D&D 5E Goodberries and Eberron

[doctorbadwolf]

To stay offtopic, ok it concerns foodstuff: I am from a country in europe. Since they converted our currency to euro in 2002 they claim that the prices in relation to income did not rise because of it. That is true for many things.

But i tell you what, if until the 30s of last century they would have raised the price for absolute basics for the poorest of the population namely bread (back then also beer but that does not apply today) they would have caused revolutions, with mobs with torches and pitchforks storming the parliament and lynching the politicians.
I can remember the price for a basic wheat bread being 1/16 of what it is today and the incomes did rise since then but not by that factor. And that is a sure and real indicator that i am at least partially right with my original post.
They also compute the inflation by putting together a bundle of goods. This bundle consists also of stuff which is nice to have like consumer electronics which might have gone down in price even. So they compute a very low inflation ratio, when in fact many people feel it should be much higher. This is why:
Those things essential for living basic foodstuff like bread, milk, vegetables also fuel and energy and rent for rented places in other words all the things you simply cannot live without have all become much more expensive in relation to income.
I can miss on a new TV or computer for a year if i cannot afford it but i cannot starve or freeze and i have to get to work somehow.

Here’s the thing. Meat isn’t a staple. You. Can live without it. You’ll be fine if it’s too expensive to have every day.

Grain products like bread and rice, people on a budget cannot go without. If beef gets cheaper to produce in Eberron, the price of beef won’t go up until the market has been saturated and people are used to buying beef all the time. Until then, the price will go down to a point where the poor can regularly purchase beef.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

Alright. So I have no idea if my calculations are accurate or my assumptions reasonable. Even if they are off a bit though, I think it provides an interesting look at the economic buying power of each class. This can then be used as a jumping off point to determine reasonable prices for services and goods based on how prevalent or accessible they could be for a given economic class (ie cantrips and 1st level spells are probably pretty common and accessible, 2nd level spells are less common, and higher level spells are generally accessible only to the wealthiest or most connected).

Assumption 1
In the PHB, they provide the lifestyle cost per day on page 157. However, I thought it might be better to use the prices on page 158 detailing the price of food per day.

Assumption 2
I read somewhere that in 1900 the average percentage of income spent on food was about 40%. Eberron certainly doesn't look like Earth in 1900, but I thought it to be a reasonable price point for this exercise.

Assumption 3
As the buying power of a class increases, the percentage of the income spent on food drops. I have no idea if this is true, but it seemed like a reasonable idea to me. I kept it at 40% for Squalid, Poor, and Modest. Then I dropped it to 30% for Comfortable, 20% for Wealthy, and 15% for Aristocratic.

Assumption 4
I figured the average family size was 5 (two parents and three children). I assumed food prices would be stable for each member of the household, so the cost per day was multiplied by 5 to account for each person.

Once again, I have no idea if my assumptions are reasonable, but I figured they were as good a place to start as any.

Based on this, I got the following numbers.

Food Cost for Family of 5

Lifestyle	Week	Month	Year
Squalid	1 gp, 5 cp	4 gp, 2 sp	50 gp, 4 sp
Poor	2 gp 1 sp	8 gp, 4 sp	10 gp, 8 sp
Modest	10 gp, 5 sp	42 gp	504 gp
Comfortable	17 gp, 5 sp	70 gp	840 gp
Wealthy	28 gp	112 gp	1,344 gp
Aristocratic	70 gp	280 gp	3,360 gp

Total Income Estimate Family of 5 (Extrapolated from Food Cost)

Lifestyle	Week	Month	Year
Squalid	2 gp, 6 sp, 3 cp	10 gp, 5 sp	126 gp
Poor	5 gp, 2 sp, 5 cp	21 gp	252 gp
Modest	26 gp, 2 sp, 5 cp	105 gp	1,260 gp
Comfortable	58 gp, 3 sp, 3 cp	233 gp, 3 sp, 3 cp	2,800 gp
Wealthy	140 gp	560 gp	6,720 gp
Aristocratic	467+ gp	1,867+ gp	22,400+ gp

I think this can provide a "good enough" baseline for economic purchasing power based on class. We can start making some reasonable guesses at price points for different services based on how likely they are to be available to a certain economic class (also considering lower classes may need to save for certain goods and services or seek second/third-hand items). Of course, game balance for PCs also needs to be considered, but only to a point. A DM is free to adjust the monetary rewards and treasure an adventuring party can obtain.

