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Message: <blockquote data-quote="milest3hr4t" data-source="post: 5616256" data-attributes="member: 6679248">take the total value of all treasure that any one dragon has, and multiply that by the number of dragons... I'm pretty sure if all dragons pooled their monetary resources, they could easily buy up all the resources of all the kingdoms of any given race, and what they couldn't buy, if they all went at once, any kingdom would fall. Thousands of dragons siege a single kingdom? its gone over night. the only reason that doesn't happen is that dragons are solitary, and chromatic/metallic dragons are... well... you know.Depends on the government really. It depends on the political system they use, the monetary system they use, and the over all wealth of the people. in any totalitarian state there's no way a private citizen would own so much as a single bullet, and by extension, in a fantasy setting, it would likely follow that teaching of magic, or even the written word, would be forbidden, and young sorcerers would likely be either rounded up and executed, or 'sacrificed' to some god that may or may not be made up. In communism, no private citizen would own the means of production, that's equivalent to all anvils being inside the castle walls, and all the smiths are rounded up and brought in to serve. in an absolute monarchy, taxes would likely be so high as to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the peasantry, to prevent them from ever affording anything capable of usurping them, IE the blacksmith could never afford to make himself full plate, shield and weapon of choice, let alone arm a revolution. In a capitalist state, everyone would probably think themselves adventurers, and constantly try to take control of anything and everything. the result is so much in-fighting among individuals and groups, that the government would always be larger than any one group, and thats assuming that the capitalist state isn't also a monarchy, dictatorship, socialist, or anything else that could easily become a totalitarian military state. If you look at it, that is probably closest to many kingdoms. its a monarchy, but people are free to profit and expand as they choose, not as the monarch chooses. Adventurers are born, gather enough gold to arm themselves, and go do basically whatever they want. none of the individual interests however are ever powerful enough to truly overthrow the monarchy. Lets say a local thieve guild, or even gang, attempted to overthrow the monarchy? they'd all be slaughtered. a school of magic vs the state-sanctioned academy? the state sanctioned casters have the most resources, and access to long forgotten spells, artifacts, etc, AND the addition of the military, and lets not forget any assassins the monarch chose to hire, AND the resources to publicly make them pariahs. I suppose the thing to say here is that, government DOES exist in most fantasy settings, but it's largely ignored in favor of 'Hey let's go have an ADVENTURE you guys'. Not many people want to worry about the global politics when they want to go blow up the BBEG and take his stuff. I personally like having politics in setting at times, it meansthe BBEG can actually be an entire government to be overthrown. though it would never work if you have to hamfist role-play into the rollplay.On a bit of a side note, if a setting has multiple kingdoms, and therefor multiple governments, wouldn't the setting have multiple forms of currency, and therefor different exchange rates? wouldn't one region also have more or less of any given material and therefor change prices of any given goods by region? What happens in a setting if a government issues paper money, it gets widely accepted, but then the government is overthrown? was the paper-money backed in gold? silver? bags of grain? bottles of fine wine? plots of land? loans to be paid back at interest? a fraction of the royal crown? stock options? If a group of adventurers overthrow a government that used paper money, and then take all the wealth, would they be evil for withholding the wealth that rightfully belongs to its people who still only poses the paper money backed by that very wealth? what PC would just start handing out the gold for these now useless pieces of paper?Point is i'm amazed government was mentioned without its financing. that's kind of a big part of how any government actually runs. I'm pretty sure kings pay their courts and armies with gold collected by tax from the peasantry, tax which is implied to be for protection and rights which they may or may not receive, but if you had say, a democratically elected board of officials managing a large communist state, providing all the needs in exchange for servitude, there would not only be no need for tax, but no need for currency of any kind. fill out requisition form, collect goods, repeat. It's a fantasy setting so it could work, which would have very dramatic repercussions for any adventurers stumbling into their domain. btw I'm miles and this was my first post at enworld. I'm not sure how I should feel about that.<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" /></blockquote>

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