A typical gold piece ( i.e., coin) in the ancient/medieval "real" world was MUCH smaller than Gygax's "10 gold pieces is a pound".
Gygax's weight makes a "typical" gold piece well over an ounce, a ridiculously large coin by real world standards (such coins existed, but really weren't used for circulation in the medieval/ancient world, except as parts of large transactions). He's off a bit, but gold coins hadn't been in circulation for a LONG time when he wrote the D&D books. Then again, even copper coins never made it to that size (copper coins varied from the size of a dime to about the size of a modern half dollar).
A more realistic size would the Byzantine Solidus (used from around 300 to 1400 AD), about 1/10 the size of Gygax's coins, or Spain's 1/2 Escudo (1/20 of an ounce).
It's really tough to compare the value of a dragon's hoard in modern terms. Quality steel was worth more than its weight in gold until the early 19th century--a 40 lb suit of plate should sell for far more than 400 gold even in Gygax gold, though today, even if plate armor was still useful for everyone, would still be pretty cheap because we can manufacture steel in far greater quantities; that's not even factoring magic, though I suspect a +1 bow isn't quite as powerful as a standard issue uzi.
Anyway, saying a dragon's hoard is worth 125 million in modern terms is probably as good a guess as any.
Value of a Gold Piece?
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Last edited by Doom on Fri Nov 30, 2012 7:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote: And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
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Lago PARANOIA
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Since the value of gold as a commodity is exactly equal to that of gold as currency and it's apparently been like this for (at least) decades, the amount of deflation in the D&D-verse much be immense. Like, William Jennings Bryan would either turn into the Incredible Hulk or die whimpering in the fetal position.
But since D&D is a ridiculous Dark Age Europe fantasy pastiche, what do you expect?
But since D&D is a ridiculous Dark Age Europe fantasy pastiche, what do you expect?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
i did it nt he past, dont feel like it today, but how about you claim it was off, give the volume of each coin (platinum, gold, silver, copper) at 10 per pound, or 2nd and ups 50 per pound.Doom wrote:A typical gold piece ( i.e., coin) in the ancient/medieval "real" world was MUCH smaller than Gygax's "10 gold pieces is a pound".
Gygax's weight makes a "typical" gold piece well over an ounce, a ridiculously large coin by real world standards (such coins existed, but really weren't used for circulation in the medieval/ancient world, except as parts of large transactions). He's off a bit, but gold coins hadn't been in circulation for a LONG time when he wrote the D&D books. Then again, even copper coins never made it to that size (copper coins varied from the size of a dime to about the size of a modern half dollar).
Play the game, not the rules.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
Let's talk about the size and weight of coins in D&D. In 1E, coins were 10 to the pound, and equipment weights were given in gold coin equivalents, making it easier to do your value-for-money Greyhawking calculations. In 2E onward, coins were 50/lb, making them a bit easier to handle.
A typical US penny weighs 2.5g. One pound is 454g. A 2E D&D coin weighs about the same as 3.6 pennies, so if you make a stack of 7 pennies in your hand, that's about the weight of a a pair of 2E coins. If you've ever rolled coins, you probably have an idea of how heavy a roll of pennies is. Well, it's only 13.7 2E D&D coins.
In 1E, things were worse. You need a stack of 18 pennies to match the weight of a single coin, and your roll of pennies is only 2.75 coins. Unwieldy much?
Now let's talk about volume.
If we assume pure elemental metals, in 2E onward, we get a gold coin that's 1.06 times the volume of the penny. If we keep the thickness the same, just increase its diameter by 3%.
For a silver coin, our coin is a bit under twice as large as a penny. We can either double its thickness, or increase its diameter by 40%. Note that a US quarter has only 83% more volume than a US penny, so a silver piece is larger still!
Our pure copper piece is 2.29x the volume of a US penny. It's slightly smaller than a Canadian Loonie (2.434x volume) or US $1 coin (2.495x volume of a penny). It's about equal to the volume of 3 dimes. Assuming we kept the thickness of a penny, we increase its diameter by 50%. This isn't an unrealistically large coin, but it's perhaps a bit large for something that's supposed to be the smallest unit of currency.