 

[Coroc]

...

Assumption 1
In the PHB, they provide the lifestyle cost per day on page 157. However, I thought it might be better to use the prices on page 158 detailing the price of food per day.
...

I really like the tables you made, but the PHB as a precondition might work for food, it does not work at all for goods important to adventurers like weapons and armor.
That is why I converted all prices to silver(1gp PHB = 1s in my campaign for equipment), that helps a bit.
To give some rough example: If the price for a mundane Sword will feed a family for a year, then every guard better not sleep on his job and gets his weapon stolen. Or in other words the smithy has to be the richest man in town.
RAW economy is totally botched and only usable if you need some sort of pricing if an adventurer wants to buy some equipment, but you take into account each and every logical fallacy coming along with it.
I prefer to make my own economy which tends to work in a logic way and is much more accurate to historic RL equivalents.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I really like the tables you made, but the PHB as a precondition might work for food, it does not work at all for goods important to adventurers like weapons and armor.
That is why I converted all prices to silver(1gp PHB = 1s in my campaign for equipment), that helps a bit.
To give some rough example: If the price for a mundane Sword will feed a family for a year, then every guard better not sleep on his job and gets his weapon stolen. Or in other words the smithy has to be the richest man in town.
RAW economy is totally botched and only usable if you need some sort of pricing if an adventurer wants to buy some equipment, but you take into account each and every logical fallacy coming along with it.
I prefer to make my own economy which tends to work in a logic way and is much more accurate to historic RL equivalents.

As a mild alternative, most guards have clubs and spears, because swords always were incredibly expensive and could feed an entire family for a good long while.

Also, I'd say most family's are poor not squalid or wretched. Not only does that match for "unskilled labor" which is 2 silver a day, but Squalid calls out that people at that level tend to be those who "suffered a setback" like suffering from a disease, being insane, or being an exile. So, a common laborer and their family are definetly meant to be around Poor

 

[Coroc]

As a mild alternative, most guards have clubs and spears, because swords always were incredibly expensive and could feed an entire family for a good long while.

Also, I'd say most family's are poor not squalid or wretched. Not only does that match for "unskilled labor" which is 2 silver a day, but Squalid calls out that people at that level tend to be those who "suffered a setback" like suffering from a disease, being insane, or being an exile. So, a common laborer and their family are definetly meant to be around Poor

True that swords were more expensive than e.g. axes, but that changed in the late middle ages. A historic price for a standard sword would be 6 silver around 1450 in England, when a unskilled laborer would make 1 silver a day so that is very comparative.
In Viking times swords were so expensive that the average Viking would have a sax or seax which is a long knife and an axe or a spear rather, only leaders could afford swords. But also for these times the gold pricing for equipment is far to high in the PHB.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Alright. So I have no idea if my calculations are accurate or my assumptions reasonable. Even if they are off a bit though, I think it provides an interesting look at the economic buying power of each class. This can then be used as a jumping off point to determine reasonable prices for services and goods based on how prevalent or accessible they could be for a given economic class (ie cantrips and 1st level spells are probably pretty common and accessible, 2nd level spells are less common, and higher level spells are generally accessible only to the wealthiest or most connected).

Good job! Let's tackle this task, then. I am curious whether we'll collectively be able to piece something good-looking! Your assumption is that 1st level spells should be "pretty accessible" and 3rd to the elite. Let's work from that.

Assumption 1
In the PHB, they provide the lifestyle cost per day on page 157. However, I thought it might be better to use the prices on page 158 detailing the price of food per day.

I'd use the lifestyle cost per day with a discount ; since inn stay, as a temporary accomodation, should cost more than a long-term rent.

Assumption 2
I read somewhere that in 1900 the average percentage of income spent on food was about 40%. Eberron certainly doesn't look like Earth in 1900, but I thought it to be a reasonable price point for this exercise.

