Value of a copper piece

[Loonook]

With a longsword as a luxury weapon, 15gp = $1500 looks pretty reasonable to me. 3e D&D has a bit of a problem with inflated armour costs, 1500gp = $150,000 for a suit of full plate is possibly rather excessive; some 16th-17th century plate armour worn by the high nobility may have approached that sort of figure, but in a D&D world those guys would be wearing magic armour.

4e D&D lowered the cost of plate armour massively, to 50gp - similar to Basic D&D's 60gp. This was done for purposes of playability rather than simulation, but if that is for a very basic breastplate & helm (3e 'breastplate') with the +n/magic versions equating to more complete and ornate suits, then it actually looks fairly plausible. At 50gp = $5000 that's still a fair whack of change. In 4e 1500gp/$150,000 gets you +2 magic plate armour.

The problem being is that we're not looking at 16th and 17th century style armors; rather, we are looking at armors from the 14, 15, and perhaps EARLY 16th centuries. Plate Armor really comes into its own in the 15th century and through to the 16th, but comes from so many sources during the period of the transition. Cheap munitions armor in plate came about in the 16th-17th century as firearms begin their dominance, but early plate armor? That stuff was expensive.

Specially fitted pieces of high-tempered, high-quality steel made to the wearer. It also includes all the accouterments (arming jacket, possible plated surcoat instead, tabard) that must be tailored. If you figure the labor spent on forging plates, fitting them to the wearer, confirming fits, preparations, and actually fitting it all together without the handy tools available to modern craftsmen could quite easily take a year.

The whole thing is that the armor IS Special. Plate Armor was a specialized armor, almost Exotic in its presentation and service when compared to similar solutions for the same problem (jack o' plates, plate "mail"). Plate Armor is actually assisted by the craft rules to prevent it from taking as long as it COULD to complete.

Plate requires at least DC: 18 to craft. A normal 1st level smith (as presented above) could make plate in about a year, which a few texts point out (based on orders from armorsmiths) is about the right amount of time it would take (~ 50 weeks). If you carry your Apprentices along for their Aid bonuses as in the above examples you can improve your lot quite a bit via Fast Crafting (increase DC to 28, 29 overall check with +10 Aid bonus, 81.2 gp/week improvement)... Your Plate Mail would be produced in about four and a half months. Two suits a year along with a pair of masterwork longswords and various odds and ends can make for an intense but profitable year. Since you're spending 81.2/week you could technically focus on making your two plate suits Masterwork as that 'odd and end'.

End of Year you have 2 Masterwork Plate Mails and 2 Masterwork Longswords for your troubles; overall cost: 1675 GP up front. Profit: 2255 GP.

Royal Armorers live QUITE well . As he probably receives additional commissions and helps to broker deals for others along with selling his Journeyman's work at higher prices (and good wages for them). As a bachelor he could support himself in lavish luxury, and if he is billeted or provided rooms due to his reputation (again, uncommon but not unheard of) he could be spending a good sum of that on other things. He may have more competent tools to assist his work, and could easily rise in society through investment of his additional money into ventures that may pop up.

It is definitely possible to have a single 1st or 2nd level Expert leave behind a legacy that can move his family up the ladder through his frugality. Living in a Common lifestyle and reinvesting into maintenance for his forge and wages (10% on maintenance seems to be about the 'round number' breaking point for the idea) can have 1500+ GP to work with.

If he uses this money to expand his workshop, pick up more apprentices and journeymen, and build himself up he could develop a small empire within his own service. If he can invest into various businesses he can produce a supply of income. An Inn runs 13000 GP to be built from the ground up, and would probably sell for less than that. With twenty rooms, ten stables, and a tavern a common inn can produce 2737.5 GP/year at 50% capacity for the year. If you figure a heavy loan of 10% interest with half down and half of its overall cash reinvested the inn can be fully paid for in a little under 8 years (I factored in the costs of everything too, yes ). With half again the amount given (684.37 GP) the man can reinvest into further properties. If he is charged taxes on the property (figuring our 25% tax/tithe rate) the business will STILL have that cash to invest while remaining afloat. And that is figuring a low amount of beds occupied in this metropolis.

There is plenty of money out there for those who are skilled in the D&D world, and a merchant could quite easily start a humble smithy.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[S'mon]

The problem being is that we're not looking at 16th and 17th century style armors; rather, we are looking at armors from the 14, 15, and perhaps EARLY 16th centuries. Plate Armor really comes into its own in the 15th century and through to the 16th, but comes from so many sources during the period of the transition. Cheap munitions armor in plate came about in the 16th-17th century as firearms begin their dominance, but early plate armor? That stuff was expensive.

