Low Magic Campaigns?

[S'mon]

Normally, the fact that laborers earn 1sp/day while wealth is generally weighed in gp doesn't really matter, but when it does matter it becomes game breaking. The problem is that a PC can leverage the labor market, buying an enormous ammount of labor at very low prices. When that happens, the realistic thing is wage inflation, because if that doesn't happen you end up with the PC leveraging highly undervalued labor and breaking the economy. If wage inflation does happen, then then you end up settling with a gold peice standard anyway.

Sure - I base my campaign world economy off 1sp/day, so eg a PC Baron is spending the equivalent of 1sp/day maintaining his castle staff. BUT if a PC wants to hire 10,000 labourers to clear the muck from Trolll Swamp Dungeon of Horrible Death, it's either impossible or a lot more expensive. Generally, fairly safe short-term work may be 5 sp/day, dangerous stuff like dungeon torchbearer 1gp or more.

 

[S'mon]

This actually creates a greater disparity between the lower and middle classes than the already large wage disparity which existed in the real world between peasant farmers and craftsman, which was more like 3-5 times unskilled wages.
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Hm, slight miscommunication here. A peasant farmer with land is much much better off than an unskilled labourer! So well off, he can usually maintain a family!

Where the unskilled labourer IMC gets the BTB 1 sp/day, the peasant farmer typically generates more like 5 sp/day of food, flax or whatever, enough to support a family and to pay taxes & tithes. The skilled craftsman generates maybe 2 gp/day, eg 1 longsword a week.

Edit: To clarify - 1sp/day is the cost of maintaining eg a castle maid, or the minimum a landless labourer will work for in long-term employ; maybe farming the land of the wealthier peasant. A peasant farmer has land; he has to pay rent on it, but the crops are his once he's paid his tithes.

 

[Raven Crowking]

By that definition, a 'universal' price list can't exist.

True.

Costs are always relative to place and society. Historically, they are very often relative to the individuals involved as well.

BTW, last Saturday was Free Comic Book Day....A fine example of many publishers and stores giving away bread for less than the cost of flour simply because they had other incentives to do so.

RC

 

[gizmo33]

If the people of Bongo are the finest axe crafters in the world, and it costs them 10 sp to make an axe that they can sell for 15 sp, but they can make crappy hammers for 2 sp that sell for 6 sp; and the people of Tongo are the finest hammer makers in the world, but they pay 4 sp to make hammers that sell for 7 sp (although they can make crappy axes that cost 6 sp to make and sell for 12 sp), the odds are good that the world is going to be flooded with crappy (but cheaper) axes and swords, rather than finer (but more expensive) axes and swords. Unless, of course, there is some incentive other than money involved. That's economics at work.

Well, people need axes because you can't chop down trees with a hammer. So if the situation starts off like you say, then there's lots of hammers and few axes. Price of hammers goes down, price of axes goes up. I don't think there's really going to be a flood of crappy axes - enough that the demands are satisfied, and then merchants are going to be sailing around with shiploads of axes trying to sell them - they're certainly not going to buy more, which means the people of Bongo aren't going to make more because they'll find quickly that there's no one to sell them to.

So the prices don't stay at the levels you indicate if there's not an equilibrium between buying and selling, supply and demand. What I assume for simplicity sake is that the base price for an axe represents the equilibrium.

And economies that don't use money still have a sense of value. And for purposes of the game I think that the exchange rates according to a standard can still be used to determine how things go. If I'm in a completely feudal environment, then one noble might trade 10 laborers working for a week in exchange for an ox. No money is involved, and yet how do you, as a DM who doesn't live in that world (or one even like it) gauge whether or not it would be considered a fair trade? In my scheme, you'd compare 10 man-weeks of labor on a chart (with a resulting gp value) to an ox, and compare the gp values. If they're close, then it's a done deal. Again, no money is involved - but value is.

Where the disconnect lies, I think, is in that the modern Western world is largely based upon a monetary incentive system. Most pre-modern civilizations had other incentive schemes, some of which were far more important than money, because, ultimately, they governed what you could hope to gain more than the coins in your pocket did.

