Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5695877" data-attributes="member: 4937">To begin with, S'mon, you entire post is infused with the assumption that I don't know anything about medieval economies.  Please, start from the assumption that I am in every way describing a medieval baseline and see where that gets you.If hovels were a mere 100gp, I'd have less of a problem with that.  Still some problem but much less of one. That implies only that a hovel requires 6000-10000 man days of labor to create.  The problem is that typically, because buildings are always priced according to the gold peice encomy, simple hovels are priced at like 1000gp implying that something like 60,000-100,000 man days of labor go into them.  Even we assume skilled labor and its higher costs, we are still left with hovels that take a team of 10 men at least 6-7 years to build.I mean, I'm well aware of the longer craft times required for hand made goods and the proportionately higher percentages of income required therefore to purchase any durable goods.  But do the math.  If you price things in gold, and you price labor in silver, you are always left with tremendous absurdities.  I have no problem with complex goods taking days or weeks to make, but often this is ridiculous.  A masterwork sword might well require a months labor, but a simple sword (or a longbow) is the work of only a couple of days at most.Certainly.  But if you are going to assume that inflation kicks in as soon as the PCs start buying, and thereafter rejigger the whole price list, why not instead build the assumptions of PC wealth into the economy so that history doesn't illogically begin with the existance of the PC's?Besides which, this inflation assumption is utterly ridiculous and has been the ridiculous basis of so many bad pricing schemes since D&D was published.  To explain why, we must go back to 1e.   Let me 'read' you something:In other words, the table of equipment costs in the 1e Player's Handbook already is justified by the fact that Gygax knows that these costs represent as inflated of a pricing scheme as he can think of.   In other words, Gygax is justifying the dual economy of ordinary goods supplied in silver peices, but adventuring supplies bought in gold peices by explaining that all the adventuring supplies are being bought in a place equivalent to Dawson during the Klondike gold rush.   So it always amusing me and infuriates me at turns to see people bring out the inflation argument, or suggest that adventuring supplies cost two or three times that listed in the players handbook because of the extremities of inflation.  Those people are unknowingly (I think in almost every case) arguing for boom times that dwarf in frenzy that of Dawson City at the height of the gold rush, one of the most extreme historical examples imaginable.The fact of the matter is that most of us don't have our campaigns centered around a traditional Gygaxian haven town adjacent to a massive dungeon complex which will be the sole focus of the campaign.  Hense, if we are talking about realism and simulation, we ought to be arguing not for greater inflation than what Gygax used to explain his very gamist monetary decisions.When you said this, were you already aware that D&D's pricing scheme assumes that a single egg costs the PC's, in modern terms, $24?  That's what an egg costs in Dawson City/D&D (per Gygax's claim).  It's obvious that laborers earning on the silver peice standard can't live on the gold peice standard that the PC's are forced to.  I making zero assumptions beyond those required for a medieval economy.  Rather, I'm trying to create a sensible medieval economy.  Don't start lecturing me about my supposed anachronisms until you do some math.</blockquote>

Verification