Assuming a gold coin is not pure (which is reasonable, since gold is very soft), it will grow a bit larger. The karat rating of gold indicates its ratio of gold to base metal by mass. Since our masses are constant (45.4g), to compute the volume of the coin, just take the appropriate weighted average of the gold coin volume and that of, say, copper. E.g. a 12 kt coin would have a volume of (1.06 + 2.29) / 2 = 1.675 times that of a US penny, or a diameter 30% bigger. A 16 kt coin would have a volume of 16/24 * 1.06 + 8/24 * 2.29 = 1.47 times that of a US penny (or roughly 2 dimes).
Sterling silver is 92.5% silver, and the rest other metals like copper. 0.925 * 1.96 + 0.075 * 2.29 = 1.98, so even close to being exactly two pennies, but not a significant difference. The coins will last much longer, though.
For 1E coins, just multiply all the volumes by 5. Those sizes are ridiculous! A copper coin has the volume of 11.45 pennies. Assuming double thickness, that's still increasing its diameter by 2.4x! This coin is going to cover most of your palm. Triple thickness? Still two pennies across.[/i]
A typical US penny weighs 2.5g. One pound is 454g. A 2E D&D coin weighs about the same as 3.6 pennies, so if you make a stack of 7 pennies in your hand, that's about the weight of a a pair of 2E coins. If you've ever rolled coins, you probably have an idea of how heavy a roll of pennies is. Well, it's only 13.7 2E D&D coins.
In 1E, things were worse. You need a stack of 18 pennies to match the weight of a single coin, and your roll of pennies is only 2.75 coins. Unwieldy much?
Now let's talk about volume.
If we assume pure elemental metals, in 2E onward, we get a gold coin that's 1.06 times the volume of the penny. If we keep the thickness the same, just increase its diameter by 3%.
For a silver coin, our coin is a bit under twice as large as a penny. We can either double its thickness, or increase its diameter by 40%. Note that a US quarter has only 83% more volume than a US penny, so a silver piece is larger still!
Our pure copper piece is 2.29x the volume of a US penny. It's slightly smaller than a Canadian Loonie (2.434x volume) or US $1 coin (2.495x volume of a penny). It's about equal to the volume of 3 dimes. Assuming we kept the thickness of a penny, we increase its diameter by 50%. This isn't an unrealistically large coin, but it's perhaps a bit large for something that's supposed to be the smallest unit of currency.
Assuming a gold coin is not pure (which is reasonable, since gold is very soft), it will grow a bit larger. The karat rating of gold indicates its ratio of gold to base metal by mass. Since our masses are constant (45.4g), to compute the volume of the coin, just take the appropriate weighted average of the gold coin volume and that of, say, copper. E.g. a 12 kt coin would have a volume of (1.06 + 2.29) / 2 = 1.675 times that of a US penny, or a diameter 30% bigger. A 16 kt coin would have a volume of 16/24 * 1.06 + 8/24 * 2.29 = 1.47 times that of a US penny (or roughly 2 dimes).
Sterling silver is 92.5% silver, and the rest other metals like copper. 0.925 * 1.96 + 0.075 * 2.29 = 1.98, so even close to being exactly two pennies, but not a significant difference. The coins will last much longer, though.
For 1E coins, just multiply all the volumes by 5. Those sizes are ridiculous! A copper coin has the volume of 11.45 pennies. Assuming double thickness, that's still increasing its diameter by 2.4x! This coin is going to cover most of your palm. Triple thickness? Still two pennies across.[/i]
yeah, my old spreadsheet based on a column of gold had coins sized based on 1 inch coins and they were very flimsy. assuming pure metal in D&D would really be flawed.
i figure in reality a D&D coin would have to be an alloy, but we dont know the sizes of coins really until 4th, or i cant find it in 1st.
also we dont know the shape of D&D coins, whether they are round, hex (knowing Gary probably), have a hollow center, etc.
i used "beads" as coins in one adventure i ran, and being a sling bullet costs 1 cp, my players just ignored buying bullets and pelted enemies with excess copper pieces. the whizzing sound it would give form the center hole on the bead was also something they used to scare people or as a signal to ambush people with also. very inventive that was i thought.
the hole in the "coins" or beads, they also figured made it harder to steal because they had their most important money threaded to their clothes so that a weary pickpocket would be harder to catch as a mistake would mean a fighter suddenly without pants and a thief hovering around his legs. many a thief quickly declared they were trying to rob the PC rather than be thought to be doing something else.
grr, i am going to have to recalculate the coins volumes as the beads and such i had long ago and lsot on another computer this weekend after all it seems.
unless you would be so kind to give a rundown of your findings in like a chart?
