How much does an inn cost to buy?

[Agemegos]

Ahhh, this is why I love the internet; the comaraderie.

If you want camaraderie, patronise me in normal-sized type.

 

[Agemegos]

I understand your desires for more realistic pricing, but to me changing the bullion ratios to something reasonable is of much greater "realism" concern than items costing less than 5gp being a factor of ten or more off of each other. To me, more people understand the massive, glaring, error that's underlying every transaction. Although It's possible to justify this through abundance levels, it's something that grates heavier upon the average gamer than the disparities in commodity pricing. And bluntly, most gamers don't care about even this easily recognizable error because they quickly get the point that coins are just widgets, although they may never verbalize it.

The price of copper in D&D is pretty bad, I'll agree: about nine times higher than historical values. That puts copper pans in doubt. But the price of gold (although rather low by mediaeval standards) is within the range of values for the ancient Mediterranean. Neither of these discrepancies seems to me to be as bad as buildings ten to twenty times too expensive, implying rents ten to twenty times too expensive, implying that workers can't afford to live even in a hovel.

There's been a long and strongly stated arguement than magic wouldn't create something resembling England/Nothern France

Sure, but the people of a D&D world have mediaeval means of production to fall back on when magic fails them: or when it makes something far more expensively than making or growing it in a mediaeval way.

According to thet PHB, magic somehow makes chickens strangely cheap and meat strangely expensive. Why don't the people whip out knives and convert a few excess chickens into meat?

According to the DMG, magic somehow makes building a tower cost 500,000 day's wages. But we have records that show that the huge towers in Carnavon Castle cost about £200 to build, which is 'only' about 40,000 day's wages.

Similarly, magic somehow makes a mansion in D&D cost 1,000,000 man-days of labour, whereas we know that using mediaeval technology a nobleman's city house with courtyard could be bought as cheaply sometimes as £90 (1,800 days' wages) including the real estate. Why would people in a D&D world use this magical technology if just getting a bunch of guys with simple tools would build them a mansion at 1/400 the cost?

Or if you suppose that people in a D&D world acually do most mundane things using a mediaeval approach, you end up with work-sites crawling with twenty times a reasonable number of workers for twenty time a reasonable construction time.

Primarily, I think that's any change on prices for things less than 5 gp isn't of any importance because such precision isn't needed to play the game.

Maybe the price of single item isn't important. (But even then, I think you might as well get it right.) But often enough PCs buy inns or provision armies. And then the players whip out a calculator, and next thing you know they have a scheme to get rich quick.

Although I'm completely with you about appreciating a more internally consistant effort in D&D pricing, to me, the problems in pricing that involve players are the important ones.

I am used to players becoming landed lords or wide-ranging merchant-adventurers, buying and running inns, building fortifications for towns etc. And I find that tht these prices do involve players, often enough.

In this equation, game balance issues are more important than real-life believeability and will always win over.

That's true, but I don't think that any consideration of game balance either did or would go in to listing chickens as a price that allows a poulterer to make a profit on 1.7 day's wages on each one he slaughters.

I think that attempts to rationalize the fiscal system would probably create more difficulties than benefits because, to me and the vast majority of gamers, orders of maginitude errors for things less than 5gp aren't of any concern to begin with. Messing with familiar price structures, however, is concerning.

You're having a bob each way. Either the prices are insignificant and it is not worth the trouble to get them right, or players are deeply attached to them and would be thrown into deep consternation by any changes to their beloved prices. It can't be both.

Besides which, some of the most glaring discrepancies are in things that cost 50,000 to 1,000,000 gp, not less than five.

 

[Alchemist]

Whoo. What else is there to say? Either wages are too low or prices are too high. Some prices are really crazy and could do with some tweaking to be "realistic".

I would like a more internally consistent price list/wage schedule for my game, as I am preparing to run a more mercantile oriented campaign, and it's hard to justify the value assigned to many items in extrapolation to bulk-shipping quantities (and realising that the book value given is a retail price, not wholesale).