There's a question of perception vs. reality. The people living in medieval times might have perceived that their world consisted of fighters, clerics, and peasants. Theoretically, people served, prayed, and fought according to their station. However, in reality people valued gold, and that gold oftentimes, IMO, was enough to cause people to ignore their principles. A lord might borrow gold from a merchant beneath his station in order to pay for silk for his wardrobe. So at some point I think you have to decide how much you want to idealize the non-monetary exchanges in a culture - since it's fantasy, I suppose you can completely idealize it for purposes of the campaign.

Also, even if there are things more important than money within a culture, international trade exists throughout every period and time I can think of, and there are no social bonds. The example of the Mongol to Chinese trade in silk and horses is an example. There may very well be no money involved (instead based on tribute or allegiance) but these things are still judged on value since the two societies have no other basis to trade things on.

As an aside, can a person in a D&D world reasonably survive on 1 sp/day? Assuming that the person has even one non-laboring dependent, how much does it cost to eat and be sheltered per day?

A while back I spot checked the "Trade Goods" prices in the PHB against my notes regarding historical prices, using labor costs as a comparison. The 1 sp daily wage happens to agree with the relative worth of eggs, oxen, and wheat (there's alot of fluctuation in the historical prices, so at best I was looking at order of magnitude). I found the prices for flax and salt to be too high in the PHB.

The DMGs advice is that 1 sp/day assumes that the person grows his own food, sews his own clothes, and does his own work to maintain his household. There's some evidence in a book that I read on the English Manor that the "work day" for a peasant actually ended at noon - although I've only seen this in one book but it was a fairly detailed one.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Well, people need axes because you can't chop down trees with a hammer. So if the situation starts off like you say, then there's lots of hammers and few axes. Price of hammers goes down, price of axes goes up. I don't think there's really going to be a flood of crappy axes - enough that the demands are satisfied, and then merchants are going to be sailing around with shiploads of axes trying to sell them - they're certainly not going to buy more, which means the people of Bongo aren't going to make more because they'll find quickly that there's no one to sell them to.

My point was that market efficiency doesn't always lead to superior quality. The +1 sword is a superior quality to the normal sword; market efficiency often means that you can make more producing crap than you can producing a great product. This is why the world has many more McDonalds than it does Licks Resteraunts.

Also, this is why it is easier to hire 10 mercenaries than buy a +1 sword.

Really, though, reading your response, I have the feeling that we are now arguing more about definitions than anything else.


RC

 

[gizmo33]

Edit: To clarify - 1sp/day is the cost of maintaining eg a castle maid, or the minimum a landless labourer will work for in long-term employ; maybe farming the land of the wealthier peasant. A peasant farmer has land; he has to pay rent on it, but the crops are his once he's paid his tithes.

There was a class of person in the historical middle ages that they call a cottar. He had enough land maybe to barely keep his family alive, but him, his wife, and their older children would hire out their labor at harvest time and such (this was in addition to whatever work was required by the lord).

I'm not even sure I would class a head of household's earnings at 1 sp/day. I would probably say that 1 sp/day refers to the labor price for a woman (in the sexist middle ages) or teen-ager/child - or those classes of people that would make the equivalent of minimum wage in our society. A maid might fall into this category, she sleeps in the castle hall, eats leftovers from the kitchen, and gets a gift of new clothes at Christmas time. Such positions were considered prestige jobs in castles though, so I'd probably up the wages from those paid to farm workers (or at least effective wages once you count gifts).

A google search on medieval wages led by to a page for a "thatcher", and someone called a "thatcher's mate" (this is someone who thatches roofs, plus his wife). The wages, on average, were about double for the thatcher as for his mate.

 

[gizmo33]

The 1sp/day daily wage is an artifact of 1st edition. That in turn is an artifact of Gygax's medievalism. It doesn't make any since within the larger framework of D&D economics.

