Fantasy World Economics

[Rel]

You average human cleric can use his powers all he wants for the benefit of society because his gods want humans to prosper. Druids are interested in nature and the balance and wouldn’t want to use their power to give humans power over nature.

I won't belabor the point because I'm not interested in sidetracking your analysis (which I'm still enjoying a great deal). But I do think that it is not necessarily against the Druid's interests to use his powers to make local crops flourish.

As you aptly point out, crops are far from a sure thing. Over time if a certain percentage of them fail on average each year then the people are going to plant more than they would need to account for these losses. Since the agricultural techniques we're assuming don't allow them to get more production per acre then the only way to accomplish this is by planting additional acres. And the only way to get additional acres is to clear more wilderness.

By using their powers over plants to assure a good crop for the villagers, the Druids can prevent these people from clear cutting more of the forest, draining wetlands or other natural areas in order to provide more cropland. They can also use the influence they garner in this process to wangle deals with the local overlord to set aside areas as sacrosanct from human development. Everybody wins!

I'll shut up now. Carry on.

 

[velm]

Granted, I will admit I only skimmed through portions of some of the posts, but I imagine that thieves or rogues whatever they are called now, could be run like a mafia family. Some of those mafia families are pretty wealthy, maybe not necessarily in actual wealth at hand but at potential. Think of all the different areas that they can run; gambling casinos (illegal, of course, where the house gets most of the profits), 'insurance' (pay us, or accidents will happen), the obvious one of theft of items (some mundane and average to the exotic), prostitution rings, people paying dues to their supervisors, loan sharking (I will loan you this 100 gold for 59% rate weekly if it is not paid off), and so on.
If I had my choice to compare a noble family to a guild, the guild would win, because the noble family might be paying the guild for a variety of reasons. Either to make things run smoother, maybe get things off the docks faster, or past the guards before someone elses, or they might actually be paying them 'insurance' to make sure nothing happens to any of the warehouses. Plus the guild, can see to it that those they do not like 'sleep with the fishes'. Sure that noble family will have money, but all it takes is a simple word from the head of the guild to either have the head of the family have an accident with a dagger while he sleeps or a little poison in his mead, or their business goes down the drain and the coffers run out of money.
I think it is hard to really say how rogues do business, from the beggers who milk money off people to the rogues who pick the pockets of the commoners at the market to the ones who break into treasuries to get that set of 10,000 gp gems.
It would be hard to put a value on them, plus they can have the possibility to advance pretty quick with all the 'trouble' they can get into. Think about the CR of traps that can be laid out and overcome, and other things.

 

[painandgreed]

By using their powers over plants to assure a good crop for the villagers, the Druids can prevent these people from clear cutting more of the forest, draining wetlands or other natural areas in order to provide more cropland.

Point taken and conceded, but the reasons that a druid might or might not help villages is all just hand waving to justify, after the fact, the number of druids that a DM decides should be in his or her campaign.

If I had my choice to compare a noble family to a guild, the guild would win, because the noble family might be paying the guild for a variety of reasons.

At this point we’re into the realm of campaign design by the DM. There are many reasons that either could be the more feared. The Guild has the dark aspects of what theft or death could occur to one that opposes them. However, a noble could just march in, declare all the thieves stuff his and kill the entire family on whim and all be legal because he’s a noble and easy because he controls a large number of fighters and clerics in a stand up fight. Nobles are not without their power which they guard jealously. Like I said, with some much power at stake, it might be that some nobles have placed themselves in such positions of power as well as being nobles. One situation is that you have an experienced adventuring party. The fighter has become a noble. The cleric heads his church. The thief runs the Guild. The wizard has power in his own right or controls the wizard’s guild. You essentially have a distributed adventurer party that controls a good deal of the kingdom and can use each other’s power and influence to aid the others. My personal opinion on the matter is that this is heroic fantasy and that such relationships will all be decided by the special NPCs that the DM creates and populates his world with and that nothing can really be decided without consideration of such.

I think it is hard to really say how rogues do business, from the beggers who milk money off people to the rogues who pick the pockets of the commoners at the market to the ones who break into treasuries to get that set of 10,000 gp gems.

We figured earlier the average rate of accent of a thief and the average wealth one would make defeating the required CRs to do so. They’re going up in levels, so they’re defeating CRs which provide and average amount of money based upon the difficulty of the CR. I consider this wealth to be the income of the various insurance, thefts, and cons that would be going on.