I am truly curious: What would our two principles in this thread (Agemegos and JGBrowning) suggest to rebalance the price lists (and perhaps wages) away from dungeoncrawling towards a more "real D&D common-folk" pricing?

Fantastic thread, BTW. I love this stuff, despite having only general knowledge.

 

[Sledge]

Hey Agamegos, I would be really interested in a list of your sources. I'm beginning to feel inspired to rewrite the Equipment document....

 

[Agemegos]

Hey Agamegos, I would be really interested in a list of your sources. I'm beginning to feel inspired to rewrite the Equipment document....

One source I used was a list compiled by Glenys Armstrong, The Company of Ordinance +44 (0)1793 524524, which cited as its sources:

New Towns of the Middle Ages - Maurice Beresford 1988

A Baronial Household of the 13th Century
- Margaret Wade La Barge 1980

Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages
- Christopher Dyer 1990

Medieval Women - Henrietta Layser 1995

The Medieval Soldier - Embleton and Howe 1994

Memoires of the Crusades - Villeharduin & De Joineville

Another was a list compiled by Kenneth Hodges (hodges@jif.berkeley.edu), which cited as its sources:

[1] English Wayfaring Life in the XIVth Century, J. J. Jusserand, trans Lucy Smith, Putnam's Sons, New York,1931 (Orig. 1889).

[2] London in the Age of Chaucer, A. R. Myers, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1972

[3] Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Cambridge University Press, 1989

[4] English Weapons & Warfare, 449-1660, A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, Barnes & Noble, 1992 (orig. 1966)

[5] The Armourer and his Craft from the XIth to the XVIth Century, Charles ffoulkes, Dover, 1988 (orig. 1912)

[6]"The Cost of Castle Building: The Case of the Tower at Langeais," Bernard Bachrach, in The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality, ed. Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe, Kendall/Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, 1984

[7] The Knight in History, Frances Gies, Harper & Row, New York, 1984

[8] Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay, Craig Turner and Tony
Soper, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1990

[9] Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies, Harper & Row, New York, 1969

Both those lists were on the Web, and you might be able to find them by searching on their author's names.

I have also used information I came across in reading, for example in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, but the information was only scattered. The only source I could recommend as having good stuff in any concentration is Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Note: both Armstong and Hodges give prices with an epoch. You will have to adjust for inflation, which was significant (not that English coin was significantly debased between about 800 and about 1485: but the production of silver-mines in Germany expended the supply of silver faster than the mediaeval economy grew).

 

[random user]

Thank you all for the replies and very informative posts. I've settled on a number, and thought I would share it since I started this all.

Again (with so many posts it could be easy to miss), my players aren't really interested in running an inn. They happened to make contact with an inn-owner who is looking to expand. The players need an excuse to poke their noses in various places. Thus they decided that playing investors might be an ideal cover.

They don't know how to run an inn nor do they have any desire to learn. They aren't even thinking about how to make any money off the inn (though I'm sure they would be happy if it did provide a revenue stream). They want to build a spy network across towns and have a way to pass messages. Having a spy at each inn is a good way to gather information, and having an excuse to visit those inns raises no suspicions as to why the players are there a lot. Partnering with an experienced inn-owner relieves them of any responsibility of running the inn, which is fine by both them and me -- they want to be essentially a silent partner.

A local bookstore happened to have Stronghold Builder's Guidebook available for browsing. In it, it listed a 10 room inn with tavern to be a little over 13,000gp. This doesn't include the land it's on. Broken down, the tavern/kitchen/stables part was about 7,000gp, and each additional bedroom was 700gp.

I've decided to go with these figures. Rather than buying the land, the inn-owner will lease the land from the town. Since I don't have to figure out how much the land would cost, I'm not going to worry about that. Also as a note, a fancier inn/tavern was a lot more expensive, but my NPC inn-owner wants a less fancy, more functional inn that can hold a big crowd of working folks. The price I'm going by will create an inn to his ideal.

