fully functional 3.5 economies?

[zlefin]

has anyone made a fully functional, consistent, and reasonably real-worldish economy for 3.5?
i know there's lots fo ways the economic model of the game tends to break down; and silly cheese like the ladder/10ft pole thing; given the amoutn of homebrewing that happens around here, i'm guessing someone has built a fully functional economy (with a fair number of rules changes).

[The Random NPC]

has anyone made a fully functional, consistent, and reasonably real-worldish economy for 3.5?
i know there's lots fo ways the economic model of the game tends to break down; and silly cheese like the ladder/10ft pole thing; given the amoutn of homebrewing that happens around here, i'm guessing someone has built a fully functional economy (with a fair number of rules changes).

Economies are really complex creatures, and if anyone has made a fully functional, consistent, and reasonably real-worldish economy, they aren't playing 3.5. If only because they spend all their time calculating what effect Dwarf McUrist's Dog Bone trinket shop has on the economy.

[Jeff the Green]

Economies are really complex creatures, and if anyone has made a fully functional, consistent, and reasonably real-worldish economy, they aren't playing 3.5. If only because they spend all their time calculating what effect Dwarf McUrist's Dog Bone trinket shop has on the economy.

Or because they're too busy spending their Nobel Prize money. Seriously, economics is trying very hard to become a science (cf. Paul Krugman, experimental economics), but it's not there yet.

[The Random NPC]

Or because they're too busy spending their Nobel Prize money. Seriously, economics is trying very hard to become a science (cf. Paul Krugman, experimental economics), but it's not there yet.

I did not know that, I thought it was a science.

[willpell]

Economics will never become a science, because it is based on the belief that human behavior can be perfectly predicted with enough data, and that's just not ever going to be true. Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable, and so no amount of study and control can ever totally understand what we'll do. Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing.

[fryplink]

We can't even understand how the real-world economy works, even with a basic idea of all it's contents. Now take that and complicate that by being capable of having truly unlimited supply in many sectors of the economy.

Lets just look at one tiny sliver of the economy. Exactly how does supply and demand work when you can create more food than the world needs, but still have transport overhead? And then competition. You would have a price war that could hypothetically lower prices down to whatever transport cost is. Except, the most efficient form of transport would be magical, and easily accessible to both sides capable of creating unlimited food. And then you have to think about how the now unemployed farmers are going to afford this ultra-cheap food. They would have to either leave the business of farming and do what? or do they live off the land, giving those food companies no one to sell too (because the farmers have no money, but have access to food with no people to buy the more-expensive food) causing the unlimited food company to have problems meeting the transport and system creation costs. Basically you have an economy that doesn't need input from anyone but magicians, except other need money to buy products from them. Even assuming you don't get monopolies (which might actually be good for the system in this case, by creating a false maximum supply) where will people in a world powered by magical automation work to afford the goods they need. In effect a realistic world in 3.5 would eventually evolve into massive enclaves ruled by wizards and the people they decided were allowed to mooch off of them, surrounded by the forests of the world, because the wizards can just create what they needed. If you need diamonds for Resurrection, just use Genesis to make a plane of them. Everything the world needed could be supplied by these wizards and the things they created with their mind.

In short, there wouldn't be a real economy in a 3.5 world. Or more accurately there would be an economy of favor held by wizards. As such a system made for a realistic 3.5 economy doesn't exist, because we don't understand limited resource economics well enough to model them in the imagination of a small group of gamers, and the economic model in 3.5's natural conclusion is a world without a satisfying economy.

Also, as for the Economic stuff above, I'm a political economy student. I'm knowledgeable in the field, but not a real economist (and real economists don't understand the topic either), I wrote this in about 10 mins, and it's 2:00am in my time zone. Take this with a grain of salt.

[zlefin]

i'm looking for non-tippy verse stuff; which means all the things that lead to tippy-verseness have to be changed; hence why such a thing would lead to a lot of homebrew.
And it doens't have to be super-duper perfect; but i've been on these forums enough to know there's a lto of problems with the economyin 3.5; so i'm looking for someone who's made a full set of fixes. by all accounts, making something significantly better and more stable should be quite feasible.

[ThiagoMartell]

The problem with crafting is that wizards need to buy components for everything they craft, that's what the gp represents. It's not 'put gold in this side, magic item comes out of the other side', gp pieces for crafting are simply an abstraction for ease of play. So whoever produces those components is still a part of the economy. Those components can be ignored by using XP instead or using wish to get the components.

Magic by itself solves a lot of problems, with no need for magical items. Your food example only depends on Create Food and Water, a relatively low level spell that any community can get access to, according to the demographic guidelines in the DMG (note that I mean can in that it is possible for them to get a cleric of a high enough level, but for the smaller communities this is a bit harder). But then again, we have a set price for spellcasting, and it's on gp per spell. Peasants get a silver piece by day.

At minimal CL, you're looking at food and water for 15 people for 150 gp.
A poor meal, including water, costs 1 sp.
The only way to get magical food to be a thing is if someone decides to spend their 3rd level spell slots just for feeding people.

One of the more popular attempts to do so is the Tippyverse, but it's assumptions are not very consistent internally. It's worth a look, though.

[The Random NPC]

The problem with crafting is that wizards need to buy components for everything they craft, that's what the gp represents. It's not 'put gold in this side, magic item comes out of the other side', gp pieces for crafting are simply an abstraction for ease of play. So whoever produces those components is still a part of the economy. Those components can be ignored by using XP instead or using wish to get the components.

Magic by itself solves a lot of problems, with no need for magical items. Your food example only depends on Create Food and Water, a relatively low level spell that any community can get access to, according to the demographic guidelines in the DMG (note that I mean can in that it is possible for them to get a cleric of a high enough level, but for the smaller communities this is a bit harder). But then again, we have a set price for spellcasting, and it's on gp per spell. Peasants get a silver piece by day.

At minimal CL, you're looking at food and water for 15 people for 150 gp.
A poor meal, including water, costs 1 sp.
The only way to get magical food to be a thing is if someone decides to spend their 3rd level spell slots just for feeding people.

One of the more popular attempts to do so is the Tippyverse, but it's assumptions are not very consistent internally. It's worth a look, though.

Peasants make closer to 1gp a day, unless you assume that they don't get access to Profession and the rules associated with it.

[Jeff the Green]

I did not know that, I thought it was a science.

Unfortunately, many of its practitioners make assumptions that they have know idea whether they're true, don't bother to check whether they're true, and than pronounce them to be the Truth. Their conclusions follow from their principles, but their principles are based on how they think the world should run, not on how it actually does. Sort of like Aristotle's statement that heavy things fall faster than light things, or that an arrow has a constant force behind it. And then many others are beholden to political or business interests, and it's sometimes hard to tell who.

[ThiagoMartell]

Peasants make closer to 1gp a day, unless you assume that they don't get access to Profession and the rules associated with it.
That's precisely what untrained labor means, yes.

