# How much does an inn cost to buy?



## random user

My players are thinking about investing in a partnership to buy or build an inn/tavern. They want it to be fairly big (how many rooms is a big inn anyways?).  Anyone have any idea how much that should cost or where I can find out where I can find the answer?

The DMG (pg101 v3.5) says that a Grand House "4-10 room house is made of of wood and has a thatched roof" costs 5000gp.  Based on that I ballparked the cost of an inn/tavern to be around 10000gp.

Any help would be appreciated!


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## Arnwyn

Full details can be found in a Dragon Magazine article called "Ill Gotten Gains" (Dragon #268, February 2000).

It's all about investing in an inn (or shipping, tavern, etc) and gives all the necessary costs to buy and run the endeavor.


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## ichabod

By the SBG, 10,000 gp will get you an in with a kitchen and dining area serving 30 people, stables with room for 12 horses, a common sleeping area for 20 people, and 4 private bedrooms.

Of course, that's just the building. If it's already built in an area that attracts steady business, the owner will probably want more.


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## Elder-Basilisk

My goodness, that all sounds ridiculously expensive! It sounds more like the price for an estate or villa than an inn. One wonders how the one-horse town ever managed to put up a saloon at those prices. And, considering the amount of money that commoners and experts most likely make (between 1 and 12 gp/week), one wonders how anyone ever manages to open an inn. In the stories, inkeepers are generally wealthy folk in the town but they don't have 100 times the wealth of everyone else--or at least they don't need to have that much to start an inn.


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## ichabod

Well, the numbers I quoted were for a 5,000 sq. ft. inn. Around here something that big, completely unfurnished unlike the inn I quoted, would cost around $400,000. That's what, 16 years income for someone who is a modern commoner? At 12 gp a week, you make about 600 gp a year, so 10,000 gp is about 17 or 18 years income.


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## I'm A Banana

Well, consider that your average inkeep isn't buying an inn -- he built it up, and lives in it with his family. He's well-off because travelers are good income, not because he can afford a giant building.

Also, this raises the issue of not every hamlet having a tavern or inn.....leads to some interesting actions as the PC's try to finangle a bedroom for the night out in the boondocks.


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## med stud

Lots of inns werent that dramatic. It was someone who served food and beverage as an aside and maybe later specialized in it. This kind of custom still exists in Tanzania today; while the men are at work many house wives cook food and sell it outside their houses.

If a small town wants an inn and a special building for the inn they will probably do what farmers did until early 20th century; they would build it themselves from the materials available. They wont go to the local carpenters and hand up 10000 gp up front. Building was extremely expensive during the middle ages IF you wanted strange materials or lots of stone. Otherwise it was mostly a question of time and the "monetary" cost was the reduced production of the farm it meant to leave it during the building.


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## Phineas Crow

Using MMS: WE I got the following numbers:

Inn, 3 stories 4000 sq. ft. (1500/1500/1000)

Foundation: Stone
Walls: Wattle and Daub
Roof: Thatch

Interior Style: Normal
Exterior Style: Normal

Cost: 272,025 gp
Build Time: 160 weeks


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## Elder-Basilisk

Kamikaze Midget said:
			
		

> Well, consider that your average inkeep isn't buying an inn -- he built it up, and lives in it with his family. He's well-off because travelers are good income, not because he can afford a giant building.




I would imagine that's true--however, the question is how the inkeep managed to build the inn up. How much of the cost is labor, for instance, and how much is materials and land. If the prospective innkeep has enough money to live on for a while, I would imagine that he and his family can account for most of the labor. But that still leaves the question of how much money the original inkeep had on hand.



> Also, this raises the issue of not every hamlet having a tavern or inn.....leads to some interesting actions as the PC's try to finangle a bedroom for the night out in the boondocks.




That's certainly true. I believe the medieval demographics (including those in MMS) were such that only mid size towns could be expected to have an inn. Most of the time the PCs are travelling through the country they should be staying as guests in houses or barns.


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## Elder-Basilisk

There's got to be something wrong either with those numbers or with some other prices.

According to Sword and Fist, I could buy and outfit four border towers for that price. It seems like they should cost more than an inn not less (especially since they're mostly stone structures and the inn is wattle and daub.

For that matter, I could hire wizards or priests to build the inn using Wall of Stone spells for much less than that (at PHB prices).



			
				Phineas Crow said:
			
		

> Using MMS: WE I got the following numbers:
> 
> Inn, 3 stories 4000 sq. ft. (1500/1500/1000)
> 
> Foundation: Stone
> Walls: Wattle and Daub
> Roof: Thatch
> 
> Interior Style: Normal
> Exterior Style: Normal
> 
> Cost: 272,025 gp
> Build Time: 160 weeks


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## Phineas Crow

Elder-Basilisk said:
			
		

> There's got to be something wrong either with those numbers or with some other prices.
> 
> According to Sword and Fist, I could buy and outfit four border towers for that price. It seems like they should cost more than an inn not less (especially since they're mostly stone structures and the inn is wattle and daub.
> 
> For that matter, I could hire wizards or priests to build the inn using Wall of Stone spells for much less than that (at PHB prices).





Well, here is a breakdown of how I got those numbers.


Inn, 3 stories

Layout and Excavation
1st floor: (1500 sq ft x 2gp/sq ft)  = 3000 gp
2nd floor: (1500 sq ft x 2gp/sq ft x 1.1 height modifier) = 3300 gp
3rd floor: (1000 sq ft x 2gp/sq ft x 1.2 height modifier) = 2400 gp
Excavation: (1500 sq ft footprint x 2 cubic feet of excavation x 0.2gp per cubic foot) = 600 gp
Initial Estimate = 9300 gp

Materials
Foundation: Stone / Wall: Wattle and Daub /  Roof: Thatch
Material Modifier: 14
Material Cost: (Material Modifier 14 x Initial Estimate 9300 gp) = 130,200 gp
Base Price: (Initial Estimate 9300 + Material Cost 130,200 gp) = 139,500 gp

Carriage
Carriage Cost: (Base Price 139,500 gp x .2 flat fee) = 27,900 gp

Style
Interior Style Cost: (Base Price 139,500 gp x .6 Style Modifier, Normal) = 83,700 gp
Exterior Style Cost: (Base Price 139,500 gp x .15 Style Modifier, Normal) = 20,925 gp

Final Cost: Base Price 139,500 gp + Carriage Cost 27,900 gp + Interior Style Cost 83,700 gp + Exterior Style Cost 20,925 gp = 272,025 gp


All this is the mundane cost... a stack of Wall of Stone scrolls and a Lyre of Building could potentially reduce the costs greatly.


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## DragonLancer

Why do players always want inns and taverns these days? 

What happened to spending your gold on a castle or tower?


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## Phineas Crow

Elder-Basilisk said:
			
		

> ...According to Sword and Fist, I could buy and outfit four border towers for that price. It seems like they should cost more than an inn not less (especially since they're mostly stone structures and the inn is wattle and daub...




Just for fun I computed the S&F Border Tower using the MMS:WE building system, here are the results:

Border Tower
S&F Price: 40,000 gp
S&F Build Time: 4 weeks

MMS:WE Price: 45,509 gp
MMS:WE Build Time: 56 weeks


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## marketingman

It could always be for free if they clear out all the ghosts who have taken up residence.


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## Agemegos

Here are some price (in pennies, from a time when the common wage of day labour was a penny-farthing (1.25 pennies) per day.

*Building construction*

Church, 125’, stonework only 27,000
	”  cathedral 500,000+
Cottage, 2 storey– w. material free 480
Hall & chamber, modest 2,880
	–labour only, materials from estate
Hovel, from materials available 120
Wooden gatehouse, with drawbridge
	–with materials from estate 1,280
	–plus value of materials 3,840
Stone gatehouse, in modest private castle
	–with materials from estate 4,000
	–plus value of materials 7,200
Tower (in large royal castle) 48,000
Well, per fathom deep 18

*Buildings & real estate*

Row house (in York, well built) 1,200
Craftsman’s house, with shop, 2,880
	workers’ quarters, and tile roof
Merchant’s house, in large city 7,200
House with a courtyard, ” 21,600
Guildhall in large city 32,600
	(hall, 2 chambers, buttery, pantry, kitchen)

Divide these costs by 12.5 to get equivalents in D&D gold pieces.

I would guess that a small inn would be about equivalent to a merchant's house, and that a very grand inn might be up to equivalent to a guildhall. So I would suggest that a minimum for a decent inn (including real estate, materials, and construction) would be about 580 gp, and that a maximum for a very grand inn would be about 2,800 gp.

The folowing figures, also in pennies, will give you an idea of how much it might cost to furnish and inn:

*Household furnishings*

Basin & ewer 16–32
Blanket, woolen 15
Bottle 3
Bowl, earthenware 0.25
Candles, tallow, in the country, per lb. 1.5
	”  tallow, in a large city, per lb. 2
	”  wax, per lb. 6.5
Chair 4
Chest 6
	”  large, for clothes 24
Coffer (strongbox) 12
Cup, earthenware 0.25
	”  glass 2.5
Ewer, metal (brass?) 6
Knife, eating 2
Mattress, straw 2
Mirror, silvered 24
Padlock 12
Pillow 1
Plate, earthenware 0.25
Pot, cooking, ceramic 0.5
	”  brass, large 12
Sheet, linen 4
Stool 3
Towel 6
Table 6

And the following may give some idea of the cost of stock:

*Provisions*

Ale, per gallon 0.5
Bacon, per side 9.5
Bread, 1 loaf (24 oz?) 0.25
Cider, per tun 60
Cheese, retail, per lb 2
	” whole, 80 lb 40
Eggs, per dozen 0.5
Fish, herrings, per dozen 1
	” Pike, whole, 3’ long 80
	” Sturgeon, per barrel 396
Fruit, figs, per lb 1.5
	” pears, 30 1
	” pomegranate, 1 only 6
Gingerbread, per lb 36
Grain, barley, per quarter 22
	” oats, per quarter 16
	” wheat, per quarter 38
Ham, whole 16
Onions, 1 bushel 8
Partridges, per brace 4.5
Raisins, per lb 2
Salt, per bushel 3
Spices, per lb up to 168
Sugar, per lb 12
Wine, fine claret, per tun (252 gal.) 480
	” best, per gallon 4–5
	” cheapest, per gallon 2
To feed a lord, per day 7
	” a squire ” 4
	” yeoman ” 3
	” groom ” 1

You see that most of the prices suggested by game designers display an almost schizophrenic lack of connection with plausibility. No plausible business turnover could ever amortise an inn costing 272,025 gp, a figure that is nearly 500 times too high.


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## Kilmore

I'm with MM in principle (BTW, welcome to EN World).

What kind of adventuring party BUYS an inn?  Don't most parties acquire inns by getting poisoned by the gang-involved cooks and waitresses, bust out of the cells beneath the wine cellar, find evidence of criminal activity, wreak righteous vengance, and claim the inn as salvage?


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## random user

Kilmore said:
			
		

> I'm with MM in principle (BTW, welcome to EN World).
> 
> What kind of adventuring party BUYS an inn?  Don't most parties acquire inns by getting poisoned by the gang-involved cooks and waitresses, bust out of the cells beneath the wine cellar, find evidence of criminal activity, wreak righteous vengance, and claim the inn as salvage?



 Well, this is what has happened.  In short, through a combination of luck and fate they befriended a innkeeper and made a new drink (similar to a wine cooler) and new entertainment (basically karaoke) popular.

It's proven to be so popular the innkeeper is interested in expanding his business to a neighboring city.  While others have started immitating the karaoke, his brand is the equivelent of the "hippest" and he's trying to cash in on the brand name.  And besides no one else knows the secret of making wine coolers that taste as good as his does.

If it proves popular, he's hoping to actually start a chain of inns (he's making tons of gold right now because his tavern is packed and he's charging a lot for the wine coolers.  As a matter of fact he can actually charge a cover because it's so popular, which had previously been unhead of).  

At the same time, the party has been given a long term assignment that is intrigue related.  They're thinking that it would be a great cover if they could pose as investors for these new inns, and it would also give them a base of operations and a way to pass messages back and forth through the cities if necessary.  It would also give them an excuse to travel between the cities a lot, and allow them to ask certain questions under the guise of being concerned about their investment in the inn.

Anyways, that was their idea, so they asked how much each inn cost to build/buy.  I didn't have an answer available at the time, so I ballparked it at 10kgp, but then told them that I was sorry that I hadn't anticipated that they would have thought of that so that number is subject to change. 

From there we moved on (they wanted to go visit an undead ruins) to an adventure, agreeing to table the discussion of that till the next session.  So here I am, trying to find out how much an inn costs


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## ichabod

Agemegos said:
			
		

> You see that most of the prices suggested by game designers display an almost schizophrenic lack of connection with plausibility. No plausible business turnover could ever amortise an inn costing 272,025 gp, a figure that is nearly 500 times too high.




Are you sure this isn't a case of your prices for some things not jibing with their prices for other things? I mean, by the D&D rules, the inn I quoted grosses about 4,500 gp a year at an average of half occupancy on room and meals alone. Add in money from booze, probably their big money maker, and it would seem a reasonable business to me.


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## jgbrowning

Phineas Crow said:
			
		

> Well, here is a breakdown of how I got those numbers.
> 
> 
> Inn, 3 stories
> 
> Layout and Excavation
> 1st floor: (1500 sq ft x 2gp/sq ft)  = 3000 gp
> 2nd floor: (1500 sq ft x 2gp/sq ft x 1.1 height modifier) = 3300 gp
> 3rd floor: (1000 sq ft x 2gp/sq ft x 1.2 height modifier) = 2400 gp
> Excavation: (1500 sq ft footprint x 2 cubic feet of excavation x 0.2gp per cubic foot) = 600 gp
> Initial Estimate = 9300 gp
> 
> Materials
> Foundation: Stone / Wall: Wattle and Daub /  Roof: Thatch
> Material Modifier: 14
> Material Cost: (Material Modifier 14 x Initial Estimate 9300 gp) = 130,200 gp
> Base Price: (Initial Estimate 9300 + Material Cost 130,200 gp) = 139,500 gp




Material modifier is a percentage (14% instead of x 14) so continuing with that in mind....

Material Cost: (Material Modifier .14 x Initial Estimate 9300 gp) = 1302
Base Price: (Initial Estimate 9300 + Material Cost 1,302 gp) = 10,602 gp

Carriage
Carriage Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x .2 flat fee) = 2,120 gp

Style
Interior Style Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x 1.6 Style Modifier, Normal) = 16,963 gp
Exterior Style Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x 1.15 Style Modifier, Normal) = 12,192 gp

Final Cost: Base Price 10,602 gp + Carriage Cost 2,120 gp + Interior Style Cost 16,963 gp + Exterior Style Cost 12,192 gp = 41,877 gp

So the final cost for the inn is 41,877 gp and would probably pay for itself in 10 years... and.. i just got my computer fixed and just found out that MMS:WE is up for an Origins award!  

joe b.


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## Phineas Crow

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Material modifier is a percentage (14% instead of x 14) so continuing with that in mind....
> 
> Material Cost: (Material Modifier .14 x Initial Estimate 9300 gp) = 1302
> Base Price: (Initial Estimate 9300 + Material Cost 1,302 gp) = 10,602 gp
> 
> Carriage
> Carriage Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x .2 flat fee) = 2,120 gp
> 
> Style
> Interior Style Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x 1.6 Style Modifier, Normal) = 16,963 gp
> Exterior Style Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x 1.15 Style Modifier, Normal) = 12,192 gp
> 
> Final Cost: Base Price 10,602 gp + Carriage Cost 2,120 gp + Interior Style Cost 16,963 gp + Exterior Style Cost 12,192 gp = 41,877 gp
> 
> So the final cost for the inn is 41,877 gp and would probably pay for itself in 10 years... and.. i just got my computer fixed and just found out that MMS:WE is up for an Origins award!
> 
> joe b.





ok, that works better... I must of blanked out while skimming the materials step...

Congrats on the Origins award, MMS:WS deserves a nomination.


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## Agemegos

ichabod said:
			
		

> Are you sure this isn't a case of your prices for some things not jibing with their prices for other things? I mean, by the D&D rules, the inn I quoted grosses about 4,500 gp a year at an average of half occupancy on room and meals alone. Add in money from booze, probably their big money maker, and it would seem a reasonable business to me.




Well, 4,500 gp per year from an investment of 272,000 gp is a gross return of only 1.65% per annum on investment. Now subtract out running expenses. It is a crummy business.

Besides, how  do you expect it to achieve a room occupancy of 50% when it is charging the equivalent of 2.5 to 62.5 pennies per night? Mediaeval inns charged 1 penny per night for beds suitable for gentlemen (in the city: penny-farthing in the country), and a farthing a night for beds suitable for servants. In a rural inn you could get a lavish meat meal, including wine, for twopence. In a D&D inn such a meal costs at least 5 sp (which is three times as much) and more probably 10 gp (sixty times as much). How many people can afford such prices? And even on the basis of these grossly inflated prices, you only manage an annual turnover of 1.65% on capital. How you plan to get 5% or even 3% net return on your capital under circumstances like that beggars imagination.

People in a community where the wages of labour are 1 sp per day cannot afford PHB prices for meals and accommodation. Still less ale, which the PHB prices at five times its mediaeval real price. (ie. mediaeval ale cost 0.4 days wages a gallon. PHB ale costs 2 day's wages a gallon.) And even if they could, you are still getting nowhere near the turnover of 25-30% that such a place would need to cover costs (including maintenance), pay its keeper a wage, and return a decent interest on its capital value.


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## S'mon

Agemegos said:
			
		

> You see that most of the prices suggested by game designers display an almost schizophrenic lack of connection with plausibility. No plausible business turnover could ever amortise an inn costing 272,025 gp, a figure that is nearly 500 times too high.




