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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4023870" data-attributes="member: 30001">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.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.</blockquote>

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