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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3508687" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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.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. 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 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.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.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.Err.... if that's how you think these things are handled.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.</blockquote>

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