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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 1539728" data-attributes="member: 463">Hmm, housing costs vary a lot depending on land scarcity & construction costs (wages and materials) but they tend to stay within the same order of magnitude.  I believe housing in UK now is about 2.5 times more expensive relative to wages than a century ago; OTOH a much higher proportion of the adult population is in work - mostly due to women entering the salaried workforce - and it's easier to get a mortgage; affordability over the whole country for a typical family thus hasn't changed much.I've never heard anything like that 1-2% figure for medieval interest rates before, I don't know if it represents church-approved rates or was just made up from thin air, in either case it seems irrelevant.  I have one snippet of interest-rate info from the Classical world:In the first century BC Lucullus, placed in charge of Asia Minor by the Roman Senate, made himself very unpopular with usurers by a decree limiting maximum interest rates to 12% - presumably that was considered a 'fair' amount.  I get the impression that real historical interest rates for private lending to 'respectable' borrowers have tended to mostly be in the 10-20% per annum range, several posters here have given similar figures. I think MMW: WE's figures for building prices are designed to tie in with the DMG's building costs - which seem completely arbitrary figures intended to make buildings expensive for PCs, so expensive that Daern's Instant Fortresses are reasonable housing alternatives for the minor noble(!) - rather than to tie in with the DMG's stated hireling costs, that appear to exist in another reality altogether.As far as money goes IMC, I use something like 1gp = $50, 1 sp = $5, $5/1sp is the survival/subsistence wage for a single adult.  So I have to reduce the building costs - IMC 500gp buys a pretty decent, if modest, dwelling.  50,000gp buys a substantial castle.edit: In fact, looking at the DMG building costs, just dividing them all by 10 seems to give pretty reasonable results that make some sense when compared to DMG magic item prices & labour costs.</blockquote>

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