Small modification - the peasant is not taking grain to market. Grain goes to the miller. The miller grinds it to flour. Some of that flour goes back to the peasant, to feed his family. The rest the miller keeps and sells, to cover his own needs.
A workable fantasy economy?
- Thread starter RangerWickett
- Start date
Small modification - the peasant is not taking grain to market. Grain goes to the miller. The miller grinds it to flour. Some of that flour goes back to the peasant, to feed his family. The rest the miller keeps and sells, to cover his own needs.
This is a general problem D&D faces. Your level is your power-level within the game, and it implies a certain amount of material wealth -- wealth which is both a reward for good play and a means toward more power.
The game doesn't handle other, similar scenarios well either, like a low-level halfling rogue with an artifact-ring, a magic sword, and a (magical) chain shirt worth a king's ransom. Or a young king, with or without Excalibur.
A DM with a good eye for such things can make it work, but the system gets ugly when the numbers don't improve in lock step -- a one-hit die rogue can still only take one hit, for instance.
Also, the DM might like to lend the player wealth, but that gets awkward when there's an unwritten expectation that you will earn more wealth moving forward, and your current wealth, properly invested in equipment, is how you'll get there.
TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
First, if it hasn’t been noted, XRPs Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe is the best reference I know for these issues. But it still has the same problem that all these exercises have. (oops, it has).
The problem is that there is economy of a fantasy land, and the economy of the game.
These are different things.
In the economy of the fantasy land, there as so many parameters and fudge factors, you can come up with whatever you wan’t. Want a monetized economy (to take a random example)? Easy, dwarves, treasure hunters, and wizards all ensure that lots of coin is around, and of course people use it. In fact, it might be hard to reconcile “realistic” barter with the amount of treasure implied in the various editions of D&D.
The economy of the game is different because it may actually matter for the game. Can you buy, sell, or make magic items? Can you walk into a small village and buy plate mail? Is there a market in exotic animals and mounts? How long does it take to build a castle? Is the local civilization capable of making sea worthy vessels? Do you have a spell that makes ships sea-worthy?
And the big thing the game (or this exercise) demands is only realistic under special conditions: stability. How many hours does it take to build a wall, and how much does that cost? These things are not fixed. Even assuming stable technology, they are not fixed.
Yes, in theory there are links between world and game economy. A world with the low population density explicit in 3E would not seem to be able to sustain the relatively complex 3E economy without a big reliance on fudge factors. But they are there: druidic magic raising crops yields, heavy dwarf and dungeon based production raising mineral yields. Guild magic increasing craft productivity. And of course population density (and you know this is the key, right?) cuts both ways.
Anyways, keeping in mind also that trade should be severely restricted by all those monsters wandering around, its unclear if even these fudge factors would allow a party to go into a tiny village and buy swords, horses, breastplates…as the 3E rules said that they could. But why do the rules say that? To keep this stuff from getting in the way of the game.
It probably best to think in game terms, or more general fantasy terms, and just figure out what you want to achieve. Then come up with some explanation(s) to make it seem plausible. (of course, that is probably what you are doing).
However, to show I am a good sport, in a later post, I may try to present some actual economics. But they not be what you expect.
The problem is that there is economy of a fantasy land, and the economy of the game.
These are different things.
In the economy of the fantasy land, there as so many parameters and fudge factors, you can come up with whatever you wan’t. Want a monetized economy (to take a random example)? Easy, dwarves, treasure hunters, and wizards all ensure that lots of coin is around, and of course people use it. In fact, it might be hard to reconcile “realistic” barter with the amount of treasure implied in the various editions of D&D.
The economy of the game is different because it may actually matter for the game. Can you buy, sell, or make magic items? Can you walk into a small village and buy plate mail? Is there a market in exotic animals and mounts? How long does it take to build a castle? Is the local civilization capable of making sea worthy vessels? Do you have a spell that makes ships sea-worthy?
And the big thing the game (or this exercise) demands is only realistic under special conditions: stability. How many hours does it take to build a wall, and how much does that cost? These things are not fixed. Even assuming stable technology, they are not fixed.
Yes, in theory there are links between world and game economy. A world with the low population density explicit in 3E would not seem to be able to sustain the relatively complex 3E economy without a big reliance on fudge factors. But they are there: druidic magic raising crops yields, heavy dwarf and dungeon based production raising mineral yields. Guild magic increasing craft productivity. And of course population density (and you know this is the key, right?) cuts both ways.
Anyways, keeping in mind also that trade should be severely restricted by all those monsters wandering around, its unclear if even these fudge factors would allow a party to go into a tiny village and buy swords, horses, breastplates…as the 3E rules said that they could. But why do the rules say that? To keep this stuff from getting in the way of the game.
It probably best to think in game terms, or more general fantasy terms, and just figure out what you want to achieve. Then come up with some explanation(s) to make it seem plausible. (of course, that is probably what you are doing).
However, to show I am a good sport, in a later post, I may try to present some actual economics. But they not be what you expect.
