Copyright 1999 by Immoderator <[loblolly 1453] at [my-deja.com]>.  All rights reserved.
"This material is not to be reprinted in any print medium or offered for sale in
any medium, electronic or otherwise, without my express written permission.
I absolutely reserve all copyrights to the material and the rights to reproduce
any or all of it myself for profit at any future date."--Immoderator
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Date: Fri, 01 Oct 1999 06:38:40 GMT
From: Immoderator <[loblolly 1453] at [my-deja.com]>
Subject: Re: Gold Pieces to English Pounds
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd

If I may throw my two pfennigs into this branch of the discussion, the
1st Edition DMG  (anybody here still remember that classic -- the one
which told DM's that THEY were the final arbiters of rules, not some
supplement?) is quite specific that the D&D economy is a
hyper-inflationary one, based upon the concept of adventurers coming
into town periodically with hoards of treasure.  The most relevant
examples from our world would be boom towns created by gold or silver or
opal rushes or the like, where an entrepeneur could sell a single egg
for what would would be a day's pay for a working man -- one who was NOT
in the "diggings."  Many of the great fortunes of the Western U.S., New
Spain, Australia, etc. were not built by men mining precious metals or
gems, but by slick merchants charging anything the market would bear for
otherwise unobtainable staples.  Levi Strauss & Co. is an outstanding
example -- Levi was able to charge whatever he wanted for his riveted
jeans in the 1840's and 1850's, and a century later his same patterns
could command comparable modern prices ($100 for example) in the former
Soviet Union because the demand was enormous and the supply of ready
money was there, doing no good to the bearer unless it was immediately
translated into something tangible like food, automobile parts -- or
Levi jeans.

There are several probable outcomes to such a situation:  (1) the
entrepeneurs and anyone who was able to keep his/her mineral wealth
could settle down and become the local elite when the economy stabilized
(e.g., San Francisco and Leadville), (2) the entrepeneurs could pack it
in when the pickings started becoming slim or competition started moving
in, returning with their wealth to their original cities (e.g., the
Astors, whose wealth was founded on frontier fur trading), (3) or the
nouveau riche could settle down and use their wealth to buy power and
exploit the surrounding poor -- or imported laborers -- in a neo-feudal,
hacienda or latifundia type economy.

It seems apparent that this third option is what D&D (and then AD&D) was
supposed to grow into, with "name level characters" moving out into "the
wilderness" and establishing strongholds and "attracting followers."
Let us translate that phrase "attracting followers" into "acquiring poor
peasants, unemployed labor, peons, sharecroppers, dependent clients,
etc." and we will have a good idea of what the original D&D would
logically lead to:  poor people gravitating towards the only individuals
with the power and ready cash to protect and employ (or at least feed,
clothe and shelter) them.  For a peasant in such an economy, the options
are very limited, and for all but the most outstanding types (who would
become PC's or important NPC's, anyway) the three  main options would be
starvation, scratching out a living on the wildest edges of the
frontier, or entering into the service of a rich and powerful PC.

As the cycle progressed, those who moved to the fringes of the
wilderness would eventually produce or attract low-level PC's, who, if
they were successful in wiping out the local monsters or villains, would
bring in a new hoard of wealth, and suddenly the frontier shanty village
of refugee peasants would become a new boom town with outrageous "rule
book prices."

Those who are really interested in this sort of thing should look
through the annotated bibliography of David Hackett Fischer's "The Great
Wave:  Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History."  With 20+ pages
devoted to the Middle Ages and European Renaissance alone, it has leads
to a wealth of primary and secondary source material.  Not touched on in
the book, as far as I can tell at a quick glance, is another parallel to
the "D&D-type economy," the pirate haven.  Although (for obvious
reasons!) it is difficult to obtain genuine financial records from
places such as early Charleston or the smuggling haven of Bristol,
certainly archaeological evidence from sunken Kingston and other pirate
ports  show that when piracy flourished the cities there were much
richer in expensive manufactured imports than they should have been
given the local economic base; in a nutshell, the locals were
overcharging pirates for stolen goods in exchange for staples and
essential gear, just as the D&D merchants overcharge "adventurers,"
whose "treasure" is -- let's face it -- just plunder going by a more
respectable name, and soon to be reminted or reset or resold for the
benefit of wealthy suppliers.

Okay, maybe it was two kreuzers's worth of input, but I date back to the
ancient days of little brown paperback rulebooks, when the goal WAS to
establish a fief in some wilderness, not to buy a mansion in the North
Ward of Waterdeep!  . . .