My feeling too - fantastic list Age, many thanks!  I can use those for costs IMC, prob as silver-piece costs.  The 3e building costs are ridiculously high - 1e construction costs was a bit low, but they went totally overboard the other way in 3e.

edit: or as gp costs; been tinkering with the wages IMC.    Anyway the col thing is that they're consistent, plausible, and seem to have some connection to reality.

Currently I'm treating the D&D economy as similar to that of some modern third-world countries, with a rich, first-world, adventurer/tourist economy - where rooms in inns cost 1gp/night - and a poor, third-world, commoner economy, where wages are 1sp/day.


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## S'mon

ichabod said:
			
		

> Are you sure this isn't a case of your prices for some things not jibing with their prices for other things? I mean, by the D&D rules, the inn I quoted grosses about 4,500 gp a year at an average of half occupancy on room and meals alone. Add in money from booze, probably their big money maker, and it would seem a reasonable business to me.




I can see an inn that grosses 4500gp a year being worth 10,000gp, assuming that's ca 2,250gp profit.  I think 10,000gp is on the extreme high side of what a big 4-star inn in a large D&D city might be worth, but not impossible.  I would tend to go w 5000gp as the average value of a typical D&D large city inn.


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## frankthedm

DragonLancer said:
			
		

> Why do players always want inns and taverns these days?
> 
> What happened to spending your gold on a castle or tower?




players are too chaotic these days and the easier rules have lowered the bar for D&D players. Many just don't have the patience to deal with property in game. Also the older players may likely own property in real life and now thier fantasy is to go where they want rather than having too many obligations.


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## Sledge

Ummm this still seems rather over the top.  At around 42000 gold in labour and materials something is very crazy.  If the materials cost 1302 gold, then you are saying that it is equivalent to 26 pounds of gold, or 260 pounds of silver, or 2600 pounds of copper.  1.3 tons of copper is a lot of metal.  I would imagine that this is a bit high in comparison to standard D&D items.  To suggest that the labour is equivalent to 9300 gold is way over the top.  This building would, given 1 gold per day, take a ten person team 930 days or 2.5 years working every day.  That inn owner that supposedly built it with a couple of other people while he wasn't getting food etceteras would have required a lot longer.  To spend 13-25 years putting his inn together is ridiculous.
On top of this you have listed 29000 gold in "style" costs.  These costs are either labor equivalent of materials equivalent.  If materials then forget about it.  No one with 29k would bother to build an inn.  They would just stay there.  If its a labour issue then we have added a good 40-80 or so years to the build time.

I understand that D&D economy is a joke, but I expect better from what MMS claims to be.


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## S'mon

Sledge said:
			
		

> I understand that D&D economy is a joke, but I expect better from what MMS claims to be.




People rave over MMS:WE, but I have a copy and I have to say I wasn't too impressed by it.  I find my old (very old) White Dwarf articles by Paul Vernon on creating towns & quasi-medieval socirties still more useful.  They're in Best of White Dwarf Articles III, which you can prob get on ebay.


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## Sledge

The ironic thing here was that I was considering buying the product, but with the vastly overinflated prices quoted in it, I think my money will go elsewhere.  Truth be told I'm rather disappointed.


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## Vaxalon

Here's a little snippet that may inform your discussion.

Medieval-era loans, made on high-risk ventures like exploration and conquest, usually charged between 1% and 2% interest.

Low-risk loans usually got less than 1% net ROI.

Having an inn that makes 1% ROI per year is a nicely profitable system.


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## jgbrowning

Sledge said:
			
		

> Ummm this still seems rather over the top.  At around 42000 gold in labour and materials something is very crazy.  If the materials cost 1302 gold, then you are saying that it is equivalent to 26 pounds of gold, or 260 pounds of silver, or 2600 pounds of copper.




Actually neither. D&D gold is not equal to real gold. The first dificulty in pricing comes from the utter lack of reality in the monetary system to begin with. Our gold pieces are D&D gold pieces, not real life gold pieces. It would be much easier to deal with real money. Your criticism here is directed towards the D&D economic system, not at MMS:WE's use of the system.



> 1.3 tons of copper is a lot of metal.  I would imagine that this is a bit high in comparison to standard D&D items.  To suggest that the labour is equivalent to 9300 gold is way over the top.  This building would, given 1 gold per day, take a ten person team 930 days or 2.5 years working every day.  That inn owner that supposedly built it with a couple of other people while he wasn't getting food etceteras would have required a lot longer.  To spend 13-25 years putting his inn together is ridiculous.




Per my corrected pricing post 19 on this thread, the actual building time is around 24 weeks for a 3 story (1500 sq. ft. per story) structure around 45 to 50 feet tall. If you wanted it below 45 ft, the price would be lower.



> On top of this you have listed 29000 gold in "style" costs.  These costs are either labor equivalent of materials equivalent.  If materials then forget about it.  No one with 29k would bother to build an inn.  They would just stay there.  If its a labour issue then we have added a good 40-80 or so years to the build time.




Style is a rough measurement of outside and inside interior decorating. Outside is less expensive than inside, as inside assumes all the needed acoutrements for the buildings functioning.

But all the individual accounting aside, the goal of the building system is to produce a number that is reasonable according to d20 economics. 42k gp isn't an unreasonable number in a world where a pound of silver is equal to 1/10 a pound of gold. At lot of the problem in the inflated pricing is the D&D monetary system to begin with.

I don't think an inn that effectively generates an average 10% return per year is a joke. A commercial structure that pays for itself in 10 years isn't unreasonable. As to what MMS:WE claims to be, it's a guide to simulating a medieval-feel in a d20 fantasy world. There's much more to it than a building system that does produce fairly accurate d20 gp results. There's stuff for fleshing out cities, manors, and the aristocratic class, all within the d20 trope. If you're looking for something strictly medieval, I'd just go with history books.

Thanks for the congrats on the origins nomination Phineas Crow. We're really excited about just getting nominated. Recognition from one's peers is always nice.

joe b.


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## spectre72

What is MMS:WE?


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## jgbrowning

spectre72 said:
			
		

> What is MMS:WE?




A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe by Expeditious Retreat Press. It got Monte Cook's only 10, it won 3 Golden Ennies at last years Ennie awards and I wrote it.

Suzi helped.  

*ow*

Ok Suzi wrote _a lot_ of it.

joe b.


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## borc killer

41,877 gp for an inn is a good price.  This is the amount of money that one would spend to walk up to a builder and say 'I want an inn and here is the money'.  Which would never happen.

If a new inn was being brought into life in a town you would almost certainly have more than one owner… most places would be sponsored in some way by a merchant or a lord of some kind (just like the Bank is the owner of most American buildings… until you get your loan paid off… or do you all walk in and plop down $100,000 for a house?).  You can also get out of some of the costs by supplying your own labor (kids, followers, or elementals) or materials (cut your own trees, wall of stone, or elementals).

Also in MMS you would not have to pay the 41k in gold… if you are a cleric/wizard you can cast spells to pay for some of that or if you are a warrior/ranger/whatever you can server the local lord to help with some of that cost (assuming you are borrowing money from the lord).

41k is a good number.

Borc Killer


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## spectre72

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe by Expeditious Retreat Press. It got Monte Cook's only 10, it won 3 Golden Ennies at last years Ennie awards and I wrote it.
> 
> Suzi helped.
> 
> *ow*
> 
> Ok Suzi wrote _a lot_ of it.
> 
> joe b.




Thanks for the info.

I am looking for similar information on costs of constructions for our current campaign.

My Gnomish Monk/Psion is about to retire and start a fighting school after a rescent session which was almost a TPK (only she survived).

I have found a few sources, but none seem as detailed as what has been discussed in this thread.

She has quite a bit of money since she acquired a ring of elemental control (water) which was sold to a merchant from a a good amount of gems and a 10% interest in his business for the coming year.

In relation to the rest of the characters in the game she is quite rich  

Once again thanks
Scott


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## Sledge

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Actually neither. D&D gold is not equal to real gold. The first dificulty in pricing comes from the utter lack of reality in the monetary system to begin with. Our gold pieces are D&D gold pieces, not real life gold pieces. It would be much easier to deal with real money. Your criticism here is directed towards the D&D economic system, not at MMS:WE's use of the system.



Actually I am referring to the MMS in the context of the D&D economic system.  The price is only slightly less than an Instant Fortress.  By price comparison I find that 42000 is very very high.  If I can get a magical portable version for around 25% more then I will.



> Per my corrected pricing post 19 on this thread, the actual building time is around 24 weeks for a 3 story (1500 sq. ft. per story) structure around 45 to 50 feet tall. If you wanted it below 45 ft, the price would be lower.



So 24 weeks to build at 9300 gold equals 55 gold per day.  That means that you either have a team of around 50 or something very odd going on.  This surely is very obviously a problem.



> Style is a rough measurement of outside and inside interior decorating. Outside is less expensive than inside, as inside assumes all the needed acoutrements for the buildings functioning.



Wow so you're saying that the paint on the walls outside and the little sign are worth 12000 gold?  That is pretty amazing.  What are they painted with?  Dragons blood with Basilisk pigments?  Seriously that is 71 gold per day of building time just for the outside appearance.  At 19000 for just the inside decorating there must be some very exotic materials inside.  The question was not for an inn with furnishing lined in silk and stuffed with cockatrice feathers.  It was not for one that sported gold goblets and plates.  That is the price being quoted here.



> But all the individual accounting aside, the goal of the building system is to produce a number that is reasonable according to d20 economics. 42k gp isn't an unreasonable number in a world where a pound of silver is equal to 1/10 a pound of gold. At lot of the problem in the inflated pricing is the D&D monetary system to begin with.




Actually for one the value between gold and silver is very easily explainable.  I find the the 42k gp is what isn't explainable.  D&D may be messed up, but this is throwing the system out the window.  The average innkeeper that someone suggested built the inn himself simply could not do so.  He also could not arrange a loan of 42000 gp on the promise of an inn that may survive 10 years, after which (presuming no one is paid that works at the inn) he could barely pay it back.  The quoted 1-2% (which is a little off what I remember from my brief review of medieval and rennaissance university info) is still 4200-8400 gp at the very least.  This leaves a minimum PROFIT of 14 gp per day.  Given that maintaining the building and cooking food will generally take up all the time of the innkeeper and his employees, he will have to buy food and drink as well as bedding and stable supplies.  This good inn (2gp a night plus 5 sp for a meal per the rules) would have 5 rooms occupied just to cover the loan.  Maintenance and other supplies would also add to the requirements.  Given that the innkeeper only personally takes home 1 gp a day and the rest of his staff gets even less your still talking about an inn that is filled top to bottom with people before it makes sense at that price of investment.
I understand that the book is trying to get the feel of a Medieval society, but that doesn't require that all common sense and math be ignored in order to make an inn expensive to any character under 15-20th level.  Remember that characters don't even have 42000 in total equipment value until they reach 10th level.  To simply throw magic in and drasticly raise the price of nonmagic stuff does not create a medieval feel society with magic.  The idea is to make it more believable not less.


----------



## random user

I would be interested in some calculations vs some known figures to see how close it comes.  If nothing else, perhaps a correlation in prices possibly could be determined.

In the DMG, pg 101, it calls a simple house "this 1 to 3 room house is made of wood and has a thatched roof" at 1000gp.

It calls a grand house "this 4 to 10 room house is made of wood and has a thatched roof" at 5000gp.

It calls a mansion "This 10 to 20 room residence has 2 to 3 stories and is made of wood and brick.  It has a slate roof" at 100k gp.

It calls a tower "This round or square, three-level tower is made of stone" at 50k gp.

What does MMS:WE price these at, approximately?


----------



## ichabod

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Well, 4,500 gp per year from an investment of 272,000 gp is a gross return of only 1.65% per annum on investment. Now subtract out running expenses. It is a crummy business.




You're doing it again and I'm beginning to wonder why. You're comparing part of the gross profit from one company's prouct to the (accidentally miscalculated) costs from another companies product. This is an especially poor comparison considering that AFAICT, one of the products is based on a completely different economic system than the others. It like saying that since stone age New Guinea tribesman could never afford to stay at the Plaza, hotels in New York City are crummy businesses.



> Besides, how  do you expect it to achieve a room occupancy of 50% when it is charging the equivalent of 2.5 to 62.5 pennies per night




I can expect to do it because I'm not randomly changing montary scales on different parts of the equation.


----------



## Numion

I thought that interest rates were much higher in medieval times. If rates are that low, doesn't it also mean that rents are very low too?

EDIT: At least a little googling came up with much higher results for medieval interest rates: 12-30%.


----------



## Elder-Basilisk

It probably depends upon the time and place in medieval Europe. I know that usury (either the charging of interest or the charging of interest greater than a certain rather low (by modern standards) rate--I'm not sure which since I haven't made this a topic of my study) was forbidden by the Western Church. Consequently, non-Christians--mostly Jews as they were the primary non-Christian minority in Europe at the time) filled that economic niche.

If usury was lending at any interest, then the rates quoted would probably be typical rates of interest from Jewish moneylenders. If usury was lending at more than a minimal amount of interest, I would imagine that the rates previously quoted were what was approved by the church for Christians and that Jewish moneylenders may have had different interest rates. (And may well have been more willing to lend out money).

Assuming that both figures are accurate, it seems most likely to me that the low figures were those permitted to Christians by the church and the higher figures you found were those charged by Jewish merchants who were actually permitted to be in the moneylending business. In any case, it seems to me that those rates are artificially low and probably are a result of church prohibitions against usury. In locations where there were no such prohibitions (such as pre-Christian Iceland, for instance), the rates might have been higher--and those or the Jewish interest rates might be a more realistic source for a D&D campaign where usury is not forbidden to the majority of the populace.

It would also be interesting to find out how joint ventures were treated in medieval days--for instance a prospective inkeeper in an outlying town offering to go into business with a wealthy merchant in the city--the merchant pays for the majority of the materials, in return for a certain percentage of the inn's income or profit (or perhaps, simply for a set amount of money per year--in the medieval era, things that were supposed to be percentages like the various tithes were generally set at a fixed amount and left there for years; it's conceivable that such could happen in business as well). In an environment where usury is not permitted to most merchants, that type of arrangement seems like a potentially attractive alternative to loaning out money at 1-2%.



			
				Numion said:
			
		

> I thought that interest rates were much higher in medieval times. If rates are that low, doesn't it also mean that rents are very low too?
> 
> EDIT: At least a little googling came up with much higher results for medieval interest rates: 12-30%.


----------



## Agemegos

Vaxalon said:
			
		

> Medieval-era loans, made on high-risk ventures like exploration and conquest, usually charged between 1% and 2% interest.




Rubbish.

In the most peaceful and prosperous times, Mediaeval-era farmland sold for twenty-five to thirty years' rent, implying an interest rate on secure investments of 3.3 to 4% per annum. In disturbed or impoverished times purchase prices were lower, reflecting higher rates of return. A fairly common price of land in late mediaeval England was ten to twelve years' rent, implying an intereest rate of 8.3% to 10%.

The purchase price of urban property was usually lower in terms of rent: but that includes a risk premium for vacancy and fire and an allowance for depreciation.

The interest rates implied on merchant contracts was often in the range around 16% (incorporating a risk premium). Interest rates on personal loans were sometimes 25%-33%, reflecting considerable risk of default and the difficulty of suing for debt.


----------



## Numion

If Christians churches ruling is the only thing keeping interests low .. then maybe they shouldn't be in D&D? I know several fantasy worlds that have specific gods for trade and merchants. The temples double as banks in some cases 

So low interest rates in high-risk worlds like D&D settings would be rare. By high-risk I mean that cities are more prone to wanton destruction / takeover by evil overlords, demihuman pillagers, stuff like that. 

And not to drift too far from the subject, that would affect building prices.


----------



## Agemegos

ichabod said:
			
		

> You're doing it again and I'm beginning to wonder why. You're comparing part of the gross profit from one company's prouct to the (accidentally miscalculated) costs from another companies product.




Check the continuity. I inveiged against an inn costing 272,000 gp, saying that no plausible turnover could amortise it. You leaped in to contradict me quoting a turnover of 4,500 per annum.

I pointed out that such a turnover was grossly inadequate to cover expenses, let alone provide a reasonable return on the investment under discussion. The fact that that turnover was associated with that investment was your doing, not mine.

I also pointed out that that turnover was improbable, given that it was based on prices that are very high in comparison to wages in the same environment.



> I can expect to do it because I'm not randomly changing montary scales on different parts of the equation.




Well, I'm not randomly changing monetary scales either. When I have to compare real prices (ie. prices in comparison to wages) between to situations (which I have to do to make my argument that PHB prices for lodgings are very high in comparison to wages) I carefully compare mediaeval pennies (each 0.8 days' wages for common labour) with the slightly more valuable D&D silver pieces (each one day's wages for common labour).

The argument goes like this:

Common labourers in mediaeval times were very poor.

The wages of common labour listed in the PHB are substantially lower (when expressed in terms of food and especially lodging) than mediaeval real wages. Therefore the broad mass of people in a D&D word are absolutely impoverished. Therefore demand will be comparatively low for luxury (superior, technically) goods and services such as ale in taverns and rooms in inns.

But the PHB real prices (ie. prices in terms of wages) for these things are rather high (three times or more the mediaeval equivalents (in terms of wages, not pieces of money). Low demand combined with high prices suggests very low turnover. 

If you weren't referring to D&D wages, D&D prices, and the 272,000 gp inn that I was criticising, your ought to have made that clear at the point when you replied to my post that _was_ talking about those things.


----------



## jgbrowning

random user said:
			
		

> I would be interested in some calculations vs some known figures to see how close it comes.  If nothing else, perhaps a correlation in prices possibly could be determined.
> 
> In the DMG, pg 101, it calls a simple house "this 1 to 3 room house is made of wood and has a thatched roof" at 1000gp.




