Gold or Silver Standard?

[mmadsen]

So even a first level character is a multimillionaire in his or her own culture?

In a sense, yes, but he doesn't have the purchasing power of a wealthy American; he simply has vastly more money than the peasant folk.

They have enough money even after buying equipment to live at a standard that the "common" person can only dream of. Then why adventure?

Presumably a young man with arms and armor did not buy them with his vast wealth; he's the second or third son of a landed noble, and he won't inherit any land. Unless he can carve out his own place in the world, he won't have anything to pass on to his sons.

 

[Belgarath]

In a sense, yes, but he doesn't have the purchasing power of a wealthy American; he simply has vastly more money than the peasant folk.
Presumably a young man with arms and armor did not buy them with his vast wealth; he's the second or third son of a landed noble, and he won't inherit any land. Unless he can carve out his own place in the world, he won't have anything to pass on to his sons.

All of that just reinforces my distaste for the sytem as it stands. A sword in this system is simply too valuable to hand away even if it is to your favorite student or son. Each character would have to come from some extremely wealthy begginnings to even start out at all. According to the books a suit of leather armor is 10gp. This is way out of the range of any normal person. A warrior should be able to get something even better than that. I mean come on, this is boiled leather we are talking about. Even considering the fact that it took a tanner some time to mold it into the proper shape and all, its still worth way more than what a commoner should be able to afford.

Look at it this way too. Say you see some dirty person who is wearing some even stained leather armor. Wouldnt it seem surprising that some guy who looks like a homless bum is wearing the equivelant of an armani suit? The mathematics of it all simply does not work out

 

[mmadsen]

A sword in this system is simply too valuable to hand away even if it is to your favorite student or son.

A sword is too valuable for a landed noble to give to his son?

Each character would have to come from some extremely wealthy begginnings to even start out at all.

Of course. This isn't the Land of Opportunity. Now, a peasant conscript could find himself surrounded by lots of lootable arms and armor, and he could rise through the ranks, so to speak, but it would be rare -- the kind of thing a PC might do.

According to the books a suit of leather armor is 10gp. This is way out of the range of any normal person.

I'd have to think about how much a cowhide would cost in a medieval economy, but I don't think it would be cheap. After all, look at how much a leather trench coat costs today, when we raise far more cattle far more cheaply than in the past.

Through most of history, the armor we now consider normal for that era was often the armor of the very richest members of that society. Only the very wealthiest Greeks were armored hoplites, for instance, and only the wealthiest of them had a bronze helmet, breastplate, and greaves. Even amongst the hoplites, most had quilted linen armor.

 

[Belgarath]

There is something that you seem to have forgotten though. This is not an entirely accurate historical world. There is one thing that they have that we didnt - working magic.

Take your example of not knowing as much about raising cattle. I think this isnt right. What if some retired ranger or druid decided he was going to take up farming. How much knowledge about it would he be able to aquire if he can actually speak with animals himself. He would even be able to teach some of it to someone who cant cast the spell.

This is a world that has not developed our level of technology. That does not mean to say it is ignorant or backwards. It simply has another resource that we didnt. A cleric of a nature god or druid would have a lot of information on how to raise crops from his diety.

Granted, if you look at the class breakdown in the DMG, spell casters are pretty rare. That does not mean that would they have learned cannot be passed down to be used by "mundane" people. Im not talking about everyone using spells, im talking about it being common knowledge that if you want a good crop you need to rotate your fields.

Even some of the magic user stuff would be viable. Think of the things a mage would have to know about physics, engineering and other "sciences" to be able to perform his magic or at least can learn if he set his mind to it.

 

[BradfordFerguson]

metal change = name change

changing the metal of the coinage simply amounts to a name change. 4E will hopefully be keeping it simple, so they should GET RID OF THE COPPER PIECE even. Making silver the "new gold" and copper the "new silver" just amounts to a name change. You could make the change to make it FEEL like more of a low fantasy setting than standard 4e will turn out to be.

the copper piece is a joke. anything that costs a copper piece needs to be torn out of the PHB. Screw water and food and ale! Who tracks when their PCs shower or poop? Why should you track when they drink and eat? It's just not interesting to me.

chalk? candles? If you have a player that wants to put it on their character sheet, then great, otherwise I don't want em taking up space in my PHB.

 

[gizmo33]

That is just the point of what i am making. It states that a common meal is 3 sp. That would mean a common meal according to their culture.

The 3.5 SRD is more specific IIRC: "Common meals might consist of bread, chicken stew, carrots, and watered-down ale or wine."

So perhaps:
> 1/2 lb loaf of bread = 2 cp
> chicken stew = ? a whole chicken is 2 cp. Why not take that as an upper limit.
> carrots = ? Say vegetables are probably twice grain by weight - due to labor and fragility. 1 cp for 1/2 pound of carrots (mmmmm good)
> ale = a mug of ale is 4 cp (this is very expensive compared to historic prices IMO)

Maybe 9 cp total? I don't know how you get to 3 sp in this case. I think that the DnD people didn't think much about reality of their prices, and I seriously doubt they took the few minutes to do the computation that I did above.

I think the above, in the case of ale at least, are tavern prices anyway. Eyeball a recipe for brewing ale, with it's proportions of barley, etc., or look at historical ale prices, by the gallon compared with laborer wages for the same time period and I think you'll find that the ale price in DnD is too high. Same thing goes for meat prices compared to the price of an ox.

Then again, think about what you pay for a hotdog at a stadium event, and I think the DnD prices make for good "let's fleece the out-of-towner" tavern price. However, I think DnD should list the real prices for the benefit of PCs who might own a farm and for non-upscale taverns.

Even if we discard the entire modern to pre-industrial problem, it still leaves that something that is common is still 3 times the rate that a laborer makes in a day. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever

I agree, commoners spent time at the tavern. But "laborers"? I think we need a more precise definition of what that means. There are all sorts of laborers, especially in a world without child labor laws. They're not all going to get paid the same. I prefer to think of 1 sp/day as the bottom scale of the labor market.

What does it take for a laborer to support a family as head of household? Given the amount of labor that it takes just to run a household (spinning cloth, baking the bread, etc.) I think it's reasonable to assume that one of the adults of the household spends at least 1/2 a day at home, more in in a household with infants obviously. It's not unreasonable to assume that a head-of-household laborer would have to earn subsistence wages.

I recently read a ball-park figure from a historian at 8 bushels grain/adult/year. That's just bread consumption assuming a bulk of, but not all, calories come from bread. I'd say another 50% of that value would/could go to clothes, other foodstuffs, etc. Say equivalent of 3 adults/year in a household. 8 bushels grain = about 400 lbs = 400 cp * 150% = 600 cp/year = 50 cp/month per adult. x3 adults = 150 cp/month = about 5 cp/day.

The 1 sp only comes your way on days that you work, so you're not getting 365 sp/year. Also, there are tithes, taxes, fines, etc. And I'm not convinced that 150% grain price is your total living expense.

Basically I think 1 sp/day is ok in an order-of-magnitude way. 2 sp/day wouldn't be bad either. A sword at 15 gp, and many other prices in the 3.5 SRD though, IMO don't stand up to this order of magnitude thought experiment.