D&D Economics

[Turanil]

The absurdity of D&D economics always irritated me. Something needs to be done!

I would do things like that:

1) Take the price of most common goods in the PHB and try to determine a range of coherent incomes. I vaguely guess that simple peasants would be at 1d4 gp per month (not in gold but copper and barter), while nobles would be at 150 gp per month for an avrage.

2) Treasures and rewards are much reduced. The small village of peasants don't offer 500 gp (per adventurer!) to save them from the nearby ogres. It's absurd at several levels: they don't have such a fortune, and they would pay regular men-at-arms much less, etc. So PCs will have to content themselves with small incomes, and maybe if succesful make as much money as a wealthy noble, no more.

3) Magic: all the problem is there, costs of magic. Divide all prices of magic per 10 or even 100!! At least have price that would let magic be practiced by relatively wealthy normal people. BUT where creation of magic items are involved, it becomes extremely difficult and time consuming to find the proper ingredients, special components, and what not. So even if manufacturing a sword +1 only costs 100 gp, it would be much work and other appropriate conditions, that it's impossible to mass-produce anything magical.

 

[Gez]

Then divide magic item prices by 10, but multiply creation time by 100. (Instead of one day per 1000 gp of market cost, one day per 10 gp of market cost. Since a 1000 gp item will become with these rules a 100 gp item, the duration would actually be decupled, not centupled.)

 

[Rel]

A long time ago, ENBoarder "Old One" posted an economic system in the Homebrew forum, which I had then archived online as a simple HTML file.

Bah. That guy is such a hack. Who listens to him anyway.

 

[jmucchiello]

1) Take the price of most common goods in the PHB and try to determine a range of coherent incomes. I vaguely guess that simple peasants would be at 1d4 gp per month (not in gold but copper and barter), while nobles would be at 150 gp per month for an avrage.

2) Treasures and rewards are much reduced. The small village of peasants don't offer 500 gp (per adventurer!) to save them from the nearby ogres. It's absurd at several levels: they don't have such a fortune, and they would pay regular men-at-arms much less, etc. So PCs will have to content themselves with small incomes, and maybe if succesful make as much money as a wealthy noble, no more.

But it's not D&D without the 5,000 gp hoard. Oh, wrong thread.

So pay peasents 50 gp a month and lords 3000 gp a month. Then you can leave all the prices alone.

3) Magic: all the problem is there, costs of magic. Divide all prices of magic per 10 or even 100!! At least have price that would let magic be practiced by relatively wealthy normal people. BUT where creation of magic items are involved, it becomes extremely difficult and time consuming to find the proper ingredients, special components, and what not. So even if manufacturing a sword +1 only costs 100 gp, it would be much work and other appropriate conditions, that it's impossible to mass-produce anything magical.

This doesn't make sense. If it is time consuming or requires rare ingredients to make a magic item, the cost of these things should be in the cost of the item. You can't have reduced magic item prices and rare ingredients. That doesn't make sense. And there is no worry that magic items will flood the market, they are still very expensive at 100 gp or more if peasents are still in the 1-4 gp / month range.

 

[Turanil]

But it's not D&D without the 5,000 gp hoard.

I admit that I like much more a "grim'n'gritty" setting, something with a Warhammer FRP feel. In my next campaign, money will be hard to come by...

This doesn't make sense. If it is time consuming or requires rare ingredients to make a magic item, the cost of these things should be in the cost of the item. You can't have reduced magic item prices and rare ingredients. That doesn't make sense. And there is no worry that magic items will flood the market, they are still very expensive at 100 gp or more if peasents are still in the 1-4 gp / month range.

I have yet to look carefully at how things will be done. However the principle will be this: a noble with an income of 150 gp per month, must be able to learn and practice magic-use with only 50 gp. per month. As such inscribing spells on spellbooks, etc. will be way much cheaper than in the core rules. If potions are manufactured, this must be doable at relatively low price: Cure-light-wounds potion at 10 or 20 gp, not 700!

