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Message: <blockquote data-quote="antieon" data-source="post: 6958601" data-attributes="member: 6780238">I understand what skilled labor is, that is why construction crews generally have a foreman to direct those unskilled laborers on what to do.  This is exactly the type of laborer you are using to make small peasant wood homes that are primarily wood, with some rough stone for such things as a foundation and fireplace.  Obviously you would need more skilled laborers and masons if you were creating a temple / castle / fortress of some sort, but for the average peasant this cheaper construction would suffice.Let us look at a blacksmith for instance as I consider this skilled labor to see if the unskilled laborer at a single silver a day is in-line with my thinking above.  In this example we will use a chainmail tunic which costs 75gp in D&D world.  As there is no definitive time it takes to create one from historical reading, I have found various people online that have created their own chainmail tunic and are using them as an example.  The example in particular was a mail tunic utilizing butte style chain links (most common in history) as it was much easier to produce.  He used over 28,000 links and it took him roughly 200 hours to produce.  Say someone with more experience creating them could do this same work in half the time giving us a total of 100 hours.  We know most laborers would work from sun up to sun down.  In a typical ten day that means the laborer could create 1 per week.  Now we also assume that a skilled laborer would be paid more than an unskilled laborer. 75gp (cost of chainmail) / 100 hours of time = 7sp 5cp per hour of the skilled laborers time, without even considering what the raw material costs.  We could over analyze this thing to death but using just the 75gp for a chain tunic seems like that price list might be in-line with what real costs for hours of labor and raw material would have been that could be applied to the true costs.All in all I think 1sp/day for cheap construction labor is completely plausible and that a small house for a peasant could be created for less than 25gp.</blockquote>

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