House, 450sq.ft., dirt/wood/thatch, flat 20% carriage, Normal style "appropriate for average craftsmen", = 987gp completed in just over a week.



> It calls a grand house "this 4 to 10 room house is made of wood and has a thatched roof" at 5000gp.




House, 1500sq.ft. (1000 on ground, 500 on top story), dirt/wood/thatch, flat 20% carriage, Tasteful style "minimum style of any successful merchant", = 4149 gp completed in just over 5 weeks



> It calls a mansion "This 10 to 20 room residence has 2 to 3 stories and is made of wood and brick.  It has a slate roof" at 100k gp.




House, 9000sq.ft. (3000 on each of the 3 floors), stone/brick/stone (here it's a bit different, when MMS:WE used wood it means the structure is using mostly wood for the walls, it think they mean to have brick on the outer walls so I'm using brick for the walls instead of wood), flat 20% carraige, luxurious style "expected by the nobility", = 78, 429 gp

Completed in 98 weeks. This is a bit off, I'd use something besides the "house" discriptor for a house of this scope. It would probably get done within a year which would be roughly as fast as the typical inn/tavern.



> It calls a tower "This round or square, three-level tower is made of stone" at 50k gp.




Shell Keep, 30x30 3 stories all stone, flat 20% carriage, Style is Basic "provides a small manner of comfort within a mostly utilitarian structure", = 35,248 completed in under 5 weeks.

We think the building system is very good at generating a respectable figure for structures. It also breaks down structures into several components so GMs have some guidelines to work with when their PC has unusual circumstances. We also explain how spells and items affect the process.

The building times were one of the hardest to determine. The tower above is going up faster than it really would while the mansion is going up slower. We went with the expediant "X number of gp per week" to determine the fastest time the structure could be complete without overstaffing, ie. this is what would normally happen if you have a complete crew. The tower is fast because castles cost mucho bucks so their gp per week is high, while the mansion is slow because houses are comparatively cheep so their gp per week is low.

http://www.exp.citymax.com/page/page/411181.htm has some filled out worksheets. On page 7 is our write up of Harlech castle and page 9 has some notes about the historical construction. I don't think we did too shabby.

joe b.


----------



## Doc_Klueless

DragonLancer said:
			
		

> Why do players always want inns and taverns these days?
> What happened to spending your gold on a castle or tower?



You meet way cooler weirdos if you're serving beer, wine and spirits, than if you're sitting in a cold, lonely tower.


----------



## ichabod

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Check the continuity. I inveiged against an inn costing 272,000 gp, saying that no plausible turnover could amortise it. You leaped in to contradict me quoting a turnover of 4,500 per annum.




No I asked you a question about differing scales, after you made a sweeping statement about game designers and their poor connection with reality. Then I pointed out that the inn I had quoted was viable under the D&D rules.



> I pointed out that such a turnover was grossly inadequate to cover expenses, let alone provide a reasonable return on the investment under discussion. The fact that that turnover was associated with that investment was your doing, not mine.




No, I was quite clear that I was talking about the inn I quoted. You are the one who mixed it up with the one quoted by Phineas. Not owning the book his figures came from, and realizing that it probably used different economic assumptions, I could not comment on the viability of his in.



> I also pointed out that that turnover was improbable, given that it was based on prices that are very high in comparison to wages in the same environment.




I already did the comparison with wages. Any first level character without intelligence problems can average 7 gp per week. At that rate, the prices are not a problem.



> Well, I'm not randomly changing monetary scales either. When I have to compare real prices (ie. prices in comparison to wages) between to situations (which I have to do to make my argument that PHB prices for lodgings are very high in comparison to wages) I carefully compare mediaeval pennies (each 0.8 days' wages for common labour) with the slightly more valuable D&D silver pieces (each one day's wages for common labour).




Which isn't necessarily a fair comparison. Just because you can draw a comparison between two things in two different economic systems doesn't mean that comparison holds throughout the system. Supply, demand, culture, demographics can change the relative prices of things within the system.



> The wages of common labour listed in the PHB are substantially lower (when expressed in terms of food and especially lodging) than mediaeval real wages. Therefore the broad mass of people in a D&D word are absolutely impoverished. Therefore demand will be comparatively low for luxury (superior, technically) goods and services such as ale in taverns and rooms in inns.




Given that any first level character with an int of at least 10 can earn an average of 7 gp a week. Manual labor earns a tenth of that. If it states in the PHB that the broad mass of people are manual laborers, I missed that. 


> If you weren't referring to D&D wages, D&D prices, and the 272,000 gp inn that I was criticising, your ought to have made that clear at the point when you replied to my post that _was_ talking about those things.




I made it quite clear what I was refering to in my post. This statement of yours on the other hand:



> You see that most of the prices suggested by game designers display an almost schizophrenic lack of connection with plausibility.




I found vague, and assumed you making a general statement about game designers, which would include the prices I quoted. My appologies if I misunderstood your admittedly vague statements.


----------



## dead

For the many years that I've played D&D it's been a constant bane working out how much such and such might cost.

At the moment I just say that 1gp = $40

From where I come from -- in the modern day world -- an inn would cost a minimum of $500,000.

So, $500,000 ÷ 40 = 12,500gp.

So far, this formula seems to be working but I haven't checked against ALL items in the PHB and DMG.

I know a longsword costs 15gp (from memory, I don't have the PHB on hand) which means it's worth $600. This may seem like a lot, but then again, how much does it cost to equip a modern day soldier? Thousands of dollars!

Bare in mind I don't come from the USA. The value of our dollar is about 70% of the US dollar.

I've just started this system -- it comes from Gygax's idea in World Builder (or Living Fantasy?) -- but there will probably be flaws in it.


----------



## Sledge

For the record, there is no point in comparing costs to modern costs.  Things are dramatically different in their proportions.  Housing these days is very inflated from even a century ago.


----------



## Saeviomagy

Just one thing...

lyre of building: 13000 gp.

Produces the effect of 600 man-days of work in an hour of playing.

Which sort of blows holes in most systems methods of determining the price of a structure, not least of which those that suggest any value over about 13,000 gp for any one building that's not of ludicrous size.

Mind you, that includes D&D's own systems.


----------



## micromaximum

Don't forget that building costs aren't the only thing to consider.  Land isn't free and there are definitely going to be taxes.  Then there are guild fees and/or licenses to consider.  The local underworld is going to want a cut and maybe even the local law enforcement, especially if you have a lot of trouble with brawls.  Then there are the employees to pay and you always have to worry about theft from both patrons and employees.  You also need to deal with suppliers and maybe even entertainment.

If the characters really want to own an inn, it's probably best to work it into the background of the story and gloss over many of the details like cost, revenue and profit.  Perhaps they can do some important work for a wealthy benefactor that rewards them by bringing them in as special partners.  They own an inn but all of the details are handled by their business partner.  Profits shouldn't matter, because a single adventure would probably result in greater material rewards than years of operating an inn.  Instead just let them know they stay in the best rooms, eat the finest food and otherwise live the good life on their share of the profits.  The rest of their money goes towards showing the employees and patrons a good time and in return their friends keep an ear open for interesting news and make sure no one surprises the characters on their home turf.


----------



## Agemegos

ichabod said:
			
		

> No, I was quite clear that I was talking about the inn I quoted. You are the one who mixed it up with the one quoted by Phineas.




Look at post #18 in this thread. That is your post, is it not? Look at the quoted text in it. The subject was very definitely an inn costing 272,000 gp.

As for the 7gp/week income of craftsmen, I maintain that when taken in juxtaposition with the 1sp/day wage of common labour (PHB p96) it is further evidence of the carelessness and contempt for even easy reality-checking that is common amongst game designers. Wage differentials in mediaeval employment were nothing like so wide, and there is no clear reason why a D&D economy ought to provide below-starvation wages to common labour. Nor does it make any sort of economic sense that labourer's wages should be so low if jobs as craftsmen are so rewarding and as easy to obtain as you assume.

You suggest that the economy of a D&D society need not be based on a broad mass of people ekeing out livings by common labour. You suppose that the vast majority might be craftsmen instead, their incomes consisting of at least 90% return on their human capital. That is an interesting (but problematic) model for a post-industrial society, but it is completely inconsistent with a quasi-mediaeval setting such as most DMs assume. If a D&D society does *not* consist largely of agricultural workers, someone ought to say so.


----------



## S'mon

Sledge said:
			
		

> For the record, there is no point in comparing costs to modern costs.  Things are dramatically different in their proportions.  Housing these days is very inflated from even a century ago.




Hmm, housing costs vary a lot depending on land scarcity & construction costs (wages and materials) but they tend to stay within the same order of magnitude.  I believe housing in UK now is about 2.5 times more expensive relative to wages than a century ago; OTOH a much higher proportion of the adult population is in work - mostly due to women entering the salaried workforce - and it's easier to get a mortgage; affordability over the whole country for a typical family thus hasn't changed much.

I've never heard anything like that 1-2% figure for medieval interest rates before, I don't know if it represents church-approved rates or was just made up from thin air, in either case it seems irrelevant.  I have one snippet of interest-rate info from the Classical world:

In the first century BC Lucullus, placed in charge of Asia Minor by the Roman Senate, made himself very unpopular with usurers by a decree limiting maximum interest rates to 12% - presumably that was considered a 'fair' amount.  I get the impression that real historical interest rates for private lending to 'respectable' borrowers have tended to mostly be in the 10-20% per annum range, several posters here have given similar figures. 

I think MMW: WE's figures for building prices are designed to tie in with the DMG's building costs - which seem completely arbitrary figures intended to make buildings expensive for PCs, so expensive that Daern's Instant Fortresses are reasonable housing alternatives for the minor noble(!) - rather than to tie in with the DMG's stated hireling costs, that appear to exist in another reality altogether.

As far as money goes IMC, I use something like 1gp = $50, 1 sp = $5, $5/1sp is the survival/subsistence wage for a single adult.  So I have to reduce the building costs - IMC 500gp buys a pretty decent, if modest, dwelling.  50,000gp buys a substantial castle.

edit: In fact, looking at the DMG building costs, just dividing them all by 10 seems to give pretty reasonable results that make some sense when compared to DMG magic item prices & labour costs.


----------



## S'mon

dead said:
			
		

> For the many years that I've played D&D it's been a constant bane working out how much such and such might cost.
> 
> At the moment I just say that 1gp = $40
> 
> From where I come from -- in the modern day world -- an inn would cost a minimum of $500,000.
> 
> So, $500,000 ÷ 40 = 12,500gp.




Conversion from real-world prices might not give perfect results (unskilled labourers in USA 2004 certainly earn more than D&D medieval commoners) but frankly I think it's one of the better ways of doing it.  Certainly much much better than the Monte Cook approach of basing everything around the PCs and their wealth-by-level table.


----------



## S'mon

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> House, 450sq.ft., dirt/wood/thatch, flat 20% carriage, Normal style "appropriate for average craftsmen", = 987gp completed in just over a week...
> 
> (snip)
> 
> ...We think the building system is very good at generating a respectable figure for structures....




 

OK, a hovel that takes a week to build costs **987gp** and you think that's reasonable?

Compare to 1650gp cost of a suit of masterwork full plate armour.  AIR I recall a contemporary account of the Black Prince in the Scottish campaigns musing that he, wearing (in D&D terms) masterwork plate, wore "The wealth of twelve Scottish farms on his back".  - The point being that Scottish farms were poor and the English relatively rich.  Still, I think there's a huge amount of evidence that the DMG & MMS:WE building figures are roughly 10 times too high.


----------



## CalrinAlshaw

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Material modifier is a percentage (14% instead of x 14) so continuing with that in mind....
> 
> Material Cost: (Material Modifier .14 x Initial Estimate 9300 gp) = 1302
> Base Price: (Initial Estimate 9300 + Material Cost 1,302 gp) = 10,602 gp
> 
> Carriage
> Carriage Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x .2 flat fee) = 2,120 gp
> 
> Style
> Interior Style Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x 1.6 Style Modifier, Normal) = 16,963 gp
> Exterior Style Cost: (Base Price 10,602 gp x 1.15 Style Modifier, Normal) = 12,192 gp
> 
> Final Cost: Base Price 10,602 gp + Carriage Cost 2,120 gp + Interior Style Cost 16,963 gp + Exterior Style Cost 12,192 gp = 41,877 gp
> 
> So the final cost for the inn is 41,877 gp and would probably pay for itself in 10 years... and.. i just got my computer fixed and just found out that MMS:WE is up for an Origins award!
> 
> joe b.





Out of curiosity, bringing up the cost of Inn's again, why does it cost 12,192gp to whitewash the walls and hang a sign outside the entrance, that is the main style of most buildings that were mid-level wealth. Now, I could see the interior cost being quite high, after all you need beds, tables, chairs, a bar, an entire kitchen to furnish etc. But that still seems extremely high...is the owner buying an innfull of exotic rare woods and commissioning the best crafters for this project?

Calrin Alshaw


----------



## CalrinAlshaw

S'mon said:
			
		

> OK, a hovel that takes a week to build costs **987gp** and you think that's reasonable?
> 
> Compare to 1650gp cost of a suit of masterwork full plate armour.  AIR I recall a contemporary account of the Black Prince in the Scottish campaigns musing that he, wearing (in D&D terms) masterwork plate, wore "The wealth of twelve Scottish farms on his back".  - The point being that Scottish farms were poor and the English relatively rich.  Still, I think there's a huge amount of evidence that the DMG & MMS:WE building figures are roughly 10 times too high.




That was for a nice comfy 1-3 room house with a thatched roof..with 450sq.ft. 
One thing I'm going to mention, most people who lived in tiny villages all helped each other keep the village in 1 piece. They'd help build a small home for 2 newly-weds, thered be a thatcher, a butcher (usually mid-wealth), maybe a tavern or inn, a smithy, then everyone else did for themselves.

Other than that stuff, a nice little 2 room cottage 15x30 or 20x22.5 for 987gp is a bit much, but that is for wood walls and such, which was above average.

Calrin Alshaw

Calrin Alshaw


----------



## S'mon

CalrinAlshaw said:
			
		

> That was for a nice comfy 1-3 room house with a thatched roof..with 450sq.ft.




Define 'comfy'! 
My mother grew up in a 2-room house in Londonderry in the 1940s, her grandmother had a 1-room house.  In US terms they were 1 step above 'poor white trash' in that they tried to keep the place clean, they had a field out the back where they grew potatoes.  Definitely not middle-class though.

Going back to the middle ages, the house as described seems maybe that of a 5-person peasant family with a decent amount of land (earning maybe 5sp/day equivalent in the countryside), or a skilled artisan in the city earning around 7gp/week, 1gp/day (per PHB craft rules).  I can't conceive of it costing more than 100gp* in D&D terms.  A really crummy dwelling, the equivalent of modern shanty-town shacks, might be worth 5-10gp.

*I guess in the city, land scarcity might drive the price higher.  x10 seems unlikely, though.


----------



## Agemegos

CalrinAlshaw said:
			
		

> Other than that stuff, a nice little 2 room cottage 15x30 or 20x22.5 for 987gp is a bit much, but that is for wood walls and such, which was above average.




I'll say it is a bit much! Even at 1 gp per day it is the price of three years' labour. And therefore the equivalent of £5 in mediaeval money. You could in fact buy a well-built row-house in York (including the real estate it was built on) for three year's labourer's wages. Or build two and a half 2-storey cottages (with materials from the estate).


----------



## The Gryphon

Saeviomagy said:
			
		

> Just one thing...
> 
> lyre of building: 13000 gp.
> 
> Produces the effect of 600 man-days of work in an hour of playing.
> 
> Which sort of blows holes in most systems methods of determining the price of a structure, not least of which those that suggest any value over about 13,000 gp for any one building that's not of ludicrous size.
> 
> Mind you, that includes D&D's own systems.



How exactly does that "blow holes" in the system, 600 mandays is only 85 labourers working for 1 week. They cost 59gp 5sp in wages, and if you feed them the equivalent of poor inn meals costing 59gp 5sp [what they're likely used to eating], that comes to 119gp/week.

In the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook [D&D's own system] it specifically states that labour acounts for 30% of the building cost under the lyre's usefulness (pg. 45). In my opinion you're getting a great deal with the lyre reducing costs by that amount.


----------



## ichabod

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Look at post #18 in this thread. That is your post, is it not? Look at the quoted text in it. The subject was very definitely an inn costing 272,000 gp.




I notice that you don't reference where I talked about that exact post. The quoted text in that post contained a broad generalization about all game designers, so was clearly not only about an inn costing 272,000 gp. And, AS I HAVE NOTED BEFORE my text in that post was clearly talking about the 10,000 gp inn I quoted in post #3.

But you are obviously not interested in any of these facts, as they have been stated before and you have ignored them. But you know, I don't know why I expected any different. This just seems to be the accepted level of "discourse" on ENWorld these days. And frankly, it's just not worth it any more.


----------



## Sledge

What I wouldn't give for a book that made a believable economy based pricing list and building costs available.


----------



## Agemegos

ichabod said:
			
		

> The quoted text in that post contained a broad generalization about all game designers, so was clearly not only about an inn costing 272,000 gp.




You are right, it was not. In the post from which you quoted I had listed a number of representative prices for provisions and household fittings. I invited a comparison of the ratios among these and their relation to wages with the relative and real prices of such items listed in the PHB (or, in my experience, just about any other gaming source). Incidentally, these absurd prices are what you seem to have based your estimates of the turnover of an inn ono.

But you're so vain, you thought the post was about you. They all have to be, don't they?


----------



## Agemegos

ichabod said:
			
		

> The quoted text in that post contained a broad generalization about all game designers, so was clearly not only about an inn costing 272,000 gp.