If magic items last forever -- or at least a very, very long time -- we would expect to see them created primarily by those with a long time horizon -- either long-lived races, like the elves, or patriarchs of powerful families who might expect to pass on such a valuable asset.
Such durability would imply that the stock of magic items should be much greater than the flow of new magic items into the economy, like the slow accumulation of, say, gold from mining.
Unlike gold though, magic items are far from fungible. How many Stings for a palantir?
And unlike gold, magic items aren't mined via unskilled labor but created via highly skilled labor -- which may be in much shorter supply now than in the Golden Age, when magic was common.
Celebrim
Legend
First, I already said that, and I don't think I said he takes grain to market. And second, the miller is also collecting 'taxes' from the peasant for the landlord when he grinds the flours, so the miller is taking only a cut of what he keeps and sending the rest to the landlord.
By 'product' I meant things like beeswax, honey, dyed thread, homespun, shingles, firewood, broom handles, vegetables when in season, straw baskets, and anything else the family could produce off their land that had a market value and which the landlord hadn't legally monopolized the way he'd monopolized venison.
My apologies if I missed it. Having missed it, and not having seen clear differentiation between grain and other products, it seemed worth mentioning for completeness.
A point made above, bears repeating...
The economy presented in the rulebooks is a resource management system for a game. Real world economics don't have to be fun to play with, and so they work differently.
RangerWickett
Legend
This is all great stuff. Even if the mundane details of how much a farmer can make if he has an apiary never crop up, it's a) fun to know, and b) a potential source of inspiration and details for a game.
So okay, we've got a general idea of how much money different tiers of society make, and how much some standard goods cost. And we understand that the human population is much lower than it is today, population densities are lower, and so the ultimate potential of society is lower. In a real Medieval-esque setting, certain things may be possible without being broadly implemented.
For instance, medieval people had the technological knowledge to make crude steam powered devices (I seem to recall even way back at the Temple of Zeus, the doors were steam-powered), but they lacked the critical mass of resources and population to make it worthwhile to develop a railroad. It was simply infeasible, because they didn't have enough people to mine the necessary quantities of iron and coal, nor to construct standardized train cars.
Magic items, then, I see like technological novelties. Hell -- I admit my knowledge of electrical history is limited -- but it was potentially possible to get enough hand-made galvanic cell batteries to build an electric fence, though the cost to keep it working would have been overwhelming.
For this reason, as we develop further details, they will be heavily influenced by just how magic works in whatever magic system you prefer to use. If you can violate conservation of energy, well, all bets are off; if instead magic doesn't create energy but just converts it from sources that wouldn't work in the real world (e.g., goats' blood, diamond dust, prayer), we can at least begin to have a rational magical economy.
Now, the core D&D magic system doesn't concern itself with where the power of magic comes from, so -- like the details of peasants' and merchants' lives -- we can come up with all sorts of flavor without changing the game mechanics.
So what do you say? Should we gloss over the 'how' of a magic missile? We just assume wizards have figured it out, that they paid some metaphysical price for the physical power they wield? Maybe that's why they get fewer hit points. It's body-based fuel, or perhaps they draw mana from other planes, and doing so taxes the body. Either way, they can get their magic combat tricks. We just need to figure out a reasonable value.
Healing wounds. Creating light. Empowering soldiers to fight on. Creating barriers to keep out pests or thieves, or keep in livestock. Translation. Communicating with animals, with nature. How valuable are these things? Should it be based on how useful they are to society, or how hard they are to do? (And if it's the latter, so much depends on what magic system you're using.)
(Alternately, perhaps in another thread, I'll try a different approach. Rather than trying to figure out everything at once, we could start from the beginning. You've got a primitive stone age culture, just starting to work out barter and writing, and they have access to simple magic. What do they do with it? How do they value it?)
So okay, we've got a general idea of how much money different tiers of society make, and how much some standard goods cost. And we understand that the human population is much lower than it is today, population densities are lower, and so the ultimate potential of society is lower. In a real Medieval-esque setting, certain things may be possible without being broadly implemented.
For instance, medieval people had the technological knowledge to make crude steam powered devices (I seem to recall even way back at the Temple of Zeus, the doors were steam-powered), but they lacked the critical mass of resources and population to make it worthwhile to develop a railroad. It was simply infeasible, because they didn't have enough people to mine the necessary quantities of iron and coal, nor to construct standardized train cars.
Magic items, then, I see like technological novelties. Hell -- I admit my knowledge of electrical history is limited -- but it was potentially possible to get enough hand-made galvanic cell batteries to build an electric fence, though the cost to keep it working would have been overwhelming.
For this reason, as we develop further details, they will be heavily influenced by just how magic works in whatever magic system you prefer to use. If you can violate conservation of energy, well, all bets are off; if instead magic doesn't create energy but just converts it from sources that wouldn't work in the real world (e.g., goats' blood, diamond dust, prayer), we can at least begin to have a rational magical economy.
