How much fer that thar chicken?

[Gunton The Terrible]

Did you see the size of that chicken?
- from some movie I forget the name of...

Young Guns...Dirty Steve (I believe) said it while they journeyed to the "Spirit World"

 

[Christian Walker]

I just want to say thanks to all who posted here. Tons of good ideas.

 

[Turjan]

This has no basis in the D&D rules. The DMG demographics say that a community will have this total amount of wealth availible, not that it will all be in chickens (or whatever). That is, among the 30,000 people (but actually concentrated among the very wealthy) there are liquid or near-liquid resources totaling the amount listed, assuming it was correctly calculated. There's *nothing* to suggest that communities keep their wealth exclusively in livestock, let alone just chickens.

Then Peter goes on to assume that the community will have not only its total wealth in chickens, but also in every other resource... an absurd conclusion, giving comminities perhaps a thousand times more wealth than the DMG gives them.

I know . Maybe I should make clear why I posted this . The first post suggested to change a specific part of the economy to poultry as currency (specifically the payment of the player). I just cited this example in order to make clear how ridiculously cheap a chicken is as compared to the sums that are normally exchanged in RPG's. That's not a few silvers, as suggested in the DMG, but in normal games it's in the tens or hundreds of golds (depending on the level, of course). If you replace these gold pieces by chicken, the player will have a logistic problem .

Maybe I should have cut off the end of the cited post .

 

[hong]

This has no basis in the D&D rules. The DMG demographics say that a community will have this total amount of wealth availible, not that it will all be in chickens (or whatever). That is, among the 30,000 people (but actually concentrated among the very wealthy) there are liquid or near-liquid resources totaling the amount listed, assuming it was correctly calculated. There's *nothing* to suggest that communities keep their wealth exclusively in livestock, let alone just chickens.

No. "To determine the amount of ready cash in a community, _OR_ the _TOTAL VALUE OF ANY GIVEN ITEM OF EQUIPMENT_ for sale at any given time..." The limit applies to each individual item type, not everything in aggregate. Notice also how the example given, of adventurers trying to buy 15gp longswords in a hamlet with a 450 gp limit, mentions 30 such longswords for sale without reference to buying anything else.

 

[Gothmog]

This is still available. You can also check out Kenzer's Goods and Gear: The Ultimate Adventurer's Guide, which is for Kalamar and Hackmaster. LOTS of equipment there, use the Kalamar prices as written.

I'll second this- Kenzer's Goods and Gear is the best equipment book out there right now specifically for D&D. ICEs "and a 10 foot pole" is another great book, useful in any time period (I use it a lot for my Call of Cthulhu games).

 

[haakon1]

I've always been interested in this kind of thing. I wrote up a whole economics for Greyhawk deal once, about trade at a more detailed level than this country has copper, that one has silver, which is really pretty lame stuff. My source list for economic products and services was something called NAICS -- the North American Industrial Classification System, created for NAFTA. It lists just about every type of industry and agriculture known to man.

I also used the 1 gp = $20 thing as a rule of thumb for D&D. For Wild West stuff, I use $1 = $20, to account for inflation, and the theory that an average cowpoke makes $1 a day. In general, it takes a heck of a lot more labor to do things, but labor is cheap. Unskilled services (torchbearers) are dirt cheap, but manufactured goods are more expensive. Interestingly, that was true as recently as like the 1920s.

 

[Turjan]

No. "To determine the amount of ready cash in a community, _OR_ the _TOTAL VALUE OF ANY GIVEN ITEM OF EQUIPMENT_ for sale at any given time..." The limit applies to each individual item type, not everything in aggregate. Notice also how the example given, of adventurers trying to buy 15gp longswords in a hamlet with a 450 gp limit, mentions 30 such longswords for sale without reference to buying anything else.

Right. If they meant it or not, the example suggests that you are right. However, the gem example preceding the longsword example lets me think that it was not really meant to work this way. In order to buy the gems, the community has to collect even its last copper piece to pay for the gems. Why any peasants right in their head would spend their last coppers on gems is a completely different question. I suppose the whole rule is thought just to restrict the use of communities as unlimited cash cows without claiming to make economical sense.

Anyway, you never know. On our next visit to Waterdeep, I'll advise the players to wear gas masks. Waterdeep, City of Splendors, City of Chickens!