Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Humanophile" data-source="post: 1978991" data-attributes="member: 1049">I factor a certain level of "gouge the rich" into the PHB prices, but there also is an undeniable aspect of supply and demand going on.  Simply put, your parish priest only has a limited supply of spells.  It goes without saying that everyone is going to want some magical assistance with something on a regular basis throughout the day.  Demand far outstrips supply, so the cleric who's too friendly with his spellcasting ability will have to turn away far more people than he helps, which tends not to do good things to one's image.  Some sort of system to disincline people from regular magical assistance should be in place, and that's even before you factor in any spells the cleric might prefer having on hand for his own self-preservation.  (Which with D&D causes a lovely little feedback loop; the less a cleric has to worry about his own hide, the fewer spells he'll have available to help the community.)That's not saying that if you're a faithful member of the church, you won't recieve pro-bono healing if you have a bad encounter with a housecat.  But demand for magic probably outstrips supply by such a degree that casual prices have to be high.Untrained NPC hirelings tend to make anywhere from an illegal immegrant's to a third world worker's usual income.  Comparing that to the U.S. mandated minimum wage is like comparing apples and oranges.  For a better comparison, your average first level trained NPC earns nine gold per week; ten if he has the proper gear (which costs ~6 weeks wages, and pays for itself within a year.)  So if we say a starting salary of 500 gold a year, magic is pricy, but not in the "diamond studded yacht" sense of the word.Of course, we could also accept that D&D economics is out-and-out whacked, which is what I think most of this board has already done.</blockquote>

Verification