NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6495367" data-attributes="member: 4937">Mostly because mining has been industrialized to such a degree compared to the middle ages that the availability of metal is no longer comparable.  The price of copper and silver relative to gold has plummeted over the last 400 years and especially during the last 100.My main quibble is that US average income is not a good measurement for median income in an agrarian community.  Since it is useful to use US pricing, I think that 'common labor is more equivalent to the bottom quintile of US labor, or about $19,178 per year.  In the agrarian community though, this standard of living (or its equivalent) makes up about 80% of the population.  Of course, we could all scale that down to some impoverished area - wages in Cuba or the Sudan, for example - but we'd also have to adjust to cost of living in those locations as well, and overall, things would be no less distorted by modernism.  I also prefer the assumption of 20 s.p. to the gold piece, since the 1 = 10 'metric' ratio is typical of fewer eras and regions, and I consider it less well supported.That remains to only whether we are pulling the taxes out of the equation.  In point of fact, I don't think we should.  Medieval common laborers demanded a silver coin per day, and still had to pay out 30% of their income in taxes.  However, we do have to pull out the Sabbath (at least the Christian one) so only at most about 310 working days a year.  So I work the math as $19,178/310 = $61.86 a day of equivalent buying power for our D&D resident, keeping in mind that nothing that is mass manufactured is available to him but that since everyone has low wages, labor and its low skill products (handicrafts) are fairly cheap.   If 1 day's labor = 1 gold, and 1 gold = 100 copper, then about $0.62 a day (very close to my rough guess earlier).  As I said, I prefer 1 day's labor = 1 silver, with 20 silver = 1 gold and 10 copper = 1 silver, making a copper than worth about $6.19, and a gold worth $1240.  Interestingly, this calculation (purely by accident) matches well with the spot price for gold.Unfortunately, detailed historical prices are really hard to come by, so in practice I find you have to work out your price list from your income assumptions rather than the reverse.</blockquote>

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