$150,000 expensive? Or add the inevitable +150gp/$15,000 for 3e 'masterwork', making it $165,000. I don't know, I think that's pushing the bounds of plausibility whether we're talking AD 1500 or AD 1600, but depending on what it represents I can see an argument that it's not a ridiculous sum (unlike, say, 15gp for a lantern!).

 

[Loonook]

$150,000 expensive? Or add the inevitable +150gp/$15,000 for 3e 'masterwork', making it $165,000. I don't know, I think that's pushing the bounds of plausibility whether we're talking AD 1500 or AD 1600, but depending on what it represents I can see an argument that it's not a ridiculous sum (unlike, say, 15gp for a lantern!).

Just figure in the hours involved in its creation. As I stated before a year is considered 'about right' for a suit of plate armor after fittings and measures. The specific shape of the armor was extremely important to help deflect blows, make the thing work... And it would take someone knowing what they are doing quite a bit of time to get all those smaller pieces prepared.

For a 1st level Smith to do a basic suit it takes 44 weeks. 44 Weeks of focused work, with the (personally silly) 40 hr workweek. The Smith is making around 56 CP/hr of work. Excellent wage!

The average smith worked 12 hours 6 days a week. 3168 hrs - 31 CP/hr.
Fantastic!

Now... You only have this to work on. You probably have a floater for the overall costs of the materials... But do you have a buyer for the equipment if the original owner doesn't return for their commission? Plate Armor is a white elephant item... It is worth a lot, but some Smith in a thorp isn't making back his money for a dog's age as there is no one to buy it. Now if you can get it to another location you're good... But you also need to either suck up selling the thing at 1/2 price to a merchant... Or take it on your own.

Now you need to pay for travel, a guide, hope the Guild that controls smiths in your local city doesn't want dues for an out-of-town practitioner, gate fees, chance thieves, possibly hire a tough from your village to come with you... And your time away from the forge, of course.

Over the years plate armor was refitted, replaced, parts broken... The reason why tabards and other obfuscating covers were employed to not show chinks in armor. But D&D doesn't include maintenance unless you get sundered . D&D interpretations of armor are wacky anyways... But for our purposes yes, I believe that the cost makes it fit at that point where it is too high to be worth replicating without a guaranteed buyer, and in that space where the extremely high AC is balanced by its price.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Particle_Man]

In Canada they are phasing out the copper piece . . .

 

[Celebrim]

I acknowledge upfront the difference between a medieval economy and a modern one, but I was surprised by how much a copper piece was in practical terms. A low-level laborer makes 10 cp per day, as per 3.5 DMG 105 or PF 159 or 2ed DMG xx. So relatively stable over the editions. That's 3650 cp a year. A US full-time minimum wage laborer makes 15,000 USD a year, so a cp is about 4 USDs. That doesn't tells us buying power, but it should equate roughly to how they feel in the hands of the poor. Imagine how it should feel to your character raised from the slums looking at a pile of copper... that is, like looking at a pile of dollar bills. Tossing out gp to beggars should be like handing out hundred dollar bills. A longsword is worth 15 gp, or $6,000; you leave it in a saddle bag, you should expect it to be gone when you get back. A "mere" +1 weapon is 2000 gp, or $800,000; you leave that lying around in a temple of a LG god, I'm not sure you should expect to find it there when you get back. PF character wealth by level says that each 3rd level character is carrying 3000 gp, or over a million USD. In some ways, our comparison has long broken down by that point, but any way you cut it, that's 55 years of an average man's salary. If a bunch of thugs manage to jump a party of four 3rd level characters and kill them, they can live the rest of their lives with all the alcohol, food and whores they want even after whatever the fence takes.

The reason I thought about this is that in my Ptolus campaign, there's going to be a curse during pregnancy that horribly mutates the child (i.e., makes them tiefling, aasimar, or any one of a number of planetouched races I have or will make). There's a magical charm, such that if it's worn during pregnancy, the child will be fine. But I wondered how much to make that charm to put it out of the reach of the lower classes but easily feasible for upper classes. Depending on how low and high, I'm thinking 5-50 gp.

This has larger ramifications. One argument is that D&D's economy is creaky, and don't shine a spotlight on it. On the other hand, maybe pressing it would be fun. As narrator or NPC, why, yes, you can buy a periapt of wisdom + 4, or you feed and clothe most of the poor in the city. In Ptolus, I suspect there's a lot of bodies that may or may not be returned to the surface of people who decided their life was worth any shot at a million dollars. Maybe they had to hock everything they owned to buy a long sword, but they were going to try it.

Excellent topic of conversation.

Yes, there are differences in the modern and premodern economy due to industrialization, but the cost of handmade goods hasn't changed that much, so hand made goods can be seen as a pretty good marker of price even in today's economy.