[MrLemon]

I think in order for D&D economics to make sense, Magic item prices have to be reduced a lot, maybe by a factor of 10.
As it stands, adventurers are immensely richer than almost everyone, which is almost entirely due to looting the bad guys magic stuff. That again is due to no one being able to explain why the employer is paying each PC like 5000 gold pieces for doing their job, because that money would likely buy a sellsword army...

Also, with reduced magic item pricing, you can actually explain why the bandits still do banditry despite wielding magic weapons (in order to be a shred of effective)

Also a little off topic:
Economics will never become a science, because it is based on the belief that human behavior can be perfectly predicted with enough data, and that's just not ever going to be true. Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable, and so no amount of study and control can ever totally understand what we'll do. Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing. Psychologists and sociologists would tend to disagree, and both are unarguably sciences

[Eugenides]

Economics will never become a science, because it is based on the belief that human behavior can be perfectly predicted with enough data, and that's just not ever going to be true. Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable, and so no amount of study and control can ever totally understand what we'll do. Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing.

Except for the part where with large enough numbers statistics MAKE humans predictable. True, an individual is never going to be predictable, because hey, humans do strange things. But as a society, we're fairly predictable. The "mob mentality" as it were can rule out the bad decisions, and can use past data to make scarily accurate predictions.

[Twilightwyrm]

Technically, the standard 3.5 economy (unspecified and potentially silly as it can get) is fully functional, in that commerce happens between individuals through a medium of exchange, and there is a system through which an individual's goods or services can garner them material gain.
Now, what I suspect you are actually asking about, is a more fully optimized, or "efficient", economy. That is to say, the economic players within the economy are taking significant advantage of the technologies (read: magic) technically available to them, are making decisions based upon (modern) business principles, and a vast majority of the available workforce is deployed towards manufacturing or providing some service. Economic "efficiency", like I mentioned. While a certain amount of this is theoretically possible, trying to do this in a world with magic, however, becomes...silly when taking to its logical conclusion. Real world economies are rarely fully optimized, as processes tend to stagnate, and innovation is not always fully capitalized on, due to the risk involved. Factor magic into this equation, and things quickly spin out of control (One should rightfully consider an economy that runs on the transaction of "souls" as currency at its highest levels "out of control").
The reason for this, I suspect, is manifold: players want to naturally assume that any arcane caster/being with a suitably high intelligence is going to fully comprehend and act on modern business and socioeconomic principles (insomuch as the player understands them), when in fact this is highly unlikely. Players (and DMs, for some reason) also want to assume that magic is, for some reason, readily available, without actually thinking through the implications of this. And finally, players come from this modern society, a society without "magic" as such, where each person has a catalog of background knowledge that would but the smartest hunter-gatherer of their generation to shame. Indeed, it is not unrealistic to assume that, as far as mathematics or physical science or commerce, or even communication practices are concerned, an average professional is probably more competence in their area than the smartest Pit Fiend, regardless of what the stats might say. Conversely, however, we have a very limited understanding of how exactly magic interacts with the rest of the world, an understanding that any decently competent wizard would (theoretically) likely beat out the most knowledgeable D&D player regarding. And since one cannot even properly understand a normal economy without understanding a laundry list of other subjects, having to have an equally good understanding of a system of magic that only exists so far as players and DMs will it to exist, with no other possible information to be gained than what can be made up or extrapolated, this means that actually creating a "fully functional" D&D economy is going to be an exercise in pencil snapping, dice hurling frustration, at the most optimistic.

[Hecuba]

Economics will never become a science, because it is based on the belief that human behavior can be perfectly predicted with enough data, and that's just not ever going to be true. Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable, and so no amount of study and control can ever totally understand what we'll do. Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing.

Now that simply isn't the case. No scientific model is perfect: they merely strive for a high level of statistical consistancy. And taken en masse, human behavior can be very predictable over certain time frames.

We aren't nearly to the point to that the physical sciences are, largely because human economies are a highly chaotic system. But chaotic systems can be modeled: there are merely limites on how far they can be simplified.

[The Dark Fiddler]

Economics will never become a science, because it is based on the belief that human behavior can be perfectly predicted with enough data, and that's just not ever going to be true. Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable, and so no amount of study and control can ever totally understand what we'll do. Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing.

So, uh... psychology doesn't exist, then? Or is that not a science, either?

[Aharon]

Why do you expect a real-worldish economy to emerge given the laws of nature that define the 3.5 universe? Our economy is based on real-world technology, if we had magic, it would certainly look differently - closer to Tippyverse, probably. Tippyverse or something similar is one of the fully functional, consistent economies that emerges from the given laws.

Another version is the three-tiered economy of Frank Trollmann and K, found in the current version of the Tome of Awesome (http://code.google.com/p/awesometome/downloads/detail?name=Tome0.7rev139.pdf):


8.3 Economy
100 pounds of gold for a house? How does anyone make rent without a wheelbarrow?"

Since time immemorial, D&D has used the gold piece as its primary currency. It is apparently a chunk of reasonably pure gold of vaguely standardized weight that people use fairly interchangeably in different cities populated by different species. In the bad old days, each gold coin was a tenth of a pound, which was hilarious and inane. In the current edition, each gold piece is a fiftieth of a pound. That's 3.43 gp to the Troy Ounce, which means that in the modern economy, each gp is about $171 worth of gold. Obviously, gold is signicantly more common in D&D than it is on Earth, gold is also undervalued because its status as a currency standard drives it out of industrial uses and causes in
ation. Further, populations in D&D are orders of magnitude smaller than they are in the real world, so the gold per person is higher even with the same amount of gold. So the gold piece is massively less valuable in D&D economies than it would be in Earth's economies. Nonetheless, things are really expensive in D&D, and the high price in gold means that there's a distinct limitation of how much wealth can be transported by any means available. The economies of currency transaction are actually so unfavorable that currency as we understand the term does not exist. Things don't have prices or costs (all transactions are conducted in barter and a common medium of exchange is heavy lumps of precious metal).

8.3.1 Wish and the Economy
An Efreet can provide a wish for any magical item of 15,000 gp or less. A Balor can greater teleport at will, but can only carry 30 pounds of currency while doing so. Even in platinum pieces, that's 15,000 gp worth of metal. The
long and the short of it is that at the upper end of the economy, currency has no particular purchasing power, and magic items of 15,000 gp value or less are viewed as wooden nickels at best. You can spend 15,000 gp and get magic items, but people in the know won't sell you a magic item worth 15,001 gp for money. That kind of item can only be bought for love. Or human souls. Or some other planar currency that is not replicable by chain binding a room
full of Efreet to make in bulk. Powerful characters actually can have bat caves that have sword racks literally covered in 15,000 gp magic items. It's not even a deal because they could just go home and slap some Efreet around and get some more. But even a single major magic item that's heavy stu that such characters will notice. Those things don't come free with hope alone, and every archmage knows that.

