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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 1542795" data-attributes="member: 18377">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.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.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.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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