As I said in a previous post, according to my estimates the prices for the "Trade Goods" given in the 3E PHB are in the neighborhood of historical prices when compared against the wage price. The prices for weapons and ships and stuff like that though, are a lot weirder.

A coin in DnD is significantly heavier AFAIK than it's historical counterpart. Without that consideration though, I don't really think the prices are all the crazy for the core goods (trade goods and labor). Then again, PC adventurers are dealing in diamonds and weapons and stuff - and those prices might be way off the mark.

Another way that it is wrong is that anyone with minimal ranks in a craft or profession skill can earn average 10 times the rate of unskilled labor. This actually creates a greater disparity between the lower and middle classes than the already large wage disparity which existed in the real world between peasant farmers and craftsman, which was more like 3-5 times unskilled wages.

The Craft rules in the PHB IMO make no sense what-so-ever. Though I suppose they're convenient for game purposes. According to the craft rules, the "value added" for labor for making a longsword is exactly the same as the value added for making a gold necklace. IMO if you relied upon it too much, assuming that every good or service had exactly the same ratio of labor to raw material would yield ridiculous results and that's what the Craft rules appear to do IMO.

I'm not an expert here, but my understanding is that baring a few exceptional cases of coin scarcity or surplus, the exchange rate of 1 oz gold = 20 oz silver held fairly steady for thousands of years (before the mechanical mining of silver). Relative abundance or scarcity of silver to gold might effect that, but I'm fairly sure those are short term phenoms.

As I understand it silver from the "New World" made a huge difference in it's value, and that was one of the turning points also. I've read Islamic history somewhere that said that gold and silver exchanged at about the same rate and other strange things like that. At one point I came across the 10:1 value for a certain historical time and place that I don't recall. Since most historical prices are given in terms of silver, the value of gold isn't much of an issue to me.

 

[Raven Crowking]

There's a question of perception vs. reality. The people living in medieval times might have perceived that their world consisted of fighters, clerics, and peasants. Theoretically, people served, prayed, and fought according to their station. However, in reality people valued gold, and that gold oftentimes, IMO, was enough to cause people to ignore their principles. A lord might borrow gold from a merchant beneath his station in order to pay for silk for his wardrobe. So at some point I think you have to decide how much you want to idealize the non-monetary exchanges in a culture - since it's fantasy, I suppose you can completely idealize it for purposes of the campaign.

Again, as shown in The Godfather.

People value money? Check.

That money causes them to ignore thier principles? Check.

A senator might borrow from a mafia Don below his station? Check.

Also, even if there are things more important than money within a culture, international trade exists throughout every period and time I can think of, and there are no social bonds. The example of the Mongol to Chinese trade in silk and horses is an example. There may very well be no money involved (instead based on tribute or allegiance) but these things are still judged on value since the two societies have no other basis to trade things on.

How can something be based on tribute or allegiance with no social bonds?

Colour me confused.

And, I am still unsure how this leads back to you being able to find a +1 sword at book price.

RC

 

[gizmo33]

My main point is that the existance of a base price list does not dictate the terms of the market for magic items within a particular setting. The fact that something has been assigned a base price doesn't mean that the market for that item is freely entered by anyone, or that the item can be found for sell easily (and in particular on demand and quickly), or that under the circumstances that it is found mean that it will be available for that base price.

I completely agree with all these things. The base price list does not take into account all of the things that could modify the price. What I wish they would have done in 3E was give a chart of all the possible unforseen circumstances that could arise while buying a magic item (shortages, monopolies, laws, theft, fraud, etc.) Shelling out 30,000 gp for a magic item seems a lot less eventful than it should.

BTW - what rulebook are you talking about where WotC retracted some of it's prices? I would be interested in seeing that.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Shelling out 30,000 gp for a magic item seems a lot less eventful than it should.

Well, we fully agree on that then.

BTW - what rulebook are you talking about where WotC retracted some of it's prices? I would be interested in seeing that.

I believe he's referring to the Magic Item Compendium.

RC