Lanefan
Victoria Rules
You're absolutely right.Belgarath said:Where i think the whole thing breaks down is that a laborer gets 1 sp a day. The poor meal will cost 1sp. Ok, that will feed just him and him alone. What about any family he has, or people that will depend on him to feed them. Even a laborer should be able to scrounge out enough money to be able to feed at least one other person.
The answer: instead of fiddling with whether it's a gold-based or silver-based system, just change the labourers' wage to something that makes a bit of sense within the existing system, then adjust other wages to suit. It doesn't take much - even a jump to 2 or 3 s.p. a day might suffice.
As for food costs; what we see in the PHB is the cost of eating out, with the "poor meal" still being the equivalent of eating at McD's in our culture. In the quasi-medieval system used by most game worlds, much of the food would be grown on site or bartered for, costing next to nothing.
Where the wage system falls flat isn't food so much, but clothing and shelter; and again a small jump is all that's needed to fix it, without messing with everything else.
Lanefan