8.3.2 Wartime Economies Make for Shortages
Many people wonder why a masterwork dagger goes for more than its weight in gold. That's a pretty valid question to ask; certainly I'm not going to attempt to justify the 600 gp price tag on a masterwork walking stick, that's
just an example of simplistic game mechanics run amok. But to an extent the crazy prices can be justied by the fact that every settlement in every D&D world is on a war footing all the time. The idea that Peace is somehow a
natural state is a fairly recent one, and based on the frequency of wars all over the world it's obviously just wishful thinking anyway. War is the default position of every major economy in the world, and that means that weapons
have an immediate, and desperate, clientele. Iron is still relatively cheap, because you can't kill people with it right now, but actual weapons and armor are crazy expensive. That doesn't explain the fact that the PHB charges you over a quarter Oz. of gold just to get a backpack, and it doesn't explain the fact that the markup on masterworking a buckler is the same as the markup on masterworking a breastplate, that's just a game simplication that makes no real-world sense. But it's a start.

8.3.3 Coins are Big and Heavy
How many boards could the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?"

From the standpoint of the adventurer, the primary diculty of the D&D currency system is that the lack of a coherent banking and paper currency system means that there are profound limits to what you could possibly
purchase even with platinum. But the currency system hurts on the other end as well. Untrained labor gets a silverpiece a week. That's 500 copper coins a year, which means that no matter how cheap things are they can only
make one purchase a day most of the time. That's pretty stifling to the economy, in that however much gets produced, no one can buy it. Demand, from the economics standpoint, is strangled to the point where large production outputs don't even matter (remember that in economics Demand doesn't mean "what people want," it means "what people are willing and able to pay for," so if the average person only has 500 discrete pieces of currency per year, that puts an absolute cap on economic demand, even though the people are of course both needy and greedy enough to want anything you happen to produce). What's worse, those coins are heavy. For our next demonstration, reach into your change drawer and sh out nine pennies. That's a decent lump in your pocket, neh? That's about one copper piece. Gold pieces are smaller (less than half the size, actually), but weigh the same. D&D currency, therefore, is more like a Monopoly playing piece than it is like a modern or ancient coin. There's no reason to even believe these things are round, people are seriously marching around gold hats and silver dogs as the basic medium of exchange. Now, you may ask yourself why these coins are so titanic compared to real coins. The answer is because having piles of coins is awesome. Dragons are supposed to sleep on that stu, and that requires big piles of coins. Consider my own mattress, which is a twin-size (pretty reasonable for a single medium-size creature) and nearly .2 cubic
meters. If it was made out of gold, it would be about 3.9 tonnes. That's about eighty-six hundred pounds, and even with the ginormous coins in D&D, that's four hundred and thirty thousand gold pieces. In previous editions, that
sort of thing was simply accepted and very powerful dragons really did have the millions of gold pieces which was actually nice. Since third edition, they've been trying to make gold actually equal character power, and the result
has been that dragon hoards are. . . really small. None of this "We need to get a wagon team to haul it all away", no. In 3rd edition, hoard sizes have become manageable, even ridiculously tiny. When a 6th level party defeats a
powerful and wealthy monster, they can expect to find. . . nearly a liter of gold. That is, the treasure hoard of that evil dragon you defeated will actually fit into an Evian bottle.
There are two ways to handle this:
1. Live with the fact that treasures are small and unexciting in modern D&D.
2. Live with the fact that characters who grab a realistic dragon's hoard become filthy stinking rich and this fundamentally changes the way they interact with society.
But once you accept that the realities of the wish based economy, you actually don't have to live with characters unbalancing the game once they nd a real mattress lled with gold. That's not even a problem once characters
are no longer excited by a +2 enhancement bonus to a stat or a +3 enhancement bonus to Armor. Which means somewhere between 9th and 13th level it's perfectly ne for players to nd actual money without unbalancing the game. Really, you can stop worrying about it.

8.3.4 Bad Money Drives Out Good: The Penalties of Paper
People from the modern world are generally pretty perplexed by this idea of handing back and forth actual metal as a medium of exchange. It is an undeniable truth in our lives that the idea of currency is just that: an idea. As long as whatever I'm trading for goods and services can be traded for goods and services, it doesn't actually matter if the exchange commodity has any ascribed intrinsic worth. Paper descriptions of value or even ephemeral electronic representations are not only adequate, they're convenient. But more than that, using valuable commodities as a medium of exchange inhibits the growth of the economy. As long as a certain portion of the wealth is locked up in currency, the economy is strangled coming and going: not only is there a completely arbitrary limit on how many goods and services can be exchanged (the gold supply), but there is also a limit on the kinds of industry and artistic expression that can occur (in that if you use gold for anything but currency you're actually shrinking the money supply and producing negative GDP).
So. . . you're going to solve that by instituting a paper-based exchange system where initially the paper is exchangeable for gold and that eventually gets phased out when the Plebes realize that handing actual gold back and
forth is inconvenient and dumb, right? Wrong. Remember that this is the Iron Age, and people haven't invented Nationalism yet. The cornerstone of the Greenback currency is a belief in the nation that prints it and nations
simply don't exist. You've got empires, and you've got kingdoms, and you've got tribes, and you've got unincorporated villages. . . and that's it as far as civilization goes. When you look at a map in D&D and a colored region
has a name on it, that's the name of the region. Possibly it's even the name of some guy in the region. The point is, that it's not a country in the modern sense of the word, so if some new guy walks in who's bad enough the next
cartographer will put his name on the region instead. And that means that "The Full Faith and Credit of the Kingdom of Daxall" is worth precisely nothing. And while King Daxall can, through force of arms, take all the gold away from all the peasants and get them to trade pieces of paper for goods and services in its place no one will actually believe that the paper is currency. They're
literally trading promises by King Daxall that he'll let them have their money back if they leave town. And since the serfs can't even leave town, even that promise is meaningless to them. A serf accepts paper for goods and services
only because he'll be beheaded if he doesn't. The black market value of these pieces of paper is pretty close to zero. Worse, nearby governments will see this as a blatant attempt to sequester all the gold in King Daxall's pants and
will probably declare war (in addition to the fact that no one outside the reach of King Daxall's pikemen will accept Daxall Dollars).

8.3.5 Powerful Creatures Have a Powerful Economy
The amount of gold it takes to get anywhere as a land lord is very large. The question that arises then, is why awesome architecture exists at all. It's a valid question, the listed costs to put things like pit traps and thrones made
of bone into your dungeon are stupendously large and actual magical swag can be made available for much less than that. The answer is that:
1. People don't actually pay all that gold to have their homes remodeled (see the peonomicon below).
2. Powerful articers and adventurers don't even want your gold. If something has a value of 100,000 gold pieces, it can't be purchased with gold pieces at all { because that's an actual ton of gold that you'd have to plop over
the counter and the merchant you're dealing with won't take your money even if you have it. Here we're going to be focusing in on
 Gems
 Souls
 Concentration
 Hope
 Raw Chaos