copper, silver, gold, platinum per coin (@ 50 and 10 per pound)
volume:
diameter:
thickness
i figure in reality a D&D coin would have to be an alloy, but we dont know the sizes of coins really until 4th, or i cant find it in 1st.
also we dont know the shape of D&D coins, whether they are round, hex (knowing Gary probably), have a hollow center, etc.
i used "beads" as coins in one adventure i ran, and being a sling bullet costs 1 cp, my players just ignored buying bullets and pelted enemies with excess copper pieces. the whizzing sound it would give form the center hole on the bead was also something they used to scare people or as a signal to ambush people with also. very inventive that was i thought.
the hole in the "coins" or beads, they also figured made it harder to steal because they had their most important money threaded to their clothes so that a weary pickpocket would be harder to catch as a mistake would mean a fighter suddenly without pants and a thief hovering around his legs. many a thief quickly declared they were trying to rob the PC rather than be thought to be doing something else.
grr, i am going to have to recalculate the coins volumes as the beads and such i had long ago and lsot on another computer this weekend after all it seems.
unless you would be so kind to give a rundown of your findings in like a chart?
copper, silver, gold, platinum per coin (@ 50 and 10 per pound)
volume:
diameter:
thickness
Play the game, not the rules.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
I've posted this in other forums, here it is for here. D&D money, 2011.
Some of that is also taken from the tomes and such. I'm a fan of this place.
I've done an overhaul of my house rules on currency and prices. Here's some of the more useful results.
In modern terms 1gp is ~$50. People get paid very little and most things cost about the same.
The coins people should be using in D&D are tiny miscellaneous copper coins (1cp), or small silver pennies (~8cp) and gold florins (~3gp). Copper coins are metropolitan and only used locally, silver is minted and used everywhere but doesn't travel well, while gold is mostly a large-scale trade coin. There are 1000cp to the pound (as 1000 coins), 200sp (as 250 pennies), and 400gp (as 125 florins). Platinum coins are an 18th century invention, so can fuck off.
Sticking with the cp/sp/gp notation in game, a variety of different-sized coins are all worth 10/20/400gp per pound (copper/silver/gold).
Unskilled labour should be paid 2sp/day, master craftsmen should profit 3sp/day, and skilled merchants earn up to 5sp/day, so Craft and Profession skills profit about d20+mods in sp/week, and unskilled fits as a default. That's a post-monster economy.
Cut room and meal prices by a factor of 3 or 4 at the low end, unless it's festival time or you're renting a room at the hell-mouth. Most weapons and armour are just slightly overpriced, about 150% of average (assuming high quality weapons, humanoid weapons should be worth a few silver at best), so feel free to discount a little as appropriate. A few things like posh frocks are vastly too cheap. Chickens are half price.
Certain items are anachronistic, and priced to suit. Full plate and a few weapons are about 10x the price they settle to when common, along with some other gear. As a campaign note, very few people use the expensive stuff, because it doesn't really exist yet.
Traps and poisons are just as stupidly priced as you'd expect. Divide by 1000 or so.
Spellcasters make far too much money casting spells, there's only a handful of them can replace more than one or two days of unskilled labour, spell level x caster level in sp at the most, not 100x that.
A king's ransom is about 300,000gp, or 750 pounds of gold.
In modern terms 1gp is ~$50. People get paid very little and most things cost about the same.
The coins people should be using in D&D are tiny miscellaneous copper coins (1cp), or small silver pennies (~8cp) and gold florins (~3gp). Copper coins are metropolitan and only used locally, silver is minted and used everywhere but doesn't travel well, while gold is mostly a large-scale trade coin. There are 1000cp to the pound (as 1000 coins), 200sp (as 250 pennies), and 400gp (as 125 florins). Platinum coins are an 18th century invention, so can fuck off.
Sticking with the cp/sp/gp notation in game, a variety of different-sized coins are all worth 10/20/400gp per pound (copper/silver/gold).
Unskilled labour should be paid 2sp/day, master craftsmen should profit 3sp/day, and skilled merchants earn up to 5sp/day, so Craft and Profession skills profit about d20+mods in sp/week, and unskilled fits as a default. That's a post-monster economy.
Cut room and meal prices by a factor of 3 or 4 at the low end, unless it's festival time or you're renting a room at the hell-mouth. Most weapons and armour are just slightly overpriced, about 150% of average (assuming high quality weapons, humanoid weapons should be worth a few silver at best), so feel free to discount a little as appropriate. A few things like posh frocks are vastly too cheap. Chickens are half price.
