How much does an inn cost to buy?

[The Gryphon]

Anyway, you are correct in noting that it would not be good sense to slaughter a good egg-laying hen worth 1.6 sp to sell her meat for 1.2 sp. Will you acknowledge that on the other hand there is something whacky about a market in which you can buy a hen for 2 cp, slaughter her, and sell the meat for 18 sp? That's 17.8 sp profit for an operation that I assure you can be done with little skill and in few minutes.

I'll agree it's a little steep, but the price quoted for meat is for cooked meat being sold in an inn, not meat you'd buy from a market and cook yourself. The situation is somewhat equivalent to eating at a restaurant within a 4 star hotel, generally no peasant will be eating at an inn just like a person on the poverty line today won't be eating at said restaurant.

I imagine that a lot of situations within D&D are based on modern day equivalents, with people constructing the system looking at modern pricing as a guideline to how expensive an item should be from start to finish. For example (we'll stick with the chicken), the poultry farmer sells a chicken for $4.00...while the butcher sells the same prepared chicken for $10.00 and fillets off the same chicken for maybe $10.00 per kg ($5.00 per lb.)...then we have the restaurant selling it's chicken for $25.00 or more (for less than 1/2 lb. of chicken).

Most people today would understand how this system of pricing works thus making it easy to understand, but may not understand how the medieval economy worked. Seeing as D&D isn't a statistical medieval simulation, it doesn't matter if the prices mesh with medieval pricing as long as the system is somewhat consistent internally which I think it is (at least consistent enough that one portion won't break another).

We're now so far off topic I can't believe we're still in the same thread

 

[Saeviomagy]

Only 85 labourers was of course a reference to how little they cost in the grand scheme of things, not to whether or not it's a large amount of work in a small amount of time

To use the device more than once a week for building [the equivalent of 300 mandays of work], you'd have to be somewhat skilled with the device as you need to make a DC 18 Perform (stringed instrument) check. So we're down to half the labourers without a skill check anyway, thus halving the discount to 15% instead of 30%.

Actually you get 600 mandays out of it - you only need a successful roll if you go over an hour. Half an hour provides for 300 mandays of work.

And heaven forbid if you hire a 1st or 2nd level bard with good charisma. Now the lyre works for however long he can stay awake.

If you pay him comparable rates to what he'd earn in the big city, he can walk away with as much as 1gp per day.

For doing the work of 4800 men...

 

[The Gryphon]

Actually you get 600 mandays out of it - you only need a successful roll if you go over an hour. Half an hour provides for 300 mandays of work.

And heaven forbid if you hire a 1st or 2nd level bard with good charisma. Now the lyre works for however long he can stay awake.

If you pay him comparable rates to what he'd earn in the big city, he can walk away with as much as 1gp per day.

For doing the work of 4800 men...

Sorry my mistake. That's just how I'd make it work, with a check every 30 minutes and increasing the DC by 2 with each check after the first, considering it has to be constant play. The secondary reason I'd change it is that lyre has always seemed odd in that it's powers all last for 30 minutes, one of which can't be pushed past this limit, but the check is hourly.

The bard would demand at least 1gp per day, probably more, but that's neither here nor there. The entire point is that you can pay a pittance, other than the cost of the lyre itself, to get a lot of work done thus avoiding the labour cost altogether. No matter how much work the lyre can do for you you still have to pay for the materials, thus the construction might happen faster but at most it will be 30% cheaper according to the SBG.

My players have just started building their castles, but haven't worked this out yet, so lets keep it quiet