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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9766251" data-attributes="member: 4937">So like [USER=25619]@haakon1[/USER] I build my assumptions about prices from wages.  One reason for this is that D&D price lists are historically jacked up and highly unreliable owing to two different pricing structures developing.  The Player's Handbook price lists utilizing a gold piece economy and this is literally justified by Gygax in the text that the pricing situation may be assumed to being equivalent to purchasing supplies during the Klondike gold rush.  All the prices in the PH represent extreme cases of hyper inflation and scarcity and yet they became treated as "normal".  But elsewhere in the text, such as in the wages for hirelings in the DMG, Gygax inconsistently based wages and taxation rates and so forth not on the gold standard but on the silver standard of roughly 1 silver coin is a day's wages for an unskilled laborer.  The effect of this was to have prices for PC's be in gold but prices for NPC's be in silver, which gives the PC's among other things massive leverage to hire NPC labor cheaply as well as greatly confuse people about the normal prices for items when you aren't in the middle of the Klondike gold rush.  For example, I've seen published material suggesting prices three times higher than the PH prices, which is sort of silly if the explanation in the PH is true.1 sp to a day's wages allows for all sorts of extrapolation regarding prices, including doing something like 1 sp = $75 worth of largely handmade goods or services in 2025.  If you then project the 2e PH prices to that you get a private suite runs you $7500 a night.  While there isn't a perfect correlation between room services centuries before the present and room services now or even hotels in the sense we think of them if we are going to be perfectly frank, a private room shouldn't cost the equivalent of $1500 dollars in most cases.  And we can verify that from the scant price lists that we do have for items in the past.I reality accommodations were typically more spartan then than now and prices were accordingly lower than what we'd normally pay because these were "flop house" levels of accommodation.  This tends to equal out the general increased labor efficiency of mechanization so that a basic room for 2-3 silvers or a common room for a couple of coppers works out to be pretty realistic.Note on the other hand that every service, like the use of a towel or a pitcher of clean water or really anything that required the innkeeper to go to any effort on your behalf was probably extra if you weren't paying some premium price (a silver or two extra).  And further note that a big portion of the innkeepers profits came out of things like providing meals or fodder for horses or what have you, all of which would get itemized in a typical bill.  One way to simplify this is just apply flat cost of living fees of say 1 s.p. per day per level of the character plus the cost of pets and retainers and regularly have the players deduct living expenses without having to deal with every mundane cost and moment of the day.</blockquote>

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