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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7787067" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, as a practical matter most groups will not be interested in a detailed economics simulation.And if you are going to create a detailed economics simulation, I should tell you that most economists and many historians believe Diocletian's edict on maximum prices was the single largest contributor to the collapse of the Roman empire. I feel you were going to point to the one thing that caused the fall of Rome, that would be it, because his edict was so far removed from the economic reality of the empire that it basically destroyed the small farms and independent merchants that had made up the backbone of not only the empire's economy, but critically the social class from which the Legions were primarily drawn. Between the two, this created almost all of Rome's latter difficulties, from the fact that it had to depend on foreign mercenaries to defend it's borders to the fact that it could never balance it's budgets.  So if you are looking for realistic prices, don't look to the edict.For my part, I find that mostly I just need decent approximations. And a decent approximation can be found by getting a price of any handmade good and dividing that price by the local expected daily wage. The resulting price is roughly it's price in daily wages in D&D, so then all you have to decide is what a daily wage in your setting is - in mine it is the silver piece. You can do some interesting things with purchasing power parity to try to simulate a pre-industrial economy but mostly you just need something that is quick and close enough to work that it keeps the game moving forward.Word of warning. Even this quick and dirty method can be a lot of work if you are going to adjust the daily wage from anything but 1 g.p. per day, because you'll need to redo the standard price lists and costs of magic items and spell components extensively, and you'll need to adjust values of just about everything you find in published texts (treasure allocation for example). And even if you stick with the gold piece standard, you're going to find that there are typically still artifacts of the old 1e AD&D two pricing standards hidden in various places in the price lists where those assumptions have been copied forward into succeeding editions. Particularly take care on prices of buildings, taxation, commodity goods and food, which are often uncorrected.</blockquote>

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