In terms of how often something like this comes up, *shrug* I have no idea really. All I know is my players (completely blindsighting me) thought up of a good cover story. But I'm not going to hand them a spy network across cities for free. Now they have a figure to work with, and can decide whether their gold would be best spent on this plan or something else (and to be honest I have no idea what they will decide -- but that's fine, that's what makes it D&D and not "let's all be characters in the DM's story").

 

[jgbrowning]

The price of copper in D&D is pretty bad, I'll agree: about nine times higher than historical values. That puts copper pans in doubt. But the price of gold (although rather low by mediaeval standards) is within the range of values for the ancient Mediterranean. Neither of these discrepancies seems to me to be as bad as buildings ten to twenty times too expensive, implying rents ten to twenty times too expensive, implying that workers can't afford to live even in a hovel.

This is my last response on this issue as it seems to be turning into a dead horse. I'll outline my basic ideas for a final time.

You think certain things are cheap because you're comparing the prices to your assumption that D&D prices/labor/costs should be comparable to medieval europe. That's your assumption and it's not a bad one, but it's not really supported by the game design as shown. You're basing you assumptions on a particular place and particular time in the real-world (outside of your mediterranean example) as opposed to the game world. In the game world, prices are a function of game balance, independent of any concepts of a working economy. The balance issues relating to a peasants ability to buy food/land etc is the least factor of consideration when discussing d20 design.

The ancient mediterranean does nothing to suport your stance of mimicing a medieval economy. To really mimic a medieval situation, the basic D&D assumption of 100cp=10sp=1gp MUST be changed to a more reasonable sumation of medieval exchange. This, however, would result in a massive change of game balance. There was never a 100/10/1 exchange rate per ounce of copper, silver, and gold in medieval europe.

Maybe the price of single item isn't important. (But even then, I think you might as well get it right.) But often enough PCs buy inns or provision armies. And then the players whip out a calculator, and next thing you know they have a scheme to get rich quick.

This is why we have DMs who can apply common sense to each individual circumstance. I can't use the D&D rules to determine how grain prices fluctuate during seasons or during years of feast or famine: I simply can't do that using the tool set given. The D&D toolset isn't designed, nor should it necessarily be designed to support a particular economic/gaming viewpoint. It should be designed to support the play style of the majority of its customers while having enough flexibilty to be adapted to more unique styles. You can easily adapt prices to suit your personal desires, so I think it functions admirably in it's main purpose.

If you're serious about designing an reasonable economic system it's going to be quite a task. You'll find that for every reasonable thing you do, you'll have different reasonable people show you how it doesn't really work that way and how there's seems to be a good dozen exceptions to every general rule. An economic system is massively complex, it will have to function admirably for both simple peasent to peasent interactions while working for large ship-sized international commerce, and it will (ideally) have no impact on existing PCs relative game-wealth. It will also have to be very simple to use because mostly players don't went to spend time bean counting.

Personally, I spent about a day thinking about the sheer dificulty of the process and threw out any hopes of making a more rational pricing system. This is why we created the economic simulator we did for MMS:WE. It uses a DC system to modifiy prices based upon what the GM thinks is reasonable for their economics. It's a tool to consistantly manipulate prices. That's the beauty of the economic simulator. It's a process used based upon the GMs need, not an explaination of what need or how that need works. For example: prices go up under many circumstances and we give a mechanic to show how prices can go up. We don't explain why, or how, or when, because those are GMs decisions based upon circumstance and campaign. Something more complex isn't desired because it would be more complicated that most gamers want. Honestly, MMS:WE's building system is more complicated than most people want, but anything simplier would be even less accurate. We made our choice to go with the more complex in this case, but provided many functions that are manipulatable by the user to create what they want. This of course means that they can use the system to create something utterly silly. But really who cares? Abusing any system simulating a complex action is usually easy.

