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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1928638" data-attributes="member: 7240">Tempestarii were an important part of the early medieval economy. One of the expected duties of priests was to provide insurance against weather wizards who might sabhotage crops. Farmers also often paid-off local tempestarii in advance so that they would not call down hail and other disasters on fields. I would therefore suggest that most spending on magic should not be understood as improving crop conditions. Rather, most spending should be understood as defensive. Wizards casting Control Weather, druids casting Plant Growth should be doing what they are doing to fight or prevent crop sabhotage by malicious weather wizards.There is a really sharp difference between how money worked at the large scale between the late antique, early medieval and high medieval worlds. It is my view that while D&D is usually simulating an approximation of high medieval society, when it comes to money, it is the early medieval world that is being represented. This was the world inhabited by dragons with their hoards -- dragon hoards were not a strange thing because coin hoarding was often a response to turbulent economic and political conditions. So, unlike modern society where the largest concentrations of money are more likely to be recirculated; in early medieval Europe, if too much money got accumulated, it was more likely to be removed from the economy and placed in a hoard or, more likely, converted into ornamental objects. I think your above paragraph is a fair representation of state economics of late antiquity but does not really fit with the treatment of money in the eras of Alfred the Great and Charlemagne. This is a problem you address, of course, in the paragraph below:This is true but the way you write this paragraph, you seem to be assuming too strong a link between a cash economy and the majority of the population. Even in the high medieval period, a minority of transactions outside of cities involved cash. While urban economies could be quite adversely impacted by changes in money supply, rural economies were much less so. While those with feudal title to rural land were affected by money supply issues, their tenants generally were not. Also, too heavy a reliance on data from Byzantium and the brief episodes of economic coherence in early medieval Western Europe obscures the fact that feudalism was a pretty direct and effective response to the kinds of problems you were describing above. While your inflation model is not wholly inaccurate -- indeed there were pretty obvious episodes of inflation in early medieval Europe (though I would argue that they tended to cluster around the Byzantine Empire and other areas that escaped the development of vassalage), it simply cannot function in game terms. It collides directly with the magic item creation mechanic. I would therefore suggest that a more likely response to a large wealth surplus in a village is for prices to remain the same but for artisans to slow down production and stop accepting commissions for cash. Artisans might sell a lot of products in a few weeks and then, wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, bury their money in the back yard and take some time off or go to a city or simply continue accepting cash commissions but only in trade goods.</blockquote>

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