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On character wealth an d game balance
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7085783" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>It's vastly larger in game that in an appropriately inspiring historical period. Even if you assume that 1 g.p. is just a days wages, the Paladin just dropped the equivalent of a $5000 tip. Even fairly wealthy people don't drop $5000 that casually. If you assume that 1 s.p. is a day's wages, the Paladin just dropped the equivalent a $100,000 dollar tip. </p><p></p><p>And let's keep in mind, if 1 s.p. is a days wages, then the Paladin just gave away what amounts to a significant fraction of the income of the King of England during the period - 30,000 pounds of silver annually. (Yes, your PC in the game is wealthier in a sense than the King of England, assuming the campaign has been going on for less than a year game time.) The King couldn't have readily afford to spend 100 gold coins on his pleasure on a whim, and not run and maintain control of the Kingdom. Your paladin just displayed a gift of largess that not only would have astounded a medieval peasant, but might well have astounded the King.</p><p></p><p>I don't want to get into a huge argument regarding the way the economy worked in the middle ages, except to say that most people confuse the early modern with the middle ages or confuse stories about the middle ages with the middle ages. If by 'middle ages' we mean the period in Northern Europe from about 400 AD to 1400 AD, then for the most of that period there wasn't a very sharp economic divide between the wealthy and the poor because for the most part there wasn't enough goods for anyone to live what we'd think of as a lavish lifestyle. There were sharp differences in political power and legal rights, but the noble born mostly lived a slightly grander version of the peasant life and traded the security of being unlikely to starve to death, for the very real chance some other noble would come and stick a sharpened bit of metal through them. There wasn't any medicine to speak of, and poor and rich suffered alike. Food was common and coarse and little varied whether you were a villain or a noble - you just got meat a bit more often as a noble. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. A silver button, containing no more silver than a silver penny, and having been worked by a haberdasher for less than a day, couldn't possibly be worth more than a couple days wages to a peasant. Granted, he might never see silver coin that often, and he might never have so much surplus income to waste on silver buttons, and there might be sumptuary laws that forbid him to wear silver buttons, but a whole set of silver buttons weren't half a years 'wages' much less half a life time. The same is true of the pearl buttons and we've have the bills of sale for pearls to prove that. A whole set of pearl buttons might be worth a couple months income for a peasant, but it's simply not possible for pearl buttons to be worth half a lifetime's income for a peasant - unless it takes a peasant half a lifetime to make them. They don't.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7085783, member: 4937"] It's vastly larger in game that in an appropriately inspiring historical period. Even if you assume that 1 g.p. is just a days wages, the Paladin just dropped the equivalent of a $5000 tip. Even fairly wealthy people don't drop $5000 that casually. If you assume that 1 s.p. is a day's wages, the Paladin just dropped the equivalent a $100,000 dollar tip. And let's keep in mind, if 1 s.p. is a days wages, then the Paladin just gave away what amounts to a significant fraction of the income of the King of England during the period - 30,000 pounds of silver annually. (Yes, your PC in the game is wealthier in a sense than the King of England, assuming the campaign has been going on for less than a year game time.) The King couldn't have readily afford to spend 100 gold coins on his pleasure on a whim, and not run and maintain control of the Kingdom. Your paladin just displayed a gift of largess that not only would have astounded a medieval peasant, but might well have astounded the King. I don't want to get into a huge argument regarding the way the economy worked in the middle ages, except to say that most people confuse the early modern with the middle ages or confuse stories about the middle ages with the middle ages. If by 'middle ages' we mean the period in Northern Europe from about 400 AD to 1400 AD, then for the most of that period there wasn't a very sharp economic divide between the wealthy and the poor because for the most part there wasn't enough goods for anyone to live what we'd think of as a lavish lifestyle. There were sharp differences in political power and legal rights, but the noble born mostly lived a slightly grander version of the peasant life and traded the security of being unlikely to starve to death, for the very real chance some other noble would come and stick a sharpened bit of metal through them. There wasn't any medicine to speak of, and poor and rich suffered alike. Food was common and coarse and little varied whether you were a villain or a noble - you just got meat a bit more often as a noble. No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. A silver button, containing no more silver than a silver penny, and having been worked by a haberdasher for less than a day, couldn't possibly be worth more than a couple days wages to a peasant. Granted, he might never see silver coin that often, and he might never have so much surplus income to waste on silver buttons, and there might be sumptuary laws that forbid him to wear silver buttons, but a whole set of silver buttons weren't half a years 'wages' much less half a life time. The same is true of the pearl buttons and we've have the bills of sale for pearls to prove that. A whole set of pearl buttons might be worth a couple months income for a peasant, but it's simply not possible for pearl buttons to be worth half a lifetime's income for a peasant - unless it takes a peasant half a lifetime to make them. They don't. [/QUOTE]
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