economy of dnd

[Greenfield]

Start with the idea that we're in an age prior to the advent of the tractor, the harvester, the threshing machine and the McCormic Reaper. A farmer will let 1/4 of his land "lie fallow" to "rest". That is, he lets it grow weeds so he can plow them under, and combine the organics back in as a simple fertilizer.

In Renaissance times and before, you needed to have between 80 and 90 percent of the population working on farms. The introduction of high yield crops like potatoes and modern corn changed this, and that allowed more people to pursue careers that didn't involve producing food, so tradesmen could start to produce a middle class.

Now we can add magic, and treat a Druid's Plant Growth spell like a good dose of fertilizer, but considering the cost of spell casting services it was very much beyond what could be justified. The increase in food production wasn't enough to pay for the spell.

In many areas the "increase in wealth" may be in the form of children being raised to bring more land under cultivation, expanding farm holdings. That only works in areas where there's unclaimed/uncultivated land to expand onto though.

So I can see the idea that "Farmer" isn't a listed Profession. For the economy of the game world to resemble a real medieval setting, he has to be a subsistence farmer, producing enough to feed himself and his family, with maybe 10% surplus to go to pay his taxes.

So how does that jibe with meals costing a silver piece a day, the same as his income? Non magical crafting has a cost of 1/3 the market price. So that poor meal costs him 3.333333 cp to prepare, and that difference lets him pay for clothing, gear, feed any children who aren't big enough to help work the land, and pay the local lord come quarter-day.

Note that, by the book, a loaf of bread costs 2 cp. So did a chicken, or a pound of flour. If we presume a similar price for vegetables, someone who could cook and cut their own firewood could feed a small family in relative luxury (bread, soup and meat) for a shade over half a silver piece, and that's if they bought the goods at full price instead of producing them themselves for a third of the price.

By the way, I wasn't exaggerating. Meat was a rare and special thing in medieval times, the kind of thing that happened at a Sunday meal (and sparsely then), so yeah, that really is a luxury lifestyle for a family of 4 by the standards of the medieval peasant. The kids get to argue over the drumstick.

Bread and meat 3 meals a day? They're living like kings, I tell you! On 6 cp a day.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

No, I think you're wrong - and I really think you need to rethink your economics if you're not going for a modern-world feel. The food he sells to the adventurers is income as normal. Mending the fence counts 0gp towards net income, that's an expense.

Of course he could be a commercial wool farmer, or flax etc. Is that what you're going for?

1) Again, the Profession rules tell us how much he makes; the flavor text tells us how he makes it. Joe Farmer makes his check and gets 10gp worth of stuff at the end of that week. Did he make an extra 1000 pounds of wheat that week? Highly unlikely. Was there some drastic need for whatever crops he was selling that bumped up the price? Maybe. Regardless of how he got it, he ends up with 10gp. It's up to the flavor text to tell us how medieval the economics are--but one thing the rules tell us is that Joe Farmer is not a dirt-farming serf who barely survives day to day.

2) The point I was making with the meals and fences was not that those aren't expenses, but rather than those things are included in the wealth Profession gives him. A farmer could, in-game, have his wife cook some meals for his family, have his children can some food for the winter, have his cow Bessie give birth to a calf, have his son cut down some lumber to build a barn, and so forth--but mechanically, that's X gp worth of food he has to buy, Y gp of wood he has to buy, a new cow he has to pay for, and so on. That the farmer only ends up with a handful of silver pieces at the end of the week in-game doesn't change the fact that he ended up with the equivalent X gp worth of goods and services by the rules.

3) For the sake of example, I'm assuming a farmer has crops and livestock and maybe a forest he can get wood from and so forth. The same principles apply for Joe Only-Grows-Wheat Farmer, the examples are just less interesting.

4) You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of "Here's how medieval economics works; let's apply that to D&D." That's completely backwards. The question in the OP was "How do D&D economics work?" and the answer to that question is "The Profession rules are how NPCs make money." You can explain that in-game using medieval economics, Renaissance economics, or (with sufficiently many spellcasters) post-scarcity economics if you want, but if you want to know how D&D economics actually works, you have to start with the rules, not the flavor text.

Your approach is post-Malthusian because you have a small proportion of the population producing more than enough food to feed the entire population. I don't see how you get around that? By having land in such short supply that a small number of farmers farm *all* the farmable land, with no additional food production possible?