Certain items are anachronistic, and priced to suit. Full plate and a few weapons are about 10x the price they settle to when common, along with some other gear. As a campaign note, very few people use the expensive stuff, because it doesn't really exist yet.
Traps and poisons are just as stupidly priced as you'd expect. Divide by 1000 or so.
Spellcasters make far too much money casting spells, there's only a handful of them can replace more than one or two days of unskilled labour, spell level x caster level in sp at the most, not 100x that.
A king's ransom is about 300,000gp, or 750 pounds of gold.
tussock wrote:Most of this sprung from the basic 3e trade goods and hireling costs (with an eye to how they compare to weapons, armour, and other real-world gear), comparing those to historic figures, finding the historic silver content of those figures, and calculating back into cp/sp/qp.
The British pound has inflation data running back to 1300 or so, and the reality check on the numbers there works well enough.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
"profit 3sp/day" i read that as meaning the cost of materials and paying the unskilled laborers (the guy working the bellows), yeilds not much left for the master craftsmen.
merchants are stationary legalized bandits. and could make more than anyone save adventurers. the middleman always gets the lions share of profits.
merchants are stationary legalized bandits. and could make more than anyone save adventurers. the middleman always gets the lions share of profits.
Play the game, not the rules.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
A GP is about $500, and move on with your life. It's simple, it's close enough to right, and it makes the numbers fairly easy.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Lago PARANOIA
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What? Sure, it's simple and easy to work with, if you ignore the fact that flippant simplification leads to a intuition that is completely and totally wrong.fectin wrote:A GP is about $500, and move on with your life. It's simple, it's close enough to right, and it makes the numbers fairly easy.
Here's a question for you: how much food and clothing can a thrifty D&D laborer in a cosmopolitan city get with one gold piece? By contrast, how much food and clothing can a regular-ass citizen in a social democracy get with 500 dollars?
Before you start trying to tweak the dollar amounts to refute my point, let me say that I'm not just here to discuss prices. I'm trying to make a point about the whole folly of trying to compare the D&D economy and the real world economy. The gap between what currency and productivity -- let alone economy theory -- means in 'our' world compared to that of a ridiculous Dark Age Europe fantasy pastiche is huge. Ridiculously huge. So huge that any attempt to think about deceptively simple shit like prices and services in D&D from a modern is doomed to fail.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
not really. just come from D&D with lots of gold, sell it, buy more platinum than the gold you had, and go back to D&D world 10 times as rich as you were when you started.
Play the game, not the rules.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
In pre-plague Europe they did, more like 5-30 times as much as unskilled labour (labour got 1000 calories a day in good years and were described as barely conscious most of the time). In post-plague Europe that changed to roughly the 2/3/5 ratio, because labour became a valuable commodity. I figure post-monster D&D is close enough to post-plague Europe, lots of vacant land and competition for labour.Korgan0 wrote:Shouldn't master craftsmen and merchants be making way more than a fraction more of what an unskilled ranch-hand makes?
Actual landed nobles could pull much more, the King's ransom is his yearly earnings, so he's pushing five thousand times what the labourers get, maybe 1sp per adult male subject per month (trickling up from larger land revenues pulled by local barons).
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
I could be wrong, but I think that may be his point. D&D monetary numbers are stupid, meaningless and contradictory (though they don't go full batshit-insane until you throw dragonlance iron pieces into the mix).Lago PARANOIA wrote:What? Sure, it's simple and easy to work with, if you ignore the fact that flippant simplification leads to a intuition that is completely and totally wrong.fectin wrote:A GP is about $500, and move on with your life. It's simple, it's close enough to right, and it makes the numbers fairly easy.
Here's a question for you: how much food and clothing can a thrifty D&D laborer in a cosmopolitan city get with one gold piece? By contrast, how much food and clothing can a regular-ass citizen in a social democracy get with 500 dollars?
Before you start trying to tweak the dollar amounts to refute my point, let me say that I'm not just here to discuss prices. I'm trying to make a point about the whole folly of trying to compare the D&D economy and the real world economy. The gap between what currency and productivity -- let alone economy theory -- means in 'our' world compared to that of a ridiculous Dark Age Europe fantasy pastiche is huge. Ridiculously huge. So huge that any attempt to think about deceptively simple shit like prices and services in D&D from a modern is doomed to fail.
