Low Magic Campaigns?

[Raven Crowking]

I'm not sure about this. Money is a very old concept.

Yes, but "usury" usually applies to money, not goods.

I think I could find examples of some of these things. "Prices determined by markets" are, however, trivial to find in the history, and are not unique to the modern period.

Of course. In order for a society to function, it assigns relative values to items that people require daily.

Similarly, scutage was sending money instead of men at arms to a liege -- but the money varied, and the liege could say no.

I agree that people have an implicit understanding of the value of things in their society and that is not an anachronism. It would be difficult to put yourself into an NPC's boots and decide what the value is to the NPC if that were not true. Similarly, while you cannot know the absolute value of an object on ebay, you can gain a rough idea of its value.

I would hazard that it is unlikely for anyone to do any real work on a setting without gaining some insight into the rough values of objects relative to each other, including where they differ from "book value".

I think one of the main differences between the periods is the scale at which these things are available. A city probably can't afford to light it's streets because 80% of it's income is going to defense. But we're talking about adventurers here, who often have 10's of thousands of GP to throw around - so what the average practice was for a medieval society might not even be relevant.

Scale, and attitude.

The elite in D&D have power that we don't normally consider in the real world (although our elite probably have the same level of power). As in The Godfather, the reply to the statement that Senators don't have people killed, "Now who's being naive?" probably applies.

Anyone who can make you the Doohickey of Wondrous Power simply doesn't need to. The trick is convincing him that he wants to. At some point, economics becomes politics.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

I suggest that it's quite possible if he's dealing with two different traders. One trader needs the horses badly since two of his own have just died. The trader is also rude and a European of some different faith. The Mongol knows he can get a good rate from this guy and doesn't feel like cutting him a break.

The next trader is the Mongol's distant cousin. This guy has looked out for the Mongol in the past, given him food during lean times, and is fairly close to the Khan's family. The Mongol figures that by being good to this guy, he maintains important personal relationships and possibly opens up some new markets in case the Khan needs horses. So he gives this trader a very generous deal.

Well said.

As the various threads about the demise of print magazines shows, modern economics sometimes ignore the non-monetary value of moving wealth around. And much of this has, no doubt, to do with scale. If my potential customer pool is huge, I can afford to be rude. If I know that I'm liable to deal with the same person repeatedly, my generousity one day can be repaid manyfold later.

Another good example of this, btw, is in the LGS vs. FLGS threads. A FLGS, with its scale, is using a model where individual connections are more important than any individual sale. A LGS is one where either they don't "get" this, or the customer base is so large as to render it void.

Recently, I had a friend telling me he was upset because he wanted to buy a CGCed Iron Man #1. The book value was about $400 Canadian, but the guy who had it wanted $1,000, and wouldn't budge on the price. Clearly, while he was willing to part with IM #1, it wasn't worth it to him for "book value".

And, frankly, I strongly prefer a game in which a magic item is treated closer to that IM #1 than to a carrot in the supermarket. I can see some things being for sale in small quantities -- and I can easily see some things being given away to buy favour, goodwill, and service. I just don't expect a howitzer, a fine diamond ring, and a painting by Da Vinci to be available in Aisle 10 at Walmart anytime soon.

YMMV.

RC

 

[Celebrim]

"Prices determined by markets" are, however, trivial to find in the history, and are not unique to the modern period.

I wish you would take it for granted that I know a bit of something about economic and social history. You don't know how frustrating it is to be told that what I know from years of study and experience is a 'cultural myth'. You evidently know something. I think you'd be well served to assume that I do too.

Of course 'prices determined by markets' are trivial to find in history. Economic laws aren't artifacts. But prices determined solely or primarily by markets are not ubiquitous in the way that an American might expect them to be. For an example of where pricing is not determined primarily by an economic market, one only has to become a tourist and go to an actual street market somewhere. At that point, you'll discover that the price is primarily determined by who you are and moreover that the price you pay will be determined by your ability to 'haggle' which is primarily a combination of your ability to know how the seller values the item and your ability to convince the seller that you belong to his cultural group to one extent or another despite your strange 'foreign' appearance by conforming to his social expectations of a legitimate buyer.