--
"Let there be patrons like Maecenas
 and there will be poets like Horace."

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Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 03:52:58 GMT
From: Immoderator <[loblolly 1453] at [my-deja.com]>
Subject: Re: Gold Pieces to Pounds / Dollars to Coppers
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.dnd
Message-ID: <7teh2o$1m2$[REDACTED] at [nnrp1.deja.com]>

> [snippped excellent discussion of boom towns]

Flattery WILL get you somewhere with egomaniacal economic historians!

>(snip for brevity) I have no real idea how to run a reasonable economy.
> I'd much rather have a reasonable economy presented, based on real
> world  figures and some educated guesses (for magic and the like) with
> some percentage modifiers for "boom" towns, normal towns,
> backwaters, big cities, rarity,  etc. I haven't done it yet
> but I'm pretty sure I'm going to convert to using Pendragon's price
> list, which is based on actual 13th Century Medieval prices where
> they are known. I've gotten a few others off the net which aren't bad.

I confess to being unfamiliar with Pendragon's price list (PLEASE DON'T
ANYONE TELL CHAOSIUM ON ME!), but if you are comfortable with it, by all
means, use it.  I haven't thoroughly investigated the Ars Magica economy
yet (except for book prices), but it seems to be a game where people
have done their homework, and there are a lot of miscellaneous Ars
Magica pages on the WWW.

What I would suggest, if you want to add some variety and authenticity,
is to adapt the begging modifiers used in "A Mighty Fortress" (and I
think in "The Thieves' Handbook," too) to reflect prices and
availability.  Rembering that 1 on a D20 is equal to 5%, you decide
that everything listed in whatever price list you use is available in a
huge metropolis (e.g., a Constantiople, Venice, Baghdad, Kaifeng, etc.),
at stated prices;

stated prices would apply to smaller cities, but that only things
ordinary city-dwellers would use would be available (i.e. chain mail,
but no sets of full plate armor, only minor magic items, etc.);

in a town there would be a 10% mark-up on all prices (goods have to be
transported through bandit-infested forests and mountains), and there
would be very few decent weapons and armor, most of which would have to
be special-ordered from a city or individually crafted to order (as per
the rules in "The Fighter's Handbook");

in a hamlet or village even fewer items would be available (only a few
stray pieces of used metal armor, almost no weapons beyond those an
ordinary villager would use for hunting, and not more than one or two
extremely common magic items), and the price mark-up would be 25% on
anything which had to be brought in from a town or city;

in the countryside almost nothing beyond simple food and drink and the
crudest lodgings would be available, there would be almost no "city
things," and what there are would have a 35% price mark-up.

In a "boom town" economy, anything could be had (or ordered), but the
prices might be five to ten times higher than they would be in a city,
on the assumption that adventurers with tens of thousands of gold pieces
can afford to pay five silver pieces for a loaf of bread (which might
have been a week's total income for a skilled craftsman before the PC's
stumbled into town throwing gold around like plastic Mardi Gras
necklaces!).

One lesson which has impressed upon me by other old-time gamers is:
"PRICE DENOTES QUALITY" (at least in most cases, when dealing with
honest merchants, few though they may be in some towns!).  "Aurora's
Catalog" (for the Forgotten Realms setting) gives some good examples of
this, with widely different prices for items of clothing, for example,
based upon how fancy they are, and the rarity of the materials, whereas
the PHB might give only a single price for an item.  A pair of slippers
which were little better than rawhide moccasins might cost a few
coppers, while ermine-lined monogramed silk slippers embroidered with
gold thread might cost fifty gold pieces the pair (and obviously would
NOT be available outside of large cities).  A suit of standard chainmail
might cost the list price; a used set which has been through some
battles and been patched up might have an AC penalty, but be cheaper
(unless of course, the town's local hedge wizard threw a few cantrips
like Polish on it, in which case some rich out-of-town chump -- I mean
PC -- might pay twice what it is worth, especially if the party's 1st
level mage detects a magical dweomer on the armor).

As for giving you a fixed price list for your own game's economy, that
would be presumptuous without knowing all of the nuances of your
campaign.  One book which is readily available in large libraries is
"Three Behaim Boys," by Steven Ozment, the true story of three
well-to-do brothers in late Renaissance Germany.  Their letters often
include information about prices (students have been writing home for
money for three thousand years!), and Appendix 2 is a very, VERY general
chart of the relative value of money from 1550-1650.

