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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Ben" data-source="post: 264358" data-attributes="member: 1396">Lets figure we have 500,000 commoners in this fake country making 1sp per day, and 50,000 artisans making 1gp per day.  Arbitrary figure, but we'll use it as an easy to figure base point.That's 100,000gp per day in this imaginary country.  If they work 6 days a week 52 weeks a year that's 312 work days.   31,200,000 gp would be the Gross Domestic Product.  Per Capita that's 56.72gp per person per year (The United States has $33,900 per person in 1999).   Anyways, the military budget is 3.2% of the GDP for the US in 1999.   3.2% of our imaginary GDP of 31,200,000 would give us an imaginary military budget of 998,400gp per year for a fairly well prepared but not actively engaged military.  Israel has almost 3x our military budget compared to GDP, that would be 3 million gold peices per year!  Yikes.   Now, 1 million gold pieces a year sounds like a lot, but a wand of fireballs, 5th level is 11,250gp.  That's 1.1% of the military budget for the year - ouch.   1.1% of the US budget is 3.1 billion dollars - lots of loot for one guy to be carrying around!!  Granted this is all comparison, but your "average" citizen (10 parts commoner, 1 part skilled artisan) who makes 56.72gp per year and contributes 1.81gp per year to the military budget means you'd need 6215 people laboring for 1 year paying taxes just to put that wand in the wizards hand, and that doesn't include paying him either!   Would your 5th level wizard find a job for 1gp per day?  Nah, you'd want far more then that and so would this NPC wizard.Anyways, that's all just theory.</blockquote>

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