You are right, it was not. In the post from which you quoted I had listed a number of representative prices for construction, real estate, provisions and household fittings. I invited a comparison of the ratios among these and their relation to wages with the relative and real prices of such items listed in the PHB (or, in my experience, just about any other gaming source). The result, for anyone who bothers to crack a book, is that the PHB prices, relative and real, are absolutely absurd.

Seriously, look at post #15 in this thread. I made no reference to your estimate of the price of an inn. I made it very clear that I was referring to the 272,000-gp estimate. I didn't quote any part of any one of your messages. What made you think that post was about you?


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## jgbrowning

S'mon said:
			
		

> Compare to 1650gp cost of a suit of masterwork full plate armour.  AIR I recall a contemporary account of the Black Prince in the Scottish campaigns musing that he, wearing (in D&D terms) masterwork plate, wore "The wealth of twelve Scottish farms on his back".  - The point being that Scottish farms were poor and the English relatively rich.  Still, I think there's a huge amount of evidence that the DMG & MMS:WE building figures are roughly 10 times too high.




Gaming prices aren't comparable to real life prices. Partly because depending upon what time and where you discuss, the prices vary massively from location to location while the gaming system attempts to normalize these massive variations (The price of food/land/buildings in New York City is much greater than in rural New Mexico--as a game designer how should one normalize these prices in a role-playing game that takes place in modern times?) and partly because prices are set in relation to PC's, not to create an economic simulation. This is the inherant problem with comparisons of economics from real life and role-playing games.

I don't think my pricing is off by much. If it was ten times too high that means the innkeeper will be able to pay off his (now 4.2k instead of 42k) investment the *second year* of running his inn (assuming 4k a year income or 1/2 occupancy). That seems way to fast for me. Under my pricing it will take about 20-25 average years during which he'll earn a good wage as well.

Given that an average cook or sailer makes around 10gp a week (average profession check), it takes them about two years to buy the 987gp house. It would take them two weeks of work if you reduced by a factor of 10. (_Edit: please note the bad math. *sigh*.. it should actually be 10 weeks_)



			
				Agemegos said:
			
		

> As for the 7gp/week income of craftsmen, I maintain that when taken in juxtaposition with the 1sp/day wage of common labour (PHB p96) it is further evidence of the carelessness and contempt for even easy reality-checking that is common amongst game designers. Wage differentials in mediaeval employment were nothing like so wide, and there is no clear reason why a D&D economy ought to provide below-starvation wages to common labour. Nor does it make any sort of economic sense that labourer's wages should be so low if jobs as craftsmen are so rewarding and as easy to obtain as you assume.




That's far from starvation level. 1 sp a day buys a pound of flour and a chicken for 4 cp -- leaving 6 cp (60% of income) for other expenses. Also, laborer's wages can make sense economically because much of a craftman's earnings are controled by guilds and there are large barriers to competative entry. A 10 to one ratio seems a bit high, but again how important is a higher level of accuracy for the intent of the game? And of course, starvation wasn't uncommon in the historical period.

I think one of the problems with historical conversion is our natural inclination to assume that a cp, sp, or gp, in the game has any relation to a RL coin of the same metal. The buying power of these metals in the D&D world, as well as expect wages and returns are funtioning indepentently of any RL valuation of metal and only function in relation to cost of items in the PH and DMG. A British pound isn't worth the same amount of metal in D&D as it is in real life. It's not worth a pound of D&D silver (5 gp) because the purchasing power of an equivilent amount of metal in both worlds is different. I'm kind of bumbling around the point here, but the value of the metal in the game _isn't_ related to anything but the value of goods in the game. We can try and draw comparables, but I find it best to consider cp, sp, and gp as widgets, which distances my natural inclination to assume a value realtionship between the metals. I view D&D coinage has having no comparable value in relation to real world metals.

If the arguement is one of "The D&D system doesn't make economic sense" I think we'll all agree, Yes, it doesn't. And that's because a Hammer is a really bad Saw. It's not designed to do that. But once that's out of the way, using that system to simulate results for roleplaying purposes should be the next point of discussion. The dificulties of modeling even a modern building system are daunting (try getting 10 quotes for a specialty built home to see how there's great variation even in the same modern city) and modeling a D&D system is even more so because many things (magic items in particular) are priced according to a particular use to an adventuring group for killing monsters. Just because an _Instant Fortress_ "costs" as much as an inn, doesn't mean that either concepts aren't valid. There's just two methods of accounting *with different goals* going on that unfortunately, use the same coinage.

MMS:WE is %100 OGC, so if anyone wants to modify it to suit their tastes and publish they can. I know that starting from what I've created and modifying it to suit an individual campaign is much easier than starting from scratch. I think MMS:WE produces usable results, both in the building system and the economic simulator.

joe b.


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## dead

S'mon said:
			
		

> Conversion from real-world prices might not give perfect results (unskilled labourers in USA 2004 certainly earn more than D&D medieval commoners) but frankly I think it's one of the better ways of doing it.  Certainly much much better than the Monte Cook approach of basing everything around the PCs and their wealth-by-level table.




That's exactly right, S'mon. It makes no "sense" to base prices on modern equivalents but it's a damn good way of solving problems in the game. So far I've had no problems with the mechanic. It has in no way sullied the believability of my medieval campaign world.


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## Saeviomagy

The Gryphon said:
			
		

> How exactly does that "blow holes" in the system, 600 mandays is only 85 labourers working for 1 week. They cost 59gp 5sp in wages, and if you feed them the equivalent of poor inn meals costing 59gp 5sp [what they're likely used to eating], that comes to 119gp/week.



Only 85 labourers for a week! And you did it in an hour! And you're not even talented with the device. Not too long ago people were claiming that the innkeep would build his inn himself.

Now it gets done in an hour.


> In the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook [D&D's own system] it specifically states that labour acounts for 30% of the building cost under the lyre's usefulness (pg. 45). In my opinion you're getting a great deal with the lyre reducing costs by that amount.




I'll admit that the land is going to cost a fair amount, but you can't say for certain that other resources are going to be unavailable.

If you've got a block of land in a forest - is labour really only 30% of the cost of building a log cabin?

If you're putting something up in a quarry - is labour only 30%?


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## Agemegos

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> I don't think my pricing is off by much. If it was ten times too high that means the innkeeper will be able to pay off his (now 4.2k instead of 42k) investment the *second year* of running his inn (assuming 4k a year income or 1/2 occupancy).




Now you are assuming that all the revenue is gross profit. You ought to allow for expenses, such as wages and maintenance.

And I still doubt that the revenue you assume makes sense, because the price of accommodation is very high in comparison to wages.



> That's far from starvation level. 1 sp a day buys a pound of flour and a chicken for 4 cp -- leaving 6 cp (60% of income) for other expenses.




You have the advantage in defending a list of highly erratic prices that you are able to choose the ones that are unreasonably low and ignore the ones that are unreasonably high. A mediaeval worker would not have been able to afford a chicken on a day's wages. On the other hand, he would have been able to afford two and a half gallons of ale rather than half a gallon. Or his wages would have covered five nights' accommodation in an inn (for the standards suitable for a gentleman's servant), instead of half a night. Or 1,000 days' wages would have built twenty-five two-storey cottages, instead of one simple house.

The touchstone for costs of living in a quasi-mediaeval setting is bread. A mediaeval labourer was paid the (typical) price of five 24-oz loaves of bread per day, or 7.5 pounds of bread. A labourer in D&D is paid the price of 5 half-pound loaves per day, or 2.5 pounds of bread.



> I think one of the problems with historical conversion is our natural inclination to assume that a cp, sp, or gp, in the game has any relation to a RL coin of the same metal.




That is a problem, but I am consistently careful to avoid it by always working in terms of labour-prices.



> If the arguement is one of "The D&D system doesn't make economic sense" I think we'll all agree, Yes, it doesn't. And that's because a Hammer is a really bad Saw. It's not designed to do that. But once that's out of the way, using that system to simulate results for roleplaying purposes should be the next point of discussion.




It should. Now, what role-playing purpose is served by making chickens eight times too cheap and bread three times too expensive?


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## Alchemist

This seems like a good place for me to jump in.  I think you're both on unstable ground. 


			
				Agemegos said:
			
		

> Now, what role-playing purpose is served by making chickens eight times too cheap and bread three times too expensive?




The one that involves role-playing what are, in essence, rock stars.  We aren't playing a game of peasants; this is a game that assumes the characters are far and away beyond any reasonable approximation or simulation of a working, stable economic system, and those characters don't care what the price of bread vs chicken is.  They lay out 10gp for the King's Meal and call it good before retiring to the most expensive room (2gp, by the book, perhaps as much as 20gp for the "penthouse at a Vegas casino" equivalent) in the place.  The gap in earning ability presented between characters and normal people makes me wonder why everybody dosen't take up arms and have a go at adventuring.   Seriously.  Adventurers take in windfalls in a single adventure that rival the GDP of small towns.  Who can talk of reasonable in the face of that?

I think there is a fundamental flaw in this entire argument-there is no economic system that can be expected to work as we would expect (ie: reasonably) with the numbers given in the core books.  The proliferation of magics should reasonably make the economy more modern than feudal, so comparisons to quotes from the economy of France in 1110 (or whatever) dosen't really jive with me.  Who cares what the yield of a 12th century farm was when plant growth is available?  You get my drift, I'm sure.  A less than holistic approach at economy building is wasted time, IMHO.

There are 2 options in my mind:

1.   Book prices reflect what rich out-of-towners (read: roaming adventurers) would pay, not what the average person pays for meals, homes and stays at the inn; Typical people (~3rd level IMC) make between 3sp and 3gp per day, depending on their skillset.  Obviously, that dosen't feed, clothe and shelter his family with the prices given.  If you assume everybody is 1st level for some silly reason, that nets them 1sp-1gp/day.  Either way, the prices are buggered.  Perhaps dividing by 10 for stuff in the PHB might be a good start.

2.   Either that, or the quoted working wage is too low and the prices are right.  In that case, multiplying the wage would be the way to go.  It's all the same in the end, until we throw the adventurers (who have *thousands* of gp to equip with in the span of only a few levels) into the mix.

Somebody else has already said this in different words, but in the end the problem is that the prices listed are somehow balanced against characters who measure value in how much it improves their dungeon crawling abilities, not normal people who just want to have a life.  Any attempt to balance normal people (and normal economic forces) against the exceptional is admirable (I have and like MMS:WE) and works as long as one dosen't think about it too hard, like much of the rest of the game.  If one wants versimilitude in their economy, they probably shouldn't leave thousands of gp in wealth laying around for characters to find and flood markets with.

Blah.  That probably ranged off topic a bit, but I needed to dump it all out.  You may fire when ready.


----------



## Mark Plemmons

Good thread.  

Personally, I like to keep my prices as simple and as close to what I consider reasonable as possible.

For example, in dungeon or castle building, my usual guideline is that the base cost of a plain, undecorated 10 foot-by-10 foot stone room equals 100 gp, including labor and materials.  Of course, from there you can add tons of modifiers, if you want to.  That's where most of the arguing comes in.  

I'd say a mostly fully furnished, standard wooden inn would cost about 2,000-3,000 gp, while a grand and fancy inn might be 10,000-25,000 gp.

Then there's the rent you need to charge, which is gonna depend on the rooms you have.  This would vary from 1 sp to 2 gp/day, since prices vary depending on availability and the cost of living in the local economy - which of course also varies depending on campaign setting...   

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous innkeepers could vary prices depending on the apparent wealth or race of their patrons.  They might not even be above trying to scam an extra gold piece or two by gouging wealthy adventurers (whom they believe will probably die in their next dungeon foray anyway).

In very poor areas, one might expect to pay about half the standard cost (and expect leaky roofs, rats, and serious drafts), while in wealthy areas a character might expect to pay as much as four times the standard cost.  The aptly-named “common rooms” are similar to barracks, and anyone who pays their entrance fee simply beds down there for the night.  Semi-private rooms would have two to four beds (often in bunk style) and would be rented for a flat cost, no matter how many people stay there.  Semi-private rooms have locks.  One private room is also rented for the flat cost, not by the number of individuals staying there.  However, private rooms would be generally small and only comfortably accommodate a single person.  But hey, they would come with locks and a chamber pot!

Naturally, I'll have more info on this in Goods & Gear: the Ultimate Adventurer's Guide, when it comes back from the printer in (hopefully) a few weeks.  But the above are my rough notes I thought might come in a little handy.


----------



## jgbrowning

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Now you are assuming that all the revenue is gross profit. You ought to allow for expenses, such as wages and maintenance.




I was assuming 1/2 went to pay off the investment and the other 1/2 went into all that your speaking of. If the innkeeper only takes roughly 30% of that 1/2, that's around double the average profession check.



> And I still doubt that the revenue you assume makes sense, because the price of accommodation is very high in comparison to wages.




I have no arguement here. But again, accommodation is designed for PC interaction costs, not for NPC interaction costs, and not to be compared with medieval prices from particular locales.



> You have the advantage in defending a list of highly erratic prices that you are able to choose the ones that are unreasonably low and ignore the ones that are unreasonably high. A mediaeval worker would not have been able to afford a chicken on a day's wages. On the other hand, he would have been able to afford two and a half gallons of ale rather than half a gallon. Or his wages would have covered five nights' accommodation in an inn (for the standards suitable for a gentleman's servant), instead of half a night. Or 1,000 days' wages would have built twenty-five two-storey cottages, instead of one simple house.




Here it's important to note that costs listed in D&D aren't designed to simulate a medieval economy. They are only designed for PC interaction.



> The touchstone for costs of living in a quasi-mediaeval setting is bread. A mediaeval labourer was paid the (typical) price of five 24-oz loaves of bread per day, or 7.5 pounds of bread. A labourer in D&D is paid the price of 5 half-pound loaves per day, or 2.5 pounds of bread.
> 
> It should. Now, what role-playing purpose is served by making chickens eight times too cheap and bread three times too expensive?




On the other hand, what role-playing purpose is served by doing so? The gist of my arguement is this. People don't role-play commoners. They role-play PCs. The fact that chickens are to cheap and bread is too expensive means absolutely nothing to the vast majority of D&D role-playing. The fact that the D&D economy isn't comparable to medieval, again doesn't mean anything.

What do we need? We need numbers that relate to PCs. Costs that are designed to interact with PCs. Anything that isn't interacting with a PC is wasted space. From a publisher/design perspective hashing out anything that the PC's won't interact with is pointless and only serves a separate goal: world-building.

Although I love world building and the medieval feel (look what I've written) I know that the point of the game is to kill things and take their stuff while getting more powerful to kill tougher things and get better stuff. There's lots of other ways to play, of course, and it's for those other types of players that this information is even minisculy important.

But it's important to distinguish between world-building exercises (creating a working economy is a world-building exercise) and between role-playing. Having a PC own an inn is role-playing with a bit of a working economy thrown in. At the root of it, if the DM and the Player are both satisfied with whatever expenses/profits they create, that's *all that's needed* for the game, regardless of how irrational those numbers are when compared to real-life economics of a particular place and time. Anything more than that simple part is world building, again not role-playing. And that wealth is in relation to PCs and PCs expected power levels because that's what runs the game engine of kill monsters and take their stuff and get more powerful.

If there is inconsistancy between a player's perspective and a GM's perspective about something such as inn cost or probable profit, an agreement should be easily met if they are both considerate, mature individuals willing to compromise about a subject that (lets be honest here) we all have only a passing familiarity with. If there's still conflict, rules may help reduce it, but the end conflict is the result of a clash that no rules will solve, because eventually someone's going to point out that chickens are too cheap and bread is too expensive based upon their personal knowledge of a particular time and place. Some people want chickens and bread to be priced "right," but others can support cases for a different "right price" based upon different times and location assumptions. Because at the heart of it, the arguement is one of "reality" and "how much reality should be in my role-playing game." That's personal preferance, not irrational game design. If the GM and the player agree (to quote Bob Barker) *the Price is Right.*

joe b.


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## Agemegos

Alchemist said:
			
		

> 1.   Book prices reflect what rich out-of-towners (read: roaming adventurers) would pay, not what the average person pays for meals, homes and stays at the inn.




But some of the prices are unreasonably _cheap_.

Your rock stars are paying triple for bread but getting chicken at an 87.5% _discount_.

And besides, the mediaeval prices I have for meals, beds, light, fire, and meals in inns _were_ paid by wealthy outsiders: gentlemen travelling with servants.



> If one wants versimilitude in their economy, they probably shouldn't leave thousands of gp in wealth laying around for characters to find and flood markets with.




I don't think that that is necessary. Colossal windfalls enrich a few people, and temporarily increase the real prices of the things they want. But pretty soon the money gets around and bids up the price of everything, and you are left with a perfectly functional economy with high nominal prices.

It simply isn't a problem that a D&D gold piece containing 9.5 grammes of gold has a much lower purchasing power than a mediaeval ducat containing 3.5 grammes of gold. That is a perfectly reasonable result of an environment where gold is plentiful.

The problem is when a PC want to buy and operate an inn, but it works out that the building is so damned expensive that no reasonable estimate of the number of patrons and the amount they could afford to spend will allow the PC-innkeeper to cover running costs and depreciation, let alone making a return on his investment.

Or possibly the problem is that when a PC wants to buy an inn it is so damned cheap and so damned profitable that the PC is soon so rich that he doesn't care about monsters' treasure.

I understand the argument that the price lists in D&D have to support dungeon-bashing, and provide a little balance in dungeon-bashing campaigns. The thing is that I don't see why they have to make problems for other campaigns when doing so has precious little impact on dungeon-bashing. Some of us like to run campaigns with other premisses andsometimes even other focusses than dungeon-bashing. It is a pity that some parts of the rules have been written so carelessly that we have to re-write them ourselves to do so.

