D&D 5E 5E economics -The Peasants are revolting!

[Micah Sweet]

I would say that it's important to keep in mind that farming tools (and presumably an appropriate proficiency) would certainly be expected to exist in your average fantasy-medieval setting; as would a fair number of others skills and tool proficiencies. I would imagine that they're not listed in the PHB on account of not being very useful for adventurers. Farming isn't really something you can do for a few extra coins during your off week between adventures. It's simple enough to add them in or subsume tasks into other skills (say Nature, Survival, or Herbalism Kit proficiencies) if a PC wants to try it. It may not be standardized across games, but the game settings frequently aren't anyway. Or at least have significant variations between campaigns and DMs, even in established settings like Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron

The base ruleset doesn't go into the minutiae of how a gameworld works; and probably shouldn't. It may be an interesting thing to consider from a world-building standpoint, but text and design space devoted to such details would mean that other game mechanics and options suffer.

That, or we need a bigger book. My vote is for option 2.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Or like a sperate books for the people who really really want it while not bogging down the core with stuff most people will never use?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Or like a sperate books for the people who really really want it while not bogging down the core with stuff most people will never use?

Sure, provided the book actually gets made. WotC's track record doesn't fill me with confidence. Better to try to get some of this in a book likely to get published. Both 5e games from Kobold Press and EN Publishing are more broad and varied mechanically than WotC 5e ever was or is likely ever to be.

 

[Emerikol]

Yeah, OP isn't entirely crazy as it sounds. You can find lists online of what the average income of people from the poorest countries make when converted to comparable buying power in your own country. The overwhelming majority of us first-worlders will find that such incomes wouldn't even cover rent, let alone food costs in our own respective countries. So how do people in such conditions manage to live?

In generational or communal housing; and by subsisting on food they personally grow, herd, hunt, or gather. Not by earning money as unskilled laborers and spending that money for food and shelter.

We are getting off the subject a bit but one thing to realize. When you compare national currencies the trade imbalance can skew on the ground value. There are people who live on incomes like 20 dollars a month but they aren't spending dollars. They are spending their devalued currency but inside the country that devalued currency actually has more buying power. The only way you could really compare would be to analyze the living conditions people in two different countries.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

We are getting off the subject a bit but one thing to realize. When you compare national currencies the trade imbalance can skew on the ground value. There are people who live on incomes like 20 dollars a month but they aren't spending dollars. They are spending their devalued currency but inside the country that devalued currency actually has more buying power. The only way you could really compare would be to analyze the living conditions people in two different countries.

And yet again....no. What I'm talking about is already indexed against local prices. That's what "converted to comparable buying power" means.

 

[Emerikol]

And yet again....no. What I'm talking about is already indexed against local prices. That's what "converted to comparable buying power" means.

Well when you said that when done they would not be able to live, that is my point. A person can live on the equivalent of 20 dollars a month in a foreign country that is poorer. I'm not saying identically but they can survive. A person cannot survive on 20 dollars a month in the US period. Not and live indoors and have enough food. So the adjustments must have failed.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Well when you said that when done they would not be able to live, that is my point. A person can live on the equivalent of 20 dollars a month in a foreign country that is poorer. I'm not saying identically but they can survive. A person cannot survive on 20 dollars a month in the US period. Not and live indoors and have enough food. So the adjustments must have failed.

You're not doing the comparison correctly. In a former life I was a cost estimator for construction projects, so I had to deal with this.

The "$20US in NoWheresLandia" involves buying completely different goods. Milled grain, not store-bought bread. A 5hp scooter that can't go faster than 35mph but gets 150mpg rather than a 140hp car. Poultices made from local plants rather than pharmaceuticals. A straw pallet over a $500 mattress. A house made of actual wattle & daub rather than a structure that meets building codes and has utilities. Using fifty local laborers at $1/day rather than renting a 100hp excavator at $100/hr. Oh and all projects take about 4x longer than they would in the US despite having almost no paperwork, approvals or inspections because material availability is utterly erratic.

