D&D 4E 4e PC Upkeep Costs

[S'mon]

Adapted from: Making money matter (forked from Abstracting Wealth) - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine

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.

 

[darkwing]

Men, arms, money, and provisions are the sinews of wars. But of these four, the first two are the most necessary; for men and arms will always find money and provisions, but money and provisions cannot always raise men and arms.

 

[S'mon]

Men, arms, money, and provisions are the sinews of wars. But of these four, the first two are the most necessary; for men and arms will always find money and provisions, but money and provisions cannot always raise men and arms.

Sounds like Machiavelli?

I don't agree - plenty of armies with Generals who thought like that have deserted or starved. It really depends where the scarcities lie, and what the culture is like.

 

[darkwing]

Sounds like Machiavelli?

There's a good reason for that. It is Machiavelli.

 

[Leif]

So, S'mon, is your source for this information only the 3.5E DMG? Isn't there more info like this in 3.5E DMGII and various setting books? I must admit to my great shame that I haven't read enough of them to know myself, although that seems like the kind of thing that might be found in the FR or Eb campaign guides.

 

[S'mon]

So, S'mon, is your source for this information only the 3.5E DMG? Isn't there more info like this in 3.5E DMGII and various setting books? I must admit to my great shame that I haven't read enough of them to know myself, although that seems like the kind of thing that might be found in the FR or Eb campaign guides.

Eh, dozens of books from the '70s on.

My starting point is the 1e DMG and the old White Dwarf articles on Town Planner and Building a Pseudo-Medieval Society, with their 'ale standard'. I allow for inflation, the WD articles used 1 1e gp = £20, it's more like 1 4e gp = £50 now. I also look at the BECMI books (especially the Dominion Taxation rules in Companion Set), the 3e supplement "Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" and elsewhere. I've also looked at historical norms, finding out that eg low-level castle servants didn't get paid; that soldiers and especially sailors ate very well and consumed a *lot* of calories, etc.

I have found the 3e baseline numbers to be probably the most useful as a tabula rasa though; in particular the 1 sp/day subsistence level = 3gp/month and the baseline infantry wage of 2sp/day, 6gp/month. The listed middle class expenditure (45gp/m) and lavish expenditure (200gp/m) fit in well there; better than the exaggerated range in the 1e DMG wages (merc soldier 2gp/m, sergeant 20gp/m. lieutenant 200-300gp, captain 500-800gp, PCs spend 100gp/level/m) or in BECMI.

 

[Leif]

Ok, man, I'm sold! Write it up, publish it, and make it canon!

Incidentally, I have zero knowledge of BECMI rules. Well, not precisely zero, I guess, since I did own the B set. By the time ECMI were published, I was ensconced in AD&D.

 

[S'mon]

Ok, man, I'm sold! Write it up, publish it, and make it canon!

I did just write it up.

I guess what I could write up is some of my guidelines guideline on how spending loads of money both raises social status and can consequently aid with various CHA-based checks. Most of that is in my head though and what I have is geared to Heroic-Tier. But as a guideline, at 10gp/week you're looking at +2 to Streetwise, Bluff, Diplomacy; at 50gp/week +4, at 250 gp +6, etc: x5 expenditure for +2 on roll. This scales with the item/parcel wealth system where you get x5 value per 5 levels, so roughly speaking for deity-level carousing you might get a +12 mod at 30th level.

 

[Kerranin]

Is this listed in your southlands blog?

 

[S'mon]

Is this listed in your southlands blog?

No, I have some similar notes for my own use but I don't want to apply them mechanistically; eg I'm influenced by how a player describes their expenditure. Cooler stuff gets bigger bonuses.