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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 925697" data-attributes="member: 4937">I personally believe that the silver peices per week rules are VERY good, but that the _prices_ of goods are often TOTALLY off base.Remember, the _prices_ of goods are NOT based off historical research or anything but often as not simply what the designer felt would be _balanced_ during character creation.  (Thus the cost of bucklers, for instance).  Take masterwork, for example.  It adds a flat 300 g.p. penalty to the cost regardless of the item in question.  Masterwork club, whip, sword, staff its all the same.  In my campaign, masterwork weapons costs 10 times the cost of the weapon with a minimum of 10 g.p.  Suddenly, masterwork versions of simple items start taking reasonable ammounts of time where as masterwork versions of complex items still take the appropriately long periods.For the record, most prices in D&D are realistically 3 to 20 times too high.  But some prices are actually pretty good based on historical comparisons.  Medieval peasants really did earn about a silver coin a day.  A sword in the medieval period really could take a week or a month to make.  A suit of plate really could take a years labor from a master armorsmith and a team of assistants.The craft skill is actually well thought out, but to get it to give good numbers you will have to rework D&D's broken prices and economics.  For one thing, starting PC's should start with silver peices NOT gold peices.  When you consider that a silver peice is supposed to be a days wages, you realize that a gold piece has the buying power of something like $1000 dollars and that the prices of many objects in the equipment list are utterly ridiculous.Lastly to understand the very basis of this problem you have to go back to first edition.  Gygax was I think in terms of his understanding of medieval economics still one of the best designers ever involved with D&D IMO, and the prices in D&D are still based of his original price lists to a large extent.   Unfortunately, by his own admission, his original price list ASSUMED hyperinflation in the area in which the PC's were operating along the lines of the prices in Alaska in the Klondike gold rush.  Well, that might be fine for balance in Gygax's original campaign and latter consensual fantasy with its copious loot, taking those prices as _base prices_ and not as some multiple of a true base price of an item has left D&D with a mixed bag of economic assumptions.  Wages and services (as from the DMG) are based on a realistic silver peice economy, where as the prices of goods (especially weapons) other than food are based a fantasy gold peice economy.  Latter designers never rectified this problem and it troubles D&D to this day.</blockquote>

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