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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgbrowning" data-source="post: 1542951" data-attributes="member: 5724">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.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.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.</blockquote>

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