However, within NoWheresLandia, there is a clear delineated between the "middle class" person who makes $20/mo, the shanty dweller who subsists on $10/mo, the skilled artisan who makes $50/mo and the elite that earns $200/mo.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

There is a probably a confusion in the argument, between $ as in USD and $ as in PPP dollars.

I don't think anybody said "how, poor people, they must leave with 1$ a day so they must starve since it doesn't even buy you a coffee". The measure used (and mentionned first by @Shadowdweller00 was always PPP dollars, which have the property of being multiplied by the local cost it takes to buy a standardized array of goods. It is a much better measure because it takes into account that a person in a poor country will not pay the same thing for its vegetable or haircut that one in a wealthy country, so a USD will buy more than it would by just using the exchange rate between the local currency and the USD. The PPP dollars takes that into account.

It is however still an imperfect measure, because it uses a standardized array of goods, and in reality, people in different country don't have the same spending patterns. As @kigmatzomat illustrated, solutions can be found for less buy not buying the standardized array of goods. This array contain both "imported goods and service" that are priced on a world market (oil, iphones) and "local goods" where there is no external cost and that is priced mostly with local expenses. The international goods in the array skew the cost of life higher, while in reality, the buying pattern of a local resident of an impoverished country is simply different, avoiding international goods.

Purchasing Power Parity: Weights Matter

The rate at which the currency of one country would have to be converted into that of another country to buy the same amount of goods and services in each country

www.imf.org

But it's still a better measurement than just convering the average wages of a foreign country into the local currency, as journalists are prone to do.

Another illustration: in my country we have several overseas territories. Civil servants posted there gets an extra allowance covering the price difference between mainland and overseas territories. It can be as much a 70% pay increase, depending on which territory. That's enough to cover the increased cost... should they consume the exact same things they would if they were on the continent. In practice, it can be a great opportunity to save money if one is willing to change eating pattern and eat mostly locally grown products instead of imported products from the mainland, because due to the price of import, dairy product cost like 3x the price of mainland, while fruits are inexpensive as they can be imported from surrounding poorer countries. So sure, the average can be a 70% difference in price, but more often than not, the consumption basket changes, so you don't pay the 70% increase that is theoretically calculated the same way the PPP dollar value is calculated.

 

[ECMO3]

I don't know if they intended to recreate the conditions that lead to frequent peasant revolts in Europe during the 17th-18th centuries, but they did a bang up job of it.

If my peasants revolt it is more XP for me.

 

[M_Natas]

The problem with the 5e (and what I have seen 5.5e) economy is, that even the adventure economy is not explained.

What is the purpose of a game economy? To facilitate adventure and offer verisimilitude.

The discussion so far is more about realism vs. sumulatism of the game world. So more about how real the economy of the game world feels (and how that can be used for adventure hooks to some extent).

But I think the bigger problem is, that 5e and 5.5e also don't give DMs guidelines and help to just facilitate the Party Site of the economy. They just give a punch of prices (or price ranges for magic items) on the expense site and a bunch of tables for treasure on the income site.
Even the most basic "expected average gold per level if you use the treasure table" explanation is totally missing from the 2014 DMG and from what I have seen also from the 2024 DMG. And that is the minimum needed for DMs to make informed decisions. If the DM doesn't get a clue how much money are party is expected to make, he can't set prices accordingly and we end up with a million and one posts about "what can my players do with all their useless money?"

5e fails at a simulatinist approach and a gaming approach with money.
Like, with Monopoly, which is pure gamist, you know how, when and if to use money. You know the relative and absolute value of every street, house and hotel, at a glance. You know how much money you can expect and how much you have to pay.
5e utterly fails at that on the income level for the players (and the DM).

I'm myself more in the camp of simulationst- of Pro Verisimilitude- but he'll, I could live with complete gamist money rules, if they would actually work.