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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 1541775" data-attributes="member: 18377">These differences do exist in historical prices. The real price of grain, flour, and bread varied significantly from year to year, and a long-term trend roughly doubled the price of livestock and halved the price of worked metal goods between about 1000 and about 1400. But these variations from time to time and place to place, though economically significant in themselves, were as nothing compared with the discrepancies in the PHB price list.I am not asking for a realistic system of price variations from time to time and from place to place. I don't want a system that randomly produces years of famine and years of plenty with realistic impacts on  wages and prices of food. I just want a list of prices that doesn't imply absurdities.The reason that I use mediaeval price ratios as examples when I can is that I think everyone assumes that most mundane items in a D&D world are produced using a quasi-mediaeval technology. Most of us assume that fields are plought by peasants with ploughs drawn by teams of horses or oxen, sown and harvested by hand, and that the grain is threshed and then ground in wind or water mills and baked in wood-fired ovens. Certainly was assume that people in a D&D world could fall back on that technology if the alternatives worked out to be more expensive. So it is that there is a certain amount of labour involved in preparing the fields, sowing, harvesting, threshing, grinding, winnowing, kneading, building a mill and oven, gathering firewood, and baking a loaf of bread. It would be possible to assume and calculate and work out what a loaf of bread ought to cost in terms of labour using mediaeval technology: but fortunately we don't have to (if records exist), because the mediaeval economy alreadyworked it out for us.The same applies to building an inn. Digging the foundations, quarrying stone, felling and sawing timber, cutting and hauling wood, cutting rushes, digging clay etc. etc. all involves a certain amount of labour (a little of it skilled). In the end, this labour is the cost of building the inn. The mediaeval ratio of building costs to wages gives us an idea of how much labour it takes to build an inn using mediaeval techniques. If we quote a price for a building that in far off the mediaeval price of building such a building (and I mean a real price, a price in terms of labour) then if anyone looks at our system closely he or she will discover that it implies either a lot of people working very hard and producing a ridiculously small amount, or that it implies a couple of blokes throwing up a ludicrous amount of construction in laughably little time.And people do look closely, because occasionally even epic heroes want to build a fort in a hurry, and want to know how quickly they can do it witht eh resources available. It's best not to give crazy results, don't you think?Indeed. But I really don't see that the bizarre price ratios between, for example, chickens and meat or wages and fortress construction promote PC interaction.I'm not calling for a system that will reflect the difference in price ratios between wheat and ironmongery in Poland and in Northern Italy, for a game about merchant ships. I am only asking that the things already listed should have sensible prices instead of stupid ones.Well, Random User is playiing a rare breed of D&D then. But this thread is supposed to be about helping hiim to do so.Besides which, I am enough of a grognard to remember a time when we generally aspired to building our our castles (or temples, or wizard's towers, or guild halls), garrisoning them, and equipping,  provisioning and paying our retainers. That sort of thing works a lot better when players' attempts to work out what they can afford do not give rise to hoots of derisive laughter and garrisons with very odd diets. (The worst offender in this cas was an early edition of Chivalry & Sorcery which strongly encouraged quartermasters to feed their troops entirely on smoked salmon.)Sure it does. But the fact that you cannot reflect that variability in price ratios does not mean that you have to adopt a set of relative prices that make no sense under an circumstances: such as building costs five hundred times as high as were necessary under even mediaeval technology, or chickens that can be slaughtered at a profit of more than a day's wages each.I would not be able to quote a price of petrol that was right fo right whole of the century. But that doesn't mean that any price that I might list is as good as any other. For instance, supposing that I listed the wage of common labour as $1 per hour and the price of petrol as $500 a gallon: in a setting in which it was supposed that people drove around in cars as freely as we do today. That price would be ridiculous. And yet some price ratios in the PHB, (and in Chivalry & Sorcery, MERP, DragonQuest, HârnMaster and others are every bit as bad as that.I think not. They will often be discrepant, of course. But only as much as price ratios actually varied. And they never varied through factors of hundreds: many of them never varied as much as a factor of two. In short any fixed prices (such as mine) must be faulty, but they need not be anything like as bad as the PHB prices.No, that turns out not to be the case. There were difference in relative prices between Engalnd c 1350 and Italy c. 1210, but they were nothing like as big, not with in a long cooee of the magnitude of, the differences in relative prices betwen the PHB and England/Northern France c 1200.No I wouldn't. Because the price ratio between silver and gold is a function of their relative abundance, which has nothing much to do with technology. Any ratio is as plausible as any other.What I am concerned about are the price ratios that as the result of people making and consuming things using certain methods.A suitable set of circumstances could make silver one tenth of the price of gold. A suitable set of circumstances could even make silver ten times the price of gold. In that case, any price ratio can make sense.But given that ale is made out of barley, and that it is drunk by people who work for wages, it makes no sense to list a pint of ale as costing less than the amount of barley needed to make it, or more than a labourer earns in a day.I use mediaeval price ratios as an example, to show those readers who have no idea how much work is involved in building a wooden house (for example) how far out of whack some PHB prices are. But my problem with PHB prices is not that they are different from mediaeval prices. My problem is that they are totally whacky when compared to one another.For example, according to the PHB you can buy a chicken for 4 cp. But you can sell 1/2 pound of meat for 30 cp, and a chicken often has two or three pounds of meat on it. Work out what the profit is of slaughtering and dressing a chicken. Compare that to PHB wages. The result is ridiculous. And that is why the price ratio between chickens and meat in the PHB is so dramatically different from the mediaeval ratio. But the difference from the mediaeval ratio is not the problem. The problem is that the PHB prices are ridiculous in themselves.And I hope that my argument is coming through: that although price ratios can vary according to circumstances, no conceivable circumstances (and certainly no circumstances in which the majority of people are behaving as though they were in a quasi-mediaeval world) would produce anything like some of the price ratios in the PHB.</blockquote>

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