D&D General Games Economies

[Stalker0]

You still need the raw materials, steel doesn't just grow on trees. So a big part of the expense is raw materials needed for the spell.

The game lists iron as a trade material costing 1 sp per lb. Now the question is do we need true steel, or would iron and charcoal suffice?

Lets assume a more stringest standard. Now how much would steel cost? I've seen numbers all over the place, from like 1 gp/lb to like 5 gp/lb. I'll go with this higher number. So 65 lbs of plate armor requires 325 gp of steel. A hefty sum, but 1500 - 325 = 1175 gp for 10 minutes work is still pretty darn solid.

 

[kermit4karate]

Yeah, based on this, I think you’re probably misunderstanding what I mean when I say “RPGs don’t have economies.” Yes, you absolutely can think about how a fictional economy might work and set prices and award treasure in a way that makes sense based on how you imagine that economy to work. It’s just that doing so isn’t simulating an economy. It’s creating an illusion of one.

OK...so, let's say we are just creating the illusion of an economy. And? You've piqued my interest. What's next?

 

[Horwath]

The game lists iron as a trade material costing 1 sp per lb. Now the question is do we need true steel, or would iron and charcoal suffice?

Lets assume a more stringest standard. Now how much would steel cost? I've seen numbers all over the place, from like 1 gp/lb to like 5 gp/lb. I'll go with this higher number. So 65 lbs of plate armor requires 325 gp of steel. A hefty sum, but 1500 - 325 = 1175 gp for 10 minutes work is still pretty darn solid.

we kind of had that problem in 3.5e and item creation feats.
Sure, there you did lose some XP for creating magic items, but you could have just go with local patrol and "farm" some orc and goblins to make those item.
And profit margin of 500GP per day was huge.

so we changed it to no XP cost(as we went with milestone leveling) and made raw material cost at 95% of the market price.

and for a rate of making 1000GP per day, that still leaves you with 50GP per day of profit. More than enough for a very luxurious lifestyle. Even if you work only 1 week per month.

if magic making would cost 95-99% of market price, and mundane making would be 20-30% of market price and much longer craft time, there could be a balance somewhere.

 

[AlViking]

With respect, this is the ENTIRE point of this thread, to make a more realistic economy for people that want that sort of thing. So I highlighted certain spells that would need special handling, like fabricate, to prevent economy breaks and for dms to decide how they want to handle it.

I recognize it is a difficult task, for some would consider it an impossible task, but it is what we are here to do. So saying "well its not made to be realistic", isn't very productive to this discussion.

You only highlighted the fabricate spell unless I missed it. If a single spell throws the entire economic system into turmoil (I don't think it does for the reasons I explained), then change the spell. But yes, I do think it's pretty much impossible to really know how the economy would work because it's going to vary widely based on innumerable other world building ideas. One of those ideas is how magic is going to impact the larger world. If humans can understand the basics of magic, if gods can bless certain people with extraordinary powers, why can't people that are not wizards or clerics use magic in other ways? A skilled craftsman couldn't cast a cantrip if their life depended on it but through centuries of trial and error people have learned to manipulate magical energies to create higher quality steel or weave fine materials more quickly.

The game lists iron as a trade material costing 1 sp per lb. Now the question is do we need true steel, or would iron and charcoal suffice?

Lets assume a more stringest standard. Now how much would steel cost? I've seen numbers all over the place, from like 1 gp/lb to like 5 gp/lb. I'll go with this higher number. So 65 lbs of plate armor requires 325 gp of steel. A hefty sum, but 1500 - 325 = 1175 gp for 10 minutes work is still pretty darn solid.

Iron is not steel. Unlike what you may see on film, you don't create a sword by pouring molten liquid into a cast and then sharpening. Without understanding the molecular structure of how the iron bonds with carbon (along with other trace minerals) and the details of how the molecules are organized you can't make high quality steel. If you are making a sword, a high quality one will be a combination of soft metal that can absorb impact and hard but brittle steel that can maintain an edge. For armor you need to understand exactly how thick the armor needs to be at certain points to provide protection while making the armor as light as possible, how to curve the armor to deflect blows as much as possible.

Making good weapons and armor is an art. It's not just slapping together some plates of iron. Every step along the forging process was done not because people understood what they were doing to manipulate the metal, they did it because centuries of trial and error taught them that it worked. Truly understanding how it all works requires a level of technology and understanding that a wizard simply isn't going to have.

 

[billd91]

Making good weapons and armor is an art. It's not just slapping together some plates of iron. Every step along the forging process was done not because people understood what they were doing to manipulate the metal, they did it because centuries of trial and error taught them that it worked. Truly understanding how it all works requires a level of technology and understanding that a wizard simply isn't going to have.

The issue here is that a wizard, with the appropriate skills or tool proficiencies, does have that understanding as much as any professional armorer would in D&D terms.

Fabricate may be a problematic spell when it comes to D&D simulating an economy if 7th level and higher wizards exist in big enough numbers. But that really just underscores that fabricate isn't there to simulate an economy or to enable a wizard PC to set up shop. It's there to enable a wizard to make things within the bounds of a D&D game's narrative. And like other rules that are for PCs only not NPCs (and vice versa), it's not intended to set the physics/economic model for the setting. It's an exception to all that mundane nonsense. It's there to enable the game to work in a particular way and people should stop trying to put the square peg into a round hole.

 

[AlViking]

The issue here is that a wizard, with the appropriate skills or tool proficiencies, does have that understanding as much as any professional armorer would in D&D terms.

The point I was replying to has to do with raw materials. Iron is an input into the raw material for steel, it is in not steel. Whether or not a wizard could sit down at a forge and make steel the old fashioned way does not mean they understand how they are transforming the iron into steel, they just know the proper steps to make it happen. Of course you can always make the spell powerful enough so that the magic knows how to bond the different elements together in the proper complex lattice structures without the caster actually understanding it; that's one of those innumerable assumptions about how the world works in your game.

Fabricate may be a problematic spell when it comes to D&D simulating an economy if 7th level and higher wizards exist in big enough numbers. But that really just underscores that fabricate isn't there to simulate an economy or to enable a wizard PC to set up shop. It's there to enable a wizard to make things within the bounds of a D&D game's narrative. And like other rules that are for PCs only not NPCs (and vice versa), it's not intended to set the physics/economic model for the setting. It's an exception to all that mundane nonsense. It's there to enable the game to work in a particular way and people should stop trying to put the square peg into a round hole.

This I agree with. If you started from the ground up worrying about things like the economy you would either not have the fabricate spell or you would put significant limitations on it. Since I want it to be useful in some cases I put significant limitations on it.

 

[practicalm]

Some one mentioned how did we know that creating economies is hard. One way is to notice that only two computer games have player run economies. Eve Online and Puzzle Pirates. And the Puzzle Pirate economy is collapsing because it's an old game that hasn't been updated.

If you want to see the one of my favorite economic diagrams this is it
Puzzle Pirate Economy Diagram