So instead of trying to justify bullshit, just throw an arbitrary value out and move on. A system where a fucking backpack is worth either a tenth of a pound of gold or half a pound of gold (depending on if you are using 10:1 or 50:1 for coin weights) is never going to be mapped to anything functional.
Last edited by Voss on Tue Dec 04, 2012 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Voss has the gist of it.
My approach was actually that a detailed analysis of an economy based on handwaving is both stupid hard and thankless, as opposed to impossible and thankless, but it's really a distinction without a difference.
You could undertake a rigorous analysis of the economics of gold-based economies, and layer that on top of DnD's pricing structure, or you could realize that DnD's economics are FUBAR right out of the gate, pick a halfway reasonable conversion factor, and (emphasis added this time) move on with your life.
$500 is close enough to the commodity price to be reasonable. That makes 1cp about $5 (a nice draft beer), 1sp about $50 (a day's wages for unskilled labor, absent unions), and 1 gp a lot, but not a crazy amount. It's close enough to be sane, and that's as good as you're going to get with dnd economics.
My approach was actually that a detailed analysis of an economy based on handwaving is both stupid hard and thankless, as opposed to impossible and thankless, but it's really a distinction without a difference.
You could undertake a rigorous analysis of the economics of gold-based economies, and layer that on top of DnD's pricing structure, or you could realize that DnD's economics are FUBAR right out of the gate, pick a halfway reasonable conversion factor, and (emphasis added this time) move on with your life.
$500 is close enough to the commodity price to be reasonable. That makes 1cp about $5 (a nice draft beer), 1sp about $50 (a day's wages for unskilled labor, absent unions), and 1 gp a lot, but not a crazy amount. It's close enough to be sane, and that's as good as you're going to get with dnd economics.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
@fectin, that totally fails to appreciate how poor everyone was back then. How poor a lot of people in the world are right now (half the world makes $2.50 a day). But if you want to spend time defending something you know is wrong because you don't want to be right, that's fine too.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
Back when, tussock?
What historical period do you think DnD represents?
(edit: tags)
What historical period do you think DnD represents?
(edit: tags)
Last edited by fectin on Tue Dec 04, 2012 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
OD&D is reinforced Chainmail. 1350-1400. Various campaign settings and splatbooks change that up to around the early age of exploration at 1500. Plus a good few anachronisms. In general you're late medieval, pre-renaissance, but with the cannon replaced by Wizards.
I use late 14th century, post-plague western Europe (with Irish-style ascetic Monks who lecture you about your impurity and offer forgiveness as they repeatedly kick you in the nuts). It's a touch early for full plate and so on, but as the tables make full plate impossibly expensive that's fine, you're paying for custom prototypes.
But it doesn't matter, the structure of Europe's economy and the balance of wages and prices stayed much the same from the plague to the industrial revolution. The pennies eventually became groats, but the common silver coins were much the same size and weight and bought the same goods for several centuries.
I use late 14th century, post-plague western Europe (with Irish-style ascetic Monks who lecture you about your impurity and offer forgiveness as they repeatedly kick you in the nuts). It's a touch early for full plate and so on, but as the tables make full plate impossibly expensive that's fine, you're paying for custom prototypes.
But it doesn't matter, the structure of Europe's economy and the balance of wages and prices stayed much the same from the plague to the industrial revolution. The pennies eventually became groats, but the common silver coins were much the same size and weight and bought the same goods for several centuries.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
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Desdan_Mervolam
- Knight-Baron
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This statement is meaningless because cost of living is not the same everywhere across the world.tussock wrote:@fectin, that totally fails to appreciate how poor everyone was back then. How poor a lot of people in the world are right now (half the world makes $2.50 a day).
Don't bother trying to impress gamers. They're too busy trying to impress you to care.
Per Dyer's Standards of Living in the Middle Ages, total cost of all of a Knight's armor was £16 6s 8d (reference 1374). He also indicates that unskilled wages rose roughly 25%-50% over those 50 years. Adam Smith famously documents the wild fluctuations in silver price over that time (why doesn't anyone read Wealth of Nations? Because he spends pages and pages on how silver prices fluctuate wildly).
Your assertions are simply wrong.
Dnd does not simulate or emulate anything, any more than Monopoly does.
Your assertions are simply wrong.
