Food and lodging

[DirtySkeptic]

Hey, I know this is a pretty stupid and silly question, but I was wondering how important keeping track of costs for things like Food and lodging at inns. for example, suppose after a current adventure ends, I want the next adventure to happen two weeks later. in that spare time, I perhaps don't really want to waste time role playing out ordering baked mead and stew off a menu at an inn, or going into the detail of what kind or room they want. and having to do that endlessly. It just seems to take focus of the sweeping victory of defeating the goblin lord of the dungeon of darkness by saying "by the way, you owe 200 gold worth of lodging fees to the Drunk Kobold Inn.
I have two alternatives to this. the first would be to just ignore it. I worry that would somehow unbalance the budget of the PCs or the game itself. My second thought would be to average out how much per week an average room and food would cost, then subtract it from found treasure. Unfortunately, costs can fluctuate based on economics. I know I'm fretting over something silly and minimal, but what should I do? How much detail of boring day to day activities does the game expect me to keep track of and role play?

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

Most people just ignore this altogether. The amounts of money are low relative to what adventurers get, so it just doesn't make much of a difference. (As a player, I sometimes just round down treasure received as a way of simulating this.)

If you play a really low cash game, or if you charge really high rates for food and lodgings, then it might have a small effect on character wealth. But even then, it doesn't make much of a difference.

If you really care about consistency, hitting them with regular upkeep costs of the "you've spent 10 gp for the last two weeks of food and lodging" will take care of the consistency while not adding much time. It also has the advantage of allowing players to establish character in trivial ways ("Can my character just stay in the stables? That's the kind of cheap-skate he is." "That's fine for you, but my character will pay extra for a private room and the finest foods.") And it might give the PCs incentives to acquire homes of their own. But the advantages are small, and tracking these sorts of things is boring to many players and GMs. So unless you feel a particularly strong desire to deal with it, I just wouldn't bother.

 

[Morrus]

I don't. I just handwave it. It's not an interesting part of the game to me - I'd rathe rget on with the heroic, fun stuff!

Once you're past, like, 1st level, the cost is so negligible compared to PC wealth anyway, that it almost seems pedantic to mention it.

Occasionally, I'll say "hand over 5 GP apiece for food etc. in the last six months". Which, when you consider that 5GP is a year's wages for many NPCs, is still expensive

 

[Treebore]

Yeah, it depends on the amount of wealth the party has. While they are below a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand gold, food and housing can have a significant effect. I don't worry about it again unless they become landed. Maintenance and defense costs are very significant then. Like a current players Baronial lands cost him a million gold in costs per year. So between that and his 30% "tax" it knocks his lands profits to below 11 million gold per year.

(I used MAgical Medievel Societies: Western Europe to work out his 100 square mile lands profits and costs, blew my mind to see what a 3E D&D economy is like.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

Probably best to ignore it, as you say. The system is fairly resilient anyway, PCs can easily have +/-20% of the wealth-by-level guidelines and it won't have a noticeable effect. Determined min/maxing is much more significant.

 

[Nikroecyst]

My players like to feal that they are getting things cheap so I open this up for them and its gone pretty well so far. I think they like the aspect of getting a bargain on an expensive room and getting the really fine wine and crazy expensive lamb chops instead of cheese and bread. They like buying and trading, mostly finding good deals on expensive stuff.

I think though that this is unique to this group and before I gamed this group I either waved it off or just used 5gp a day for food and lodging unless they were doing something more than that. Either this or I waved it off like everyone else.

I think it really depends on how indepth your pcs wanna get and how indepth you wanna get.

 

[Aholibamah]

It tends to count more at low levels, since the pcs don't have that much money then. What I tend to do is ask the pcs how much they generally spend on food, clothing, lodgings and just count that off--unless the inn in question is going to be a significant part of their stay in an area.

(ie--the Temple of Elemental Evil kind of thing where the pcs might very well be staying at the inn for weeks--then you might also just have them settle now and then)

As for food--unless the food is important to emphasize local colour and things like that, don't worry about it. I find that now and then describing the poor or excellent quality of food they might be able to get draws them in and makes it more enjoyable.

 

[Melhaic]

I guess I'm a bastard... I like how Conan does it: unless you have very specific plans for your loot, half of it goes down the drain in a month. This represents living it up when not facing daily death. My characters are relatively poor as well (>50% wealth per level), adn I use silver standard currency. Uber rich PCs (at least a low to mid levels) don't appeal to me, and the Conan rule keeps things in check, while still allowing me to give out decent treasure to get the players pumped. YMMV

 

[Graybeard]

I usually leave it up to my players. Sometimes they want to play it out and order expensive food and stay at the best Inns and other times they don't care. If they want to play it out, then I will tell them the price of food and rooms. If not, then I just handwave it and ignore any costs.

 

[jdrakeh]

Honestly, it depends on the game (to be clear, I mean the game being played, not the system being used to play it). In most D&D campaigns, that kind of bean counting isn't important because D&D isn't about verisimilitude. That said, if I wanted to rebuild D&D to be about verisimilitude (and I have made the mistake of doing that before), then stuff like daily expenses becomes pretty important.