This could be an average with huge variations according to social class. In this source (in FR, sorry, that's what I stumbled upon googling) Les consommations populaires dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle à travers les monographies de l'École de Le Play - Persée, where they discuss the recordings of a 19th century mining engineer with an interest in sociology, who detailed popular budget in the 1880s, they find that the average part of the income spent of food to be 40-60%, with half of the surveyed families spending more than 50% on food. The surveyed families went from proletarian (with an annual budget of 500 francs) to upper class (with a budget of more than 10 000 francs).

Assumption 3
As the buying power of a class increases, the percentage of the income spent on food drops. I have no idea if this is true, but it seemed like a reasonable idea to me. I kept it at 40% for Squalid, Poor, and Modest. Then I dropped it to 30% for Comfortable, 20% for Wealthy, and 15% for Aristocratic.

That's probably a good rough estimate, since the same source gives 70% and 15% as extrema for the analyzed budgets, and they don't have "aristocratic" budget in the lot, peaking at wealthy.

Assumption 4
I figured the average family size was 5 (two parents and three children). I assumed food prices would be stable for each member of the household, so the cost per day was multiplied by 5 to account for each person.

Yes, but I guess most people wouldn't be buying their meal at inns. Maybe the price list is for eating out, where there is a markup compared to the raw food? Just a random tought.

Once again, I have no idea if my assumptions are reasonable, but I figured they were as good a place to start as any.

Based on this, I got the following numbers.

Food Cost for Family of 5

Lifestyle	Week	Month	Year
Squalid	1 gp, 5 cp	4 gp, 2 sp	50 gp, 4 sp
Poor	2 gp 1 sp	8 gp, 4 sp	10 gp, 8 sp
Modest	10 gp, 5 sp	42 gp	504 gp
Comfortable	17 gp, 5 sp	70 gp	840 gp
Wealthy	28 gp	112 gp	1,344 gp
Aristocratic	70 gp	280 gp	3,360 gp

Total Income Estimate Family of 5 (Extrapolated from Food Cost)

Lifestyle	Week	Month	Year
Squalid	2 gp, 6 sp, 3 cp	10 gp, 5 sp	126 gp
Poor	5 gp, 2 sp, 5 cp	21 gp	252 gp
Modest	26 gp, 2 sp, 5 cp	105 gp	1,260 gp
Comfortable	58 gp, 3 sp, 3 cp	233 gp, 3 sp, 3 cp	2,800 gp
Wealthy	140 gp	560 gp	6,720 gp
Aristocratic	467+ gp	1,867+ gp	22,400+ gp

I think this can provide a "good enough" baseline for economic purchasing power based on class. We can start making some reasonable guesses at price points for different services based on how likely they are to be available to a certain economic class (also considering lower classes may need to save for certain goods and services or seek second/third-hand items). Of course, game balance for PCs also needs to be considered, but only to a point. A DM is free to adjust the monetary rewards and treasure an adventuring party can obtain.

The poor-to-wealthy income ratio you get (26) is quite reasonable compared to the historical survey mentionned in the above source (25). So, it's extremely interesting that the table you calculated is capable of producing a realistic result of the wealth distribution. I'd posit that upper wealthy and aristocratic are even higher given historical Gini's ratios, but that's very interesting nonetheless.

I'd say the 6 person out of 10 as commoner and laborer mentioned by Keith Baker in the 3rd ed Eberron book would make them Poor, not Squalid. Even if you have a very bleak view of the 19th century working class, they would not on average sleep under bridges and sneaking into barn for shelter...
That' would mean our family of 5 would need to make 252 gp a year. On the 5 members, 4 would certainly be working. (In 1833 in the UK, the Textile Factory Act prohibited children under 11 to work more than 9 hours a day and 12 hours under 18). With 5 working members, achieving a poor lifestyle means 50gp 4 sp a year, based on 300 working days (even if there is no Sunday rest to observe, I guess as many holidays exists in Khorvaire) means 1.68 sp a day (which is coherent with the 2 sp/day if you integrate a discount for child labor, who are certainly not earning as much as their parents). Of course, when a family gets more inactive members (either because of old age or because of many younger children not old enough to be allowed to work in a factory or mine), they can certainly drop toward squalid living conditions.

