Low Magic Campaigns?

gizmo33 said:
Really, I don't think we're discussing this in good faith anymore.

Probably not. I tried to make the case that the market for magic items need not be as easy to enter as a retail shop in the modern world, or even the medieval market for wheat or even pepper, and that because of all the special circumstances involved individual transactions for magic items need not remotely resemble Adam Smith's idealized markets. I tried to suggest that buying a magic item would have more in common with haggling in Cairo marketplace or a by inventation only diamond auction in Amsterdam or an international arms market than it would to going into a discount store. I certainly wasn't trying to paint the middle ages with an overly simple brush or claim that the people of the middle ages were stupid, or any of the other things that get medievalists touchy.

Now if those assertions depend on a discussion about how the number of growing days in Germany effected the price of wheat in England or some thing like that, go to town.

Better yet, since I've wanted one for years, if the data on medieval economics is that good and you are that familiar with it, I would love to have a consistant, comprehensive, and accurate price list based on medieval economics say circa 13th century, together with the wages earned by laborers and craftsman of various types and realistic lengths of time required to craft goods using ancient techniques. Done well, that's a pdf I'd buy.
 

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mmadsen said:
The entire fantasy genre is an attempt to recreate the medievel romance.
That's simply untrue.

Is "Red Nails" not a fantasy story? Is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath not fantasy? Is "The White People" not fantasy? Is The Gods of Pegāna an attempt to recreate the medieval romance? How about "Ill Met In Lankhmar"? How about "The Testament of Athammaus"? How about Perdido Street Station? The Eyes of the Overworld?

Your definition of the fantasy genre is utterly, unecessarily, and incorrectly limited.
 

Celebrim said:
Probably not. I tried to make the case that the market for magic items need not be as easy to enter as a retail shop in the modern world, or even the medieval market for wheat or even pepper, and that because of all the special circumstances involved individual transactions for magic items need not remotely resemble Adam Smith's idealized markets. I tried to suggest that buying a magic item would have more in common with haggling in Cairo marketplace or a by inventation only diamond auction in Amsterdam or an international arms market than it would to going into a discount store. I certainly wasn't trying to paint the middle ages with an overly simple brush or claim that the people of the middle ages were stupid, or any of the other things that get medievalists touchy.

Now if those assertions depend on a discussion about how the number of growing days in Germany effected the price of wheat in England or some thing like that, go to town.

If this is what you're saying then we agree and I don't know what this argument is about. What seems to be the problem is that I'm suggesting that for game purposes, the best place to start for a price for goods is a base price. I gave the analogy to the Strength score, an unrealistic, but acceptable abstraction that somewhat models reality.

"Invitation only" auctions and similar things are fine - I actually do those kinds of things in my campaign. I think that makes a lot of sense and I'm critical of 3E in that it only describes the base prices and doesn't talk about modifiers at all. Monopolies, banditry, robber-barons, guilds, sumptuary (sp?) laws, barter - all of those things could have been helpful in reigning in the "Wallmart" sense of the economy of magic items. But removing baseline prices for a +1 sword IMO just makes things worse.

I'm not that interested in the price of wheat thing you talk about, in fact I've been saying somewhat the opposite this whole time. I'm trying to sensibly (obviously IMO) combine history with a workable system for a game. The context in which I was using historical data was to show the existence of something that I thought you guys were saying didn't exist - not to suggest a system for approximating such things in the game.

Celebrim said:
Better yet, since I've wanted one for years, if the data on medieval economics is that good and you are that familiar with it, I would love to have a consistant, comprehensive, and accurate price list based on medieval economics say circa 13th century, together with the wages earned by laborers and craftsman of various types and realistic lengths of time required to craft goods using ancient techniques. Done well, that's a pdf I'd buy.

The data on medieval economics doesn't have to be good though, that's besides the point - it simply shows the existence of a market and practices. I don't know how many Jewish bankers there were in medieval England, or how rich they were, but their existence, and whatever evidence there is, is enough to establish that there were many people of wealth that were not landed nobility, that weren't even of the dominant religion in the area, and they weren't beaten and waylaid for their stuff all of the time. Of course that happened at times, but at times it didn't happen or these families and people would have never accumulated the wealth in the first place! There were enough people from outside the nobility accumulating wealth in the Middle Ages that to write off the possibility that an adventurer could do anything effective with 20,000 gp in a quasi-medieval world I felt to be uniformed. Then again, I honestly thought I was open to the proof to the contrary, but I'm just not seeing an effort made to provide it, and yet the disagreement is vehement.

On top of that, we're not even talking about a Medieval simulation game - so the stuff I'm talking about has to be applied with care. You very well could be running a game where your 1st level PCs can't buy a longsword. But to say you can buy a longsword but not a +1 longsword - on what grounds? In most campaigns I can hire henchmen and arm them, without having to have a noble title. So while I (try to) use actual medieval practices to show that the time period was not as nasty and brutish and popular culture would suggest, my position on this is even enhanced by the fact that we're talking DnD.