And this goes on in the traditional market rather than the Adam Smith one of idealized buyers and sellers and perfect information, whether or not you the foreigner are there.

People have an implicit understanding of the value of things in their society and that is not an anachronism (medieval agricultural manuals IIRC routinely quote market prices for goods).

Good grief. I'm not saying that a person doesn't know the value of the thing that they sell. I'm saying that it is not necessarily the case that the value of the thing sold is the principally determinent of what it is sold for. For example, we live in a society relatively free of monopolies and price controls other sorts of things that violate the assumptions of Adam Smiths idealized markets. But that is hardly the case in the Middle Ages where anyone who is anyone arranges to get a monopoly right on the buying and selling or supplying of any thing that they can manage. So you might have case where its illegal to sell a commodity to anyone but a particular person, or illegal to buy from anyone but a particular person, or whatever. If someone refuses to sell you something, its not like you can necessarily go elsewhere. All the other buyers might well be and probably are in the same Guild.

The only thing modern about "instant gratification" might be the term and the guilt associated with the term...

When I speak of instant gratification I speak of the idea that if you have enough money, then there ought to be any particular thing you desire available for sale to you. I speak of the idea that you can walk into a store and find shelves stocked with goods of every sort which are ready for purchase. I speak of the idea that we expect to be able to go to a grocery store and regardless of the season of the year find produce of a particular sort, when in fact we are not far from a time when not even the King could demand to be feed say ripe blackberries outside of July or its environs. These are the products of things like industrialization which has made durable goods cheap enough that they do not have to be manufactured on demand, and refrigeration and so forth. Yes, you can find fast food in Rome, Paris, or Kyoto or whereever. But those socially contriversial aspect like guilt over materialism to instant gratification is just the upper surface of the culturally trained expectations and its not even relevant to the discussion. What's relevant to the discussion is the idea that you can walk into a town with X gold peices in your pocket and an hour later walk out with any item you could desire - and at a market price no less. And that you ought to know is just not the case any time prior to the last hundred years, and still not the case in much of the world.

It's very likely the case that a king in the late medieval period could "instantly" gratify himself with a brand new scarlet cloak simply by clapping his hands. Sure, he paid a huge amount of money to keep cloths of various colors in his wardrobe, and a staff of tailors on hand, but as far as the king's player is concerned, he erases some GP from his character sheet and writes down "scarlet cloak". Later on, his chancellor might sell his second-hand clothes, or just given them away, but the sale will be for a rational amount of money.

Which is all well and good, but in this case you've defined instant gratification to at minimum a few hours wait while it gets stitched by hand together and its only available to the king (unless somehow you manage to convince someone to let you buy some of the King's cloth, which you won't if its scarlet and it so happens that the King's household has a social monopoly on the wearing of scarlet). In defining down what 'instant gratification' means to that point, you've made the term meaningless or at least meaningless in comparison to modern expectations which are, as I said, that anyone could walk into a store regardless of who they are and walk out with a scarlett cloak at the market price for such things. But we do not even have to go so far into our own past to know that that is not generally the case. I don't care how much money you had, a black man could not walk into a white store in Birmingham of the 1920's or even the 1950's and buy a new suit. Again, the price wasn't determined primarily by the market. It just wasn't for sale unless you met the social expectations.

I guess it's a question best left to social scientists, but I really don't think medieval=Third World.

I didn't say it did, but when it comes to economics there are far more parallels to the third world than thier are to modern America. There are many things which are different, but in terms of the disparity of wealth, the relative lack of a middle class, the cash poor subsistance economy on the bottom, and the control of scarce resources by an aristocracy, the third world looks alot like the European middle ages. And you would be wrong to trace that to its historical relationship to the first world. And this isn't an artifact of colonialism or gobalism, because those societies generally look alot like thier own 'middle ages' as well when thier societies looked alot more like our middle ages society than our own modern society looks like where we came from. It really was a revolution. They aren't just tossing that word around.