Gems: Truth or Dare
Gems are, to the vast majority of participants in the economy, pretty much worthless. A 500 gp diamond is pretty much the same as a gold piece to someone who intends to purchase things with a value of 1 gp or less. And of course, there are a lot more individuals out there who will stab a peasant in the face for a diamond than a gold piece. So why does anyone care?
Well, two reasons: the rst is the obvious one that gold is extremely limited in what it can possibly purchase. A +2 sword is worth your weight in gold. Not its weight in gold, your weight in gold. It seriously costs over 166
pounds of gold, and that's just not reasonable for most people to put into their pockets. So people interacting with even the shallow end of the magic trade need there to be some crazily expensive items that have no purpose save to look pretty and be exchangeable for other stu. But unlike our world gems actually have real value as well: as the fuel for powerful magics.
On Earth, the only reason that a diamond is expensive is because there's an international organization called DeBeers that seriously has actual assassins that will shoot you in the face if you try to sell diamonds for less than
the price they've determined that they're supposed to be sold for. D&D doesn't have that kind of armed monopoly to maintain gem prices, but it does have the fact that people continuously use up gems for spells like raise dead and item creation and the like. So the fact that you can use ruby dust to make continual ames that you can turn around and sell as Everburning Torches means that ruby dust will continue to have value as long as people value light. The D&D rules actually only go into the spell component uses of a handful of gems, but rest assured that all the rest are similarly useful when we get into the ephemerals of item creation. A lot of those \components" that
cost piles of thousands of gold pieces are actually just piles of gems. Onyx keeps its value based on the needs of necromancers, but amethyst is just as needed to bind illusion magic into a cloak. The exchange rate between gems
and magic items is in no danger of going anywhere. Minor magic items and gems are traded avidly by shopkeepers, adventurers, and even powerful outsiders and wizards. But even so, gems can be simply acquired by the very powerful. The realities of the wish based economy ensure that gems can simply be obtained in large numbers by anyone who really cares enough to dedicate a conjured earth elemental to collecting them. Magical items that cannot be created with the application of spells (that is, magic
items valued at more than 15,000 gp) cannot be purchased on the open market with mundane currency, not even gems. That isn't to say that you can't cheat a goblin out of a sta of power with some shiny rocks, you totally can (heck, you could also stab the goblin in the face and take that sta of power), but doing so is not considered a \fair trade" and requires a blu check on your part.
In addition, many D&D worlds posit the existence of magic gems, which can be used to make magic items,increase personal power, make a snazzy grill with the bottom row made of gold, and all kinds of stu. In addition
to getting hot women to ask you to smile, these magical gems are magical and are actually considered fair exchange in the near-epic economy. You can't wish for Eberron Dragonshards or Planescape Planar Pearls, so those things have real value to Efreet and other creatures participating in the Big Pond. Rules for using magic gems appear in the Tome of Tiamat.

Magical Currency
 Souls: The souls of powerful creatures are trapped in gems and the trade in them is brisk on the outer planes, especially in the planar metropolis of Finality on Acheron. Once a soul is in a gem, the gem itself is of little or no value, but the soul goes for 100 gp times the square of the CR of the creature whose soul is trapped (see Tome of Fiends for more information on the use of souls).
 Concentration: Ideas take form on the outer planes, and really pernicious or stellar ideas can be so powerful that they take a while to form. In the before-time, they can be found as an amber-like substance that is extremely valued on Mechanus, and by extension every single other outer plane as well. Concentration is actually made out of ideas, and while it looks like a solid object it is actually a liquid that ows so slowly that you could watch it for a year and only a Modron could tell you have far the ow had taken it. A pound of concentration goes for 50,000 gp to an interested party, and can be used in magical crafting by those with the patience to learn its secrets (see Book of Gears for more information on the use of Concentration).
 Hope: Hope is funny stu, it has lots of inertia, but those who carry it are not weighed down in the least. It has mass, but not weight. Even the smallest piece of Hope sheds light like a daylight spell (the eective spell level for this eect is 7, and Hope can overcome almost any darkness). Hope is measured in kilograms rather than pounds, and a kilo of Hope goes for 100,000 gp to those who want it, and it can be used in magical crafting (see Tome of Virtue for more information on the use of Hope).
 Raw Chaos: The plane of Limbo is lled with possibility and change. Usually this manifests as a continuous creation and destruction that is awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Sometimes, for whatever reason this possibility doesn't become anything, and just stays as Raw Chaos. Raw Chaos can have any dimensions and any amount of mass, but from a practical standpoint you either have it or you don't. If you have Raw Chaos and someone else doesn't you can give it to them, and it is generally considered good form for them to give you magical items or planar currency worth 200,000 gp in exchange. Raw Chaos can be transformed into magical items by those with the correct skills (See Tome of Tiamat for more information on the use of Raw Chaos).

8.3.6 The Service Economy: The Profession Rules Don't Work
The profession rules make us sad. Very sad. Which is unfortunate, because almost everyone in the entire world who isn't an adventurer apparently lives and dies by these things. While the powerful adventurers go o into the planes
and exchange Raw Chaos and the Souls of Champions for powerful magical items and favors, your average orc is running around delivering hal
ing food or joining the army of a powerful warlord for little bits of metal. When the players begin their adventuring careers, they'll be caught up in this economy as well. And even if they eventually become powerful enough to purchase mighty rods with planar currencies they might still be intimately involved in it as one of those mighty warlords who throws out tiny pieces of metal to orcish warriors and starting adventurers. Here's the deal: if your character is a Sailor, that's character avor. It's not a major portion of your character's power and we really are willing to just give it to you. Having a profession is like knowing a language: sometimes it will come up and sometimes it won't. In that spirit, we suggest that Profession cease being a ranked skill altogether. Just like people don't make \speak dwarvish" checks to have words come out of their mouth, characters should not have to make \Profession: Barkeep" checks to successfully sit behind a bench and hand people ale. People who have a profession don't make checks to make money, they get a wage if they happen to have a job. The wage will depend on what kind of work they are doing (so no, you can't put 10 ranks into Profession: Janitor and be better paid than the magistrate). Characters are assumed to make a wage approximately similar to the one in the table below if they are working and have an appropriate professional skill. DMs may allow a character to put two ranks into a single Profession skill and be a \master whatever". Such characters may be able to boast about their skills or perhaps even make more money. The important part is that this means that you can nd really good scullery maids who don't have a +5 BAB. Young children can often be drafted to do grown-up jobs, and need only be paid 1/10th the normal rate for whatever it is that you have them doing. Child labor is cheap, but in some ways you get what you pay for and children may become distracted or sick before completing important or dangerous jobs.
Professions and their Pay Scale
Profession Wage/Week
 Acolyte 5 GP
 Alchemist 10 GP
 Artisan 5 GP
 Bartender/Innkeeper 15 SP
 Barrister 8 GP
 Butler 2 GP
 Clerk 3 GP
(includes more inuential administrators)
 Cook 1 GP
 Courtesan 5 SP
 Farmer 5 CP (Farmers also feed themselves)
 Fisherman 3 SP
 Groom 1 GP
 Guard 15 SP
 Laborer 1 SP (note: this means no profession at all)
 Laborer, Skilled 2 GP
 Librarian 3 GP
 Janitor/Maid 8 SP
 Military Ocer 5 GP
 Miner 2 GP
 Porter 6 SP
 Runner 1 GP
 Sage 10 GP
 Sailor 2 GP
 Scribe 2 GP
 Servant 8 SP
 Shepherd 2 SP
 Smith 15 GP
 Smith, Master 150 GP
 Soldier 15 SP
 Tailor 1 GP
 Teamster 2 GP
 Torturer 2 GP
 Valet 15 SP
 Wage Mage 10 GP

