Hazards of Hookers and Problems with Prostitutes

[Templetroll]

Hmm, the Orc and Pie adventure you brought a fine pastry for the players. If you ever run Eberron at a GameDay I'm looking forward to what you bring for that adventure!

 

[Riggs]

If caught off guard and pressed for a description, try, "If you didn't know better you'd be absolutely certain that she was the Unholy Love Child of Lucy Liu and Monica Bellucci."

Get's em' every time, right Riggs?

You got that right!

Will save?!? What's that?

 

[Shadowdancer]

And there we lost a good 45 minutes of the session to crude humor and all the baffling implications of shape-changing hookers.

45 minutes? Is that all? We've spent entire sessions in a brothel before.

 

[Shemeska]

Changeling hookers? Heck, creatures with shapechange at will... and the portions of a campaign that cannot show up in a storyhour...

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Eberron . . . After Dark.

 

[reanjr]

Among the other crude humor bandied about the table, the players all looked down at the amount of gold written on their character sheets and gawked in amazement. "My God! We could spend the rest of our lives here!"

Goods and Gear (KenzerCo) has some cost guidelines for this that I find to work pretty well. Assuming the best in the house expert 5 prostitute with a Charisma of 18 and assuming Changelings go for about twice what elves do (seems reasonable), you'd be looking at 7,200 gp per night. Although I'm not too clear on whether you add the Charisma bonus before or after the experience, age, and race multipliers, so it might only be 2,420 gp per night.

If you want quality, you could burn through cash pretty quickly.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

If you want quality, you could burn through cash pretty quickly.

You know, those numbers don't make a lick of sense to me-- one night with a prostitute should not cost nearly as much as a suit of magical plate mail. If you want to put it in mundane terms... one night with a prostitute, even an experienced (and exotic) one, should not cost more than an entire year's wages for a middle-class person.

I'd really like to see a solid, workable attempt to fix D&D economics.

 

[reanjr]

You know, those numbers don't make a lick of sense to me-- one night with a prostitute should not cost nearly as much as a suit of magical plate mail. If you want to put it in mundane terms... one night with a prostitute, even an experienced (and exotic) one, should not cost more than an entire year's wages for a middle-class person.

I'd really like to see a solid, workable attempt to fix D&D economics.

Well, look at it this way. You can (loosely) equate a gp to a dollar (or whatever local currency you use, unless you're Romanian). Can you find prostitutes in the real world for $7,000 a night? Absolutely.

(oh, and body armor in the real world tops out at about $2,000 from what I know, so prostitutes are worth more than armor)

Just for comparison, the lowest grade prostitute in Goods and Gear goes for less than a gp (though then you are looking at an aging half-orc with no applicable sexual skills). Average is about 10 gp.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Problem is, you can't loosely equate a gold piece with a dollar. That's insane.

Weren't the last real gold coins in the US $20 pieces?

In any case, you can buy a single goat for a single gold piece. Quick search online, and the cheapest goats I can find were wethers-- castrated billy goats-- for $40. Breeding goats ranged from $350 to $500.

I can easily imagine a prostitute who can charge $7000 a night. I have a much harder time picturing $280000 per night, and I simply cannot imagine $3.5 million per.

50 gold pieces is a pound of gold, which would be around $6848. That puts the gold piece at around $136.96.

Even by the weird standards of D&D economics, those numbers are nonsensical.

edit: I should hope that an aging half-orc with no applicable skills would cost less than $100/night. Still, the average cost shouldn't be in the thousands of dollars.

 

[Belen]

Problem is, you can't loosely equate a gold piece with a dollar. That's insane.

Weren't the last real gold coins in the US $20 pieces?

In any case, you can buy a single goat for a single gold piece. Quick search online, and the cheapest goats I can find were wethers-- castrated billy goats-- for $40. Breeding goats ranged from $350 to $500.

I can easily imagine a prostitute who can charge $7000 a night. I have a much harder time picturing $280000 per night, and I simply cannot imagine $3.5 million per.

50 gold pieces is a pound of gold, which would be around $6848. That puts the gold piece at around $136.96.

Even by the weird standards of D&D economics, those numbers are nonsensical.

edit: I should hope that an aging half-orc with no applicable skills would cost less than $100/night. Still, the average cost shouldn't be in the thousands of dollars.

You're equating the value of gold in modern economics with the value in a world where gold pieces is a prime currency. Gold is far more rare today that it was 100 or 200 years ago. People have far less gold/ silver than our ancestors.

I equate a gold piece in D&D to around US $20.00. One piece will not even buy a PHB.