And I'm in good company here - just look at Gygax's comments regarding serfdom and it's application on the strongholds of PCs.

Basically, I think that the buying/selling practices for magic items that people establish in their campaigns often come from a DMs desire to control the power-levels of their PCs. I also took exception to the idea that a simple analysis of a single buyer and a single seller would be sufficient in determining a selling price for an item.
 

gizmo33 said:
If this is what you're saying then we agree and I don't know what this argument is about.

Let's go back to the beginning and see if we can find out. I said:

"No. The thing is worth however much the PC is willing to pay for it, weighed against how much utility you think the PC would get from it. In your role as DM, you take on the hat of the NPC selling the item and you play him as if he was your PC (well, as if your PC had the personality and character of the NPC)." - emphasis added

This was interjected into a discussion you were having about the necessity of a price list.

I probably should have made it clearer, but I'm referring to two different things. The emphasised section refers to a metagame pricing. You are negotiating at a meta-game level, PC to DM. The following sentense refers to in game negotiating, NPC to PC.

The reason I'm adding emphasis, is I'd like to remind you that the suggested baseline prices for magic items are completely arbitrary and are entirely set by metagame concerns and not by any real world value.

What seems to be the problem is that I'm suggesting that for game purposes, the best place to start for a price for goods is a base price.

And I'm suggesting that a base price is not where you start. You start by figuring out what its worth in the metagame and then you price it according to that. A base price list is helpful only in the sense that someone hopefully did that hard work for you. (Except of course that they were often probably wrong, and they know it.) And of course, price - unlike in the real world - is a tangible quality in D&D and is tied into the physical laws of reality through the game rules.

Basically, I think that the buying/selling practices for magic items that people establish in their campaigns often come from a DMs desire to control the power-levels of their PCs.

Well, that is where the base prices come from.

I also took exception to the idea that a simple analysis of a single buyer and a single seller would be sufficient in determining a selling price for an item.

Ok. Not much I can do about that.
 

Celebrim said:
And I'm suggesting that a base price is not where you start. You start by figuring out what its worth in the metagame and then you price it according to that. A base price list is helpful only in the sense that someone hopefully did that hard work for you. (Except of course that they were often probably wrong, and they know it.) And of course, price - unlike in the real world - is a tangible quality in D&D and is tied into the physical laws of reality through the game rules.

"What it's worth in the metagame" ? I'm not even sure what that means, but if I had to guess I would think that would be a base price and yet that's apparently not the case.

How can someone be "often wrong" about a fantasy +1 sword's price in an imaginary world? If they establish the relative value of a +1 sword vs. a diamond, then I would think that would be helpful. The other factors that you guys have mentioned don't really seem to be hurt by, or even relevant to, having base prices available as a tool for the DMs use in determining the reactions of NPCs. So if you can only buy a +1 sword if you're a noble, then fine - but you're not going to buy it for a copper piece. Nor is the Godfather going to give you his mansion just because you promise to do him a favor.

A base price is a tool for modeling events - which is pretty much the core role that the rules play in DnD, right? But then you seem to say, "well there's no such thing as markets, you can't establish a base price for anything, that's an anachronism" I try to simply point that the historical records seem to show that as the population decreased as a result of the Black Death, labor costs increase. Now if labor costs were simply a matter of kings taking whatever they wanted, this would not have been the case. Are those labor values accurate? It doesn't really matter IMO - it's certainly enough to establish that supply and demand are affecting the price.

I'm sure there were particular landlords that attempted to keep their serfs tied to the land - but that really didn't affect the perceived value of the serfs labor, either to the lord, the townsman who wanted to hire him, or the serf himself. So a base price, established for that milieu, would help guide the DM as to how things are going to play out. You're going to simulate an economic environment in a game by roleplaying the decisions of millions of people in your campaign world? That's what it seems to me when it is suggested that the micro- situation (PC dealing with NPC wizard) can somehow be adjudicated without reference to the macro- situation (what all warrior-types would pay for a +1 sword, and what all wizard types would charge for it).
 

As I said before, if you want to look in detail at one mans take on economics in a medieval fantasy rpg, check out the Merchantyle article here http://home.comcast.net/~harnmil1/downloads.htm

As to the why’s of this discussion, you need to broadly consider society as well as economics. I don’t profess to understand economics, but lets start with the basics. We’ll use Sid Serf and Baron Corleone as our examples.