Some professons are actually dependent upon class level
and abilities. A 1st level Wage Mage commands a wage of 10
GP a week to sit around and cast 1st level spells and cantrips
from time to time, but a 12th level Wizard would command
an earnings per week so large that most kingdoms nd it more
expedient to simply make such magicians part of the govern-
ment.
⋆: Any skilled profession that is based on one of the ten Knowl-
edge skills in D&D is a Sage, and is not handled with the Pro-
fession skill at all. An Architect does not have \Profession:
Sage", he has Knowledge: Architecture and Engineering. The
pay scale of a Sage of any kind is extremely dependent upon
his skill results. A character with four or ve ranks in a couple
of knowledges might pull down 10 GP per week, but a char-
acter who can regularly make a DC 30 check in any subject
no matter how arcane can pull down the big bucks. Assum-
ing of course that he can nd someone that actually needs his
services.
Just because you selected a profession that makes a lot of money doesn't mean that anyone will hire you. Generally
only relatively organized areas actually have economies that even can hire Butlers and Clerks. But just because there
is work available in an area doesn't mean that there's work available for you. Even in major cities there aren't a
whole lot of jobs for a clerk or a barrister, so the competition for those jobs is pretty sti. Prospective employers are
fairly choosy about who they select for such employment, and they'll usually go to guilds (whose reputation is on
the line every time they vouch for someone) or their own aristocratic family members rather than hire some random
Half-Orc who claims to have the requisite skills.

8.3.7 Running a Business
The rules presented in the DMG2 for running a business make us very sad. Apparently the best way to make money
is to run a shop out of a shack in the woods and pour money into it until noble djinni are teleporting to your door to
hand over large gems for whatever the heck it is that you're selling. That doesn't make any kind of sense at all. We
propose instead that the costs and benets of running a business should be kind of comparable to those of working
for a wage { since it is essentially exactly the same thing. What we're looking for is rules for running a business that
aren't so obviously abusable over time, and which reward various business models rather than nding the killer app
that makes the most money (the Shop as it happens) and just using that over and over again.
Capitalization
First o: the thing where in the basic DMG2 rules you can capitalize over and over again forever and have the prots
go o towards innity is as abusable as it is dumb. So the very rst change that needs to be made is the divine
decree that you can't do that. In fact, the concept of recapitalizing just wasn't handled well there at all. It takes
money to make money, but investment is not a ladder where you set money on re until the pyre lights the heavens
ablaze and gets you epic items in parcels like clockwork. Instead, starting a business venture costs money { we call
that initial capitalization. That's a one-time cost and the only way you can spend it again is if you start up a second
business. After that, you have to supply one-third of the business' expected earnings for each month up front, we
call that operational capital. If your business is still running at the end of the month, you get that money back (in
addition to the earnings themselves), but if the business venture folds or you get driven o by rampaging monsters,
or business events cause the venture to make no money for a month { that operational capital is gone and you're out
a pocket full of shells.
Initial capitalization isn't any cheaper in the wilderness than it is in a big city. Actually, it's more expensive
because you have to get goods shipped out into the wilderness to get the whole thing o the ground { and the
wilderness in D&D is dangerous and teamsters make 2 GP a week each in compensation for that fact. Operational
capitalization is cheaper in the wilderness, because expected earnings are less and therefore 1/3 of those earnings
is also less. Yes, this means that business owners normally go to the city to conduct business, where there is a
whole governmental apparatus to facilitate business dealings and a steady parade of caravans and ships to bring your
product or service to the world. The only reasons that anyone does their business outside of major cities is because
some particularly risky ventures can only be done far from town (for example: a Larvae Orchard is a high-risk, and
therefore high prot enterprise, but it can only be located in the Wastes of Hades).
Risk
Risky business ventures make more money. But they also suer catastrophic mishaps more often. That's what
makes them risky. They are not simply an increase to the multiplier on the prot check, because that just makes
you more money because player characters don't start businesses that aren't going to have positive prot checks.
Maintaining a Risky venture involves you having more challenges to maintain your business { which in a roleplaying
game like D&D means essentially that you spend more adventures maintaining your business and therefore spend
less adventures looting other peoples' dungeons. The extra prot you make from the risky business is oset by the
extra challenges you need to overcome. Essentially, taking on a risky business is just like getting the gold from your
encounters before you go adventuring.
Risky businesses have a CR and a frequency. The DM is encouraged to send additional problems your way at
roughly the frequency of the risk factor, and the ELs of the problems thrown your way should be roughly the same as
the CR of the risk factor. Risky businesses also make a lot more money { roughly the value of an \average" treasure
of an encounter of a CR equal to the risk factor every interval of time equal to the risk factor (see the DMG, p. 51).
So an onyx mine that had a risk factor of 5/4 months would generate an extra 400gp per month (1600 gp/4) and be
plagued with an EL 5 encounter roughly 3 times a year. It's just that easy.
255
8.3. THE ECONOMICON CHAPTER 8. MONEY AND EQUIPMENT
Not all shops are the same. If you're selling burlap clothing, the prots are going to be small and ogre bandits
won't even try to take all your stu. If you're selling weapons of war or magical materials, then you can bet that
those ogre mercenaries are going to be a little bit more interested. If you're running a more valuable business (that
is, one which makes more money), the villains of the D&D world will come to take it from you { the risk factors
adjust themselves pretty much automatically when your business improves, making this approximation amazingly
accurate in addition to simple.
Resources
Resources are like Capitalization that you get to keep. While the presentation in the DMG2 is essentially \something
that makes it harder to turn a prot on your business", the fact is that what they actually are is your own private
dungeon. While the full rules for actually building your dungeon are going to have to wait until Book of Gears and
the advanced crafting rules, for now we're going to assume that the prices in the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook
hold up (and yes, we know how silly that is, but we haven't written anything better yet). Essentially, this means that
your business needs to be housed in a building, or ship, or cart, or dungeon of some kind. Bigger, more high-scale
business ventures are going to need to be housed in more expensive surroundings. That sounds bad, but remember
that when business events and risk factors happen to your business, they happen to your business, which means that
if you have a ship or a tower to hold your stu in, you actually get to use it when it gets attacked by gnoll pirates.
Keep in mind that if a business is booming, it may require more resources to house. A shack is all well and good
if you plan to sell a couple of pots a month, but if you want to move inventory you've got to have inventory. And
that means you need a place to show that inventory. Practically, that means that your projected prots (before
calculating Risk-based Prots), can't ever exceed 1/10th the value of your business' resources. Of course, some
businesses can only exist with large amounts of resources backing them up. And that's ne, since you really only get
the benets of large resources in large urban areas, this means that in general there are a lot of services that can be
found in the big city that can't be found in smaller towns. Which is exactly what you'd want, right?
Growing the Business
Characters may outgrow collecting melloweed from the Bane Mires. The occasional hydra they have to defeat to
get the goods just doesn't challenge them anymore, and the gold the whole thing takes in every month just doesn't
seem worth the hassle. When this happens there are two options: franchise the operation, or grow the business up.
A business can be expanded to a larger operation by investing in the next level of resources (causing it to be eligible
to make more prots), or by taking on higher value/risk goods and clients (causing the risk factor to increase and
prots to increase as well).
Franchising a business simply involves starting up a second (or third) business in another location. Resolve it as
a whole new business.
Prots
So how much money do these things make? Well, in addition to Resource Limitations, there are demand limitations.
That is, the amount of money that people can spend on your goods and services is proportional to how much money
they have { larger communities can spend more money than can smaller communities. The maximum prots per
month of any venture are based on the total population that business serves. If you compete with other businesses
providing the same goods and services, simply divide the region's population according to market share before you
determine maximum prots.
Population Size / Gold per Month
 20-80 { 4 GP/month
 81-400 { 10 GP per Month
 401-900 { 20 GP per Month
 901-2000 { 80 GP per Month
 2001-5000 { 300 GP per Month
 5001-12,000 { 1,500 GP per Month
 12,001-25,000 { 4,000 GP per Month
 25,001-100,000 { 10,000 GP per Month
 100,001+ { 60,000 GP per Month
Remember that while this determines the maximum prots, there's no guaranty that your business will actually
do as hoped. Things don't always work out as planned, and many business plans aren't good. In order to make
your business succeed, you'll have to make a Prot Check. Actually making the projected Prots is a DC 20 check.
256
8.3. THE ECONOMICON CHAPTER 8. MONEY AND EQUIPMENT
Every point you fail that DC, reduce your income by 5%. For every point you exceed 20 on your Prot Check, add
5% (essentially this just means that you make a 5% return for every point of Prot Check you make).
The Prot Check itself is simply a straight ability check, using your choice of your Intelligence, Wisdom, or
Charisma. Some of the modiers to Prot Checks from the DMG2 are appropriate, others are not. For your
convenience, we're replicating the entire chart with all the needed modications:
 Owner has appropriate Profession Skill +1
 Owner has two appropriate Profession skills +2
 Owner is a member of an associated guild +1
 Owner spends less than 8 hours per week assisting business operations -8
 Owner spends more than 40 hours per week assisting business +1
 Business is considered a Monopoly +10
 Business is an Oligarchy +4
 A Business Partner aids during the term +2
 Specialists are on sta +2
 Previous Prot Checks \Failed" -1 per consecutive check below 15.
Command Economies
Sometimes your \business" is actually just that you run a country, or a guild, or a church, or a criminal organization,
or a mercenary command. Or whatever. The point is that your job is to run things, and people pay taxes (or tithes,
or protection money, or whatever the kids are calling it these days) to you to make sure that you keep running things
in a manner that doesn't involve them being stabbed in the face. The amount of lucre you can squeeze out of these
situations has nothing to do with your skill checks or capitalization { you're essentially stealing from these people so
the amount of money you can crank out of them depends largely on how much you're willing to squeeze them and
how many people you are squeezing. Taxing a group of people can generate as much money as running a business
serving them would. Your \business" in this case is \not stabbing them in the face".
You can be senselessly wicked and punitive on a population and make twice as much gold, but your subjects will
hate you. You can also simply sack a region, making ten times as much gold, but driving the remaining population
away as refugees. Lawful creatures (such as Hobgoblins and Dwarves) are more likely to pay taxes or save money
and taxing or looting them is worth twice as much. Especially impoverished regions (such as one which has labored
under a cruel governor for a long time) are worth half as much or less.

