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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 427083" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, let's just do the math here.  A stone golem can lift, carry, haul, and drag as much as a team of 28 men. Although the DMG says (by tradition) that manual laborers recieve 1 sp per day, and although 1 sp per day is historically realistic, for a variety of reasons which I've gone into at great lengths in other threads, we can assume that there is according to the rest of the D&D economic model (such as it is) a basic daily wage of 1 gp per person.  Just take my word for it.Now, the Stone Golem has a couple of other advantages as a manual laborer over a team of 28 men.  First, it doesn't tire (as far as we know), and will happily drag or haul an object all night long if we let it.  Even if we are very generous about it, men can at most perform vigorous manual labor 12 hours a day (and even that will kill them in a few months).  Beasts of burden are probably limited to 8 hours a day.  So, the Golem has at least twice the productivity per day as a team of men.  We can go further.  Historically, humans have rarely worked more than 300 days per year.  Even serfs in the middle ages rarely had more than 200 working days between Sundays, Feast Days of Saints, other Holy Days, and the dead of winter.  A golem will work every day.  So, we are talking about at least a 20% increase in productivity per year.  Thus, a golem is as productive as 67 men, and replaces about 20,100 g.p. worth of wages a year (we will ignore the cost of foremen for the work gang because we will assume that the Golem will need a handler or handlers).  A stone golem will pay for itself in three years, maybe a bit longer if you need to do a bit of maintaince with the occasional transmute mud to rock spell (relatively cheap if you have the magical-industrial base for making golems on a large scale) on it to hold back the wear and tear.  Even if we foolishly assume that workers work for 1 sp per day, it pays for itself in less than a lifetime and can be bequethed to your children.And that is only the begining of its utility.  A worker who is local need only be payed, but a worker that is travelling must also be supplied (even if this is part of his pay).  This means that whether your worker is a beast or a man, if you are travelling through any but the most hospitable regions you need to have extra conveyance to transport food, water, and other necessities of life.  Not so our Golem worker, and thus we have a logistics savings as well.And consider security.  Even a gang of 28 men will not deter banditry from men armed and acustumed to the life style.  But a Stone Golem completely deters ordinary banditry!  Barbarians not of your high culture don't have chance!  Forget about the need for gaurds and the extra logistics involved in this.  Nobody without another golem or other serious magical weapon of war can stand up to you from your golem howdaw.And then there is the long term economic impact of creating a capital good like a Stone Golem (asuming you don't just foolishly leave it as a guard in your tomb of horrors).  You can now put those 28 men to work doing something else constructive.  The ammount of work your society can perform increases and the cost of goods therefore decreases resulting ultimately in a substantial improvement in quality of life.  People that would have been doing necessary manual labor become simple craftsmen, simple craftsmen become engineers and artisans, and engineers and artisans become inventors and wizards.</blockquote>

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