Moreover, when players discover something silly in the rules it often spoils the mood. "Frank, if you were a mediaeval peasant, would you rather eat half a chicken or half a pound of bread?" "Easy, Tony, I'd rather have the chicken." "Righto then--they're cheaper, too. From now on our henchmen dine on chook." And throughout the rest of the campaign players are making chicken jokes, and whenever the characters have to be silent players will make clucking sounds.

The game doesn't have to be unworkable in the dungeon. But it shouldn't be laughable outside of it.


----------



## Agemegos

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Here it's important to note that costs listed in D&D aren't designed to simulate a medieval economy. They are only designed for PC interaction.




Agreed.

Now, is it your contention that the prices that are giving us trouble in this thread (wages, real estate prices, and the prices of provisions) do a better job in PC interaction than a set of prices would that made some sort of sense when compared to one another?

Do you maintain that a set of prices suitable for PC interaction when the PCs are running an estate, a business or a mission must necessarily be unsuitable for PC interaction when the PCs are dungeon-bashing goons?

In short, I contend that a set of prices that had been compiled with a little thought and care would be just as good for supporting dungeon-bashing campaigns as the PHB prices are, and better for Random User's campaign. Which ought to make everyone happy.




> On the other hand, what role-playing purpose is served by doing so?




That was my question exactly. If you meant to ask "What role-playing purpose is served by _not_ doing so?", the answer is "The purpose of Rando User's campaign and others like it. Not all PCs are dungeon-bashers, nor rich."



> The gist of my arguement is this. People don't role-play commoners. They role-play PCs. The fact that chickens are to cheap and bread is too expensive means absolutely nothing to the vast majority of D&D role-playing.




Well if it means nothing, why not get the prices right? That way you would serve to players who play your way _and_ players who play Random User's way. If these stupid prices aren't actually doing you any good, why fight so hard to stop them from changing?



> What do we need? We need numbers that relate to PCs. Costs that are designed to interact with PCs.




I think that that is true _even if the PCs do something unconventional_. Besides, it is at best an argument for having no prices for real estate and bread, not an argument for have stupid nonsensical prices for real estate and bread.



> I know that the point of the game is to kill things and take their stuff while getting more powerful to kill tougher things and get better stuff.




Then I think you 'know' more than is true. Some people enjoy and even prefer different styles of play. And it seems to me that it would do the game no harm to serve both markets.


----------



## Sledge

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> MMS:WE is %100 OGC, so if anyone wants to modify it to suit their tastes and publish they can. I know that starting from what I've created and modifying it to suit an individual campaign is much easier than starting from scratch. I think MMS:WE produces usable results, both in the building system and the economic simulator.




Might be the only reason for me to even consider purchasing the PDF now....
NVM it's still $10... little too much for a book I'd have to rewrite.


----------



## jgbrowning

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Now, is it your contention that the prices that are giving us trouble in this thread (wages, real estate prices, and the prices of provisions) do a better job in PC interaction than a set of prices would that made some sort of sense when compared to one another?




I'm saying the definition of "sense" varies from person to person, from location to location, and from time period to time period. What makes sense cost-wise for a structure in 1190 is very different than what makes sense cost-wise for a structure in 1325, even if it's in exactly the same place.



> Do you maintain that a set of prices suitable for PC interaction when the PCs are running an estate, a business or a mission must necessarily be unsuitable for PC interaction when the PCs are dungeon-bashing goons?




Generally (read the rest of the post for further explination) I don't think these two goals are compatable. One goal is high adventure, the other is fairly precise setting creation for a supossedly setting-neutral fantasy adventure game.



> In short, I contend that a set of prices that had been compiled with a little thought and care would be just as good for supporting dungeon-bashing campaigns as the PHB prices are, and better for Random User's campaign. Which ought to make everyone happy.




The prices have been compiled with a little thought and care. The intent behind that compiling is what you disagree with. The prices are compiled with only PC interactions in mind. To compile prices outside of this goal would mean additional time spent on a matter that has little to no consequences for the majority of gamers. If it's under 10gp in cost, once past 1st level it's probably not going to matter much to any player. If it does for your group, you're playing a rare breed of D&D.



> That was my question exactly. If you meant to ask "What role-playing purpose is served by _not_ doing so?", the answer is "The purpose of Rando User's campaign and others like it. Not all PCs are dungeon-bashers, nor rich."




Again, I don't think you can really serve both groups, especially when you are forced to examine the fiscal ramifications of magic. Once you have a "realistic" medieval pricing system, you'll have to then have a "realistic" interpretation of what magic would do to that. Plant growth itself is going to dramtically change your grain-to-labor ratio's. And then factor in all the changes cheaper/more plentiful grain creates and pretty soon you're going to have to "rationally" create a fiscal system that takes into account things that are utterly irrational, unpredicable, and unrealistic. And on top of that everyone has their own interpretation of what magic would do to a real society: me included.



> Well if it means nothing, why not get the prices right? That way you would serve to players who play your way _and_ players who play Random User's way. If these stupid prices aren't actually doing you any good, why fight so hard to stop them from changing?




Again, what is right? I'm not sure if I'm communicating this properly, but the price of grain itself varies massively over the entire European continent and throughout the entire medieval time period. Also, just because "medieval wheat cost X amount of silver per quarter and an amount of labor generates this much silver at X location at X time" doesn't mean that D&D wheat/silver/labor has to follow any of those relationships. And on top of all that, don't forget magic. I don't expect a truely medieval price listing in a world where magic is as common as postulated in the core rules.

This is the logical error. You can make prices that fit what you think is right. You *can't* make *right* prices because it's your assumptions, generalizations, and the presence (and how much of a presence) of magic that will cause error. Perhaps even error on the same level as in the core prices already, just different.

The question, "What's the price for a gallon of gas?" illustrates my point. Before you can give me a price you're going to have to ask me, "Where, over what period of time, and what was inflation like?" Your prices, although based upon a set of assumptions of time period and location, may be just as faulty for another time period and location as the D&D prices seem to you. Any price range, time range, and location range chosen is just another assumption- it'll be one that suits you better, but it may not be of any material improvement to anyone else.



> think that that is true _even if the PCs do something unconventional_. Besides, it is at best an argument for having no prices for real estate and bread, not an argument for have stupid nonsensical prices for real estate and bread.




If there were no prices, someone would want to know them. This is the desire, I'm assuming, that leads to Kenzer's product. Most people don't want to have to discuss these issues of pricing for item that cost less than 10gp--they'd rather just look at a book because it's "good enough." Your definition of "good enough" is different than the majority of gamers.

This is also, if I'm understanding correctly, the idea behind a "wealth" system. It does just what you suggest: effectively removing prices.



> Then I think you 'know' more than is true. Some people enjoy and even prefer different styles of play. And it seems to me that it would do the game no harm to serve both markets.




You actually wouldn't be serving "both" markets because you'd be only serving one market (the average D&Der)+ the one market you based your prices off of (say medieval england in 1350). It will be an improvement for your particular desires in gaming, but that doesn't mean it's an improvement in gaming for anyone who wants to play outside of england in the 1350's. In fact, it may be more of a detriment for people who have your style of play (detailed world building aspects based upon history) but prefer Italy in 1210 than the simple, bad, base D&D prices we have right now.

First off, you'd absolutely have to ditch the 10/10/10 ratio of copper/silver/gold. But even simply altering that easy ratio to more suit reality would be less beneficial to more people's playing style than it would be to have a chicken be too cheap, a laborer's wage too low, and for wheat to be too expensive. I don't think changes to the basic prices do more than marginally better the game, if that. I think they would be simply concentrating on one historical aspect while potentially being at greater odds with other aspects. 

You can make realistic prices (again according to what location and over what period of time you want), but I don't think you can make realistic prices and have the desired level of simplicity that most player's are looking for. It's a matter of world-building vers. role-playing. If you're worried about your players having issues with the prices, just make up your own list of prices and tell them this is what things cost in your world. The issue is then solved from a role-playing perspective and you've customized your campaign world at the same time.

I hope my basic arguement (what time and what place) is coming though all of these paragraphs. Given some thought, it's not that difficult to imagine situations where the prices listed in the core rules are not that off. Given differences in material availablity in a make-believe world (which, realistically, there is no reason to assume that the material availability in the D&D worlds are in any form or fashion comparable to medieval england/europe to begin with) and because there's also magic in the world, I think pretty much anything is just a handwave away from being explained good enough for the vast majority of gamers.

I like history, I like writing history into my game. I've written a very good book about mixing medieval european flavor into an average d20 game. I just don't think there's any need to adjust base prices that players rarely, if ever, interact with. I do have an economic simulator in MMS:WE (which just recently got used in Bad Axe's _Grim Tales_ thx Ben!) that gives a GM a lot more flexibility in pricing and helps create that local feel you're probably after.

joe b.


----------



## Phineas Crow

I’m glad I bailed on this thread after my calculating snafu, debating medieval economy pertaining to a fantasy setting is not my forte.

I will, however, say that dismissing MMS:WE for not agreeing with its building system is an unfair judgment on the book. MMS:WE is 138 pages long (not counting the glossary, bibliography, and license) with the building system taking up only 18 pages.


----------



## jgbrowning

CalrinAlshaw said:
			
		

> Out of curiosity, bringing up the cost of Inn's again, why does it cost 12,192gp to whitewash the walls and hang a sign outside the entrance, that is the main style of most buildings that were mid-level wealth. Now, I could see the interior cost being quite high, after all you need beds, tables, chairs, a bar, an entire kitchen to furnish etc. But that still seems extremely high...is the owner buying an innfull of exotic rare woods and commissioning the best crafters for this project?
> 
> Calrin Alshaw




Since there's been two questions like this I'll answer. Style is a mechanic used to represent a particular status. It's kinda like HP. What exactly is HP? I'm sure we've all had that discussion at one time or another.

What style does is function within the system to perform a task. That task is to help differentiate pricing between cheap, lower-class buildings and very wealthy buildings. The building system is taking on a monumental task: a single system that handles all construction types with decent results. Since we were designing a system that dealt with both very cheep structures and massively expensive structures, I thought having several factors that influence the end price would be the best way to produce widely varied results.

The factors relate to their actual real occurances similarly to how HP's relate to a character's toughness: they're a generalization and style is the HP generalization while the others are much more like Str or Con. Base price per square foot is easy to understand, excavation is easy to understand, material is easy to understand, labor is easy to understand, carriage is easy to understand, but style is the sticky one. The fuction within the system it serves is to provide players the option of having lower-cost yet still functional buildings, while at the same time giving them the ability for truly luxurious structures.

We did this by making the "normal" style add a fairly large % amount to the final total, thus providing an easy way to lower cost by lowering "style" and also providing the opportunity to significantly increase cost by raising style. There are obviously other ways of doing the same mechanic. It's the one we chose. We also allow players even a bit more freedom by breaking style up into both interior and exterior. If we would have provided fewer options, we wouldn't have to have this discusion.... 

So, no. The walls are not painted with gold, the sign isn't solid silver. Just like HP is a generalized measure of a character's toughness based on level, constitution, and magic effects, style is an arbitrary modifier on the amount of wealth that went into a particular building to create the appropriate class-conscious appearance based upon materials, labor, and carriage.

joe b.


----------



## S'mon

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Gaming prices aren't comparable to real life prices...
> 
> ...Given that an average cook or sailer makes around 10gp a week (average profession check), it takes them about two years to buy the 987gp house. It would take them two weeks of work if you reduced by a factor of 10.




OK, this was your big mistake IMO.  Whoever heard of anyone in a D&D game paying the common sailors on their ship *40gp/month**?!  Or paying all the common cooks in their castle 40 gp/month?!  That's vastly out of whack with the hireling costs in the DMG, which is what you should have been paying attention to, not to the Craft/Profession skill in the PHB, which is aimed purely at _player characters_, not at DMs trying to develop a plausible world!

The PHB Craft/Profession income can be slotted into the DMG hireling-cost tables, but it clearly represents the income of a skilled artisan, a head cook, a ship-master - ie the **Middle Class** of the campaign setting, not the masses of unskilled labourers, maidservants, cooks and common sailors, who are earning around 1/10 to 1/5 the figures you quote.

In the real high-medieval period this middle class made up around 5% of the population in England (Town Planner, Paul Vernon, BoWD Articles III).  It could make up a higher proportion of a Forgotten Realms or Mystara-style D&D society, but treating it as the _baseline_ is bound to give results grotesquely out-of-whack with the unskilled-labour costs represented by the DMG hireling tables.


----------



## S'mon

& there is a good reason for DMs to develop plausible worlds - it gives PCs something to interact with outside of the dungeon environment.  With a few sensible baseline assumptions (the most important one I find being the cost of unskilled labour in an unregulated market) everything can fall into place - you can come up with reasonable prices for buying an inn, for paying a mercenary guard, for staying at an inn, or when the PCs are high-level, for taxing a realm, for raising & paying for an army, etc.

The PHB equipment prices, Craft income etc, are aimed directly at players & their PCs, so they can do stuff without GM intervention, like buying over-priced bread for their dungeon rations.  PHB prices generally work ok as "this is what the locals will charge wealthy adventurers".  Commoners in my campaign earning 1sp/day certainly don't pay more than 1cp for a flagon of ale, or a few cp for a day's low-quality food.

DMG prices, by contrast, are there to help the GM develop a campaign setting the PCs can interact with.  Unfortunately in 3e the Hireling costs and the Building costs are totally out of whack.

JG Browning & MMS:WE seems to have made the choice to stick w the Building costs given in the DMG, ignore the Hireling costs, and use the PHB Craft-income levels as the baseline for what a typical world inhabitant earns.  The only problem with that is that you thus create a world resembling a middle-class society on 21st century Earth, looking nothing like the peasant-based medieval society D&D assumes as the default backdrop.

****In short: 
If labourers earn 1gp/day or 10gp/week using their "Craft: Labourer" skill, MMS:WE's figures & the DMG Building cost figures are fine.  The DM should then raise the DMG hireling cost figures by a factor of 10, so eg a mercenary costs 2gp/day, not 2sp.   
If labourers earn 1sp/day as per DMG, then the MMS:WE & DMG Building figures are around 10 times too high.  The DM should cut them by a factor of 10.  The DMG hireling costs can then be used as given.****

Would you agree with my analysis?  If not, is it because "It's just a game, dude!"?


----------



## jgbrowning

S'mon said:
			
		

> OK, this was your big mistake IMO.  Whoever heard of anyone in a D&D game paying the common sailors on their ship *40gp/month**?!  Or paying all the common cooks in their castle 40 gp/month?!  That's vastly out of whack with the hireling costs in the DMG, which is what you should have been paying attention to, not to the Craft/Profession skill in the PHB, which is aimed purely at _player characters_, not at DMs trying to develop a plausible world!




From a designing perspective, I have several issues with the hireling section and charts. Basically, I think they're a hold-over from earlier editions that weren't updated for 3.0. Every NPC has skill points now, and if someone is actually a cook or a sailor for their livelyhood, I think an NPC will have those skills. Perhaps not at 1st level (the newbie, learning the ropes maybe), but by 2nd surely. 

Notice firstly, that they say that hirelings don't gain levels. IMHO, that's utterly bunk. That's completely counter to one of the basic concepts of 3E where any intelligent creature can gains levels. Also listed in the hireling tables are smiths, architect/engineers, and barristers (lawyers) who only earn 3sp, 5sp, and 1gp per day respectively. This as well puts me a bit off of using these numbers as they don't mesh with their respective skill requirements. To be an smith, architect/engineer, or barrister, one *must* put skill points into learning those trades. They aren't like being a maid or porter. They're not just something you pick up with a decent fluency in a short period of time.

Also the hireling chart doesn't take into account any material/tools/weapons expenses for their profession. Ie. the smith doesn't actually own anything, it's all supplied by the hireling's master so these costs represent only the *labor* involved in the professions functioning.

However, It does suggest that just hiring this individual for a day or two would double to triple their listed pay rates (probably to make up for that supplying all the materials aspect above). This would appear to be at least what a regular person would pay them for a service. For example, If I needed the smith to do a days work for me (say fixing a wagon part) I'm going to have to pay double or triple that amount at least (increasing his daily take to around 6-9sp). For the Craft(X) group that isn't far off of the craft check's 1/2 gp per check result per week result of around 5-6gp a week.

I think the main problem is the designers using the modern distiction about what qualifies as a Profession or Craft, not so much what is expected wages. If we assume everyone (except the unskilled for a particular task) functions as a craft we still have the average sailor or cook earning as much money as a 1000gp house would cost in roughly 4 a years period, double of what the straight profession check suggested.

If we follow your idea of reducing the cost of the house by 10, any creature with Craft (X) who practices their trade can buy a house every 20 weeks. (_EDIT notice: I was off in my 2 weeks estimation in my earlier post, it should have been 10 weeks. My apologies._)

I don't think, S'mon, that anyone denies the sillyness of the D&D pricing system. There are 3 basic reasons for this I think (there may be more, I'm tired and it's early):

1. Gaming history: it's how things were done in the past.
2. Grandfather systems: these old things weren't meshed with the new concepts
3. Money only related to PCs. There is no need for any coherant valuation outside of the realm of PC interaction.

I find it easier to, as opposed to lowering the base prices, just accept the (outside the very basic unskilled laborers) people are earning several gp a week under the D&D economic system and divorce that fact from what we know about history. As I said earlier, if you want to make a new pricing system that's cool. It customises your campaign and give more of the feel you want. However, MMS:WE works using D&D's expectation of income based upon skills and its belief that money is only important in relation to PCs.

But as you've shown, there's internal inconsistancies about those common earnings. And the craft skill, well, lets just say there's all sorts of things wrong with that in the end as well. There's been a lot of threads about that.