Now about magical items: Proliferation of magical items will have to be stopped by another system than absurd costs. My idea is: magic by its very nature is not something that can be rationally mass produced, it's not something akin to industrial manufacturing. So, if PCs want to manufacture a few potions of cure light wounds, but as a DM I don't want them to make dozens, I will require strange mystical ingredients. I will have to think about it, but it can be Troll blood kept in a special fragile container, and the troll must be slain during a night of full moon, and half the blood spilled over the Earth to appease the spirits of whatever, all of this done by the one who will do the potions (or it doesn't work), and so on. You see the idea: the conditions are such that you CANNOT obtain ingredients in large quantities just because you have all the money necessary. Plus magic must be done as works of art (Van Gogh paintings couldn't be mass produced!). Etc.

So, I remove the absurd costs, but whatever the reason, it's impossible to create more than one or two magical items every now and then, even if it only costs 10 gp and can be done in 10 minutes!!! (It's fantasy and magic after all)

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Now about magical items: Proliferation of magical items will have to be stopped by another system than absurd costs. My idea is: magic by its very nature is not something that can be rationally mass produced, it's not something akin to industrial manufacturing.

No need to change the system in order to do that. It works that way right now. Unlike mechanical items which can be mass produced in assembly line fashion, magic items require unusually skilled labor to create (you have to be able to cast level x spells for most item creation feats and you need the feat) and furthermore consume some kind of a mystic portion of the creator's life force (xp). They're not the kind of thing you could do with an assembly line unless you have hundreds of level 3+ wizards and clerics in the same place in your world. (And if you have that, you're into the mass magic anyway).

Of course, if you don't really mean "mass-produce" but rather "produce in relatively large quantities" that's not true. A wizard's DM should expect the wizard to write quite a few scrolls over the course of his career. A character with Craft Wondrous Item will probably produce at least a dozen wondrous items as well. However, none of that is going to be on the scale of true mass production even if it seems like that compared to games where 12th level characters are killing each other over a single, precious potion of cure light wounds.

So, if PCs want to manufacture a few potions of cure light wounds, but as a DM I don't want them to make dozens, I will require strange mystical ingredients. I will have to think about it, but it can be Troll blood kept in a special fragile container, and the troll must be slain during a night of full moon, and half the blood spilled over the Earth to appease the spirits of whatever, all of this done by the one who will do the potions (or it doesn't work), and so on. You see the idea: the conditions are such that you CANNOT obtain ingredients in large quantities just because you have all the money necessary.

So then, here's the question: can a character who spends a feat to be able to create magic items get enough use out of it that he doesn't say "man, what a waste; I should have just taken Spell Focus." The follow-up question is this: "do you want the butcher's knife, scapels, and glass vials to come out after the PCs kill every monster?" (We just killed a basilisk! Quick, let's take some of its blood--that's useful for potions of remove paralysis--its eyes (eyes of petrification, of course), its skin (for a cloak of resistance), and its claws/teeth (an amulet of natural armor).

So, there are two possibilities:
1. Either your restrictions are so heavy that item creation feats become useless and PCs will never create items (as in your example above). This, of course, raises the question of why any NPCs ever bother with it--or even how they are capable of it (3rd level clerics aren't going to be killing a lot of trolls on the night of a full moon or any other time and since low-level clerics are the primary source for potions of cure light wounds, with those restrictions, they should be non-existent).
2. The PCs are willing to live with the restrictions. "OK, I'll need a teleport spell to get to the trollfens and a find the path to get to the nearest troll, then we butcher it, collect the blood and teleport back to make the potion."

I don't really see either one of these adding to the game--especially if you're going to make 10th and 11th level PC role-play out killing a troll in order to make a single potion of cure light wounds.

Plus magic must be done as works of art (Van Gogh paintings couldn't be mass produced!). Etc.

You have some rather strange ideas about art--probably coming from popular conceptions about "great" art. I wouldn't think that all magic (even potions?!?) were supposed to be masterpieces on the order of Starry Night or the Mona Lisa. If potions and scrolls are more along the lines of 18th century locket portraits, comic books, or television episodes then it's a lot more conceivable that you could make a reasonable quantity of them while still doing them "as works of art."

Sure, adopt the art model for magic items, but your Mona Lisas, Davids, and Starry Nights are going to be the +3 Holy, adamantine, Evil Outsider Bane greatswords of wounding and robes of the archmagi not potions of cure light wounds and +1 swords. Potions of cure light wounds are more akin to the character portraits that local artists draw at conventions and +1 swords might be Harlequin romance novels. They're certainly made as works of art, but no-one will mistake them for great works of art.

