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Message: <blockquote data-quote="painandgreed" data-source="post: 1867897" data-attributes="member: 24969">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.</blockquote>

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