You can't make someone taste food as part of a DnD game. If someone chooses to eat gruel instead of a steak, you can't actually make that player eat gruel. So I never "claimed" that I didn't make this choice but I don't agree that I can somehow (as the DM) influence the player's decision in most cases. There's no amount of in-game word-smithing that's going to get across the body odor of the dwarf in the group, nor are we going to sit there at the game table for the entire 8 hour camp-time where the PCs endure the tent with holes in it.

Sure there is. Everyone that tried to sleep near the dwarf has to make a saving throw to sleep because of the stench. Those that fail, wake up in the morning fatuiged from a lack of sleep. You only need to do that once, and as soon as your average players recognize that this thing now has value, they'll treat it as something of value and role play accordingly.

And the guy who eats gruel every day ends up a malnourished medieval peasant with nutrient deficiences and teeth falling out from scurvy and thining hair and sores on his body a CON penalty. Again, once you give the player a reason to value high quality food, he will value high quality food.

No - I don't think that detailed tables of disease, discomfort, nutrition, etc. make for an interesting game, they certainly don't exist in default 3E anyway.

The thing is, I've never had to spend alot of time on these. All I've had to do is inform the characters through play that these things are present, and the players act like players and take precautions to keep these things from being a problem. The result is little time spent distracting from play, but a deeper emmersion because the world seems more real. And players role play better, because they know that there is a consequence to acting as if these things aren't going on. Moreover, they see the increasing quality in thier characters lives as their wealth improves. They are no longer living out of thier packs, and because thier is more to the world than just killing monsters not living out of thier packs becomes something they value.

Now granted, I can over-react by having an NPC haul off and attack the bad-smelling dwarf. "That'll learn 'em" might be might thought, but that's really heavy-handed and inaccurate.

Err.... if that's how you think these things are handled.

But acting like a Mongol tribesmen would trade 2 horses for a bolt of silk one day, and 15 horses the next day IMO is extremely out of whack with history and human nature (unless, of course, the market forces governing the value of silk on the steppes had changed and the tribesman and/or trader became aware of those changes).

And acting like the Mongol horseman would trade 2 horses for a bolt of silk to his kinsman by marriage because that is what the silk is worth to him, and therefore only ask 2 horses from you, a stranger, a foreigner, and therefore likely an enemy until proven otherwise is also quite missing the concept.

 

[gizmo33]

Do some more reading on economics.

I suspect that it wouldn't help. Plus you're assuming that your opinion logically follows from the evidence, which I guess is possible. I'll try some more examples, maybe that will help.

The idea that there is a "base cost" is largely an illusion of modern economic systems. There is only actual cost.

That's like saying that oxygen exists only in the modern period. The concept of oxygen was used to explain a phenomena that existed prior to the modern period. You might be getting descriptions of the system confused with it's existence. People in the Middle Ages might have not had the language or concepts to describe either oxygen or markets.

His money doesn't come directly from the sandwich; it comes from his providing service for his employers.

But his money comes from his value as a laborer. There's a lot of written history on the effect that the Black Death had on labor prices in Europe. Maybe I'm not the one that needs to do some reading.

Now, his employers gain their money directly from the sandwiches, and they have no other real motive.

Not so - gaining money is not a motive, and the stock-holders, owners, etc. involved in this have plenty of the same motives that I have - putting kids through college, buying a car etc. Their decisions about what to charge are determined by these forces - so there's lots of motives. Again - relatively stable prices and a study of this issue might be modern, but their existence is not. For a DM to run something approximating (IMO) reality, he needs to have the numbers - that's not anachronistic. People in medieval times didn't know their hitpoints either, nor did most of them probably have any idea about their strength scores. But now could one argue that a peasant didn't have a typical strength on a given day?, and that such a rule is an anachronism?

You cannot build your own home and grow your own food without also making cash, because the government would take possession of your home for failing to pay taxes.