Building that house or castle

Let’s take the example we had earlier for building a house an figuring out what it would take. First, the players need the raw materials which might not be in good supply, and then they’ll have to have people build the house. The amount of raw materials needed will be 1/3 the cost of the house which is 1,666.67 GP (or 1,666 GP, 6 SP, and 7 CP). Woodcutters or some other Profession goes out to collect the natural resources and turn them into raw materials. According to the PH, they collect half their profesion check a week in GP value. For the average person with three ranks taking 10, that would be 6.5 GP of raw material made a week. That means a little over 256 man-weeks gathering the raw materials. Once collected, then Craftsmen, probably carpenters, will turn the raw material into a house. They can build it at the DC of the task times their roll in SP per week. Assuming average 3 ranked workers and a DC of 10, this means 13 GP of house built a week per person. That’s over 384 man-weeks of work to build the house. Let’s say they hire 20 men to wood cut and 10 other men to build the house. The 20 men will bring in 130 GP of raw material a week, getting done in 13 weeks, about three months. The ten men can at the same time take 10 and turn the weekly material into a house as it is brought in taking 14 weeks total as the woodcutters need a week’s head start. We can see why production is cut, the adventurers have taken up 30 out of maybe 200 men in the hamlet to build their house. Each of the woodsmen have made 84.5 GP while the craftsmen have made 333.33 GP profit building the house. If the crafts man had tilled his farm, it would have been 260 GP for the years work, so it’s not any surprise they dropped what they’re doing to build the house. Meanwhile they’re not producing food and will have to buy it from the other farmers who will charge higher prices. In a small hamlet, it might even cause a good deal of resentment if some got the job to build the house while others didn’t. Such a project in such a small local would probably have to be a group effort for the entire population in part to prevent resentment with certain people designated to build the house and others watching over their fields all for an equal share.

A castle would cost 500,000 GP and take 100 times the amount of work to complete if the DC is the same. Theoretically 2000 professionals and 1000 craftsmen could create a castle in the same 3 months. Of course, building a castle would take Craft (stone masonry) instead of Craft (carpentry) and those people might be in harder supply. In a country of 200,000, I doubt if one in 40 people are stonemasons. I further doubt that 1 in 20 are stone cutters which is a trained only skill (funny how the trained only skill end up making less than the craft that everybody could perform). It’s not really possible to have a castle built in 3 months. There are other complications such as building a castle is probably a DC 15 or so requiring skilled craftsmen to do it correctly without risking increased costs.

Let’s do some hand waving and make some assumptions. People can only work on the castle 6 months (26 weeks) out of the year due to winter, weather, holidays, and such. 10% of the work is DC 15 while the rest is DC 10. There are 10 stonemasons with good enough Int and ranks to pull off the DC 15 while you can find another 90 for the rest of the work. We’ll say it’s a mountain country with lots of quarries and there is not any trouble getting the rock or 200 stonecutters. The stonecutters can produce 1300 GP worth of stone each week for those 26 weeks. Our craftsmen can easily handle that amount of raw material each week. We’re still looking at five years to produce this castle. This doesn’t seem too outside reality as average castles took 5-7 years to complete, although the number of men was much more than 300. Still, one castle is not always like another. Such expenses also would assume that raw materials are local. If they had to be transported from farther than the local community, then there is even more of a cost and time to building the castle.

At 100,000 GP entering the economy a year, there is no inflation in the kingdom even if paid for by treasure coming outside the kingdom. Since we’re taking up all the stonemasons and stone cutters, it is probably putting some stress on the economy and the money could be treated like treasure for the kingdom’s economy. If they seek to build two in the same amount of time or the one castle in half the time, then we’ve got around 1.5% inflation for the first year and again the next year as the 1.5% drop in production kicks in.

 

[painandgreed]

I’ve been thinking about Profesions and Crafts. Professions are trained and make half their skill check in GP per week. For a standard 4 rank 1st level character with no bonus, that woul be 7GP per week. Crafts are untrained make things and manufacture their skill check times the DC of what they are making in SP per week. For the same person, that’s 1.4 times DC in GP per week. Let’s assume a 10 DC and we end up making 14 GP per week. Even if we subtract the 1/3 of the cost from material resources, we end up 9.33 GP per week. If we go for slightly higher items that we can still make skill check by taking 10, we end up with even higher amounts of money. To make as little money as a trained professional per week, we’d have to make very simple items like wooden spoons. Even and untrained craftsman working on fairly simple items, DC 10, can make more money than a trained professional per week. Even if we take out the material cost of 1/3rd cost, this untrained craftsman is still making only a few silvers less than the trained professional. Somehow this doesn’t seem right. How can we justify or correct this?