WARNING!  MIND-NUMBING ECONOMIC HISTORY FOLLOWS FOR TWO PARAGRAPHS!

To illustrate how incredibly difficult it is to determine wages, prices
and the value of money, Ozment gives the value of the "schilling" as 10
- 12 pfennigs, and a (German) "pound" as *30* pfennigs; compare this to
the Carolingian "sou"/English "shilling" of 12 "pence" (or "pennies,"
symbol: "d." for "denier," from "denarius," a Roman silver coin the size
of a dime equal to one day's pay for a skilled craftsman at the height
of the Empire -- the "penny" of the King James Bible was a day's
wages!), *20* of which equalled a "pound" (French "livre," literally one
pound of good coins).

Since I think I mentioned elsewhere that I consider one "A Mighty
Fortress" pound to equal 1 2/3 AD&D gold pieces, I hope that you see the
immense problems involved in converting "real world" prices into "AD&D"
prices.  A D&D gold piece equals 10 silver pieces or 100 copper pieces;
in REAL Europe, a "pound" equalled 240 copper pieces, and these copper
pieces were originally made from fine silver!  20 of the fine silver
denarii (deniers/pence) originally equalled 1 solidus, which was a
Roman/Byzantine GOLD coin which was worth 1/12th of a "pound"; the
original "pound" was such an enormous quantity of money that there was
NO coin for it -- it would be as useless as a $20,000 bill!

USEFUL INFORMATION IN REALLY SIMPLE LANGUAGE FOLLOWS:

The D&D/AD&D 'gold piece' is grossly over-weighted, having originally
been intended as a measure of 'encumbrance' as well as money.  The
"gold piece" is 1/10th of a POUND in weight; this is absurd, and
should, to reflect, the real world world, be considered as 1/10th of an OUNCE.
Based on weight alone, the D&D gold piece should have something like $30
- $50 buying power in our world.  If you round it to $50 (as I do), that
means 1 AD&D copper piece should have the buying power of half a U.S.
dollar, modern money.  Go to a supermarket in a big city and consider a
US dollar as 2 c.p. -- whatever a dollar can buy there should be
available for 2 coppers in a big city D&D bazaar (except for modern
things, of course!).  Go to a small town, or a mom-and-pop store or a
7-11 and check their much higher prices and you can get an idea of what
smaller town prices would be like in a wealthy D&D world.

If you use the 1 c.p. = 50¢ rule-of-thumb, you can even get prices for
armor, magic items, etc.  A modern sword might cost $400; that would
equal 8 gold pieces under this rule.  A high-end deck of Visconti-Sforza
Tarot cards from U.S. Games Systems costs about $50; that would be 1
gold piece by this rule, and they would have no magical dweomer.  USEFUL
mages being in short supply in our world, consider that a web-site
designer might charge $50 - $100 an hour to program in HTML and java,
and it might cost $20,000 to have him/her create a high-end web page
over the course of a month (PLUS benefits PLUS expenses).

If an AD&D mage is obliged to spend a month enchanting an item, and that
is considered the medieval equivalent of a month of high-end computer
programming, a mage's time would be worth about 400 gold pieces per
month, or about 15 g.p. a day for short-term work (such as casting a
simple 1st-level spell); make that the value of a mage's time _per_
_level_,  and by using the rules for enchanting items, you can calculate
the costs of scrolls, potions, etc., based on the mage's level -- but
don't forget to add the cost of components, which are expenses for which
the mage will undoubtedly charge the client (plus a mark-up for the time
it will take to re-order supplies).

Modern prices for weapons, armor, "magical" items, rare ingredients,
etc. are available on the Internet -- just search out suppliers of
historical re-enactment groups, occult stores, jewellers, spice and herb
merchants, scientific and medical supply houses, etc.  Convert each
dollar into 2 copper pieces of price and -- voila! -- something which
approaches a realistic economy for a well-off D&D city.  Use the earlier
modifiers for towns and villages, and you should be able to make up a
whole world's economy in a few days of work.

I hope that my 1 c.p. = 50¢ rule helps you and other game-masters.  It
is NOT 100% accurate (more like 70% accurate), but it IS easy to use --
for one thing, there is no fumbling through books if a PC wants
something unusual:  you can just figure out what a modern store would
sell the item for, and apply my little rule.

--
"Let there be patrons like Maecenas
and there will be poets like Horace."
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