Not so the D&D wizard living in the tower on his own. He certainly needs food and shelter, but he has no need of you to give him money to get it. He is self-sufficient in a way that modern people are not.

This is a tough one because there's no such thing as a wizard living in a tower outside of fantasy. I can say that opting out of paying taxes in some form is not an option for the vast majority of socieities - and I think all if you count labor and turning out for warfare as payment. Even an example like the Celts, where they're distributing silver jewelry as the result of a successful military campaign, the amount of prestige I can expect to get for giving out silver would be halved in a situation where silver is twice as plentiful.

And if a wizard in a tower doesn't get food and shelter with money how in the world does he get it? Does he cast spells? and do those spells have an XP cost? And if so wouldn't he just as readily retain his XP and just have someone build a tower for him? And how does he compensate those people?

Again - 2 questions from a guy who doesn't read:
1. When silver became available in medieval Europe, the traditional peasant labor owed to the lord was commuted to: ??
2. Define "Scutage":

I could write a book on the examples of a market economy in the Late Medieval period alone.

"Base Cost" is just someone's guess as to what someone might want for something.

And a strength score is a base guess on how much weight someone can lift on any given day. Without a strength score, I have no reasonable way to define a consistent reality for NPCs in terms of strength, and I argue that without a numerical approximation for the value of goods I have only fiat to determine things value, which I think is subject to much abuse and mistakes. Without guidance DMs tend to game the players - especially in such complicated situations.

Of course, in a Guild Economy, the Guild sets the value (not the base value, the absolute value) of all services rendered and objects sold by the Guild.

But a guild, even with the monopoly, doesn't control alot of what goes on in those economies. The weaver's guild in Belgium isn't going to control the price for it's raw materials (which came from England mostly). Laborer's strike, so you can't just pay them nothing. And if you're a master shoemaker, you can't tell the grocers how to set their prices, nor can you determine what you're paying for food - so you can't ultimately effect the perceived value of the wages you're paying your workers. Plus, your obtaining the bulk of your luxury goods from merchants who aren't even from your continent - so if you don't pay the going rate, and I can sail my ship to Spain and get a better price for pepper, that's where I'm going to go.

Yes, monopolies (and a guild is more than a monopoly) are going to affect things locally for some amount of time - but the sky is not the limit here, and the market forces will undermine controls on wages and prices in spite of local baron's attempts (historically) to control these things.

In this case, the value is known, but the value is the same regardless of quality.

This is not the case, the value of different types cloth varied when sold based on the region of origin, value of the dye used, etc. Again, this is clearly spelled out in the books that (apparently) I'm not reading. I really can't tell where you're getting your information from.

And, I would hazard, more than one Guildsman operated outside Guild strictures if the profit was high enough and the chance of getting caught low.

And those profits that determine the instance of cheating are based on what forces exactly? Again, if a DM doesn't have a base price in front of him, how does he know when the smugglers start to operate? He wouldn't know anything about the macro picture of the society - I know as a DM I cannot simultaneously roleplay 40,000 people and all of their economic decisions and preferences.

What the Don is doing is, effectively, forming an alternate Feudal government within the confines of another nation.

I would completely agree - but my point is that even feudal governments operate largely according to how market forces work - whether or not the understanding of these things are anachronisms. Again, I have to refer you to the classic examples from medieval history - cash payments for rent, scutage, and labor prices as a result of the Black Death. The great changes in medieval history motivated people to write on subjects that they took for granted (like the price of wheat) but it reveals (IMO) that these things were understood and taken for granted by medieval people all along.

Which is why, when I last bought a dishwasher, I was able to lower the price by $60 simply by being willing to walk from the sale. The person selling is at an inherent disadvantage.

You're assuming that because he sold a dishwasher for less than his original asking price that he didn't make a profit. To me, this proves nothing about an advantage or disadvantage.

He can easily meet the needs of his existence without the extras that your money brings.