The goal of the MMS:WE building system surely can't be expected to fix the D&D monetary inconsistancies, can it? It's only purpose to use the D&D system to make a more medieval environment through adding cool innovative things like pricing based on sq. ft., carriage costs, and how magic effects building. At all places, when the choice was give on the rules or give on the medievalesque feel, the feel had to give. It's a d20 book, and aspires to be considered as nothing more than that. We think we did a bang up job in doing that, but it's not a history book and shouldn't ever be intended as such.

And from a design perspective, the less the end results of MMS:WE's building system vary from the "cannon" of D&D costs for (the few) structures as published by WoTC, the better. That means it has a high level of compatablity with what the majority of players consider as D&D. This is a very good thing for a d20 product.

joe b.


----------



## The Gryphon

Saeviomagy said:
			
		

> Only 85 labourers for a week! And you did it in an hour! And you're not even talented with the device. Not too long ago people were claiming that the innkeep would build his inn himself.
> 
> Now it gets done in an hour.



Only 85 labourers was of course a reference to how little they cost in the grand scheme of things, not to whether or not it's a large amount of work in a small amount of time 

To use the device more than once a week for building [the equivalent of 300 mandays of work], you'd have to be somewhat skilled with the device as you need to make a DC 18 Perform (stringed instrument) check. So we're down to half the labourers without a skill check anyway, thus halving the discount to 15% instead of 30%.

Obviously course the innkeeper COULD build the inn himself, but as with most projects it probably didn't start out this grand especially in a small village. For example, the future innkeeper builds himself a house in a small village at little cost as he provides all of the labour himself, getting his own materials or trading services with others who can do the work, thus keeping costs to a minimum.

A few travellers pass through looking for somewhere to sleep and eat, he provides a bed and meal. They give him a few coins and he decides he can make a living at this with a little work. He keeps feeding travellers passing through while enlarging his house as above.

Eventually he has an inn which has taken him 5 years to build at little direct cost [he may owe a few favours and a few villagers may drink for free]. If instead he'd hired craftsmen build it, it may have cost 10,000gp and only taken a month or two.



			
				Saeviomagy said:
			
		

> I'll admit that the land is going to cost a fair amount, but you can't say for certain that other resources are going to be unavailable.
> 
> If you've got a block of land in a forest - is labour really only 30% of the cost of building a log cabin?
> 
> If you're putting something up in a quarry - is labour only 30%?



Even land may cost nothing if you're building in wilderness ruled by no-one, or a land where the laws aren't strongly enforced. The Stronghold Builder's Guidebook doesn't include land in the building price anyway, that has to be gained independantly.

The 30% labour, unskilled construction labour would probably be a better desription, is of course a general listing. It assumes you're getting prepared materials delivered to the construction site.

As I see the lyre, it's an item that provides the muscle for building [the unskilled labour which carries, digs, hauls, etc.]. Therefore it wouldn't help with cutting, quarrying, or similarly skilled situations.

You could of course hire the relevant skilled workers to cut or mine in those sites thus reducing costs, but this isn't the same sort of labour as above. It just means you're paying for the materials at the extraction stage instead of the retail stage.

Consideration must be given to the fact that costs listed in the PHB, the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook, and most other sources are for a finished product being sold to those that won't or can't do for themselves [the retail stage of a purchase]. You only have to look at how we live today to see how that works


----------



## jgbrowning

S'mon said:
			
		

> ****In short:
> If labourers earn 1gp/day or 10gp/week using their "Craft: Labourer" skill, MMS:WE's figures & the DMG Building cost figures are fine.  The DM should then raise the DMG hireling cost figures by a factor of 10, so eg a mercenary costs 2gp/day, not 2sp.
> If labourers earn 1sp/day as per DMG, then the MMS:WE & DMG Building figures are around 10 times too high.  The DM should cut them by a factor of 10.  The DMG hireling costs can then be used as given.****
> 
> Would you agree with my analysis?  If not, is it because "It's just a game, dude!"?




I have tried my best to be polite thoughout this rather agressive thread, and would appreciate the favor returned. No, I don't agree with your analysis. I have answered your hireling's chart issues in my above post. Per the section on hirelings, multiply those costs by 2 or 3 and you'll get what the cost of the real wage is for that worker type per day when they are not functioning under retainer and when they do not have all their materials supplied to them. You'll note that this multipled number is comparable to the skill Craft (X) for most of them and comparable to Profession (X) for the most expensive of them. I also noted the game problem with assigning Craft or Profession.

And you're right. It's just a game dude. A game in which this aspect plays a very miniscule part and is only fretted over by people who share a common interest in history and economics. There isn't a reason to get heated.

joe b.


----------



## jgbrowning

Ok, there are times in a man's life when he's got to realize that god's trying to tell him something. You'd think I would have learned it from when we were hit by lightning 10 or so days ago, knocking out our internet for over a week.

But no, I had to tempt fate and dare use my own writing! I, the modern Prometheus!   

Well, I'm wrong. Wrong about the inn pricing, that is. Embarrisingly enough, I miscalculated using my own damn system. *SIGH*

The numbers listed in the front page of this thread are significantly inflated because I didn't check on Phineus Crow's style modifiers once I saw the first mistake. That's my bad: I should have been more thurough. The 42k inn cost is for an inn with a roughly Ornate Style, not a normal style. Here we go again, style getting me in trouble. Ornate Style is "Providing the first tastes of real wealth, elegantly constructed and filled with fine materials." This is a really nice inn.

See, I muliplied style by 1.6 as opposed to 0.6 for "Normal" Style. The new price of the "Normal Style" inn is only 26,000 gp.  I ****ed up with my own system. Man that sucks.

For those of you who thought the price was too high, you were right. Dammit.



This doesn't have much of an effect on discussing houses (I did those right at least...) and labor, but it has a significant effect when talking about return for the inn. The "Normal" inn is now quite a bit better investment than what It was appearing to be. It looks like 10 to 15 years and it would be scot free.

joe b.


----------



## The Gryphon

Agemegos said:
			
		

> But some of the prices are unreasonably _cheap_.
> 
> Your rock stars are paying triple for bread but getting chicken at an 87.5% _discount_.
> 
> /snip/
> 
> Moreover, when players discover something silly in the rules it often spoils the mood. "Frank, if you were a mediaeval peasant, would you rather eat half a chicken or half a pound of bread?" "Easy, Tony, I'd rather have the chicken." "Righto then--they're cheaper, too. From now on our henchmen dine on chook." And throughout the rest of the campaign players are making chicken jokes, and whenever the characters have to be silent players will make clucking sounds.
> 
> The game doesn't have to be unworkable in the dungeon. But it shouldn't be laughable outside of it.



Only one small problem I can see with this arguement. The chicken at 4cp is still alive, not ready for consumption...while the bread at 2cp is ready to eat.

So you're comparing a wholesale product with a retail product [if you want to buy bread components wholesale I bet they're a lot cheaper as well]. A better comparison would be your bread at 2cp, with a chunk of meat at 3sp [both weigh in at 1/2 lb.] both listed under food, drink, and lodging on pg. 129 in the 3.5 PHB.

Now how is the chicken [meat] priced compared to the bread?


----------



## S'mon

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> ...At all places, when the choice was give on the rules or give on the medievalesque feel, the feel had to give...




Thanks Joe, you've been very patient and have justified your approach in MMS: WE very well.  Your approach wasn't what I had expected or wanted when I bought the book - I was expecting something that would support me in creating the feel of a (magic-influenced) Medieval setting, even if that meant deviating from certain d20 assumptions (re Craft skill, cost of buidings, and such).  Hence my dissatisfaction with the product.  If that's anyone's fault though, it's the fault of the reviewers who didn't make this clear enough while they were giving their ***** ratings.

I do think your approach retains the distinct difficulty that your 'mundane' costs are so high, magic approaches like Daern's Instant Fortress appear a reasonable alternative.  I don't think that fits w Greyhawk or w many other campaign worlds, inc mine, but might work for areas like Glantri & Alphatia on Mystara, or maybe parts of the Forgotten Realms, a setting which in many ways culturally resembles modern America & Canada more closely than medieval Europe.  My own setting is much much closer to a medieval European paradigm - living in Britain I'm surrounded by vestiges of feudalism and the middle ages, so it's much more familiar to me & easier for me, perhaps.


----------



## jgbrowning

S'mon said:
			
		

> Thanks Joe, you've been very patient and have justified your approach in MMS: WE very well.  Your approach wasn't what I had expected or wanted when I bought the book - I was expecting something that would support me in creating the feel of a (magic-influenced) Medieval setting, even if that meant deviating from certain d20 assumptions (re Craft skill, cost of buidings, and such).  Hence my dissatisfaction with the product.  If that's anyone's fault though, it's the fault of the reviewers who didn't make this clear enough while they were giving their ***** ratings.




Sadly enough, I don't have Green Ronin's recent medieval book. I've heard good things about it and it may be more of what you're looking for.



> I do think your approach retains the distinct difficulty that your 'mundane' costs are so high, magic approaches like Daern's Instant Fortress appear a reasonable alternative.  I don't think that fits w Greyhawk or w many other campaign worlds, inc mine, but might work for areas like Glantri & Alphatia on Mystara, or maybe parts of the Forgotten Realms, a setting which in many ways culturally resembles modern America & Canada more closely than medieval Europe.




I can see how that would come across that way, but to be honest, I think it's also an effect of the increased level of 3e magic. In old Greyhawk we wouldn't be talking about price comparisons between an Instant Fortress and an Inn. (Which by the way if you didn't see my post, I screwed the pooch on when I did the pricing. Should have been only 26k in stead of 42k. Big difference and an embarrising mistake.) In old greyhawk you simple didn't buy those level of items.



> My own setting is much much closer to a medieval European paradigm - living in Britain I'm surrounded by vestiges of feudalism and the middle ages, so it's much more familiar to me & easier for me, perhaps.




I can just image that would make it much easier to grasp at a gutteral level that most americans simply have no ability or reason to understand. Outside of some basic history course, all my knowledge has come from college level and private studies. Most people aren't that interested.

joe b.


----------



## S'mon

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> I have tried my best to be polite thoughout this rather agressive thread...
> 
> ...There isn't a reason to get heated.
> 
> joe b.




Sorry, I wasn't aiming that at you, I wasn't heated, it just came out badly.  Should have put a smiley I guess.  I think in fact your earlier post indicates you actually do agree w my analysis though - your approach is that the DMG hireling costs are too low, and you base your system off a 1gp/day paradigm, rather than a 1sp/day paradigm.  That's fine.

I understand you put a lot of work into the book, are (justifiably) proud of it, and don't like to see it criticised.  I'd be annoyed if someone slagged off my PhD thesis without really understanding it.  And until this morning I didn't really understand MMS:WE, what you were trying to achieve with it, and why that differed from what I wanted IMC.

It's all cool.


----------



## Agemegos

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> The "Normal" inn is now quite a bit better investment than what It was appearing to be. It looks like 10 to 15 years and it would be scot free.




Assuming that running costs, maintenance, and depreciation account for 50% of turnover, leaving the rest for rent?

About 10 year's rent is a reasonable purchase price in the sort of capital-starved economy that produces mediaeval-like technology and industrial organisation.


----------



## jgbrowning

S'mon said:
			
		

> It's all cool.




Heh, yah. I had written a long angry post and then remembered that, in my experience, I've never improved a situation I didn't like by being a jerk so I didn't post it.

It was then of course that I discovered my calculation error. Heh. I'm glad it's not storming right now because I think If it was, I would have gotten another more direct method informing me to stop being an idiot.

Lightning or looking like a fool? Hrm.. I'll take the latter please......  

joe b.


----------



## jgbrowning

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Assuming that running costs, maintenance, and depreciation account for 50% of turnover, leaving the rest for rent?
> 
> About 10 year's rent is a reasonable purchase price in the sort of capital-starved economy that produces mediaeval-like technology and industrial organisation.




Yeah, the price is much better. The earlier one with 20-25 years was a bit on the high side for my liking, but it didn't seem outrageous enough to worry about it. Considering now that the 42k is for a much better style of inn, the result will come in favorably as well.

When designing the system I mostly used a whole bunch of building records from a book called _Building in England Down to 1540: A documentary History_ by L.F. Salsman. It had a massive appendix of (thankfully translated) building contracts. It's a great book, goes into prices for nails, labor, liming, all sorts of building materials and their various processes. If you haven't read it, I heartily reccomend it.

joe b.


----------



## kigmatzomat

Agemegos said:
			
		

> I'll say it is a bit much! Even at 1 gp per day it is the price of three years' labour.




*sigh*  I have one word:

*FURNISHINGS.*

Virtually all the building systems account for tables, chairs, pots, pans, dishes, utensils, stoves, blankets, cabinets, beds, chests, dressers, book cases, wall hangings, rugs, etc.   Those things are *expensive,* moreso in a medieval world where flatware has to be handmade and not churned out of a mill.  

IIRC, both MMS:WE and SBG deal with furnishings between the purpose and style level of the construction.  SBG is per-room while MMS:WE is per-structure.  



> You could in fact buy a well-built row-house in York (including the real estate it was built on) for three year's labourer's wages..




My house cost me 3 year's wages raw cost but after mortgage & interest fees, I'll be spending closer to 4 years income and that is without furnishings.  IIRC, I have insurance equal to about a third the house' value on my possessions, meaning that it would take 4-5 years income to buy the house+stuff.  

And that's a house, not an inn.  I don't need the big kitchen, plenty of serving gear, tons of pots & plates required.  

So if you assume a home is 4-5 years income then an inn, being a business, should cost more, yes?  Especially since the inn will also house the inkeeper & family.  And since the innkeeper will be more of a professional than a common laborer, the 1gp/day value is quite reasonable, if perhaps, a little low.


----------



## Agemegos

The Gryphon said:
			
		

> Only one small problem I can see with this arguement. The chicken at 4cp is still alive, not ready for consumption...while the bread at 2cp is ready to eat.




That wouldn't stop players from making clucking noises.



> So you're comparing a wholesale product with a retail product [if you want to buy bread components wholesale I bet they're a lot cheaper as well]. A better comparison would be your bread at 2cp, with a chunk of meat at 3sp [both weigh in at 1/2 lb.] both listed under food, drink, and lodging on pg. 129 in the 3.5 PHB.




In fact not, since I am basing my criticism on the (or rather, as jgbrowning points out, _a_) mediaeval price ratio of bread and a live chicken.



> Now how is the chicken [meat] priced compared to the bread?




I don't have a retail price for a dead chicken, and indeed I don't think people bought them dead very often. But I have killed and cleaned chooks, and the labour involved is small compared with the mediaeval price of a chicken, which was more than a day's labour.

As for the price of meat, in times when the population was very small in comparison to the capacity of the land it was sometimes as cheap as wheat bread. But in extensively cultivated countries (such as required the manorial system) it was (for reasons that Adam Smith expalins in _The Wealth of Nations_ Book I chapter ix part b) necessarily three or four times as expensive as wheaten bread. The PHB makes it about five times an historical cost in comparison to bread (and therefore about fifteen times an historical cost in comparison to labour). Butchering must be very expensive in a D&D world to turn chickens 8 times too cheap into meat fifteen times too dear.

In short the ratio between the price of live chickens and the price of meat in the PHB is out by a factor of one hundred and twenty.


----------



## Agemegos

kigmatzomat said:
			
		

> *sigh*  I have one word:
> 
> *FURNISHINGS.*




If you look at post #15 in this thread you will see that I have already posted a list of the prices of typical mediaeval furnishings. They aren't going to do the job.

On another point you raise: if you start measuring the cost of a inn in terms of a wealth innkeeper instead of the wages of labourer, I will be free to start measuring the prices of mediaeval buildings in comparable terms, and the comparison will go right back where it was.

Nice sigh, anyway. Now go teach your grandmother to suck eggs.


----------



## Agemegos

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> I'm saying the definition of "sense" varies from person to person, from location to location, and from time period to time period. What makes sense cost-wise for a structure in 1190 is very different than what makes sense cost-wise for a structure in 1325, even if it's in exactly the same place.




These differences do exist in historical prices. The real price of grain, flour, and bread varied significantly from year to year, and a long-term trend roughly doubled the price of livestock and halved the price of worked metal goods between about 1000 and about 1400. But these variations from time to time and place to place, though economically significant in themselves, were as nothing compared with the discrepancies in the PHB price list.

I am not asking for a realistic system of price variations from time to time and from place to place. I don't want a system that randomly produces years of famine and years of plenty with realistic impacts on  wages and prices of food. I just want a list of prices that doesn't imply absurdities.

The reason that I use mediaeval price ratios as examples when I can is that I think everyone assumes that most mundane items in a D&D world are produced using a quasi-mediaeval technology. Most of us assume that fields are plought by peasants with ploughs drawn by teams of horses or oxen, sown and harvested by hand, and that the grain is threshed and then ground in wind or water mills and baked in wood-fired ovens. Certainly was assume that people in a D&D world could fall back on that technology if the alternatives worked out to be more expensive. So it is that there is a certain amount of labour involved in preparing the fields, sowing, harvesting, threshing, grinding, winnowing, kneading, building a mill and oven, gathering firewood, and baking a loaf of bread. It would be possible to assume and calculate and work out what a loaf of bread ought to cost in terms of labour using mediaeval technology: but fortunately we don't have to (if records exist), because the mediaeval economy alreadyworked it out for us.

The same applies to building an inn. Digging the foundations, quarrying stone, felling and sawing timber, cutting and hauling wood, cutting rushes, digging clay etc. etc. all involves a certain amount of labour (a little of it skilled). In the end, this labour is the cost of building the inn. The mediaeval ratio of building costs to wages gives us an idea of how much labour it takes to build an inn using mediaeval techniques. If we quote a price for a building that in far off the mediaeval price of building such a building (and I mean a real price, a price in terms of labour) then if anyone looks at our system closely he or she will discover that it implies either a lot of people working very hard and producing a ridiculously small amount, or that it implies a couple of blokes throwing up a ludicrous amount of construction in laughably little time.

