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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4287104" data-attributes="member: 30001">"Commoners" don't need to be unarmed.  In fact, the "commoners" that I know IRL are certainly armed.  I guess it depends on your campaign world.  Commoners have plenty of reason to be involved in violence - fights between each other, protecting themselves from bandits (or doing a little light banditry themselves, etc.)  What commoners are probably missing is some organization, leadership, and motivation - but those are present at times as well (during revolution, for example). The historical feudal system dispersed military power so that the "king's patrol" was not the first and last line in local defense.  Again, it depends on how you want to organize your campaign world, but there are other options that I would think a realm would utilize if it were located in a violent borderland region.  People aren't going to sit around and wait to get killed by orcs that they know live nearby.  In fact, you could steal a page from history and design your region so that the richest commoners are *required* to own arms and armor and turn out for the common defense.In DnD, the value of gold to silver is 10:1.  The value of silver is that a silver piece is worth 1 day of labor from a "common laborer".  The value of a pound of grain is 1 cp.  If you really wanted to dig into real world prices, I'd look at historical values with the above figures in mind.I think it's possible that they do have more than 5 gp - depends on your campaign world.  A single cow is worth 10 gp.  For the sake of game balance though, I'd stick with the "treasure=EL" model, and make all other wealth in the form of bulky, lower-valued items.  I was just reading a historian who was saying that the picture of how much cash and medieval peasant had on hand is somewhat confused - court records and such seem to show peasants with an ability to generate surprising sums of cash in short periods of time.  In any case, rather than get into the complexities of something historical, I think a balance between what the peasants have, and the goblins have (who got what they have possibly by stealing it from those same peasants) is achieved with the EL=treasure system.A "patrol" dispatched by some centralized authority is not nearly the only source of protection that regions possibly have.  There could be cloisters of warrior monks, groves of druids, citizen militias, veteran yeoman fighters, ranger companies, etc.  People in violent areas would arm themselves as much as possible, just like in lawless real world areas.  Anyone who wants to keep peasants unarmed is going to have to be armed and present themselves in order to enforce that.But why are the peasants dirt poor?  If some overlord is taking all the surplus wealth from those people then it's going to be in his interest to make sure that they aren't all killed.  In a violent borderland region, it's going to be in everyone's interest to not get killed, and someone will have the resources to mount an effective defense - something certainly commensurate with whatever the orcs have managed to do.  I think that peasants have the resources to dig a ditch and build a pallisade around their village unless someone tells them not to.</blockquote>

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