I find this statement to be extremely counter-intuitive (perhaps it's due to my lack of reading). It seems to me that a basic law of human nature is that people never think that they're rich enough. Maybe it's a matter of what you define as "needs", but a middle-class merchant wants to be an upper-class merchant. An upper-class merchant wants to buy his way into the lower-nobility, etc.

He might be more interested in his own research than in making Gauntlets of Bling for you. If he has any stature, he has others working for him to meet his daily needs. He is almost a miniature government in himself.....And he wants to maximize both his profit and (equally important) his social prominence.

IME the DM rarely has an accurate grasp on the financial situation facing the wizard because rarely do they detail more about him than the superficial details necessary to run him as a encounter in a DnD game. Governments of all sizes (miniature too) have need for money, in fact they often spend way more than they make (especially in the Middle Ages).

Yes, it seems very very unlikely that Gauntlets of Bling can be bought at cost (which are the 3E DMG prices IIRC), but the idea that the wizard can simply afford to pass up a theoretically unlimited amount of GP I find to be extremely unrealistic.

Finally, contracts are worthless if they cannot be enforced.

No doubt, contracts and paper money require certain legal apparatus to exist - I tried to make that clear before. But both of them existed in the Middle Ages (although the easiest examples to find would be outside of Europe).

If the king decides not to honor a contract, he has that right.

It's not necessarily in his interest to do so - a history of the money lending practices to finance the 100 years war would probably reveal that the King did not renege on his debts willy-nilly. While an NPC king run by a DM has free reign to do as he wants because the DM controls the consequences, real-life kings did not have that luxury.

And so does the Lord Mayor of Smallville. And the King will back the Lord Mayor.

Not unconditionally, IMO this is a huge oversimplification. In fact, this ignores the political complexities that are present even in a stable society. The fact is that waving around 20,000 gp in anyone's face causes them to do all kinds of things. Now granted, if you want to be a robber baron, you can get away with it in the short-term. Maybe in your campaign world, this merchant is a state-less, class-less, kin-less vagabond, but in the real world he was often the relative of a duke, or under the protection of a independant league of merchants or foreign ruler. I find the idea that a king would thoughtlessly break his agreements, or support a lord-mayor who does so, to be naive.

Your example of two wizards who both refuse to make a magic item I find equally unconvincing. Both wizards may very well be jockeying for influence at court. 20,000 gp would go a long way towards bribing officials and affecting the kind of social class that would allow me to enhance the prestige of my "mini" government. So the grouchy old enchanter scoffs at the 20,000 gp at his own peril - unless - and it always seems to come to this - the DM just fiats his way out of this. The wizard's rival may very well take up the comission to create the potion in exchange for 20,000 gp, and the next time the two are at court, the rich wizard is now wearing nice clothes, has servants with the finest manners and livery, and is friends with the Duke, a close advisor to the king, who really had a great time at the lavish party that rich wizard threw. In a realistic society, all but the most eccentric hermits would grasp this intuitively - it's only DM fiat combined with the fact that this "reality" takes place largely outside of the game that causes this not to happen.

 

[gizmo33]

I think you'd be well served to assume that I do too.

Ok, sorry. I'll try to stick to the subject.

Of course 'prices determined by markets' are trivial to find in history. Economic laws aren't artifacts. But prices determined solely or primarily by markets are not ubiquitous in the way that an American might expect them to be.

I think we have a problem with definitions here. To me, a monopoly is a circumstancial modifier to a market price. A custom that says that only nobles wear scarlet is a circumstantial modifier (and very well might make the trade a black market or non-existent). But those are exceptional situations, and without a defined social context - simply saying that "you can't buy a +1 sword, but you can buy a normal sword" makes no sense. That, IMO is just DM fiat.

So I don't know what we mean by "markets". I've been talking about the idea of a BASELINE - so telling me that you can get more money for a horse from a rich merchant in the desert is, IMO, beside the point. The exceptional situations are not the rule - and I don't really think they are in the medieval period of Europe - though I think those exceptions exist.