You can fit the Profession rules into a Malthusian context because it's not the amount of food you can produce that matters, only the food you can consume. Today, we have enough food production capabilities to feed the entire world. Yet people go hungry. Why? Because the distribution system doesn't work. In the same way, in the D&D world you could have a single level 20 paragon commoner with +bazillion to Profession make enough food to feed the whole Prime, yet you still have the problem that demand outstrips supply because getting that food places while dragons and giants and vampires oh my roam the wilderness is a real pain.

Now, why Malthus is so important to you I'm not sure. You'll note that I originally pointed out that he was basically wrong for an industrialized society such as ours (and by extension a highly-magical society such as most D&D settings), and only pointed out that you could reconcile it with Malthus if you wanted to. I never denied that my views on D&D economics were post-Malthusian at all, and in fact attempting to apply his theory to a world which is past "Medieval Europe + magic!" into Renaissance era technology at best, or which essentially replaces technology with magic at worst, is not really feasible for the same reason it's infeasible to apply it to the real world.

 

[S'mon]

1) Again, the Profession rules tell us how much he makes; the flavor text tells us how he makes it. Joe Farmer makes his check and gets 10gp worth of stuff at the end of that week. Did he make an extra 1000 pounds of wheat that week? Highly unlikely. Was there some drastic need for whatever crops he was selling that bumped up the price? Maybe. Regardless of how he got it, he ends up with 10gp. It's up to the flavor text to tell us how medieval the economics are--but one thing the rules tell us is that Joe Farmer is not a dirt-farming serf who barely survives day to day.

The PHB Profession skill is designed for use by PCs, not for the kind of world-building "rules as physics" you're attempting here. It's idiotic to think that NPC Lawyers, Gemcutters, Sewermen and Farmers all have the same income dependent only on skill. Now I've given you a rationale for what a "professional farmer" might be in a typical D&D world where most people are peasant farmers - he'd look something like a 17th century gentleman farmer such as Oliver Cromwell (before the Civil War), perhaps. But what is certain is that your rules-as-physics approach if applied to the general mass of NPC farmers cannot give a medieval (or Renaissance) looking world. Heck, it cannot give a world looking like rural Romania in 2011, or the hill farmers of the Scottish Highlands, or plenty of other developed-world areas where farmers are much much poorer than urban professionals.

 

[S'mon]

The question in the OP was "How do D&D economics work?" and the answer to that question is "The Profession rules are how NPCs make money."

Which is completely wrong. NPCs don't roll dice and generate income based on a number on their character sheet. PCs do that.

 

[S'mon]

Today, we have enough food production capabilities to feed the entire world. Yet people go hungry. Why? Because the distribution system doesn't work.

People go hungry because they don't produce enough of value to pay for the food that is produced. And giving them free or subsidised food (as happens) drives down the value of the food they do produce, creating a vicious cycle which has destroyed the economies of a lot of developing countries and made them dependent on welfare from the developed world. But that's getting close to 'politics' I guess.

 

[Jimlock]

IMO, in order to understand the medieval economy, first one needs to understand the political and social structure of mediaeval times.

Hope this helps!

1-Feudalism 9th to 15th century medieval Europe , (Examples of feudalism)




1a-lords

Nobility, Aristocracy, Titles, Seisin, Chivalry, Knights




1b-Vassal

Vassalage: One undertakes a commendation ceremony composed by Homage & Oath of Fealty
Feudal aid, Tenement, Feudal land tenure




1c-Fief

Manorialism, Serfdom, Commoners, Peasants, Artisans, Taille

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

D&D is a fantasy adventure framework. It is not now, and never has been intended for use as an economics simulation. It has always dealt with economics as a matter of appearance - a superficial interaction with the player characters, NEVER as a logically functioning model.

If you want to fret about how much a peasant/commoner/whoever makes and whether he can actually afford the life he's supposed to live and function within a D&D economy that's YOUR affair. The game does not concern itself with that. It concerns itself only with an illusion of economy and ONLY as far as that illusory economy interacts with the player character, not with how NON-player characters economically interact with each other.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

The PHB Profession skill is designed for use by PCs, not for the kind of world-building "rules as physics" you're attempting here. It's idiotic to think that NPC Lawyers, Gemcutters, Sewermen and Farmers all have the same income dependent only on skill. Now I've given you a rationale for what a "professional farmer" might be in a typical D&D world where most people are peasant farmers - he'd look something like a 17th century gentleman farmer such as Oliver Cromwell (before the Civil War), perhaps.

