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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5536879" data-attributes="member: 4937">The biggest unrealism in that is the 'gold peice'.  The medieval peasant rarely saw a coin, but when they did it was copper and silver.  Since ancient times, a silver coin had been considered a days wages.  By the high middle ages, inflation had raised wages to the equivalent of 2-3 silver coins per day but brought for the peasant at least only a marginal increase in real wealth from the increased prosperity.  (The real money in the high middle ages was earned by the craft guilds with their legally enforced monopolies that let them fix high prices.)  So, for simplicity of calculation, let's fix the days wage at 1 s.p.  If this is a fantasy economy where gold is as common as cobblestone, then the days wage could be a g.p.Does it seem reasonable that a house for a peasant would cost three years of his wages?  Maybe or maybe not.  I don't find it too unreasonable, as three years wages is at least something that a family working together might save up over a few years, especially if we are thinking of houses as housing extended families of 12-16 people as they often did.  But, perhaps there are factors I don't know about that would allow for more accurate calculations.  The point is that 1000 s.p. is a reasonable cost for a house in an economy where the minimum wage is set at about 1 s.p. per day.  The problem you sometimes run into, as in 1e, is that Gygax sets the minimum wage at 1 s.p. per day and then sets the cost of a house at more than 10,000 s.p.  It makes sense in the adventuring economy, but not so much in the larger economy.The cottages and improvements on the land were often in theory owned even by the serfs.  In the Doomsday Book, for example, there are some fairly wealthy 'slaves' and there is documentation of nobles borrowing money from the serfs on their land because one of the serfs had become wealthy enough that they had more coin than their lord.   There are also examples in the Doomsday Book of women property owners and renters who had higher legal standing than their lower born husband.  The medieval system was nothing if not complicated, individualized, and baroque.  It was essentially little more than government through contractual obligation, and everyone's contractual obligation varied according to what they could negotiate.This doesn't change the cost of the house though.  If 50 of your friends (and their wives) come over for a house raising, the cost of the house still must include the value of the labor that was donated to its construction.  That right there would mean that the cost might be at least equivalent to 100 day wages (because any skilled carpenters would have labor worth several times the minimum wage), plus the cost of the labor put into the materials. Wealth is created by labor, but there is no free lunch.  Donated labor is still a cost born by someone.All perhaps true, but just because you dont' have a coin based economy (and in most of the middle ages you had feudalism precisely because you didn't), doesnt' mean that prices are reduced.  It just means you find alternative means of paying them than coin.</blockquote>

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