Everyone needs to eat. Without food, even Baron Corleone will die. Sid and the Baron can hunt for it, but game gets more sparse, and they need to travel further to find it, so Sid and the Baron fight over hunting rights. The Baron wins. Sid needs food, so he begins to manufacture it. He collects eggs from his hens, lets his pigs forage in the forest, ploughs fields and plants grain. The barons says, ‘hey, that’s my forest.’ By now he has built up a gang, he needs a lot of food. Sid and his friends come to an agreement with the Baron. The Baron will stop ANYONE ELSE stealing Sid’s food, provided Sid gives the Baron a cut. The Baron takes as much as he can get away with. He does not take everything, because if he did Sid and his friends would starve to death. Then the next year the Baron either starves, or works the fields himself. Somewhere here the words get changed, and Sid finds that some of his pigs, sheep and fields now ‘belong’ to the Barons. Practicaly, there is no change, Sid still looks after the same amount of stock & crop, but now, not all of it is his own. That, basically, is the feudal system.

Then, of course, you get to add the specialists, Stan the Smith and Mick the Miller are both useful to Sid. Stan makes a new iron plough and hoe, which lets Sid plough more land and grow more grain. Mick’s mechanical expertise grinds more grain more quickly, so Sid (and the Baron) get a little more food. They both need to pay these guys, Mick simply takes a cut of the grain he grinds, Stan too will take payment in kind. The Baron also likes Stan because he can make swords and armour. This lets the Baron put the squeeze on his neighbour, Baron Hardup. Faced with a powerful force, Baron Hardup negotiates. Rather than lose everything, he agrees to let Baron Corleone (who has now decided that he wants to be known as Earl Corleone) take a cut of his revenue. Earl Corleone must protect the specialists, because without them, the whole complex edifice collapses.

The above misses a lot of other specialists, the clothiers & dyers, who take the fleece from Stan’s (and the Earls) sheep and make clothes. The tanners and leatherworkers who, among many other things make vellum from the sheepskin so that the Earls clerks can make an account of his lands.

Note that there is no reason why any of these people should ever handle cash. Some will, but Sid probably never sees any, he has food on his table and if someone causes trouble for him, he expects the Earl to ‘send the boys round’ to sort the trouble out. The Earl will, probably do this, because if he doesn’t, the rest of his serfs will start saying, ‘why are we giving him our grain, if he won’t help Sid?’

The ‘merchants’ are the next specialists. These are the people who deal in cash and relative values of commodities. They move wool from the Earls hills full of sheep and in return supply the Earl with iron, because there are no mines in his fief. If wool is in short supply because of an infestation of sheep ticks, prices rise. Good for the Earl? Not if, as a consequence, the price of that new suit of clothes he wants doubles. He doesn’t pay? The merchant stops dealing with him, and tells his friends ‘watch out for that guy.’ Those merchants who do deal with the Earl offer him less, and often ask for payment in advance. Bottom line, the whole system only works so long as the majority of people have full bellies.

Oh, and Gizmo, you’re right, there has to be an accepted base price. Selling something for less than it cost for materials and manufacture is only an option if you’re starving, mad, or want to go out of business. What we call consumer protection legislation dates back, at least, to the Assize of Bread and Ale, which set the price of ale and the weight for a farthing loaf of bread.
 

Raven Crowking said:
My players gain contacts that often simply give them things because it is good policy for them to do so. Likewise, I encourage players to do the same to powerful NPCs. Think of The Godfather, where people give the Don things because they later might need his favour, and where the Don does things for future favours.

D&D economics (and politics) can learn a lot from that movie.

Or from Lord of the Rings (the novels) - the heroes gain at least as many magic items as gifts, as they do from looting barrow-wights (etc). I've noticed that players tend to value gifted items more highly, also. It's actually a bit odd that gift-giving is so not part of standard D&D when it's so central to the source material; I guess maybe because in swords & sorcery (as opposed to high fantasy), as in The Godfather, gifts always come with unwelcome strings attached...
 

S'mon said:
Or from Lord of the Rings (the novels) - the heroes gain at least as many magic items as gifts, as they do from looting barrow-wights (etc). I've noticed that players tend to value gifted items more highly, also. It's actually a bit odd that gift-giving is so not part of standard D&D when it's so central to the source material; I guess maybe because in swords & sorcery (as opposed to high fantasy), as in The Godfather, gifts always come with unwelcome strings attached...

An interesting observation, and not one that I'd thought much about before.

Thanks!
 


gizmo33 said:
If this is what you're saying then we agree and I don't know what this argument is about. What seems to be the problem is that I'm suggesting that for game purposes, the best place to start for a price for goods is a base price. I gave the analogy to the Strength score, an unrealistic, but acceptable abstraction that somewhat models reality.


Given that I've already agreed that, for game purposes, a price list is almost always necessary, I don't know what this argument is about either. :heh:

Unless it's:

I also took exception to the idea that a simple analysis of a single buyer and a single seller would be sufficient in determining a selling price for an item.

Can you example me a transaction that isn't based on a single buyer or seller (or group that acts as the same)?
 
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