Which is completely wrong. NPCs don't roll dice and generate income based on a number on their character sheet. PCs do that.

Oh? NPCs don't run on the same rules as the PCs do? So I suppose you don't give NPC blacksmiths Craft ranks, because they can just make whatever the plot demands. NPC artificers don't have a use for their craft pool, because they have arbitrary amounts of XP. If you want to know how the economy works in D&D, you have to look at the D&D rules. There are precisely two rules regarding NPC wealth in D&D: the Profession rules and the WBL rules. If you don't look at those and take those into account when attempting to figure out how the D&D economy works, you're not looking at the D&D economy, you're hand-waving it completely.

The DMG has rules for demographics. I'm guessing few people in this discussion use those as well, since (A) you can hand-wave those as easily as commoner wealth and (B) the demographics seem bad from a medieval perspective. You can quite easily take your vaguely-medieval village and plop that down and call it a day, I'm not saying you can't. What I'm saying is that that's not D&D demographics you're using there. Taking something medieval and putting into D&D wholesale doesn't take into account D&Disms and D&D rules--something civilized and regimented like the feudal system doesn't sound like it would work for elves and orcs, first off, and there are more problems besides.

D&D is not the real world. The real world doesn't have magic or non-humans, and you can't expect a world where every small town has at least a 1-in-3 chance of having a druid able to cast plant growth on every field, of having a cleric who can prevent plagues and heal minor injuries to keep the population up, of having a wizard who can send a message to a town a half-dozen miles away with a thought, will have the same economics or social dynamics.

If you feel that D&D economics don't model the vaguely-medieval European world you think they should, you're right. If you think the economic system isn't nearly as fleshed-out as it should be, you're right. But don't take literally the only indicators we have in the rules for NPC income and throw them out in favor of making up something out of whole cloth and then claim to be answering the question of how D&D economics work.

But what is certain is that your rules-as-physics approach if applied to the general mass of NPC farmers cannot give a medieval (or Renaissance) looking world. Heck, it cannot give a world looking like rural Romania in 2011, or the hill farmers of the Scottish Highlands, or plenty of other developed-world areas where farmers are much much poorer than urban professionals.

And that's not what the D&D world looks like, for the most part. Could a Romanian village in 2011 fend off an attack of goblins? Could the hill farmers of the Scottish highlands protect themselves from a dragon assault? Not a chance. Land and food are more valuable in D&D because there are more things that want to take it from people, so farmers making more money isn't nearly as illogical as you seem to think--if nothing else, how else would they pay bands of adventurers and mercenaries to take out nearby kobold infestations?

D&D is a fantasy adventure framework. It is not now, and never has been intended for use as an economics simulation. It has always dealt with economics as a matter of appearance - a superficial interaction with the player characters, NEVER as a logically functioning model.

If you want to fret about how much a peasant/commoner/whoever makes and whether he can actually afford the life he's supposed to live and function within a D&D economy that's YOUR affair. The game does not concern itself with that. It concerns itself only with an illusion of economy and ONLY as far as that illusory economy interacts with the player character, not with how NON-player characters economically interact with each other.

Quite true, to a certain extent; how much money Joe Commoner makes each week will likely never come up in an actual game. However, if you do want to know what the rules say about it, the rules are there, and they do a good enough job modeling the D&D world. I repeat: it models the D&D world. I cannot stress this enough: of course it doesn't model medieval European serfs. Of course the economics of farming and everything else would make no sense in the real world. D&D works differently, with its monster threats and its magic and its non-human farmers and all that.

You can ask how D&D economics work, and actually answer that question using the rules D&D gives you. You can say D&D economics are stupid, acknowledge that only the PCs' income matter to your players, and ignore the rules in favor of hand-waving the NPC economy into something resembling a real-world economy. You can't have it both ways.

 

[S'mon]

Oh? NPCs don't run on the same rules as the PCs do?

NPC interacting with other NPCs don't use rules at all. Any rules for NPCs are there to aid the DM in their interactions with PCs.

 

[S'mon]

If you don't look at those and take those into account when attempting to figure out how the D&D economy works, you're not looking at the D&D economy, you're hand-waving it completely.

There is no D&D economy, as Man in the Funny Hat has endeavoured to explain to you. And if there was it certainly wouldn't depend on the PHB Profession skill.