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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6511571" data-attributes="member: 82106">I believe your typical 100 ton square-rigged 2nd Century Roman merchant ship has a crew of around 5 hands, plus whoever is in charge and possibly some sort of supercargo. These numbers are HIGHLY variable though depending on the nature of the trip, expected danger levels, etc. Vessels in the 100-200 ton merchant class rarely, if ever, exceeded about 25 crew. A ship-rigged sloop of around 200 tons can be handled in a pinch by about 5 crew, older designs with simpler rigging could get away with proportionately less. In any case, its quite possible you'd have a crew of 25, 50, or even 150 if the ship is going on a long voyage of exploration into dangerous seas.Eh, I think Gary's explanation was always that there was a highly inflated 'adventurer economy' that operated in the presence of PCs so they were bound to pay rather exorbitant rates for the sorts of odd things they often wanted.Truthfully our modern notions of trade and economics are very foreign to pre-modern times. A REALISTIC medieval town of say 1100 AD wouldn't even have shops where you could spend coin at all. Virtually all production was handled by people bound up in various types of labor and trade obligations and there simply was no such thing as retail sales. The best you would do would be itinerant traders who distributed the few outside goods consumed by rural settlements. In a village the notion of purchasing some sort of good would have been ridiculous, everything made there or brought there was accounted for and needed by someone.</blockquote>

Verification