8.3.8 Bringing the World out of the Dark Ages
It is historical fact that you can take a ridiculous and crumbling imperium with serfs and horse-drawn carts managed
by a tyrannical and squabbling aristocracy and boot strap it into being a technologically sophisticated global power
that can win the space race and such in a single generation even while being invaded by an evil and genocidal empire.
The people at the top don't even need to be nice or sane, they just have to understand that economics is an entirely
voodoo science, and the limits of production can be broken by thousands of percentage points by getting everyone
to buy on credit, work on projects that people looking at the big picture tell them to work on, continuously invest
in productive capital, and believe in the future.
Right. That's called Communism, and it ends the dark ages immediately even if it isn't run well. Presumably if
it was being run by Paladins who actually radiate goodness and Wizards who are inhumanly intelligent and can cast
powerful divinations to determine projected needs and goods could be distributed to the masses with teleportals {
it would work substantially better. That sort of thing is not outside the capabilities of your characters in D&D. It's
not outside the capabilities of the people in the village your characters are saving from gnollish invasion. It's not
even technically complicated. But it isn't done.
Partly it isn't done because we're playing Dungeons & Dragons, not Logistics & Dragons. While it is true that
you can x the world's ills in a much more tangible fashion by industrializing the production of grain and arranging
a non-gold based distribution system such that staple food stus are available to all, thereby freeing up potential
productive labor for use in blah blah blah. . . the fact is that to a very real degree we play this game because telling
stories about slaying evil necromancers and swinging on chandeliers is awesome. But the other reason is that the
society in D&D really isn't ready for a modern or futuristic social setup. No one is going to understand how they are
supposed to interact with Socialism, Capitalism, or Fascism, things are Feudal and people understand that. Wealth
is exchanged for goods and services on the grounds that people on both sides of the exchange aren't sure that they
would win the resulting combat if they tried to take the goods or wealth by force of arms.
Rome had steam engines. Actual dierence engines that propelled a metal device with the power of a combustion
reaction through the medium of the expansion of heated water. Really. They never built rail roads because slaves
were cheaper than donkeys and the concept of investing in labor saving devices was preposterous. In D&D, the idea
of having an economy based around trust in the government and labor/wealth equivalencies is similarly preposterous.
It's not that the idea wouldn't work, it's that every man, woman, and child in society would simply laugh you out
of the room if you tried to explain it to them.

[Yora]

Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing.
All social sciences are. :smallamused:

Problems occur when people treat economy as natural science where doing the same thing will always yield the same result. Which in social sciences is never the case. Just because you can come up with equations which you can fill with observed numbers doesn't make it equal to mathmatics and physics.
What makes it a science is the use of the scientific method to observe, find patterns, construct theories, and compare them to further observations.

[Aharon]

Could you please not derail this thread, which is not uninteresting in its own place, with another willpell vs. defenders of science discussion that goes on for pages and pages with anyone failing to convince willpell and vice versa?

[ThiagoMartell]

Aharon, could you please all that Frank & K stuff in a spoiler? It takes forever to scroll through that wall of text and I imagine many people (like me) have already read it somewhere else. The link would suffice, IMHO.

[Aharon]

Aharon, could you please all that Frank & K stuff in a spoiler? It takes forever to scroll through that wall of text and I imagine many people (like me) have already read it somewhere else. The link would suffice, IMHO.

