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Ok, thanks for the warning. ;) A challenge that my quoted source pointed out was that the acres owned by cottars were difficult to pin down because of the suspicion that some of them were keeping land in other locations. You would think this would cause major problems if a serf were...

The evidence of chickens is there in the books I have - I recall a comment made about how eggs were a staple for the recipes in the cookbooks of the upper classes, eggs and chickens were the form of many customary rent agreements with lords. In fact, in the section dealing with the average...

I would think a generalization like "peasants all over Europe" would require a more rigorous definition before one could have an opinion for or against. "Peasant" is usually meant as a social class, and peasants were sometimes rich beyond their station. There is an account somewhere recently...

Ok, now that I'm home I can actually skim through the library - I'm looking at "Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages" by Christopher Dyer. The first thing that I notice in the chapter on Peasant Living Standards is that all three of his sample peasants own animals - even the poor cottar...

Yea, a prosperous city I suppose doesn't rule out a poor under-class. What this says about the average country peasant I'm not too sure though. The books I've mentioned already break down the living standards and describe, at least in a general way, what the archaeological and documentary...

Yes - The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. Barbara A. Hanawalt. A book mentioned in the bibliography of the "Magical Medieval Society" mentioned above. I haven't gotten that far into it, but I think it has some interesting things to say about peasant standards of living...

Yes, this could be a huge subject though. I'd point you in the direction of a book on social and economic history for Medieval Europe. The problem IMO with what people think they know about the Middle Ages is not always based on historical fact. Poverty, disease, famine, etc. certainly...

"Commoners" don't need to be unarmed. In fact, the "commoners" that I know IRL are certainly armed. I guess it depends on your campaign world. Commoners have plenty of reason to be involved in violence - fights between each other, protecting themselves from bandits (or doing a little light...

I think the best way of handling this is to try to use the tools that you already have for balancing challenge ratings and treasure awards. A thorpe full of commoners can really be thought of as a set of encounter areas, and the treasures value that PCs can get for taking them down can be the...

I have no idea where you get the notion that I'm advocating zero interaction with the DM. IME at some point, the DM abstracts situations involving a lot of repetition. For example, in order to walk from point A to point B, a player doesn't have to "interact" with the DM 47,000 times each time...

If it was the sort of truth that you describe then I would see the "may put you" part of that as being unecessary. I would think such truth could be stated with less equivocation. "DnD is designed for players age 9 to 15" or something like that on the books cover. And I think it's a little...

Just that one peasant? Then the players will ask another. And then the DM will make some generalized statement about peasants and wealth-level in his campaign. A statement that he has no intention of writing down or making consistent with the other aspects of his campaign world. At this...

Positivity? IIRC the OP called everyone's complaints about the changes irrelevant. In the process of explaining how much he doesn't like flame wars. I think the pain you're feeling could be an indication that you are allergic to unintentional irony. In any case, I'm glad that WotC still...

Well hopefully the new minions rules will mean that the edition war should be able to resolve itself much quicker than in the past. I like some of the mechanics changes - rituals, combining skills, etc. Most of the changes are ones that I can't quite figure out how they'll affect my game yet...

When I think back to being about 11 years old and we were learning the game, I recall a number of things that are relevant to your question: The first is that I don't really think that things can be too easy at the start. If they are new to RPGs in general it might take them a while to figure...

BTW - the situation is even worse in the case of the denier because it was devalued to a much greater extent, and contained less silver than it's equivalent in England (the english penny). So the bottom line is that a silver denier is not 1/240 of a troy pound of silver AFAIK.

But who says it isn't valuable? Maybe it doesn't need to be worth it's weight in silver to be considered valuable. The reason, IMO, is that people price salt in their minds based on what they think is valuable in terms of PCs, who are really millionaires in terms of their wealth. This is...

"Life in a Medieval City" (a book that's pretty commonly available in most public libraries - no Hong, it's not in the comic section) gives salt at 2 denier for 5 lbs. A denier is a silver coin (and NOT the size of a dinner plate, in case you're wondering). There actually are some anecdotes...

No it's not. This statement "worth it's weight in gold" must be figurative. The actual counter examples are hardly worth mentioning since you can google them yourself. It involves understanding what coins you are dealing with. For example, a website might tell you that Venetians charged 33...

This is probably an urban legend started in the late Roman era - I should cite sources on this if I wanted to be responsible. In any case, the value of salt in the Roman period is documented.