And people do look closely, because occasionally even epic heroes want to build a fort in a hurry, and want to know how quickly they can do it witht eh resources available. It's best not to give crazy results, don't you think?



> The prices have been compiled with a little thought and care. The intent behind that compiling is what you disagree with. The prices are compiled with only PC interactions in mind. To compile prices outside of this goal would mean additional time spent on a matter that has little to no consequences for the majority of gamers.




Indeed. But I really don't see that the bizarre price ratios between, for example, chickens and meat or wages and fortress construction promote PC interaction.

I'm not calling for a system that will reflect the difference in price ratios between wheat and ironmongery in Poland and in Northern Italy, for a game about merchant ships. I am only asking that the things already listed should have sensible prices instead of stupid ones.



> If it's under 10gp in cost, once past 1st level it's probably not going to matter much to any player. If it does for your group, you're playing a rare breed of D&D.




Well, Random User is playiing a rare breed of D&D then. But this thread is supposed to be about helping hiim to do so.

Besides which, I am enough of a grognard to remember a time when we generally aspired to building our our castles (or temples, or wizard's towers, or guild halls), garrisoning them, and equipping,  provisioning and paying our retainers. That sort of thing works a lot better when players' attempts to work out what they can afford do not give rise to hoots of derisive laughter and garrisons with very odd diets. (The worst offender in this cas was an early edition of _Chivalry & Sorcery_ which strongly encouraged quartermasters to feed their troops entirely on smoked salmon.)



> Again, what is right? I'm not sure if I'm communicating this properly, but the price of grain itself varies massively over the entire European continent and throughout the entire medieval time period.




Sure it does. But the fact that you cannot reflect that variability in price ratios does not mean that you have to adopt a set of relative prices that make no sense under an circumstances: such as building costs five hundred times as high as were necessary under even mediaeval technology, or chickens that can be slaughtered at a profit of more than a day's wages each.



> The question, "What's the price for a gallon of gas?" illustrates my point. Before you can give me a price you're going to have to ask me, "Where, over what period of time, and what was inflation like?"




I would not be able to quote a price of petrol that was right fo right whole of the century. But that doesn't mean that any price that I might list is as good as any other. For instance, supposing that I listed the wage of common labour as $1 per hour and the price of petrol as $500 a gallon: in a setting in which it was supposed that people drove around in cars as freely as we do today. That price would be ridiculous. And yet some price ratios in the PHB, (and in _Chivalry & Sorcery_, _MERP_, _DragonQuest_, _HârnMaster_ and others are every bit as bad as that.



> Your prices, although based upon a set of assumptions of time period and location, may be just as faulty for another time period and location as the D&D prices seem to you.




I think not. They will often be discrepant, of course. But only as much as price ratios actually varied. And they never varied through factors of hundreds: many of them never varied as much as a factor of two. In short any fixed prices (such as mine) must be faulty, but they need not be anything like as bad as the PHB prices.



> You actually wouldn't be serving "both" markets because you'd be only serving one market (the average D&Der)+ the one market you based your prices off of (say medieval england in 1350). It will be an improvement for your particular desires in gaming, but that doesn't mean it's an improvement in gaming for anyone who wants to play outside of england in the 1350's. In fact, it may be more of a detriment for people who have your style of play (detailed world building aspects based upon history) but prefer Italy in 1210 than the simple, bad, base D&D prices we have right now.




No, that turns out not to be the case. There were difference in relative prices between Engalnd c 1350 and Italy c. 1210, but they were nothing like as big, not with in a long cooee of the magnitude of, the differences in relative prices betwen the PHB and England/Northern France c 1200.



> First off, you'd absolutely have to ditch the 10/10/10 ratio of copper/silver/gold.




No I wouldn't. Because the price ratio between silver and gold is a function of their relative abundance, which has nothing much to do with technology. Any ratio is as plausible as any other.

What I am concerned about are the price ratios that as the result of people making and consuming things using certain methods.

A suitable set of circumstances could make silver one tenth of the price of gold. A suitable set of circumstances could even make silver ten times the price of gold. In that case, any price ratio can make sense.

But given that ale is made out of barley, and that it is drunk by people who work for wages, it makes no sense to list a pint of ale as costing less than the amount of barley needed to make it, or more than a labourer earns in a day.

I use mediaeval price ratios as an example, to show those readers who have no idea how much work is involved in building a wooden house (for example) how far out of whack some PHB prices are. But my problem with PHB prices is not that they are different from mediaeval prices. My problem is that they are totally whacky when compared to one another.

For example, according to the PHB you can buy a chicken for 4 cp. But you can sell 1/2 pound of meat for 30 cp, and a chicken often has two or three pounds of meat on it. Work out what the profit is of slaughtering and dressing a chicken. Compare that to PHB wages. The result is ridiculous. And that is why the price ratio between chickens and meat in the PHB is so dramatically different from the mediaeval ratio. But the difference from the mediaeval ratio is not the problem. The problem is that the PHB prices are ridiculous in themselves.



> I hope my basic arguement (what time and what place) is coming though all of these paragraphs.




And _I_ hope that my argument is coming through: that although price ratios can vary according to circumstances, no conceivable circumstances (and certainly no circumstances in which the majority of people are behaving as though they were in a quasi-mediaeval world) would produce anything like some of the price ratios in the PHB.


----------



## The Gryphon

Agemegos said:
			
		

> In fact not, since I am basing my criticism on the (or rather, as jgbrowning points out, _a_) mediaeval price ratio of bread and a live chicken.
> 
> I don't have a retail price for a dead chicken, and indeed I don't think people bought them dead very often. But I have killed and cleaned chooks, and the labour involved is small compared with the mediaeval price of a chicken, which was more than a day's labour.
> 
> As for the price of meat, in times when the population was very small in comparison to the capacity of the land it was sometimes as cheap as wheat bread. But in extensively cultivated countries (such as required the manorial system) it was (for reasons that Adam Smith expalins in _The Wealth of Nations_ Book I chapter ix part b) necessarily three or four times as expensive as wheaten bread. The PHB makes it about five times an historical cost in comparison to bread (and therefore about fifteen times an historical cost in comparison to labour). Butchering must be very expensive in a D&D world to turn chickens 8 times too cheap into meat fifteen times too dear.



So you're saying that based on real world economics of the time, that the 2cp chicken should cost 16cp to balance with a labourers wage of 1sp. Moving to the next item you say the 1/2 lb. of meat in the PHB should cost 2cp. As for how much meat comes from a medieval chicken, I'll use 3 lb. which I think is generous. That means I lose 4cp per chicken serving it in my inn, whereas I'd expect to make maybe 6-8cp per chicken. The math just doesn't add up.

You're also assuming facts not in evidence with your statements.

The information you've provided from the abovementioned book states that the price of meat was sometimes as cheap as bread, yet you assume the prices in the PHB must comply wholely with the manorial system of feudal government described therein, thus making the chicken cost more than a labourer earns.

Therefore the chicken which costs 16cp under your manorial system [which is probably referring to buying a chicken in a city], would cost only 4cp under another portion of the same text [which is probably referring to buying a chicken in the more isolated rural area where it's being bred]. Whereas bread will probably cost roughly the same no matter where it's made.

So increase the cost of a chicken by 4 or more when buying it in a city, easy isn't it


----------



## Arnwyn

Agemegos said:
			
		

> I am only asking that the things already listed should have sensible prices instead of stupid ones.
> Well, Random User is playiing a rare breed of D&D then. But this thread is supposed to be about helping hiim to do so.



And you will never get this. The PHB is written - thus anything said beyond that (such as "the prices _shouldn't_ be this way") is moot. Further, since the PHB is written, I have a seriously hard time believing any publisher is going to release a book about d20 economics... and an even _harder_ time believing some publisher is going to release a book about d20 economics _and_ redo the entire equipment pricing system. That's just not going to happen.

In the end, you (and maybe random user if he's not satisfied with the answers above) really have only 2 options:
1) use the d20 system that's already been written, with all its absurdities (along with the related d20 support material);
2) come up with your own entire pricing and economic system.

That's all you got. There's no sense in arguing what "should" have been done, because it's far too late for that...


----------



## Deadguy

Arnwyn speaks wise words!

I am inclined to go with Hong's advice here; he rightly points out that D&D doesn't stand up to being thought about too much. It's a game to be experienced, not a treatise on mediaeval life and economics!


----------



## kigmatzomat

Agemegos said:
			
		

> If you look at post #15 in this thread you will see that I have already posted a list of the prices of typical mediaeval furnishings. They aren't going to do the job.




I'd looked at the list before.  By my quick perusal of your list, I'd guess that yes, furnishings account for about a third of a property's values, same as I suggested.  So your 7200p merchant's house likely has 2400p of furnishings for a total property value of 9600p.  It's hard to tell for sure since "merchant's house" doesn't give an idea of square footage, if it even has an oven, existence of a cellar, etc.  



> On another point you raise: if you start measuring the cost of a inn in terms of a wealth innkeeper instead of the wages of labourer, I will be free to start measuring the prices of mediaeval buildings in comparable terms, and the comparison will go right back where it was.




The cost of an inn is directly proportional to the clientele.  A flop house with a pile of straw and pony keg on sawhorses will cost much less than one a bishop would willingly stop in.  Assuming the innkeep expects to make similar profits to other professionals at that clientele level is reasonable.   

Or in more modern terms, a hotel targeting fast food workers will cost less than one aiming for corporate executives.  Furthermore, there will be a less profitable innkeep/owner for the fastfood inn.  So the (earned) wealth of the innkeep should be reflected in the property values. 

More succinctly: you have to spend money to make money.  

*and* there's the fact that if the innkeep lives there, he doesn't keep a separate residence.  If you treat the innkeep as a merchant he'd have a 9600p home, including furnishings.  If you say his inn is on par with a merchant's home then there's another 9600p for a 19,000p inn.  



> Now go teach your grandmother to suck eggs.




Ahhh, this is why I love the internet; the comaraderie.


----------



## jgbrowning

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Because the price ratio between silver and gold is a function of their relative abundance, which has nothing much to do with technology. Any ratio is as plausible as any other.
> 
> What I am concerned about are the price ratios that as the result of people making and consuming things using certain methods.
> 
> A suitable set of circumstances could make silver one tenth of the price of gold. A suitable set of circumstances could even make silver ten times the price of gold. In that case, any price ratio can make sense.




I understand your desires for more realistic pricing, but to me changing the bullion ratios to something reasonable is of much greater "realism" concern than items costing less than 5gp being a factor of ten or more off of each other. To me, more people understand the massive, glaring, error that's underlying every transaction. Although It's possible to justify this through abundance levels, it's something that grates heavier upon the average gamer than the disparities in commodity pricing. And bluntly, most gamers don't care about even this easily recognizable error because they quickly get the point that coins are just widgets, although they may never verbalize it.



> I use mediaeval price ratios as an example, to show those readers who have no idea how much work is involved in building a wooden house (for example) how far out of whack some PHB prices are. But my problem with PHB prices is not that they are different from mediaeval prices. My problem is that they are totally whacky when compared to one another.
> 
> For example, according to the PHB you can buy a chicken for 4 cp. But you can sell 1/2 pound of meat for 30 cp, and a chicken often has two or three pounds of meat on it. Work out what the profit is of slaughtering and dressing a chicken. Compare that to PHB wages. The result is ridiculous. And that is why the price ratio between chickens and meat in the PHB is so dramatically different from the mediaeval ratio. But the difference from the mediaeval ratio is not the problem. The problem is that the PHB prices are ridiculous in themselves.




I think the pound of meat probably means beef. This would mean that you could get 90 pounds of meat for the same price as a 10 gp cow. That's quite a bit better.



> No, that turns out not to be the case. There were difference in relative prices between Engalnd c 1350 and Italy c. 1210, but they were nothing like as big, not with in a long cooee of the magnitude of, the differences in relative prices betwen the PHB and England/Northern France c 1200.




There's been a long and strongly stated arguement than magic wouldn't create something resembling England/Nothern France. Personaly, I agree, if for no other reason than no other place in the world at the time really resembled England/Norther France without magic.  If you want to make a medievalesque D&D world (which I did) I don't think that figuring out the pricing discrepancies for items that players rarely, if ever, come in contact with is very important when compared with the many other aspects of the culture and how to integrate them with d20. And unlike other "flavor" aspects, pricing does serve a mechanical purpose within the game beyond measuring value.



> And _I_ hope that my argument is coming through: that although price ratios can vary according to circumstances, no conceivable circumstances (and certainly no circumstances in which the majority of people are behaving as though they were in a quasi-mediaeval world) would produce anything like some of the price ratios in the PHB.




I think you've stated your argument clearly and have more agreement than disagreement. We just disagree on several larger aspects. Primarily, I think that's any change on prices for things less than 5 gp isn't of any importance because such precision isn't needed to play the game. It may be needed to play a particular type of game, but generally isn't needed. Anytime a real number is needed, it's only becase a player's involved, other than that, GM fiat designed to promote plot and increase tension/fun for the players always works better.

Although I'm completely with you about appreciating a more internally consistant effort in D&D pricing, to me, the problems in pricing that involve players are the important ones. In this equation, game balance issues are more important than real-life believeability and will always win over. I think that attempts to rationalize the fiscal system would probably create more difficulties than benefits because, to me and the vast majority of gamers, orders of maginitude errors for things less than 5gp aren't of any concern to begin with. Messing with familiar price structures, however, is concerning.

joe b.


----------



## S'mon

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> Messing with familiar price structures, however, is concerning.
> 
> joe b.




This is why I would prefer to keep the 3e  DMG hireling costs, which remain similar to those of previous editions, and alter the 3e DMG Building costs, which are vastly inflated (ca x10 or more) from previous editions.  One thing I think we're all agreed on is that you can't plausibly have both as being true in the same D&D quasi-medieval society.

As for PHB costs, I use the costs for adventuring gear like swords all the time, but for chickens, beer etc I'd mostly tend to ignore them when designing a society.  Obviously a 1sp/day labourer doesn't spend 5cp on a flagon of beer.  Maybe he spends 4cp on a chicken.


----------



## Haffrung Helleyes

*prices*

I always assume that the prices for food and lodging in the PHB are 'foreigner' prices -- IE the price that an unknown traveller (presumed rich) outside of his home area pays.  I travel a lot in Asia, and believe me unless you're a really good bargainer you're going to pay 2 to 10 times the going 'local' rate for food and lodging.

Divide all the food, lodging costs by 10 to reflect what the peasant pays in his own village and things make a bit more sense.  The PHB prices represent the gouging of rich foreigners because 'they can afford it'.

Ken


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## Agemegos

The Gryphon said:
			
		

> Therefore the chicken which costs 16cp under your manorial system [which is probably referring to buying a chicken in a city], would cost only 4cp under another portion of the same text [which is probably referring to buying a chicken in the more isolated rural area where it's being bred].




Actually, not all the figures are from the same text. You have to rabbit around a bit looking for records of prices.



> So increase the cost of a chicken by 4 or more when buying it in a city, easy isn't it




I actually have some figures on the difference in prices for livestock between breeding areas (Leicestershire) and London. I think the pattern is interesting (the difference is smallest for cattle, rather larger for sheep, higher again for pigs, and highest for poultry). But I really didn't think that players wanted that sort of detail in their D&D game.

As for the fact that a live chicken is worth more than its weight in meat, I will point out two things. First, that the chicken I found a price for was noted as being 'a good layer'. Second, that the relative costs of different meats tends to vary somewhat according to circumstances. When beef and mutton are raised on open ranges they are cheap meats and poultry is a luxury food. If poultry were selling as a 40% premium over mutton, or if a cockerel or 'old boiler' were cheaper than a 'good layer' the prices I quoted would make perfect sense.

Anyway, you are correct in noting that it would not be good sense to slaughter a good egg-laying hen worth 1.6 sp to sell her meat for 1.2 sp. Will you acknowledge that on the other hand there is something whacky about a market in which you can buy a hen for 2 cp, slaughter her, and sell the meat for 18 sp? That's 17.8 sp profit for an operation that I assure you can be done with little skill and in few minutes.


----------



## Agemegos

Haffrung Helleyes said:
			
		

> I always assume that the prices for food and lodging in the PHB are 'foreigner' prices -- IE the price that an unknown traveller (presumed rich) outside of his home area pays.  I travel a lot in Asia, and believe me unless you're a really good bargainer you're going to pay 2 to 10 times the going 'local' rate for food and lodging.




That has been suggested before. I don't think that it accounts for the fact that some of the prices are way too cheap.


----------



## Agemegos

kigmatzomat said:
			
		

> Ahhh, this is why I love the internet; the comaraderie.




If you want camaraderie, patronise me in normal-sized type.


----------



## Agemegos

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> I understand your desires for more realistic pricing, but to me changing the bullion ratios to something reasonable is of much greater "realism" concern than items costing less than 5gp being a factor of ten or more off of each other. To me, more people understand the massive, glaring, error that's underlying every transaction. Although It's possible to justify this through abundance levels, it's something that grates heavier upon the average gamer than the disparities in commodity pricing. And bluntly, most gamers don't care about even this easily recognizable error because they quickly get the point that coins are just widgets, although they may never verbalize it.




The price of copper in D&D is pretty bad, I'll agree: about nine times higher than historical values. That puts copper pans in doubt. But the price of gold (although rather low by mediaeval standards) is within the range of values for the ancient Mediterranean. Neither of these discrepancies seems to me to be as bad as buildings ten to twenty times too expensive, implying rents ten to twenty times too expensive, implying that workers can't afford to live even in a hovel.



> There's been a long and strongly stated arguement than magic wouldn't create something resembling England/Nothern France




Sure, but the people of a D&D world have mediaeval means of production to fall back on when magic fails them: or when it makes something far more expensively than making or growing it in a mediaeval way.

