Minting coins is a lot more difficult than just having a forge and mould. Unless you want your coins to be counterfeited very easily, you have to do a lot of extra stuff to make that counterfeiting not worth the effort.

It’s also a matter of costs. You could make a set of silverware that take 10 silver coins worth of pure silver, and sell that set for way more than 10 silver coins. If you are minting coins, though, you have to make sure your costs per coin are worth less than one coin – which is usually why cheaper alloys are used.

The problem with Ryoka is that she more to be the product of her own crap personality, rather than any actual “hard experiences” as you put it. She didn’t like her parents, so she chose to rebel against them in almost every way possible. She got in tons of fights and got in loads of trouble because of her crappy personality. And yet she also had all the vast privileges of growing up as a rich kid.

In other words, she didn’t really have a hard life, so much as she made her own life hard. That type of person doesn’t really endear themselves to others, which is pretty well reflected in the negative comments towards her as a character.

I will take a deep breath and plunge into this wonderful world again.

Yeah, my bet is Perusa.
The last time we saw her was her going-away party after she made [Courier] … and am I the only one who thinks she sold her soul to a devil to level up so extremely, from a mediocre backstabber to the runner’s equivalent of a gold ranked adventurer?
I think she was heading for First Landing or maybe Invrisil.
She’s just the sort of petty person who would badmouth someone like that, even though she would have no idea that Ryoka would ever head that far north.