Sure, forgot to do so, sorry. Link only is annoying, IMO. You would need to search through the PDF first, which is quite long.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Aharon, could you please all that Frank & K stuff in a spoiler? It takes forever to scroll through that wall of text and I imagine many people (like me) have already read it somewhere else. The link would suffice, IMHO.

I'm not usually one to complain about a wall of text, but I have to agree. Especially since the text got a bit mangled in translation.

I'm honestly surprised that post didn't hit the text cap.

On economics being a science: it's a burgeoning science. For the time being it's still equal parts science and art. In time it -may- become more predictable as the various, tremendously chaotic, factors stabalize, but that's not happening any time soon. As long as there's a human element, no model will ever perfectly reflect the realities of an economic system but, statistics being what they are, a remarkable degree of accuracy -could- become a reality.

[Aharon]

@Kelb
Got it, already changed. I noticed the conversion problem, but didn't have the time to go through the whole text and correct everything :smallredface:

@Game Economy
In my games, I use an incomplete Tippyverse - trading through teleport is used for magic items etc. (explaining magic marts, and the huge markup on magic items - the transport component is just that expensive). Powerful cartels and oligopolies, combined with the unstable political situation, prevent the system from being expanded to mundane goods, enabling a quasi-normal economy.

[Kelb_Panthera]

@Kelb
Got it, already changed. I noticed the conversion problem, but didn't have the time to go through the whole text and correct everything :smallredface:

@Game Economy
In my games, I use an incomplete Tippyverse - trading through teleport is used for magic items etc. (explaining magic marts, and the huge markup on magic items - the transport component is just that expensive). Powerful cartels and oligopolies, combined with the unstable political situation, prevent the system from being expanded to mundane goods, enabling a quasi-normal economy.

You must've posted right when I started my reply.

Gods, do I really take 15 minutes to a post? I'd think my typing speed would've improved more than that since highschool. Thanks for the spoiler though.

[The Random NPC]

Stuff

I think the OP is looking for fixes so things like ladder -> pole loopholes don't work.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I think the OP is looking for fixes so things like ladder -> pole loopholes don't work.

I never really bought that one anyway (forgive the pun). Splitting a ten foot ladder in half doesn't get you two ten-foot poles. It gets you two halves of a ladder.

The legs of the ladder have holes drilled into them for the rungs. If you split one in half it's not going to stand up to any abuse at all, it'll just break. You might as well have picked up two ten-foot long deadfall tree limbs. They'd be just as worthless.

[NichG]

Since this thread is about homebrew, not 'what is the economy of baseline 3.5', lets talk instead about what we need to adjust to make a stable economy viable in 3.5.

- Either get rid of spells that create a thing, or simply assume that the value of that thing is zero plus whatever a wizard's time is worth, or alternately its entirely set by transportation costs.
- Either get rid of trivial means of transporting large amounts of material (e.g. Teleportation Circle), or transportation costs for things are independent of total distance and only depend on bulk (labor to move it through the circle) and distance to the nearest circle.
- Generally be willing to ignore RAW in favor of common sense for local oddities that crop up - its pretty much impossible to preventatively index these, so its better to have a general rule like "People pay what the market will bear, not what the rulebooks say they will pay - if something has a listed price that is different than what the market should bear, this rule trumps the listed price". Basically saying 'we will change how things are priced, so those are no longer rules in this system'.
- Tippy-verse shenanigans that completely move into a post-scarcity economics. Things like resetting traps, Wish-loops, etc. Most of these are TO anyhow, and trying to make anything with an assumption of 'all TO stuff is in' will lead to all sorts of headaches anyhow. Considerations of the economy should probably be kept to PO.
- We need a baseline of just how optimized people and their thought processes are going to be. Do all wizards know about all spells, even if they don't actually know them? Questions like that are important in determining what things have equilibriated and what things are still waiting to be discovered and mass-produced.

[Spuddles]

Economics will never become a science, because it is based on the belief that human behavior can be perfectly predicted with enough data, and that's just not ever going to be true. Human beings are fundamentally unpredictable, and so no amount of study and control can ever totally understand what we'll do. Thusly, economics is never more than educated guessing.

It's not a science because it's not experimental. It has nothing to do with whether humans live in an inscrutable universe or a predictable one.


We can't even understand how the real-world economy works, even with a basic idea of all it's contents. Now take that and complicate that by being capable of having truly unlimited supply in many sectors of the economy.

Lets just look at one tiny sliver of the economy. Exactly how does supply and demand work when you can create more food than the world needs, but still have transport overhead? And then competition. You would have a price war that could hypothetically lower prices down to whatever transport cost is. Except, the most efficient form of transport would be magical, and easily accessible to both sides capable of creating unlimited food. And then you have to think about how the now unemployed farmers are going to afford this ultra-cheap food. They would have to either leave the business of farming and do what? or do they live off the land, giving those food companies no one to sell too (because the farmers have no money, but have access to food with no people to buy the more-expensive food) causing the unlimited food company to have problems meeting the transport and system creation costs. Basically you have an economy that doesn't need input from anyone but magicians, except other need money to buy products from them. Even assuming you don't get monopolies (which might actually be good for the system in this case, by creating a false maximum supply) where will people in a world powered by magical automation work to afford the goods they need. In effect a realistic world in 3.5 would eventually evolve into massive enclaves ruled by wizards and the people they decided were allowed to mooch off of them, surrounded by the forests of the world, because the wizards can just create what they needed. If you need diamonds for Resurrection, just use Genesis to make a plane of them. Everything the world needed could be supplied by these wizards and the things they created with their mind.

In short, there wouldn't be a real economy in a 3.5 world. Or more accurately there would be an economy of favor held by wizards. As such a system made for a realistic 3.5 economy doesn't exist, because we don't understand limited resource economics well enough to model them in the imagination of a small group of gamers, and the economic model in 3.5's natural conclusion is a world without a satisfying economy.

Also, as for the Economic stuff above, I'm a political economy student. I'm knowledgeable in the field, but not a real economist (and real economists don't understand the topic either), I wrote this in about 10 mins, and it's 2:00am in my time zone. Take this with a grain of salt.

The real world already produces more food than people need, it's just that the cost of distribution means not everyone has access to enough. It's like your whole post describes some of the modern problems in subsaharan africa.


So, uh... psychology doesn't exist, then? Or is that not a science, either?

Psychology, sociology, and political science aren't quite sciences, either, given the ethical prohibitions on proper experiments.

[Morty]

I think the way to create a functional 3.5 economy is simple -don't think too much about it. D&D 3.5 is supposed to simulate a group of people who go to places, have adventures, fight enemies and find treasure. Therefore, it doesn't work very well when we try to use it to make a consistent economy.

[demigodus]

All social sciences are. :smallamused:

As a physicist I disagree with this implication of the physical sciences not being educated guesses. They are just VERY educated, VERY careful guesses. But still guesses.


Problems occur when people treat economy as natural science where doing the same thing will always yield the same result. Which in social sciences is never the case. Just because you can come up with equations which you can fill with observed numbers doesn't make it equal to mathmatics and physics.
What makes it a science is the use of the scientific method to observe, find patterns, construct theories, and compare them to further observations.

