Average income of a social class?

[Oryan77]

I'm just trying to gauge what it means in a fantasy world to be "Poor", "Middle Class", and "Upper Class". I'm judging this off of the standard copper, silver, gold, & platinum currency.

So what would you say a person in each "class" would need to make on average per month to fall into each of those categories?

If you want to get more in depth by using "Lower Middle Class", "Upper Middle Class", "Rich", and "Bill Gates"; go ahead.

 

[S'mon]

I don't address Bill Gates, but I'm using the following 3gp-10gp-40gp-200gp system or something very close in all versions of D&D:

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I use info from pre-4e D&D, especially 3e, which seems to fit ok with 4e norms. So basic peasant subsistence is 1 sp/day; that's what you pay an unskilled labourer if there is plenty of surplus labour, it's enough to keep an active human male from starvation, it's also the cost of a maidservant in your castle - you're not really paying her, maybe an occasional sp at holiday time, but feeding her & keeping her supplied with clean linens etc adds up. A mercenary infantryman in barracks costs 2 sp/day, 6gp/month; that covers his equipment, good eating (equivalent to that Inn meal every day), booze money etc.

For PCs:

Wealthy: 200gp/month.
A wealthy, luxurious lifestyle (eg successful mercenary Captain) is 50gp/week, 200-250gp/month. That kind of cash establishes you as having higher social status than the 6gp/month riff-raff, lets you develop useful contacts, and other in-game benefit.

Middle-Class: 40gp/month
At the "we're successful!" level; a middle-class lifestyle (eg mercenary junior officer) is 10gp/week, 40-45gp/month.

Upper Working Class: 10gp/month.
For the unsuccessful or novice adventurer, they sleep 5 to a room (1 sp) and eat 1 meal/day (2sp), the 3sp/day is 2gp/week or 8gp/month for long-term stay. Call it 10gp/month including equipment, clothes, booze & sundries. A little less than what a mercenary sergeant or elite soldier makes IMCs. Also covers journeyman artisans and similar.

Lower Class: 3gp/month.
If they can't afford that, then the life of the 1sp/day, 3gp/month peasant labourer awaits - sleep in a ragged blanket on a dry(ish) stone/reed floor with 30 other men for 1cp/day, get your food from the market with plenty of hot broth and porridge and you can eat for ca 5 cp/day, if there's regular work you still have 4 cp/day for patching your rags and drinking plenty of weak beer at ca 2 cp/gallon... Not such a bad life by historical standards. But if there's no regular work, you better hope you saved some cps, or it's a choice (at best) between starvation and beggary.

BTW IMCs costs roughly equate to 1 cp = $1, 1gp = $100. This means that the 1 sp/day labourer is bringing in around $10/day, even at Purchasing Power Parity he’s better off than a substantial portion of Earth’s population in 2011. The intention is to create something vaguely pseudo-medieval, resembling neither modern US/UK nor the grinding poverty that has been the lot of most people since the invention of agriculture brought us the Malthusian Trap.

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Archived at: The Southlands Campaign: 4e D&D in the Wilderlands: 4e PC Upkeep Costs

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

Poor = up to 1,000 gold/year (in most cases wouldn't even break 500 gold/year or would use the barter system to pay for things with each other)
Lower Middle = up to 5,000 gold/year
Middle = up to 10,000 gold/year
Upper Middle = up to 50,000 gold/year
Rich = up to 100,000 gold/year
Richest of the Rich (Emperors, kings of very large countries, and very powerful heroes of great renown) = 500,000 + gold/year

I won't go with Platinum because as it stands the poor may never see a single platinum piece in their entire life unless they lived very frugally.

 

[Oryan77]

Wow, you two have drastically different ideas for earnings per month/year.

Traveon's "Lower Middle Class" makes more than twice as much a year as S'mon's "wealthy" makes (assuming 12 months are in a year).