If you're going to design a game why not assume a baseline price for everything, then people can come in and apply whatever modifiers they want. But often times, I find that the reasoning behind why a wizard won't do anything for any amount of money to be superficial and unconvincing - it usually, IMO, is inconsistent with the context in which the wizard operates.

And this goes on in the traditional market rather than the Adam Smith one of idealized buyers and sellers and perfect information, whether or not you the foreigner are there.

So fine, consistent strength scores are also idealized and completely unrealistic, but where are you going to start? Throw out the idea of any baseline?

If someone refuses to sell you something, its not like you can necessarily go elsewhere.

Maybe not - but those things are specific to time and place, and would be campaign issues. Simply not listing a price with magic items is taking an exception and making it the rule.

I speak of the idea that we expect to be able to go to a grocery store and regardless of the season of the year find produce of a particular sort, when in fact we are not far from a time when not even the King could demand to be feed say ripe blackberries outside of July or its environs.

That's not the case in the Roman era, where goods were available out of season - where greenhouses were developed for Emporers for just such reasons. Granted though, these are all exceptions. If you want to sell wheat for a different price than in the summer then fine - but imagine the game system that does this - again, I think a baseline is a simple solution.

But those socially contriversial aspect like guilt over materialism to instant gratification is just the upper surface of the culturally trained expectations and its not even relevant to the discussion.

You listed "instant gratification" as a feature unique to the 21st century, which along with the other things you listed, I thought was an oversimplification. Again, we're talking about adventurers who often have 10's of thousands of GP to spend - I don't think the life of a peasant is going to be all that helpful. I ask you to keep this in mind on the subject of whether or not I'm "whittling down" the definition - because I think it's relevant to the circumstances of the game.

Sure there is. Everyone that tried to sleep near the dwarf has to make a saving throw to sleep because of the stench.

Everyone has slept in the presence of someone with BO and I don't think fatigue modifiers apply. That, IMO, is an example of the DM overreaction in order to make a point.

 

[mmadsen]

That doesn't seem like economics to me.

I think you mean, That doesn't seem like an efficient market with perfect competition to me, and you're right, but most markets are far from efficient and far from perfectively competitive, particularly outside the modern, developed, capitalist world.

With very few buyers and/or sellers, with lots of information asymmetry, and with local lords and guilds meddling left and right, a market bears very little resemblance to what one learns about in Econ 101 or experiences in modern America.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

don't necessarily have any business being put into a fantasy campaign thoughtlessly (thoughtfully adding these things is another matter).

Conversely, why are some people so quick to condemn any fantasy setting which isn't just like 12th-century Europe with magic and monsters?

 

[mmadsen]

Conversely, why are some people so quick to condemn any fantasy setting which isn't just like 12th-century Europe with magic and monsters?

Because such a setting is typically the naive product of ignorance, not a well thought out alternative.

 

[Celebrim]

Conversely, why are some people so quick to condemn any fantasy setting which isn't just like 12th-century Europe with magic and monsters?

Because they assume that it is just another thoughtlessly put together setting. This is prejudice, but its the peculiar sort of prejudice which is based on experience.

I would site Eberron of a setting that's not thoughtlessly put together but which is not 12th-century Europe. I would site the Forgotten Realms as a setting that is thoughtlessly put together.

On the other hand, it is something of an open question whether that matters. For most groups, the setting is unimportant and can safely disappear into the background, so it hardly matters whether their was any thought in the setting at all. In the case of the FR, I see a campaign world that grew bottom up in which having a setting where a particular sort of adventure could take place nearby was far more important than whether it was logically consistant for that setting to be there. And, thoughtless or not, for a particular sort of campaign thats very functional and hardly stupid.

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

Hi

This thread seems to have calmed down again, so I'll put my head above the parapet and suggest that anyone who is interested in a fantasy take on medieval economics might want to look at this http://home.comcast.net/~harnmil1/downloads.htm site and check out the article entitled HÂRNMASTER MERCANTYLISM