The thing to keep in mind is that D&D has historically had two contridictory economic systems: gold based for PC's, and silver based for NPC's. I personally believe every DM needs to standardize behind one.

If you assume a gold based economy, which is easiest, then gold in the D&D universe is much more plentiful than in the real universe (which is plausible), and the average labor earns 1 g.p. per day in wages. Thus, a g.p. is worth about $50 (or so), and then a c.p. is worth about $0.25.

But if you assume a more realistic silver based economy, then a silver peice is a days wages and 1 g.p. is worth about $1000. In this economy, a c.p. is worth about $5. Note that if you go to a silver peice based economy, you have to fix the prices of everything because most everything except labor is priced in the gold peice economy. The gold peice economy isn't based strongly on labor, materials, or realistic economics, but on gamist assumptions about how useful the item is in D&D's default game of going into dark underground places, killing things, and taking their stuff. (To make matters worse, spotty information about historical prices was used to inform D&D price lists from time to time, so that some of it is randomly actually on a silver economy. One way to break the game is to buy on the silver economy, perform labor, and then sell on the gold economy. Profits will be staggering, and generally better than going into dungeons. Equally, labor saving magic is generally priced at its dungeon utility, and not at its economic utility. Again, profit is absurd.) The gold peice economy is sufficient if your game stays focused on that, but will be wildly dysfunctional if you game starts developing a real economy based on labor, trade, and so forth. Simply translating D&D price lists into understandable modern coinage is enough to reveal that.

 

[haakon1]

Did you adjust for inflation? An 1870s dollar is about 20 dollars today.

No -- that was my point. I think it's silly to convert from a magical medieval economy to a post-industrial service-based economy, but converting from magical medieval to 19th century is almost relevant.

BTW, Gold has inflated much more than silver -- you can get about 16x face value for pre-1964 US silver coins, but 90x face value for $20 gold coins that are pre-1934. (The date being when the US stopped using precious metals in coins.)

A pre-1934 $20 gold coin (just under an ounce) is now worth $1800. So if you want to get into modern values the gold in a GP is worth $1800/50 or $360.
-- Or, in words, that peasant laborer working for 1 sp a day is getting $36 in modern money.

http://www.coinsite.com/content/faq/20gold.asp

FYI, I like the AD&D standard of 20 sp = 1 gp. It's the same norm as real silver & gold prices in the past ($1 silver coins & $20 gold coins), and it's also the shilling to pound sterling relationship, pre-decimalization in 1974.

But I can see why the rules decimalized in 3e (or was it 2e?) for ease of math, but it loses a little bit of fun and history.

If I were more into it, I'd definitely add some additional coins to the loot piles for British flavor:
-- guinea, worth 21 shillings, e.g. 1 GBP + 1 shilling. I'd make it 21 sp in AD&D, or perhaps 11 sp in later editions. Typically a nominal amount, rather than the actual coin, for buying "fancy" stuff such as horses.

-- farthing, worth 1/4 of a cp, and just a small version of the later coin. 1/40th of a peasant's daily income, this would buy maybe a slice of bread or a turnip, whatever the cheapest thing on sale is.

-- crown, worth 5 sp (5 shillings). More often a nominal amount than actual coin, issued as a commemorative coin.

-- florin, worth 2 sp (2 shillings). Just because complex can be fun.

Not sure what to do with sixpence (half a shilling) and thrupence (1/4 shilling), so I guess ignore them. But it's fun to say stuff like 3 & 6 (3 shillings, plus 1/2 shilling).

 

[Loonook]

A pre-1934 $20 gold coin (just under an ounce) is now worth $1800. So if you want to get into modern values the gold in a GP is worth $1800/50 or $360.
-- Or, in words, that peasant laborer working for 1 sp a day is getting $36 in modern money.

The coin is more than a troy ounce, which is what the commodity is measured by... And run at 1642 per today's trading.

That coin is going to have 14.5 to the pound. So they're not the correct size for a D&D coin. The size is between a denarius and a florin by weight (41 florins/lb, 66 denarii to a lb)... However, the Denarii is probably the actual base as it is listed as 48 per Roman libra (the Roman 'pound'), closer to the 50/lb mark.

50 gold breaks down, and measuring troy ounces to the pound/D&D coins per lb comes to 476.18 per pure gold coin. As I stated previously the value system does not work well with the market flux of coinage and precious metals, but rather in the form of value per unit work.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[prosfilaes]

50 gold breaks down, and measuring troy ounces to the pound/D&D coins per lb comes to 476.18 per pure gold coin.

I don't regard that as an interesting comparison, given that over the last 20 years, gold has jumped in value 5x.

My approach to such things is to not look at details of no narrative significance too closely.

