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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgbrowning" data-source="post: 1540711" data-attributes="member: 5724">Gaming prices aren't comparable to real life prices. Partly because depending upon what time and where you discuss, the prices vary massively from location to location while the gaming system attempts to normalize these massive variations (The price of food/land/buildings in New York City is much greater than in rural New Mexico--as a game designer how should one normalize these prices in a role-playing game that takes place in modern times?) and partly because prices are set in relation to PC's, not to create an economic simulation. This is the inherant problem with comparisons of economics from real life and role-playing games.I don't think my pricing is off by much. If it was ten times too high that means the innkeeper will be able to pay off his (now 4.2k instead of 42k) investment the second year of running his inn (assuming 4k a year income or 1/2 occupancy). That seems way to fast for me. Under my pricing it will take about 20-25 average years during which he'll earn a good wage as well.Given that an average cook or sailer makes around 10gp a week (average profession check), it takes them about two years to buy the 987gp house. It would take them two weeks of work if you reduced by a factor of 10. (Edit: please note the bad math. *sigh*.. it should actually be 10 weeks)That's far from starvation level. 1 sp a day buys a pound of flour and a chicken for 4 cp -- leaving 6 cp (60% of income) for other expenses. Also, laborer's wages can make sense economically because much of a craftman's earnings are controled by guilds and there are large barriers to competative entry. A 10 to one ratio seems a bit high, but again how important is a higher level of accuracy for the intent of the game? And of course, starvation wasn't uncommon in the historical period.I think one of the problems with historical conversion is our natural inclination to assume that a cp, sp, or gp, in the game has any relation to a RL coin of the same metal. The buying power of these metals in the D&D world, as well as expect wages and returns are funtioning indepentently of any RL valuation of metal and only function in relation to cost of items in the PH and DMG. A British pound isn't worth the same amount of metal in D&D as it is in real life. It's not worth a pound of D&D silver (5 gp) because the purchasing power of an equivilent amount of metal in both worlds is different. I'm kind of bumbling around the point here, but the value of the metal in the game isn't related to anything but the value of goods in the game. We can try and draw comparables, but I find it best to consider cp, sp, and gp as widgets, which distances my natural inclination to assume a value realtionship between the metals. I view D&D coinage has having no comparable value in relation to real world metals.If the arguement is one of "The D&D system doesn't make economic sense" I think we'll all agree, Yes, it doesn't. And that's because a Hammer is a really bad Saw. It's not designed to do that. But once that's out of the way, using that system to simulate results for roleplaying purposes should be the next point of discussion. The dificulties of modeling even a modern building system are daunting (try getting 10 quotes for a specialty built home to see how there's great variation even in the same modern city) and modeling a D&D system is even more so because many things (magic items in particular) are priced according to a particular use to an adventuring group for killing monsters. Just because an Instant Fortress "costs" as much as an inn, doesn't mean that either concepts aren't valid. There's just two methods of accounting with different goals going on that unfortunately, use the same coinage.MMS:WE is %100 OGC, so if anyone wants to modify it to suit their tastes and publish they can. I know that starting from what I've created and modifying it to suit an individual campaign is much easier than starting from scratch. I think MMS:WE produces usable results, both in the building system and the economic simulator.joe b.</blockquote>

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