So, I remove the absurd costs, but whatever the reason, it's impossible to create more than one or two magical items every now and then, even if it only costs 10 gp and can be done in 10 minutes!!! (It's fantasy and magic after all)

I can't think of a better way to say "Don't bother with item creation feats in my game; they'll only be useful on the third Tuesday of the second month of a leap year." Low costs and low time consumption don't make up for being restricted to "one or two magic items" "every now and then."

Then again, this raises another question: if it's so darn hard to make magic items (a caster has to track down and kill a troll in a special ritual on the night of the full moon and then suffers a chance that the fragile container breaks on the way back, making all that effort turn out for naught), why on earth is he only going to charge 10gp for it? That sounds like a recipe for making magic items more expensive rather than less expensive.

 

[Turanil]

Well, in fact there is two points to what I said:

1) I was in my head thinking about the creation of magical items in my next setting-campaign of Castles & Crusades. No rules for magical items creation exist yet in this game, and I was thinking that creating magical items (in this C&C setting of mine) would actually earn XP and don't cost so much money. so I need other methods to restrict their proliferation!

2) At the beginning I was ranting on the "cost" of magical items, seeing it as absurd. In a straight D&D 3e game I would only divide the actual costs in gp (but not in XP) by 10 or more; while treasures found by the PCs are much less than in the traditional dungeon delving. I just don't want tons of gold sitting at every corner for the PCs to pick, THEN have absurdly high prices to relieve PCs of their tons of gold, all the while all other normal people in the world couldn't afford to buy anything.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I don't see why that has to be the case. You seem to be saying that if there is low demand, prices will drop; but my assumption is that if there is low demand, production will drop, achieving the same result. Now, clearly there are pre-existing magic items, but unless a large hoard of them is found, that won't affect the market. And the market is so small and specialized that it can be dealt with almost entirely seperately from the "normal" market. It's like the market for $50,000 watches today. Hardly anyone needs them, but they're still out there to be bought.

Hmm, what I was trying to say is that a large part of the 'DnD economy' is built without reference to game world economics so much as game system need.

It would be as though the $50,000 watch were a mandated requirement/right of attaining certain educational degrees. And the watch cost $50,000 not so much as a result of rarity or considerations inherent in its production as because the 'power' of said watch was associated with that educational degree.

I'm not saying that the magic item system is entirely without economic consideration and value as its written, but it skews the whole rest of the system. Particularly as spells are priced to fit within that system and they are, or so it seems to me, frighteningly overpriced as a result. Figuring out the magic item issue is a horror in its own right given their durability, bizarre production processes, and universal utility, but trying to do so while considering how they have to be balanced by price for game use is terrificly wonky exercise.

 

[Turanil]

Then again, this raises another question: if it's so darn hard to make magic items (a caster has to track down and kill a troll in a special ritual on the night of the full moon and then suffers a chance that the fragile container breaks on the way back, making all that effort turn out for naught), why on earth is he only going to charge 10gp for it? That sounds like a recipe for making magic items more expensive rather than less expensive.

All what you says is perfectly reasonable in the light of straight D&D 3e.

The thing is, that at the prices and costs given in D&D, nobody would be able to learn and practice magic in the first place; only the PCs who miraculously find tons of gold in every ogre's den. THUS: I need to come up (in my C&C setting) with coherent economics, prices and costs of magic that would allow relatively wealthy (but normal!) people to learn spells, inscribe spells in spellbooks, and create a dozen magical items in their lifetime. This is what I want and must work on (I need to think carefully about it). BUT THEN, PCs will be rich and will certainly want to create magical items, especially if it earns XP rather than cost it. So I must find a method to restrict PCs, so they can create one or two permanent items, and some potions, not huge amounts of them. Now, I agree that even if costs are 10 gp in components, it's so difficult that the creator would sell them the most expensive possible. But that I don't care. (In any case, an item would be sold if there is a client willing to pay a price satisfying to the creator, which is subject to variation, so no items has a price attached to it. A magic sword +1 could be sold 150 gp in one case, 872 in another case, or exchanged against a manor or an inn next time).

 

[Old One]

Bah. That guy is such a hack. Who listens to him anyway.

Yeah...that Old One is a total hack...yep, sure enough. Just add the d20 Economic System to the long line of brilliantly-conceived, shoddily-implemented ideas rattling around in my mellon .

~ OO

PS - <Old One busily begins upgrading the desert scorpion swarms for the NC Gameday VII >