gold is a cup of water and a bathroom scale. This is neither bulky nor complicated.

Other things that are dense enough to be mistaken for gold have a tendency to be more expensive than gold. If someone wanted to make a Pyrite cover for an Osmium Ingot that's great. Fool's gold only fools fools.

-Frank