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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6153270" data-attributes="member: 177">That number seems absurdly low.  Kings typically have wealth such that they can regularly raise armies and throw them around.  If a peasant makes a gross 500 GP a year, that means this guy can afford an army of... 40 peasants.  Not a single knight, or spellcaster in the bunch.  If you say he only needs to meet the peasant's net profit of 140 GP, he still can only pay 140 or so troops, total.  And that's if he's not also doing things like building or maintaining castles, feeding those 140 peasant guards, paying other servants, and so on.I suggest that a king's coffers are going to be much, much deeper than 20,000 GP/yr.  I think you're off by at least two orders of magnitude, here. Consider that much of the costs those peasants pay is taxes or rents to lords.  The costs of food for peasants is on the order of a silver a day, about 3 GP per month.  Let's say another 7 GP goes into tools, seed, and maintenance.  That leaves 20 GP going into taxes and such.  Thus, for every thousand working peasants in the kingdom, the king is getting 20,000 GP per *month*, not per year.  Now, you were stipulating the king at 20,000 a year net profit.  So, in a tiny kingdom of, say, 10,000 people, where is the other 2,380,000 GP going?  Well, into the king's budgets - for armies, and servants, and equipment, and so on.  Would not magic items be working into those budgets, rather than out of the King's personal profits?  He has *millions* to work with, not tens of thousands.</blockquote>

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