Banking Options?

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

ummm, how to put this should/could we invite a bank to be on our site to handle the exchange or just handle it ourselves....

we gonna have mint to do our own coinage??? or just use regular american dollars and cents?

[Iasin the Steward]

well, A good plan would be to get an atm on site, near the front door. and then an echanage that way they dont carry cash and use our 'coinage' system.

Og and I talked about this, he had some good ideas to increase profits from this system.

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

ok but we gonna have an actual treasury run by our staff memebers or have a bank handle it. and where we gonna have our coinage done, or we gonna do up our own printing press/coin press???

[Iasin the Steward]

we will have a bank run to a local bank.

On site though it will be a coinage system, like usinfg poker chips, but different colors like bronze, gold, and silver.

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

is there gonna different values set up for each of the coins or just 3 diff coins and thats it. say like 3 different values printed up for each of the 3 coins?

and still not covering a printing press for our paper money, if we gonna do that, or just all coinage?

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

say like 3 different size gold, 3 different size silver, and 3 different size copper, all with different values assigned what ya think on that?

[Iasin the Steward]

Naw, lets stick to one size, differnt 'colors' (values)

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

or two diff sizes each cause say the gold is worth $10.00 and i handed them $300. currency, id have 30 coins in my pocket weighing me down. and if im in garb, i dont have pockets, i have several satchels, but its not easy to reach into a satchel when your in a rush. (beleive me im speaking from experience) trying to find one coin of a certain size is no fun

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

and also same coins per kingdom or different coins per kingdom?

[Iasin the Steward]

Perhaps have it textured different?


Get with Ogunshi on this he may have some better ideas.

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

ill try, but dunno if we are on at same time?

[ogunshi]

My ideas…….

First off getting an ATM machine is fairly simple. If I remember correctly you need to talk to a bank and make an arrangement with them. Once it is in place you are in charge of refilling it and the like. The up side is that you can charge a service charge of almost everything. The highest I have even seen was at Club La Vela which charged a killer $7.00 per use. Remember that the ATM should be used with as little bother as we can. We want them to use the ATM and not keep track of how much money they are spending.

As for banking you want to do something like they do in arcades and some theme parks.
The “Ya Ol’ Bank’ exchanges real money for park money, and only that way. To encourage this a good fraction of the shops should only deal with park money. This allows people to already spend a set amount before they even have anything of value.

Think of an arcade, you go to a change machine and drop a $5 into it. You get $5 worth in tokens that can be only used in that arcade. Not the arcade has already got $5 off of you, weather you spend the tokens is up to you. And I know I’ve left an arcade with a token or three in my pocket.

Anyhow let’s say person X hands over $100 in trade for park money. We now have made $100, The shops are geared toward accepting park money. Now here’s the kicker. Because of the ‘new money’ people don’t really think about how much they are spending. This means that you could sell a soda for higher then you normally would be able to.

You offer a dungeon crawl or other ‘quests’ for people to go on. At the end of the quest, if you survive, is a prize, of game money. (you can even put it in a small chest) This gives the illusion of they can get something for nothing.

Also regular visitors can go to the bank and ‘deposit’ the coin they have earned or bought for the day. This allows us to not pound out as much coin. (loss prevention) The teller at the bank is all to happy to make a note in the ledger of how much they have. Due to the fact that the money is only valid within the walks of the park, it is our option if we want to give the people interest on the money they have in the bank. Because we are trying to make money we need to be historically correct and clam that we are only a ‘holding bank’ and do not offer interest.

Anyhow the math would work rather well. We get a set of armor which we could sell for $200. But due to the fact that we are doing this through the park and the game the math is different. We sell the suit for game gold (our minted coin) for 100 gold. So they could keep exchanging the money until they have 100 gold. Or do the dungeon crawls and earn gold if they live. Or a mix of both. Either way you look at it Joe X is spending close to $500 for it.

The keep thing to remember is distraction. You don’t want them to know how much they are really spending.

[Iasin the Steward]

I really like the idea, but i dont wnat to go too high with the over-pricing. In most laws we can not charge less than a set percentage. Here in WI the rats are as follows:

35% on premade stuff.
60% for custom made stuff.

This is ofcourse after actual cost of purchase by the 'shop'.

I say we boost it 5% each and call it square.

[ogunshi]

Hey I just come up with the marketing ideas. But there is an error in something in your note. Custom stuff can be sold at ANY price. Weather the people buy it or not is another question.

But how about thses figures
$0.50 = 1 silver
$5 = 1 gold

You could have a chainmail shirt sell for 50 gold (or $250) which is a little above average for good high quality chainmail.

A soda is 2 silver, which is about right for most eastblishments nation wide

[ogunshi]

I almost forgot we can mint our own coinage. I have the blueprints for a 12th cent coin minting machine, which I would LOVE to build. We can pound (and I mean pound) out coins fairly quickly. I woulf say we could get about 100 an hour with just one machine once we got a pattern down. We just get different color bits (small round pieces of metal) for the gold and silver coins.

The good thing is that they would be hard as sin to copy. Namely because we would hold the pounding molds, which can be changed to date and mark the coins. That makes it hard as hell to copy.

For opening day if we were just starting with a dungeon crawl I figure we would need about 10,000 gold and 25,000 silver.

[Iasin the Steward]

Hey Og, how about 1 gold = $10 and 1 Silver = $1

As far as the minting press, I like that idea. But that materialsl would you need and where to get it? I am not spending the money to get real gold and real silver. and brass would turn green.

I like the idea of a copper coin as well- but thats not my decision.

[Vellaina of Orithyia]

how bout aluminum for the coins, it comes in colors if you know were to look for it.

[Lord Reilloc Kram]

so we need to get a pattern set.

[Iasin the Steward]

use a variation of the US Army Rnlisted Engineers corp symbol pin.


www.1306engineers.com/castle_gold.JPG

[ogunshi]

I know there are several places on line where you can buy blank coin shots. I can look some of them up. As for using real gold and silver, I think that would be a really stupid idea. There are different metals that look goldish and silverfish. As for coloring the metals, I think that is a bad idea, it allows a chance for people to copy the coins easier that way.

As for what should be on the coin, do remember that there are 3 sides to every coin. The head, the tail and the side. We need to have ideas for every side. But I would highly recommend that we make our design custom with as little borrowing from any other coin.

And to tell the truth, the dollar value for each coin is not up to me. I’ll let you guys (and gals) handle that. But do remember that there should the basic money amounts. A basic amount coin and then coins of higher value. This is to avoid making a LOT of coins and makes it easier for people to carry. The problem is a LOT of people look at coins like D&D. 10 copper make a silver, 10 silver make a gold and so on. But to make things a bit easier to understand (and more confusing) how about we follow our money system?

$1 = Copper
$5 = Silver
$10 = Gold

It’s lame in a way but works and is easy to follow.