One excuse is that there simply isn’t enough work for everybody to be craftmen. Craftsmen as supposed to be able to make half their check in GP per week such as Professionals. Saying they simply don’t have the orders for the entire 9.33 GP potential per week but only make 7 GP. In this case we have a potential higher supply than we have demand and therefore the value of product and the value of work used to create that product are different. This would cause prices to go down as everybody tries to sell their extra 2.33 GP of work per week for less than its worth to win more work over the others. Even untrained craftsmen would be trying to enter the workfroce. Even selling at 7 SP above cost would net as much as a life of hard untrained labor and a high Int untrained laborer could do as well as an average trained craftsman at making things such as bows and simple weapons and one assumes other simple tools. Labor would be cheap and drive down the prices of most of the items in the PH to a few SP above 1/3 their listed cost. Of course, as people flee untrained manual labor for untrained craft labor, it is harder to come by manual labor and the wage for such would rise. Once again, we’re getting into too a complicated scheme as we want to play Dungeons & Dragons, not Warehouses & Wages, so lack of work is not a good solution.

A possible solution is that social convention prevents people from changing professions or crafts. This assumes that the vast majority of the common populace are slaves, serfs, or part of a caste system dictated by law or custom so that they are prevented from choosing other livelihoods than the one they are born with. Thus, an NPC may be able to make more money in an easier life as a carpenter than as a farmer, but is prevented from becoming a carpenter due to law or social custom because his father was a farmer. His father’s father was a farmer, and so forth till forgotten history. Assuming that the lord, cleric, mayor, village elder, or other authority figure could allow for switches in livelihood to pick up for shortages or excesses in various forms of labor, this could work with the current rules. However, it becomes a major influence to the flavor of the game. Most NPCs are not free to do as they wish and for the PCs to hire people to build their house in the earlier example they are limited to those few people who are allowed to perform such work unless they deal with the local authorities to allow otherwise. So our PCs must go ask the lord for permission to aquire hirelings as they are not allowed to leave their farms or do other work. It has a realistic feel to it, but I don’t think many DMs actually work their worlds in such a way.

Another solution would be to change the way that craftsmen produce goods and make their money. If we say that craftsmen manufacture an amount of product equal to the number the make their skill check by +1 times the DC, we end up with different numbers. Thus, a trained craftsman working on a DC 10 object takes 10 and gets a 14. They make 5 over failure. Multiplied times a DC of 10, then we end up with 5 GP of work done per week. If they have untrained assistants and masterwork tools, it looks more like 9 GP per week mines the 3 in material cost for a total of 6 GP per week, instead of our expected 7. Untrained craftsmen performing the same work would end up making 1 GP worth of product minus 1/3rd for .66 GP which is just under the .7 GP they’d make working for 1 SP per day under a trained craftsman. This method seems to work so well that I keep wondering if it is what they intended. I can’t find an example and after checking the wording, I feel that they do actually mean the full check result of the d20 plus modifiers times the DC instead of the amount the check is made by times the DC.

Professions offer their own set of problems, namely that all professions make the same amount of money. Then why doesn’t everybody flood from the hard manual labor professions to the easier ones? Thus creating another case of unbalanced supply and demand causing wages to fluctuate. It’s pretty obvious that different professions don’t produce the same wages, unless once again, everyone is locked into their profession due to law or custom. Our other solution is to make up a list of professions and their actual incomes. One issue that we must keep track of is that if we change the income is the amount of product made. If we’re using professions to gather raw material for the craftsmen, then if we make woodcutting worth less than standard, then we have to hire more woodcutters than we did previously. The amount of resources needs to equal the pay for the profession (vice versus actually) or we end up with more unbalanced supply and demand. Even then, what’s to prevent poorer professions from having their children learning richer ones as they all take the same amount of ranks? Training is one thing. Most poor professions can’t afford training of their children in anything but what they can do themselves. Perhaps some do save up the money and buy better training for a better life for their children. There’s also apprentice ships. The child joins a profession as untrained labor in return for training instead of the usual 1 SP/day pay for a set amount of time.

Another issue that comes up with professions is differences in working conditions. As we saw with our farmer earlier, the amount of money that a farmer makes is dependant on the amount of land he tills. Typically, the land he tills is not as much as he could possibly till as farmable land is somewhat scarce. Our farmer needs to till 28 acres to come up with the 7 GP per week income which would be fairly rich and near the max amount of land a single person could till a year. Even then, we see that 3 GP/week go to the lord along with other costs result in much less actual pay. A further example would be miners working mines of various metals. Unless we assume that different metals are proportionally hard to mine, it seems to reason that a gold miner should make more than a copper miner. Either they all produce their 7 GP of metal every week, a few grams of gold versus over a pound of copper, or the gold miner makes more money (literally in this case) per week than the copper miner. If they produce the same amount of value every week, then the number of mines of each metal type need to be equal. If they produce less material out of one mine than the other and there are less mines than the others, more supply demand issues. This doesn’t begin to deal with that some mines are harder to work than others. Panning for large chunks of alluvial gold is easier and cheaper than digging deep into the earth for gold bearing ore that needs to be refined. A similar set of conditions could be demonstrated for stonecutters working on sandstone, granite, or fine marble.