Dnd does not simulate or emulate anything, any more than Monopoly does.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
How difficult to read is Wealth of Nations, btw?fectin wrote:Per Dyer's Standards of Living in the Middle Ages, total cost of all of a Knight's armor was £16 6s 8d (reference 1374). He also indicates that unskilled wages rose roughly 25%-50% over those 50 years. Adam Smith famously documents the wild fluctuations in silver price over that time (why doesn't anyone read Wealth of Nations? Because he spends pages and pages on how silver prices fluctuate wildly).
Your assertions are simply wrong.
Dnd does not simulate or emulate anything, any more than Monopoly does.
I've actually been wanting to peruse it, but I don't know if I have the attention span.
I haven't read it. I assume it's about like less focused versions of Locke's Treatises though, which are already rough slogging.
I liked PJ O'Rourke's summary version. He explains what Smith said, what it means, and how it connected to his actual points. It also has a bonus chapter on the Theory of Moral Sentiments. You want that; it makes some parts of Wealth of Nations make more sense.
Linked for reference: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001FOR5KS
I liked PJ O'Rourke's summary version. He explains what Smith said, what it means, and how it connected to his actual points. It also has a bonus chapter on the Theory of Moral Sentiments. You want that; it makes some parts of Wealth of Nations make more sense.
Linked for reference: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001FOR5KS
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
actually is DOES emulate an economy, just not a real-world one that has ever been used but an entirely fictional world. the fact it cannot be equated to anything is all the missing parts, and those erroneous ones that were thrown in later to cover gaps and just fill splat books.fectin wrote:Per Dyer's Standards of Living in the Middle Ages, total cost of all of a Knight's armor was £16 6s 8d (reference 1374). He also indicates that unskilled wages rose roughly 25%-50% over those 50 years. Adam Smith famously documents the wild fluctuations in silver price over that time (why doesn't anyone read Wealth of Nations? Because he spends pages and pages on how silver prices fluctuate wildly).
Your assertions are simply wrong.
Dnd does not simulate or emulate anything, any more than Monopoly does.
the ONLY part of the D&D economy known is that which the adventuring player party is around. so the vision of the D&D worlds economy is as narrow as Glenn Beck's view of world economy. anyone at a certain bracket of income doesnt understand those of lower or higher brackets.
PCs cost of living if vastly different than a pig farmer and his family. but we could take what we know about pig farming today and go backwards with medieval implements and technologies and living conditions, throw in D&D values for known things, and come to an idea of what the pig farmer earns and how much it costs. that means it DOES emulate an actual economy.
Monopoly on the other hand is truly based on nothing but an algorithm that number4 go up as you move clockwise from GO. only chance and community chest cards take money as "expenses" from you otherwise you pocket everything from someone "renting" and never have to pay anything when you have no renters during a "cycle". Monopoly has no time frame during which the game plays as no day, week, month, year is expressed within it that is equal for all players (see again chance and community chest)
Last edited by shadzar on Tue Dec 04, 2012 3:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Play the game, not the rules.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
The distinction between emulating something that has never existed and can never exist, absent a fictional alternate universe with different first principles, and not emulating anything appears to me to be entirely without difference.
You're right though: one could create an economy from scratch, layer that on top of existing dnd, and then dnd would have an economy. Since even real world economists are largely unable to determine fairly fundamental points like "what is the relationship between minimum wage and labor demand?" though, I question how good a model would be.
You're right though: one could create an economy from scratch, layer that on top of existing dnd, and then dnd would have an economy. Since even real world economists are largely unable to determine fairly fundamental points like "what is the relationship between minimum wage and labor demand?" though, I question how good a model would be.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
the only thing the current real world economies have over a fictional world economy is that the current ones are being used by us. the fictional one has unlimited resources if so desired. the BOTH were created out of thin air and the rules for them pulled out of someone's ass, as neither existed, as the saying goes,... "In the Beginning".
Play the game, not the rules.
good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.
Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.
Sweet, I'll look into it, thanks.fectin wrote:I haven't read it. I assume it's about like less focused versions of Locke's Treatises though, which are already rough slogging.
I liked PJ O'Rourke's summary version. He explains what Smith said, what it means, and how it connected to his actual points. It also has a bonus chapter on the Theory of Moral Sentiments. You want that; it makes some parts of Wealth of Nations make more sense.
Linked for reference: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001FOR5KS
I don't know if it's interesting to you at all but a while ago a book was published that "translated" the Federalist Papers to modern dialect, basically. I've been meaning to pick that up, too.