D&D 5E How advanced/civilized are your cities?

[Zardnaar]

A major city like Waterdeep features literally dozens of different faiths, and based on the spell casting costs (and the costs for basic items like food, weapons, trade goods etc) most low level healing spells (while expensive) would be within reach of the average middle class citizen.

A 'comfortable' Middle class lifestyle costs 2gp per day in basic living expenses (before you account for luxuries and goods), and a skilled hireling (anyone with a skill or tool) earns a minimum of 2gp per day.

From that we can extrapolate a salary of around 100gp per month (around 3 GP per day) for a middle class person.

In Tyranny of Dragons, the following spellcasting services are available:

• Cure wounds (1st level) 10 gp
• Identify 20 gp
• Lesser restoration 40 gp
• Prayer of healing (2nd level) 40 gp
• Remove curse 90 gp
• Speak with dead 90 gp
• Divination 210 gp
• Greater restoration 450 gp
• Raise dead 1,250 gp

Effectively spellcasting seems to cost roughly ([level x level] x 10) + costly material components.

Raise dead is effectively a years salary, and you can speak with a dead relative or the victim of a crime for one for a months salary. Gaining information on a rival business or loved one, or the person who murdered your Aunt Mildred via Divination costs 2 months salary.

For the truly wealthy (or those in the good graces of a particular faith) you can have a limb regenerated, be cured of cancer or other diseases, be brought back from the dead months after dying, be cured of blindness or deafness etc.

All far more advanced than our current medical technology allows, and beyond even Star Trek levels of medical technology.

That excludes taxes.

D&D economymaked little sense but taxes on the peasants historically could be quite high.

The middle class is also very very small.

If that 3gp or whatever they could be taxed at 50-95%

Highest race rated ever afaik in real terms were 95% on serfs.

Waterfront is kind of a pistache of a Northern European trade port perhaps Lubeck or Hamburg.

There's not going to be enough clerics to combat a plague for example. Obviously if you have money you might have a reasonable expectation of access to clerical healing.

Obviously some faiths would heal their own for free or at cost.

 

[cbwjm]

I pretty much figure that anyone earning that 2gp a day from being a skilled hireling is more or less using all of it to maintain the comfortable lifestyle.

 

[jasper]

I checked everyone that my home town has.

 

[jgsugden]

The 15 biggest cities in my campaign world all have over a million intelligent beings living within them, or in their immediate vicinity. They benefit from the work of engineers, magi, and priests in creating a place far more advanced than 1500 London.

My biggest cities actually have several million beings living in them, but they are all extraplanar (my Sigil, City of Iron, City of Brass and City of Gold). All four of them have essentially 1900 levels of technology running through them, from once source or another.

 

[Magister Ludorum]

We don't do historical simulation chronicles, so the high magic areas tend to also have a level of advanced services. My own homebrew setting was Eberron-adjacent back in the 1980s.

 

[Zardnaar]

I don't think I have any million+ cities but I'm running colonial Americas sorta.

Even back in the old world I can't think of any cities much beyond 60k.

I don't do realistic but somewhst plausible.

There were only a relative few cities hitting 350k let alone a million pre industrialization.

Imperial Rome, China and maybe Baghdad.

Constantinople had maybe 500k.

So yeah huge city is about 250k, 1 million almost unheard of.

 

[aco175]

My major cities may have all of these. Maybe I misread the OP, but most of the cities have most of these. Slavery is the least used, but even in Waterdeep there is underground slavery to be found. I even have some of these in larger towns to give each some flavor.

 

[J-H]

Churches/Temples?

I may go back to this thread when I get around to designing the theocratic cities my Aztec Aarcokra are using.

 

[Nebulous]

I'm using the Kobold Press gazetteer for Zobeck. That city has damn near everything. It's nice having a whole sourcebook devoted to it. It's not as big as Waterdeep, but it's about 4000 feet in diameter. I was able to get a map of the city adjusted to Roll20 so we can zoom in to pretty much street level and I've embedded the map with hundreds of tokens, props, names, secrets and NPCs, so the PCs can literally go through it alley by alley if they wanted. I think I have over 20 battlemaps keyed to certain locations, so they can skip to a tavern or bar or temple or brothel or sewer or court or whatever.

In fact, I keep thinking that if someone sold a entire city set online for VTT, and had the kind of map with keyed locations and a corresponding sourcebook, I'd happily by that. That's worth $60, an entire city adventure already mapped out.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Churches/Temples?

Wow, did I forget that!?!

UPDATE: Added Churches/Temples