Now, the core D&D magic system doesn't concern itself with where the power of magic comes from, so -- like the details of peasants' and merchants' lives -- we can come up with all sorts of flavor without changing the game mechanics.
So what do you say? Should we gloss over the 'how' of a magic missile? We just assume wizards have figured it out, that they paid some metaphysical price for the physical power they wield? Maybe that's why they get fewer hit points. It's body-based fuel, or perhaps they draw mana from other planes, and doing so taxes the body. Either way, they can get their magic combat tricks. We just need to figure out a reasonable value.
Healing wounds. Creating light. Empowering soldiers to fight on. Creating barriers to keep out pests or thieves, or keep in livestock. Translation. Communicating with animals, with nature. How valuable are these things? Should it be based on how useful they are to society, or how hard they are to do? (And if it's the latter, so much depends on what magic system you're using.)
(Alternately, perhaps in another thread, I'll try a different approach. Rather than trying to figure out everything at once, we could start from the beginning. You've got a primitive stone age culture, just starting to work out barter and writing, and they have access to simple magic. What do they do with it? How do they value it?)
Celebrim
Legend
My experience with game enonomics over the years is that where they depart from reality, it tends to create problems when the game you run departs from kill the monsters and take there stuff (by design or otherwise). What is balanced to work under one scenario (PC's will invest most of their treasure into surviving the next dungeon) doesn't work so well under other scenarios (PC's will invest most of their treasure into undermining the economies of rival nations, leveraging labor markets to produce mundane resources, and creating new business ventures). I've seen PC's end up as hyperaggressive bandits that leverage most of thier very considerable cash flow toward buying up labor (liquidating the assets of whoever tries to stop them to buy up more labor), becoming a cross between a magically powered Robin Hoods and the Borg (actually, I was one of these PCs). That's alot harder to do if ground the game economics in reality, or rather, it's alot less likely to happen to a DM if the game system gives them economic structure grounded in reality rather than assuming he's an economist and will be able to adjust the game economic assumptions to compensate.
Economic assumptions are a rules subsystem that can be broken just like any other if they aren't thought out well.
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TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
A pre modern economy is basically Malthusian. This means that anything that brings prosperity, by raising birth rates and lowering death rates (nutrition is the obvious link here) causes population growth. This increases population relative to land, which then drives per capita income (and labor cost) back to a long run equilibrium. So things like technology just lead to more people, not more prosperity.
This has some funny implications, like the fact that something like the black death can bring decades of higher incomes, as it did, until population recovers.
Now, the existence of a long run equilibrium could justify some stable cost of labor and stable prices in a low fantasy game. (ie a sword costs 25 gp, or at least 20 hours of labor). What those costs are still depends on the productivity of labor to make the relevant item, and this still depends. But this is a very strong assumption, especially when fantasy is added.
Sticking with the real world, one implication is that high death rates mean higher income, and higher labor costs. Hence hygiene in different places could be (and seriously, was) a key determinant of labor costs.
Put in fantasy though, and this all just blows up. Magical healing can lower death rates, push up population, and hence bring down labor costs. But what if you have magical healing and magical birth control? Then you could have a sustained “modern” economy, even using otherwise primitive technology.
And what about costs? In the “idealic” economy of low birth and death rates but otherwise primitive technology, costs will be high. In an eberon version of this, with magi-tech, costs will fall since each hour of labour will produce substantially more.
Presumably, any respectable magical world will have all sorts of variations, and hence all sorts of labor and item costs.
This has some funny implications, like the fact that something like the black death can bring decades of higher incomes, as it did, until population recovers.
Now, the existence of a long run equilibrium could justify some stable cost of labor and stable prices in a low fantasy game. (ie a sword costs 25 gp, or at least 20 hours of labor). What those costs are still depends on the productivity of labor to make the relevant item, and this still depends. But this is a very strong assumption, especially when fantasy is added.
Sticking with the real world, one implication is that high death rates mean higher income, and higher labor costs. Hence hygiene in different places could be (and seriously, was) a key determinant of labor costs.
Put in fantasy though, and this all just blows up. Magical healing can lower death rates, push up population, and hence bring down labor costs. But what if you have magical healing and magical birth control? Then you could have a sustained “modern” economy, even using otherwise primitive technology.
And what about costs? In the “idealic” economy of low birth and death rates but otherwise primitive technology, costs will be high. In an eberon version of this, with magi-tech, costs will fall since each hour of labour will produce substantially more.
Presumably, any respectable magical world will have all sorts of variations, and hence all sorts of labor and item costs.
Yes, well, that should be no surprise, as killing monsters and taking their stuff is itself a departure from reality. Any system (economic, combat, magic, or whatever) has some base (often implicit) assumptions. Any system will appear broken if taken too far outside those base assumptions.
RangerWickett said:
I am not at all convinced a railroad counts as a "crude steam powered device". There's a whole lot of materials technology, thermodynamics, and fluid dynamics knowledge that stands between the medieval ability and a full-on steam engine capable of pulling notable cargo notable distances.
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