If you increase the food-to-income ratio a bit and consider that eating at home should cost less than eating out, you can even get a coherent result of the 1 sp/day cost for unskilled labor mentionned in the Eberron sourcebook for Sharn hired help.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

True that swords were more expensive than e.g. axes, but that changed in the late middle ages. A historic price for a standard sword would be 6 silver around 1450 in England, when a unskilled laborer would make 1 silver a day so that is very comparative.
In Viking times swords were so expensive that the average Viking would have a sax or seax which is a long knife and an axe or a spear rather, only leaders could afford swords. But also for these times the gold pricing for equipment is far to high in the PHB.

Another consideration may be that the prices presented in the PHB for weapons are the prices for those items to be commissioned. Those are brand-spankin' new and made to order. Of course the dragonmarked houses and governments might be able to afford those prices (though there may be a contract or bulk discount that lowers the unit price).

But the price for scavenged weapons or used would be much less prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the average smithy capable of making weapons probably uses their talents for things other than weapons, like tools and such. I mean PC adventurers are always finding loot that they can't sell at the full price listed in the PHB. It would make sense that most people don't buy them at full price either, since they aren't commissioning weapons.

And @Galandris, I don't have my PHB in front of me, but I thought that since they listed food as priced per day that it was representative of the cost of food based on the lifestyle, rather than the cost of eating out per day. It didn't seem to make sense that anyone less well off than those in the comfortable category would be "eating out," so despite the prices being presented with the cost of inns I figured they were conceptually separate and distinct. But I could be mistaken.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

Also, I just had a really dark thought about the relationship between House Kundarak, the Aurum, and House Jorasco. Much like healthcare in our world, its something that people in Eberron need. A basic cure wounds spell may cost a lot, but a family with a savings could manage it. But anything like Lesser Restoration may be out of reach for most. So here comes House Kundarak and Aurum-funded private banks swooping in and providing high-interest loans to such families so they can get the life saving treatment they need, but then are shackled by debt that they can't easily get out of...

Ok... Maybe I've now done whatever the opposite of jumping the shark is and made things too real.

 

[ChaosOS]

There's some very dark stories you can get into by pulling on dystopic & punk themes. For what it's worth, the Aurum as an organization (as opposed to Aurum as members) is openly a philanthropic group. So a wealthy patron comes in and pays for the sick child to go to Jorasco, but what does the father have to do as a "favor"?

 

[tetrasodium]

Also, I just had a really dark thought about the relationship between House Kundarak, the Aurum, and House Jorasco. Much like healthcare in our world, its something that people in Eberron need. A basic cure wounds spell may cost a lot, but a family with a savings could manage it. But anything like Lesser Restoration may be out of reach for most. So here comes House Kundarak and Aurum-funded private banks swooping in and providing high-interest loans to such families so they can get the life saving treatment they need, but then are shackled by debt that they can't easily get out of...

Ok... Maybe I've now done whatever the opposite of jumping the shark is and made things too real.

No it's not dark at all for eberron, there are a lot of extremely dark aspects like that either implied, explicitly called out, or just easy to string together if you spend a second thinking. IMHO the problem is less the dark direction than the fact that it omits the role of magewrights and such.

Lets say farmer macDonald breaks an axle on his wagon & as a result breaks his arm or leg while his farmhand Mick cracks his skull. The broken arm is going to a village herbalist magewright or similar where he gets a magic cast* that lets him function with pain until the limb can heal. First the Farmhand gets an herbal paste* applied to his broken skull that will help the bones knit back together. Second he's given teas* & maybe even potions that will help with the fact that he has a major concussion & possibly brain damage, those teas & potions* have no effect on anything else & might even have some nasty side effects. A week of bedrest & drinking these brews later Mick goes back to work but still has side effects from the treatment itself.. Maybe he'll have weak muscles & arthritis till he dies or visits a jorasco branch with a coupon. Jorasco doesn't print those coupons in the newspaper out of the goodness of their heart... They print that full page coupon because they literally bribed the paper not to print a story that shows them in a bad light and it's the slow season. Jorasco knows that Mick & others like him will never look at the price and say "I want to fix this more than I want to take the magewright's asprin equivalent for this side effect"... but a coupon that bring it down from a month's pay to a week's pay is enough to give a Jorasco heir who might otherwise be doing nothing productive something to do for a few minutes or hours.

* Possibly outright made by Cannith Jorasco or vadalis if not with components that were likely made by one.