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

I think in terms of what I've seen heroes in campaigns make over the course of their adventuring lives. For example in my most recent 4E campaign you see heroes buying items that are like 150,000 - 400,000 gold pieces per item at epic levels. You look at items that are low levels 1-5 and you see that the items cost like 500-1000 gold, this would be an amazing thing that a poor person would really have to save up for a long time to get.

I can definitely see where [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] is coming from and his looks more "realistic" from a medieval very little inflation standpoint. I look at what the item cost is as heroes level up and what can be expected to be bought at those levels. To me these heroes gain fame, fortune, and reputation as the most wealthy and powerful in the world and get paid at that kind of level to be able to afford the types of things that will get them the desired results (i.e. slaying a dragon with special weapons/armor).

Let's face it, a lot of times characters that get to be levels 15+ are pretty much destined to become demi-gods a lot of times.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Low - daily income in copper
Middle - daily income in silver
Upper - daily income in gold
Mega-rich - daily income in platinum
Adventurers - daily income in ale, whores, and magic items

 

[Jack7]

I think it would depend greatly upon the particular setting you are running, and what the various cultures are like within that setting.

For instance my milieu is set in our world, circa 800 AD.

However wealth and wealth standards in Ravenna or in Constantinople are very very different from wealth standards in most of Cappadocia, in Bulgaria, or in Germany, or Ireland.

Constantinople is the richest city in the world at that time and has a very well developed middle class, as well as wealthy merchant and trade classes. Some countries and some areas are mostly peasant, or maybe even pre-feudalistic.

Some areas are extremely well developed and quite wealthy (given the overall standards of the time, Alexandria for instance is quite well off) and some areas entirely rural or frontier and almost completely barbaric and undeveloped and have no sense of wealth in our modern sense of the term at all.

For some kings a few herds of livestock is equivalent to great wealth, and to the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire he can sometimes afford to wage war against the Persians almost entirely out of his own coffers.

To villagers along the Nile a fishing boat brings in a decent living, to a merchant in Italy he might possess a small fleet of trading vessels.

It's like comparing the incomes of modern Americans to the average income of tribal peoples along the Congo. Ideas of wealth and assets vary enormously.

However I'm not saying your thread idea isn't an instructive and useful exercise.

I'm just saying that the various cultures within a world would have very different rates of exchange and very different ideas about wealth.

To me though the way I define these things in my settings is this:

Poor: for the most part the poor do not or cannot or are not allowed to accumulate assets or capital. Much less income. Their chance for either economic or social advancement is slim to none.

Middle Class: in well developed societies these people can and often do accumulate assets and capital and can even enjoy some range of social mobility. In very well developed societies merit may even allow them to rise to the top. Justinian's wife was a former actress, meaning she was also a prostitute. Yet she was also smart and talented and so rose to become Empress.

Rich: the rich possess assets that can be exchanged for money or capital and more often than not they possess assets which provide an income (in the real and original sense of the world income, meaning they don't have to actually work for it). In other words, often through inheritance or grant or title, they possess investments which create more capital over time. The middle class may have assets but make their capital by working or trading for it, only in rare cases of very powerful individuals in the middle class does anyone possess investments which provide a real income. They also tend to war, fight, and kill to gain possession of other assets and sources of capital, rather than compete at trade or business for an income (and that income may or may not be money-based).

So I think of it this way: the poor are those with no real assets, except basic survival goods, no businesses, trades, or advanced skills of their own, the middle class has skills and training and businesses of their own but all of their assets are made by work, not by income, and the wealthy possess both capital and investments which produce more capital and additional assets over time.

Money is (mostly) a very modern idea in the sense of everyone having and getting and keeping money (if they so wish). Wealth was rarely measured as money to most people in the world for most of world history. So money is a sort of fantasy overlay on a fantasy idea in a fantasy game.