 

[Argus Decimus Mokira]

This is one of the more amazing threads I have read here. That is all.

-Matt

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

derned double post

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Did you account for the fact that craftwork involves a substantial initial investment of capital for tools, continual supply costs, and some nasty variances in the market?

I'm not saying these are insurmountable difficulties by any means just that they do give profession some comparative advantages. Particularly in cultures where certain kinds of property ownership will likely be difficult to attain or guarantee. You're likely to see lots of women and second sons who emphasize profession, for instance.

Also, likely, there will be heavy controls and competition in crafting, particularly in a medieval setting.

I mean sure, you can make spoons but technically that just nets you the item not the value.

Profession, on the other hand, nets you the value straight off.

Professionals, as it were, are also likely to be more mobile and probably have to work fewer hours in the course of their day. Though they are bound for a week where a crafter measures labor in terms of days.

Though that last benefit is going to depend on a number of factors.

The big question for me is how will crafting small items frequently match up to crafting higher DC items that take more time?

What's the optimum product to make, per the PHB, and what would be the optimum pattern of manufacture for a small shop worker?

Will certain items be very likely to be produced versus others? And if so should that effect the market value and availability of the product per the PHB?

 

[Buttercup]

I just wanted to say that I've been following this thread closely, and yoinking all the interesting bits--which is darn near all of it!

 

[ajanders]

Bump

This might be a good thread for the amazing keepers of the archive thread to archive.

 

[Mynex]

I’ve been thinking about Profesions and Crafts.

>snip lots of words<

Another solution would be to change the way that craftsmen produce goods and make their money.

>snip lots of words<

There's another factor in here you're missing. Some trades (whether craft or profession) require advanced learning. Hence the term 'learned trades'. any bloody fool like me can take a hammer and chisel and try to make a rectangular block of stone to set against another stone and slap some mud and straw in the cracks. However, without the advanced training in math, to make precise measurements (or at least better than eyeball measurements), I'm going to have a lot of 'almost the same size, but not quite' blocks, and that leads to castles in ruin, easier to seige/break into, and other manner of problems in that castle.

Now I take that learned professional, mark lines for the untrained to hammer on, I do the finishing work and my blocks are more or less the same size, fit closer together, and take less 'other material' to seal up tight as a drum. This also eases the workload of those that have to seal it, saves money on the raw materials made, and has a more durable 'finish' to it.

This other bit, this 'discrepancy' in wages could reflect a simple "school loan" that is being paid back for the rest of their lives (For simplicities sake I suggest this), but in return they get '1st dibs' on new work.

Now - the hard aspect of this; Changing the wages. I came to the same conclusion you did about the wages (error in calculation), but I took it a step further, as you alluded to, and changed the amount a given 'learned trade' makes per week and how much in resources the can handle.

For me, this makes things more realistic, still makes it easy to do the math (just more mulitplying. ), and I have something I'm happy with to use at my game table and it makes my players happy (yea, they mutter, but they enjoy it. ).

To take it even a step further, I've broken it into 'ranks' as we have in the real world. Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Grand Master. Different name ranks for different skill ranks. Since we're talking commoners (or experts here), I've kept it simple: 0-4 Apprentice, 5-9 Journeyman, 10-19 Master, 20+ Grandmaster.

Each name rank gets bonuses to how much they can earn per week as well as how much they can produce and raw materials they use. Some government types also have 'building regulations' that only Masters and Grandmaster can 'lead a construction crew', others that only a Master or Grandmaster may bid upon a project, etc... It all comes down to where in the world you are and what type of government is in charge.

As a general rule Grandmasters have anywhere from 5-10 Masters, 10-100 Journeyman, and 10-1000 apprentices training 'under them' at any given time - usually this is a school where the Grandmasters lessons are handed down to throught the ranks with him only 'spot checking' his students. However this can easily be converted to being 'on the job' of constructing a castle.

It's also possible that the Grandmaster simply takes orders in and assigns Masters, Journeymen, or Apprentice's to go do a project, depending on the influence, flattery, bribes, or whatever he gets to take a project.

okay.. enough of that.

While this entire thread is an excersize in anal attentive attention to detail, I love it.

I will say that most of what you've summed up in here I've done as well, or really, really close... and it's going into a series of supplements we're working on (yes, they're aimed at the anal retentive GM. ) with a lot of things you haven't hit on yet that affects a kingdoms economy (but most likely will LOL).

While things _could_ get bogged down in all the math involved, some players like that attention to detail and other times it's a simple question posed by a player to the GM that the GM has to 'spot guess'... So these types of musings are useful, informative, and fun!

Anyways, I was trying really hard to resist piping in here, but finally, I just couldn't resist anymore.

Many good thoughts, keep at it!