As designed, the D&D prices are insignficant for many things, but at the same time changing them will necessitate even more price changes because cost is a unit of balance in d20 game design, nothing more. Cost is not a measurement of labor, a measurement of wage, nor a measurement of wealth. Divorce the concept of reality associated with these terms and replace cp/sp/gp with a game balance function only. You're suggesting cost changes which (especially in the expensive items which you suggest need the most changing) will heavily impact game balance in relation to magic item pricing. Which, will greatly impact the main play-style of D&D.

In the end, even if an NPC can kill a chicken and make 300x his daily expected salary, it doesn't matter because it's a NPC. And if your PC says he can do the same, smack the idiot down.

I am truly curious: What would our two principles in this thread (Agemegos and JGBrowning) suggest to rebalance the price lists (and perhaps wages) away from dungeoncrawling towards a more "real D&D common-folk" pricing?

The possiblity of affixing a realistic labor/matieral power to unrealistic price according to the erronious base exchange function of D&D seems highly arbitrary to me. It would defeat the goal of making a more medieval pricing system even if we managed to balance it perfectly, because we'd have to change the basic ratio of the precious metals during the same medieval period to do so. What medieval aspect do we think is more important: wage to purchasing power or the ratio of metal to metal which is the only measurement we have of the economy?

I don't think there's a way to justifiy this. Both the metal ratio and the purchasing power ratio (as currently listed in D&D prices) would have to change to create a realistic pricing system. This would dramatically change the balance of the entirely of the rest of D&D mechanics. To me this is is more effort than it's worth (and I'm nuts enough to write the building system) and would require a complete re-tooling of any balance issue using cost (monsters, magic items, expected wealth).

To me, it's not worth it.

joe b.

 

[Agemegos]

This is my last response on this issue as it seems to be turning into a dead horse. I'll outline my basic ideas for a final time.

Fair enough. That being the case I will indulge in one last reply.

You think certain things are cheap because you're comparing the prices to your assumption that D&D prices/labor/costs should be comparable to medieval europe.

No. I think that the prices ought to make sense in comparison to one another, given that the people in a D&D world always have mediaeval production methods to fall back on. I don't demand a realistic mediaeval economy: just prices that aren't completely stupid when compared to one another. I use historical price ratios as evidence that my opinion about what is possible when mediaeval production methods are available is not wildly out of whack. That's all.

And so my complaint is not that PHB prices are different from mediaeval prices. And to me it is of no consequence that the price of gold in terms of silver is ten instead of rising from fifteen to thirty over a few centuries as the result of the operations of some rich silver mines. My complaint it that the PHB prices are, even taken on their own terms, absurd. And absurdities in the rules lead to absurdities in play.

 

[S'mon]

I agree w Agemegos of course. I can't understand Joe's insistence that 'realistic' exchange ratios for gold/silver/copper is vital to plausibility. And as Age has slightly said, in fact the 10:1 gold/silver ratio is pretty well exactly a ratio used from when Persian gold started flowing into the Mediterranean basin at the end of the 5th century BC, so it's hardly ahistorical. & AD&D's 20:1 ratio was being used in the early 5th c. The middle ages in northern Europe was a time of great gold scarcity of course, but that's not necessary to model a plausible society, which is all we ask.

 

[tensen]

Out of curiosity, bringing up the cost of Inn's again, why does it cost 12,192gp to whitewash the walls and hang a sign outside the entrance, that is the main style of most buildings that were mid-level wealth. Now, I could see the interior cost being quite high, after all you need beds, tables, chairs, a bar, an entire kitchen to furnish etc. But that still seems extremely high...is the owner buying an innfull of exotic rare woods and commissioning the best crafters for this project?

Calrin Alshaw

Perhaps the inn has stained glass windows that require replacing at minimum twice a week after someone gets tossed out one of them <grin>