I think they do have narrative significance. They should color how the world around responds to the PCs. As I said at the start, this came up in thinking about the pricing of a magical item unlikely to be owned by a PC. It's going to lead me to leave more dead bodies in the dungeons beneath Ptolus; a spear and light wooden shield is a 5 gp lottery ticket. Perhaps whole neighborhoods will fund the local tough to come back and make them all rich.

However, a low-level laborer does not live by the same living standards of a minimum wage laborer in the US.

I know. Not many people will have a concrete understanding of what money means to people who live like they were in a D&D world. But Mozambique is about as alien as the Forgotten Realms; telling me what a cp means in dollars in Mozambique doesn't clarify anything for me.

 

[Loonook]

I don't regard that as an interesting comparison, given that over the last 20 years, gold has jumped in value 5x.

Which is why I posted about two pages worth of analysis of your situation and priced out gold, silver, and copper based on the silver standard (again, not uncommon among during the period).

See here, here, and here for how the actual coinage comes to the same use of a copper piece being worth around $1.17.

_________________________________________________________________________

EDIT: As a Commodity coin represents a certain amount of inherent value per unit. There is a possibility that Gold has the same fluctuations within a standard D&D economy. In the most well-known discussion of famine in the Western World:

And I heard a voice from among The Beasts, which said, “A two-quart measure of wheat for a denarius and three two-quart measures of barley for a denarius, and you shall not harm the wine and the oil.” (Rev 6:6, Aramaic Transl. to English).​

The 'measure' used for wheat (a more pricey but more filling grain) versus barley (cheaper to grow but not as nourishing). 6 quarts of pearled barley provides enough Calories for about a day and a half worth of nourishment (4632 KCal), and two quarts of Wheat is a little over that (5256 KCal). The wide discrepancy is due to wheat being heavier by volume than Barley and a denser, more nutrient rich mix. An average height (5'6") physically active male individual of 150 lbs who is working at a strenuous pace needs around 3000 calories at minimum... Though of course this is probably calculating 8 hour days of activity rather than 12-14 hours which was more common during the period.

A day's wages was considered 1 denarius (a silver piece) during the Roman period and that number stayed put in most areas for quite some time. This means that Famine was seen to have raised prices for bare survival of a man to a day's wages for food alone. Now at our current living arrangements from our previous discussions we just would calculate median incomes from that point and bring ourselves to our previous conclusions... The cost of food/day for our sample family of 6 would rise astronomically in comparison to its current levels,
bringing total costs to around 12 GP/mo for food alone, or $1404/mo in food costs.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Janx]

thanks to [MENTION=1861]Loonook[/MENTION] for doing a ton of research. Folks may not reach the same conclusion as him, but I suspect he now knows more about the subject than most of us.

Here's some thoughts:
if we're looking at money as compared to what poor D&D peasants make to poor people in the US, don't compare to minimum wage. The majority of people making minimum wage (officially) are high school kids. Most adults are making more than that, which is why political discussions about raising the minimum wage are moot.

A better comparison to modern americans are migrant workers (who are NOT making minimum wage) or people who are completely dependent on government assistance (welfare). Political exageration asside about poor people with fancy cars (as in fraud), real poor people getting welfare checks and food stamps are getting less than minimum wage equivalency.

Basically, if we imagine that 1/sp a day being the lowest paying job AND having to survive on it, what's the worst living conditions to compare to where somebody is getting money, is surviving, but not doing well at all.


Nextly, consider what all this thinking about economics is for. While [MENTION=6670763]Yora[/MENTION] had a point that a PC isn't really going to notice 3cp missing from his pouch, the observation that poor NPCs can't be handing out 5gp swords or even 100gp rewards.

Additionally, PCs riding into town are going to look like easy pickings to such poor people. Even a 1st level PC before he's left for his first dungeon is toting a lot of expensive gear, compared to what the paupers have.

there's been other threads on the topic, including ones where we calculated how much D&D money you need to make to afford to eat and sleep based on prices from the PH.

I believe the objective of any such effort should be:

• don't overcomplicate things or fret about that which the PCs won't notice anyway
• Come up with the simplest resolution/fewest changes
• Focus more on preventing abuse, than anything else

From that, I would consider that:

• it would be a lot of work to shift the economy down to silver/coppers being important to PCs
• it would be unfun to have every poor NPC be highly motivated to rob the PCs
• poor NPCs and commodity prices are out of scale with the GP economy that PCs and rich NPCs live in

A simple fix MIGHT be to simply upgrade the pay for NPCs from SP/day to GP/day. A regular working making 1GP a day isn't so envious of your 30GP weapon. One could surmise that the very poor (homeless, etc) are making less than 1GP/day, but regular people are "fine".