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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 379213" data-attributes="member: 4937">"1) commoners WERE required by law to have a weapon - as they might be conscripted at any time."That statement needs a bit of ammending, since the actual situation was complex.  Free commoners were required to have a weapon in some cultures.  Notably England encouraged all freemen (Yeomen) to own and practice with a longbow after.  If you had above a certain income (essentially if you were middle class) you were in some cultures required to provide more complete arms - for instance a spear, sword, and shield in ancient Athens, or mail and a spear in 12th century Europe.   However, weapons in general were restricted, and the ownership of weapons by serfs themselves was often frowned upon.  Swords in particular were either forbidden to the lower classes or else heavily taxed (the Sword Tax).  Some efforts were made to restrict access to crossbows (generally unsuccessfully).  Armor itself was generally a priviledge reserved to knights and thier immediate retainers.On the question of the cost of purchasing a sword, a cheap sword cost between 7 and 20 days wages (actually, information on weapon prices is pretty scant especially in the medieval period <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />) for a common laborer in England in the period between the late middle ages and Elizabethian times, which works out to between $350 and $1000 dollars today - roughly what you would expect for a mass produced firearm or a hand crafted sword of medium quality today.  Assuming a 1 g.p. standard (laborers make about 1 g.p. a day), swords are not terribly priced in the PH, though the price list in general (like the weapon weights) reflects more Diablo style balance issues than actual reality.   A trained charger could cost 500-900 days wages, slightly hirer than in the DMG, but certainly closer to the correct price than if we assume a 1 s.p. wage standard.   We simply assume a relative abundance of gold in our campaign world, modify wages accordingly, fix the profession skill and viola.Like I mentioned, actual information on weapon prices in the middle ages is scarce, but you could actually work out how much a knight's sword should cost from things we do know, like the wages of weaponsmiths, the time required to make the sword, and the amount of wood required to make the charcoal.  I don't remember the exact math but I do remember that it works out to be about 70 days wages.  We can assume a masterfully made weapon would be somewhat more expensive than that.Before standardization and mass production techniques were introduced, every peice on a flintlock had to be individually crafted to fit all the other peices.  Thus, the relative price of a high quality firearm is certainly higher than the relative cost of a sword, and more akin to the price of armor (which also involved multiple hand crafted peices).</blockquote>

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