According to thet PHB, magic somehow makes chickens strangely cheap and meat strangely expensive. Why don't the people whip out knives and convert a few excess chickens into meat?

According to the DMG, magic somehow makes building a tower cost 500,000 day's wages. But we have records that show that the huge towers in Carnavon Castle cost about £200 to build, which is 'only' about 40,000 day's wages.

Similarly, magic somehow makes a mansion in D&D cost 1,000,000 man-days of labour, whereas we know that using mediaeval technology a nobleman's city house with courtyard could be bought as cheaply sometimes as £90 (1,800 days' wages) including the real estate. Why would people in a D&D world use this magical technology if just getting a bunch of guys with simple tools would build them a mansion at 1/400 the cost?

Or if you suppose that people in a D&D world acually do most mundane things using a mediaeval approach, you end up with work-sites crawling with twenty times a reasonable number of workers for twenty time a reasonable construction time.



> Primarily, I think that's any change on prices for things less than 5 gp isn't of any importance because such precision isn't needed to play the game.




Maybe the price of single item isn't important. (But even then, I think you might as well get it right.) But often enough PCs buy inns or provision armies. And then the players whip out a calculator, and next thing you know they have a scheme to get rich quick.



> Although I'm completely with you about appreciating a more internally consistant effort in D&D pricing, to me, the problems in pricing that involve players are the important ones.




I am used to players becoming landed lords or wide-ranging merchant-adventurers, buying and running inns, building fortifications for towns etc. And I find that tht these prices do involve players, often enough.



> In this equation, game balance issues are more important than real-life believeability and will always win over.




That's true, but I don't think that any consideration of game balance either did or would go in to listing chickens as a price that allows a poulterer to make a profit on 1.7 day's wages on each one he slaughters.



> I think that attempts to rationalize the fiscal system would probably create more difficulties than benefits because, to me and the vast majority of gamers, orders of maginitude errors for things less than 5gp aren't of any concern to begin with. Messing with familiar price structures, however, is concerning.




You're having a bob each way. Either the prices are insignificant and it is not worth the trouble to get them right, or players are deeply attached to them and would be thrown into deep consternation by any changes to their beloved prices. It can't be both.

Besides which, some of the most glaring discrepancies are in things that cost 50,000 to 1,000,000 gp, not less than five.


----------



## Alchemist

Whoo.  What else is there to say?  Either wages are too low or prices are too high.  Some prices are really crazy and could do with some tweaking to be "realistic".

I would like a more internally consistent price list/wage schedule for my game, as I am preparing to run a more mercantile oriented campaign, and it's hard to justify the value assigned to many items in extrapolation to bulk-shipping quantities (and realising that the book value given is a retail price, not wholesale).  

I am truly curious:  What would our two principles in this thread (Agemegos and JGBrowning) suggest to rebalance the price lists (and perhaps wages) away from dungeoncrawling towards a more "real D&D common-folk" pricing?

Fantastic thread, BTW.  I love this stuff, despite having only general knowledge.


----------



## Sledge

Hey Agamegos, I would be really interested in a list of your sources.  I'm beginning to feel inspired to rewrite the Equipment document....


----------



## Agemegos

Sledge said:
			
		

> Hey Agamegos, I would be really interested in a list of your sources.  I'm beginning to feel inspired to rewrite the Equipment document....




One source I used was a list compiled by Glenys Armstrong, The Company of Ordinance +44 (0)1793 524524, which cited as its sources:

New Towns of the Middle Ages - Maurice Beresford 1988

A Baronial Household of the 13th Century 
                        - Margaret Wade La Barge 1980

Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages
                        - Christopher Dyer 1990

Medieval Women - Henrietta Layser 1995

The Medieval Soldier - Embleton and Howe 1994

Memoires of the Crusades - Villeharduin & De Joineville

Another was a list compiled by Kenneth Hodges (hodges@jif.berkeley.edu), which cited as its sources:

[1] English Wayfaring Life in the XIVth Century, J. J. Jusserand, trans Lucy Smith, Putnam's Sons, New York,1931 (Orig. 1889).

[2] London in the Age of Chaucer, A. R. Myers, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1972

[3] Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer, Cambridge University Press, 1989

[4] English Weapons & Warfare, 449-1660, A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, Barnes & Noble, 1992 (orig. 1966)

[5] The Armourer and his Craft from the XIth to the XVIth Century, Charles ffoulkes, Dover, 1988 (orig. 1912)

[6]"The Cost of Castle Building: The Case of the Tower at Langeais," Bernard Bachrach, in The Medieval Castle: Romance and Reality, ed. Kathryn Reyerson and Faye Powe, Kendall/Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, 1984

[7] The Knight in History, Frances Gies, Harper & Row, New York, 1984

[8] Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay, Craig Turner and Tony
Soper, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1990

[9] Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies, Harper & Row, New York, 1969

Both those lists were on the Web, and you might be able to find them by searching on their author's names.

I have also used information I came across in reading, for example in Barbara Tuchman's _A Distant Mirror_, but the information was only scattered. The only source I could recommend as having good stuff in any concentration is Adam Smith's _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_.

Note: both Armstong and Hodges give prices with an epoch. You will have to adjust for inflation, which was significant (not that English coin was significantly debased between about 800 and about 1485: but the production of silver-mines in Germany expended the supply of silver faster than the mediaeval economy grew).


----------



## random user

Thank you all for the replies and very informative posts.  I've settled on a number, and thought I would share it since I started this all.

Again (with so many posts it could be easy to miss), my players aren't really interested in running an inn.  They happened to make contact with an inn-owner who is looking to expand.  The players need an excuse to poke their noses in various places.  Thus they decided that playing investors might be an ideal cover.  

They don't know how to run an inn nor do they have any desire to learn.  They aren't even thinking about how to make any money off the inn (though I'm sure they would be happy if it did provide a revenue stream).  They want to build a spy network across towns and have a way to pass messages.  Having a spy at each inn is a good way to gather information, and having an excuse to visit those inns raises no suspicions as to why the players are there a lot.  Partnering with an experienced inn-owner relieves them of any responsibility of running the inn, which is fine by both them and me -- they want to be essentially a silent partner.

A local bookstore happened to have Stronghold Builder's Guidebook available for browsing.  In it, it listed a 10 room inn with tavern to be a little over 13,000gp.  This doesn't include the land it's on.  Broken down, the tavern/kitchen/stables part was about 7,000gp, and each additional bedroom was 700gp.

I've decided to go with these figures.  Rather than buying the land, the inn-owner will lease the land from the town.  Since I don't have to figure out how much the land would cost, I'm not going to worry about that.  Also as a note, a fancier inn/tavern was a lot more expensive, but my NPC inn-owner wants a less fancy, more functional inn that can hold a big crowd of working folks.  The price I'm going by will create an inn to his ideal.

In terms of how often something like this comes up, *shrug* I have no idea really.  All I know is my players (completely blindsighting me) thought up of a good cover story.  But I'm not going to hand them a spy network across cities for free.  Now they have a figure to work with, and can decide whether their gold would be best spent on this plan or something else (and to be honest I have no idea what they will decide -- but that's fine, that's what makes it D&D and not "let's all be characters in the DM's story").


----------



## jgbrowning

Agemegos said:
			
		

> The price of copper in D&D is pretty bad, I'll agree: about nine times higher than historical values. That puts copper pans in doubt. But the price of gold (although rather low by mediaeval standards) is within the range of values for the ancient Mediterranean. Neither of these discrepancies seems to me to be as bad as buildings ten to twenty times too expensive, implying rents ten to twenty times too expensive, implying that workers can't afford to live even in a hovel.




This is my last response on this issue as it seems to be turning into a dead horse. I'll outline my basic ideas for a final time.

You think certain things are cheap because you're comparing the prices to your assumption that *D&D prices/labor/costs should be comparable to medieval europe*. That's your assumption and it's not a bad one, but it's not really supported by the game design as shown. You're basing you assumptions on a particular place and particular time in the real-world (outside of your mediterranean example) as opposed to the game world. In the game world, prices are a function of game balance, *independent of any concepts of a working economy.* The balance issues relating to a peasants ability to buy food/land etc is the least factor of consideration when discussing d20 design.

The ancient mediterranean does nothing to suport your stance of mimicing a medieval economy. To really mimic a medieval situation, the basic D&D assumption of 100cp=10sp=1gp *MUST* be changed to a more reasonable sumation of medieval exchange. This, however, would result in a massive change of game balance. There was never a 100/10/1 exchange rate per ounce of copper, silver, and gold in medieval europe.



> Maybe the price of single item isn't important. (But even then, I think you might as well get it right.) But often enough PCs buy inns or provision armies. And then the players whip out a calculator, and next thing you know they have a scheme to get rich quick.




This is why we have DMs who can apply common sense to each individual circumstance. I can't use the D&D rules to determine how grain prices fluctuate during seasons or during years of feast or famine: I simply can't do that using the tool set given. The D&D toolset isn't designed, nor should it necessarily be designed to support a particular economic/gaming viewpoint. It should be designed to support the play style of the majority of its customers while having enough flexibilty to be adapted to more unique styles. You can easily adapt prices to suit your personal desires, so I think it functions admirably in it's main purpose.

If you're serious about designing an reasonable economic system it's going to be quite a task. You'll find that for every reasonable thing you do, you'll have different reasonable people show you how it doesn't really work that way and how there's seems to be a good dozen exceptions to every general rule. An economic system is massively complex, it will have to function admirably for both simple peasent to peasent interactions while working for large ship-sized international commerce, and it will (ideally) have no impact on existing PCs relative game-wealth. It will also have to be very simple to use because mostly players don't went to spend time bean counting.

Personally, I spent about a day thinking about the sheer dificulty of the process and threw out any hopes of making a more rational pricing system. This is why we created the economic simulator we did for MMS:WE. It uses a DC system to modifiy prices based upon what the GM thinks is reasonable for their economics. It's a tool to consistantly manipulate prices. That's the beauty of the economic simulator. It's a process used based upon the GMs need, not an explaination of what need or how that need works. For example: prices go up under many circumstances and we give a mechanic to show how prices can go up. We don't explain why, or how, or when, because those are GMs decisions based upon circumstance and campaign. Something more complex isn't desired because it would be more complicated that most gamers want. Honestly, MMS:WE's building system is more complicated than most people want, but anything simplier would be even less accurate. We made our choice to go with the more complex in this case, but provided many functions that are manipulatable by the user to create what they want. This of course means that they can use the system to create something utterly silly. But really who cares? Abusing any system simulating a complex action is usually easy.

As designed, the D&D prices are insignficant for many things, but at the same time changing them will necessitate even more price changes because cost is a unit of balance in d20 game design, nothing more. Cost is not a measurement of labor, a measurement of wage, nor a measurement of wealth. Divorce the concept of reality associated with these terms and replace cp/sp/gp with a game balance function only. You're suggesting cost changes which (especially in the expensive items which you suggest need the most changing) will heavily impact game balance in relation to magic item pricing. Which, will greatly impact the main play-style of D&D.

In the end, even if an NPC can kill a chicken and make 300x his daily expected salary, it doesn't matter because it's a NPC. And if your PC says he can do the same, smack the idiot down.



			
				Alchemist said:
			
		

> I am truly curious: What would our two principles in this thread (Agemegos and JGBrowning) suggest to rebalance the price lists (and perhaps wages) away from dungeoncrawling towards a more "real D&D common-folk" pricing?




The possiblity of affixing a realistic labor/matieral power to unrealistic price according to the erronious base exchange function of D&D seems highly arbitrary to me. It would defeat the goal of making a more medieval pricing system even if we managed to balance it perfectly, because we'd have to change the basic ratio of the precious metals *during the same medieval period* to do so. What medieval aspect do we think is more important: wage to purchasing power or the ratio of metal to metal which is the only measurement we have of the economy?

I don't think there's a way to justifiy this. Both the metal ratio and the purchasing power ratio (as currently listed in D&D prices) would have to change to create a realistic pricing system. This would dramatically change the balance of the entirely of the rest of D&D mechanics. To me this is is more effort than it's worth (and I'm nuts enough to write the building system) and would require a complete re-tooling of any balance issue using cost (monsters, magic items, expected wealth).

To me, it's not worth it.

joe b.


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## Agemegos

jgbrowning said:
			
		

> This is my last response on this issue as it seems to be turning into a dead horse. I'll outline my basic ideas for a final time.




Fair enough. That being the case I will indulge in one last reply.



> You think certain things are cheap because you're comparing the prices to your assumption that *D&D prices/labor/costs should be comparable to medieval europe*.




No. I think that the prices ought to make sense in comparison to one another, given that the people in a D&D world always have mediaeval production methods to fall back on. I don't demand a realistic mediaeval economy: just prices that aren't completely stupid when compared to one another. I use historical price ratios as evidence that my opinion about what is possible when mediaeval production methods are available is not wildly out of whack. That's all.

And so my complaint is not that PHB prices are different from mediaeval prices. And to me it is of no consequence that the price of gold in terms of silver is ten instead of rising from fifteen to thirty over a few centuries as the result of the operations of some rich silver mines. My complaint it that the PHB prices are, even taken on their own terms, absurd. And absurdities in the rules lead to absurdities in play.


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## S'mon

I agree w Agemegos of course.  I can't understand Joe's insistence that 'realistic' exchange ratios for gold/silver/copper is vital to plausibility.  And as Age has slightly said, in fact the 10:1 gold/silver ratio is pretty well exactly a ratio used from when Persian gold started flowing into the Mediterranean basin at the end of the 5th century BC, so it's hardly ahistorical.  & AD&D's 20:1 ratio was being used in the early 5th c.  The middle ages in northern Europe was a time of great gold scarcity of course, but that's not necessary to model a plausible society, which is all we ask.


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## tensen

CalrinAlshaw said:
			
		

> Out of curiosity, bringing up the cost of Inn's again, why does it cost 12,192gp to whitewash the walls and hang a sign outside the entrance, that is the main style of most buildings that were mid-level wealth. Now, I could see the interior cost being quite high, after all you need beds, tables, chairs, a bar, an entire kitchen to furnish etc. But that still seems extremely high...is the owner buying an innfull of exotic rare woods and commissioning the best crafters for this project?
> 
> Calrin Alshaw




Perhaps the inn has stained glass windows that require replacing at minimum twice a week after someone gets tossed out one of them <grin>


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## The Gryphon

Agemegos said:
			
		

> Anyway, you are correct in noting that it would not be good sense to slaughter a good egg-laying hen worth 1.6 sp to sell her meat for 1.2 sp. Will you acknowledge that on the other hand there is something whacky about a market in which you can buy a hen for 2 cp, slaughter her, and sell the meat for 18 sp? That's 17.8 sp profit for an operation that I assure you can be done with little skill and in few minutes.



I'll agree it's a little steep, but the price quoted for meat is for cooked meat being sold in an inn, not meat you'd buy from a market and cook yourself. The situation is somewhat equivalent to eating at a restaurant within a 4 star hotel, generally no peasant will be eating at an inn just like a person on the poverty line today won't be eating at said restaurant.

I imagine that a lot of situations within D&D are based on modern day equivalents, with people constructing the system looking at modern pricing as a guideline to how expensive an item should be from start to finish. For example (we'll stick with the chicken), the poultry farmer sells a chicken for $4.00...while the butcher sells the same prepared chicken for $10.00 and fillets off the same chicken for maybe $10.00 per kg ($5.00 per lb.)...then we have the restaurant selling it's chicken for $25.00 or more (for less than 1/2 lb. of chicken).

Most people today would understand how this system of pricing works thus making it easy to understand, but may not understand how the medieval economy worked. Seeing as D&D isn't a statistical medieval simulation, it doesn't matter if the prices mesh with medieval pricing as long as the system is somewhat consistent internally which I think it is (at least consistent enough that one portion won't break another).

We're now so far off topic I can't believe we're still in the same thread


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## Saeviomagy

The Gryphon said:
			
		

> Only 85 labourers was of course a reference to how little they cost in the grand scheme of things, not to whether or not it's a large amount of work in a small amount of time
> 
> To use the device more than once a week for building [the equivalent of 300 mandays of work], you'd have to be somewhat skilled with the device as you need to make a DC 18 Perform (stringed instrument) check. So we're down to half the labourers without a skill check anyway, thus halving the discount to 15% instead of 30%.




Actually you get 600 mandays out of it - you only need a successful roll if you go over an hour. Half an hour provides for 300 mandays of work.

And heaven forbid if you hire a 1st or 2nd level bard with good charisma. Now the lyre works for however long he can stay awake.

If you pay him comparable rates to what he'd earn in the big city, he can walk away with as much as 1gp per day.

For doing the work of 4800 men...


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## The Gryphon

Saeviomagy said:
			
		

> Actually you get 600 mandays out of it - you only need a successful roll if you go over an hour. Half an hour provides for 300 mandays of work.
> 
> And heaven forbid if you hire a 1st or 2nd level bard with good charisma. Now the lyre works for however long he can stay awake.
> 
> If you pay him comparable rates to what he'd earn in the big city, he can walk away with as much as 1gp per day.
> 
> For doing the work of 4800 men...



Sorry my mistake. That's just how I'd make it work, with a check every 30 minutes and increasing the DC by 2 with each check after the first, considering it has to be constant play. The secondary reason I'd change it is that lyre has always seemed odd in that it's powers all last for 30 minutes, one of which can't be pushed past this limit, but the check is hourly.

The bard would demand at least 1gp per day, probably more, but that's neither here nor there. The entire point is that you can pay a pittance, other than the cost of the lyre itself, to get a lot of work done thus avoiding the labour cost altogether. No matter how much work the lyre can do for you you still have to pay for the materials, thus the construction might happen faster but at most it will be 30% cheaper according to the SBG.

My players have just started building their castles, but haven't worked this out yet, so lets keep it quiet


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