In all likelihood most anywhere you went, even if it were to Constantinople, the poor would be unskilled workers with no assets and no capital (other than subsistence and survival levels possessions). The middle class would be middle class because they possessed useful skills or ran businesses. The wealthy would be wealthy because they had income and investments and capital.

It'd be about that simple: you had nothing you're poor. You had a (trade) skill or a business, you're middle class. You had capital and income and investments (not as we think of as investments now a days, but mostly holdings, titles, grants, and privileges - such as freedom from paying taxes) and you're wealthy. That's how it would work most places, in general. And that would be true in the West, East, Africa, Middle East, or just about anywhere you could get to. The same basic ideas of no assets (poor), trade (middle class), and income (wealthy) would apply.

It wouldn't be much like our modern system of both financial and social mobility which is based around money. Wealth in a fantasy setting, if that were also based on anything like the typical idea of a more Medieval or post Roman world would have very different measurements for wealth and poverty.

Money wouldn't determine wealth so much as money would be one of the symptoms of wealth, or the lack thereof.

 

[Oryan77]

Here is my attempt at coming up with an average based on what housing costs are in the 3.5 DMG. These amounts are what a family would earn a year (net income). It is not a representation of overall wealth.

Poor = 0-9 cp/day, 0-2 gp/month, 0-24 gp/year
Lower Class = 1-2 sp/day, 3-6 gp/month, 25-100 gp/year
Middle Class = 3-9 sp/day, 7-27 gp/month, 101-300 gp/year
Upper Class = 1-5 gp/day, 28-150 gp/month, 301-1,800 gp/year
Rich = 6-33 gp/day, 151-1,000 gp/month, 1,801-12,000 gp/year
Super-Rich = 34+ gp/day, 1,001+ gp/month, 12,001+ gp/year

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm just trying to gauge what it means in a fantasy world to be "Poor", "Middle Class", and "Upper Class". I'm judging this off of the standard copper, silver, gold, & platinum currency.

So what would you say a person in each "class" would need to make on average per month to fall into each of those categories?

If you want to get more in depth by using "Lower Middle Class", "Upper Middle Class", "Rich", and "Bill Gates"; go ahead.

I think it depends on your setting and how closely you want to model it on historical periods. It also depends on the kind of economy you envision in your setting. But generally you want to make sure that incomes align with what people are able to do. If you peasants can afford to hire an army of bodyguards and fine weapons, then either their income or your prices are off. So a good place to start may be with high cost items and making sure those are just out of reach of the people who would have trouble addording them.

Ramsay MacMullen gets a bit into social class in the ancient world in Roman Social Relations (and it does touch on income a little). Handbook to life in Ancient Rome is another good one (and that gets into the economy). I also believe it is part of a broader series so there is probably a guide for different eras.

 

[Gilladian]

I run e6. So there's no epic economy, and no world-shaking magic to deal with. My economy is silver-based, and even wealthy folk only rarely handle gold.

A poor person, a peasant or free yeoman-type (or a day laborer, apprentice or footsoldier) would earn the equivalent of 1-3 sp per day in earnings. However only about 1/10th of that would be in coin. The rest would be in-kind earnings. Mostly roof over the head, food to eat and clothes to wear. Some might eat well and have good clothes, but they don't have freedom or anything they can convert to coinage. Most have no legal right to travel, or if they do, it is highly restricted.

middle class folks own property in the way of their own clothing, the tools of their trade, have rights to the use of property or membership in a guild. They're able to care for themselves. They might earn anywhere from twice to twenty times what a peasant earns, and they have the ability to pick up and move. They've got skills and they're not bound to the land they work. Most see and handle coinage on a regular basis, but don't have massive amounts on hand.

wealthy folk are the property owners. They control the contracts that bind lesser folk. They run the guilds and sit on the councils that run cities. They might have no more coinage at hand than a middle-class merchant, but they have POWER. They know HOW to operate the strings of society, and others expect them to be able to do so.

That's my take on wealth in my campaign world.