Even in the natural sciences, often times you can just dictate the probability with which each possible result will happen.

Economics has a hope of becoming a fully developed science for sure. The interference of politics just makes it really hard (experts having a vested interest to maintain their personal political party's economic model)

[Jeff the Green]

Even in the natural sciences, often times you can just dictate the probability with which each possible result will happen.

I study evolution and ecology, and I call them "squishy science" as opposed to hard science. Both because the subjects are squishy, but because it's very hard to pin down the important variables and what we know is always changing.

More on-topic, I think if you ignore the rules (except for when the players are interacting with it, since they do a reasonable job of enforcing balance) and base the economy on ancient/medieval economies (I was helpfully pointed to this resource (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm) recently), you'll get as close as you'll need.

[The Random NPC]

I never really bought that one anyway (forgive the pun). Splitting a ten foot ladder in half doesn't get you two ten-foot poles. It gets you two halves of a ladder.

The legs of the ladder have holes drilled into them for the rungs. If you split one in half it's not going to stand up to any abuse at all, it'll just break. You might as well have picked up two ten-foot long deadfall tree limbs. They'd be just as worthless.

I don't know if lashed rung ladders are more available, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. They are easier to make and are just as good as the kind with rungs set into drilled holes. Either way, both would by RAW cost the same and one leads to a loophole that gets you more money.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I don't know if lashed rung ladders are more available, but it wouldn't be unreasonable. They are easier to make and are just as good as the kind with rungs set into drilled holes. Either way, both would by RAW cost the same and one leads to a loophole that gets you more money.

Even in the case of a ladder being made of lashed together bamboo or such, it doesn't work. That stuff is pretty flimsy and if it's just a bunch of plant stems lashed together I'd argue that it's component parts are closer to non-masterwork clubs and quarterstaves than 10ft poles. Guess how much clubs and quarterstaves are worth.

A 10ft pole is closer to a long-spear haft than the leg of a ladder, no matter what you make the ladder out of.

Besides, whatever this interaction is, it's not RAW. RAW breaking a ladder results in a broken ladder. The ten foot pole thing is an extrapolation based on RL logic. There are no rules governing the disassembly of a completed item and, even if there were, the rules don't cover what anything, 10 ft ladder included, is composed of beyond a material.

RAW looks something like this.

A 10ft ladder is made of wood. It costs 5 copper pieces and weighs 20lbs.

That's it. There's no mention of the legs being solid 10ft poles, no mention of how the legs and rungs are fastened together, and certainly nothing to say that you can disassemble it in any way.

[fryplink]

Psychology, sociology, and political science aren't quite sciences, either, given the ethical prohibitions on proper experiments.

I've been a participant in Psychology experiments before. Also, I've definitely sourced proper experiments in all of these fields in my thesis. That said, the rigor is often lacking and proper experiments are rare (Which is why my thesis is independent statistical analysis)

[theUnearther]

I too want to complain on this one.

It's not a science because it's not experimental. It has nothing to do with whether humans live in an inscrutable universe or a predictable one.
Lack of experimental-ness does not a science unmake. Also, economics can very much be experimental, and I would wager that they have been, repeatedly. It's just that it would be "cruel".

[Jeff the Green]

I too want to complain on this one.

Lack of experimental-ness does not a science unmake. Also, economics can very much be experimental, and I would wager that they have been, repeatedly. It's just that it would be "cruel".

Yeah, the "scienceness" of a field is less about whether practitioners follow a mostly-fictional "scientific method" (no one does) and more about whether they accept empiricism. While experiments are the gold standard of empiricism because they let you eliminate many confounding variables, there are lots of other ways to test hypotheses empirically.

[ThiagoMartell]

I think the way to create a functional 3.5 economy is simple -don't think too much about it. D&D 3.5 is supposed to simulate a group of people who go to places, have adventures, fight enemies and find treasure. Therefore, it doesn't work very well when we try to use it to make a consistent economy.

I agree. Just consider the world runs on a feudal economy and that the PCs are special. I mean, that's what the designers did.

[Alienist]

As it stands, adventurers are immensely richer than almost everyone, which is almost entirely due to looting the bad guys magic stuff.

This is true, but the more important question is where did the bad guys get all that stuff in the first place?

Imagine if (in real life) everyone who didn't like you was a multi-millionaire and drove a lambo.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser kept making huge hauls, but then they'd spend it all on wine, women, gambling and other kinds of exorbitantly high lifestyle (not unlike many lotto winners). Thus they kept getting reset to 0, and had motivation to go out and perform another heist. On the other hand, if your DM kept doing that you'd get annoyed at him pretty quickly...

[The Random NPC]

This is true, but the more important question is where did the bad guys get all that stuff in the first place?

Imagine if (in real life) everyone who didn't like you was a multi-millionaire and drove a lambo.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser kept making huge hauls, but then they'd spend it all on wine, women, gambling and other kinds of exorbitantly high lifestyle (not unlike many lotto winners). Thus they kept getting reset to 0, and had motivation to go out and perform another heist. On the other hand, if your DM kept doing that you'd get annoyed at him pretty quickly...

Isn't it obvious? They get it from retired adventurers.

[NichG]

Here's a way to make a less vertically catastrophic economy (as in, one where Lv20 adventurers don't have to be worth more than kings): separate the difficulty of acquiring a magic item from its gp value. I'm going to give a rough way to do this but still retain a connection between the two. You could in principle totally separate magic items from material wealth, but then you have to have meta-rules that prevent PCs from trying to exchange them for gold or from trying to buy them off of people.

For ease of doing this, lets say that the effective level of a particular magic item is some function of its value. Permanent magic items might have a level equal to the point at which its rulebook-listed gp value is 1/4 of a character's WBL at that level (wands and staffs count as permanent for this). For one-use expendables such as scrolls and potions, it'd be the point at which you've bought say 10 doses of it.

A given city can only provide up to a certain level in magic items on the open market. Choosing how this level corresponds to population density basically determines how high or low magic your civilization is. For items beyond this level, you cannot buy them 'at will' within this market - they are things that might come up for auction, but no one in the city stocks them on hand. You could have a second level which represents commissioned goods, where buying commissioned goods works via the price increases for items above the city level that I mention below.

Now flatten out all the gp values of the 'magic' part of magic items so that prices scale linearly, not quadratically (as is currently the case). You could do this simply by repricing everything's 'basic market value' to be 10*the square root of what is listed for magic items. Leave non-magic things, and the mundane components of magic things, alone in this pricing. Simultaneously, scale up NPC wealth by adding a portion of wealth that is not liquid or at hand, representing that most NPCs will have money invested in permanent things like land, their home, etc, which are considerations that PCs do not generally have. The gap then between NPC WBL and PC WBL is due to the PCs not necessarily having these secondary investments.

An enchantment that would have cost 10000gp now costs 1000gp, but an item that would have cost 100gp still costs 100gp. Leave the base item prices untouched. A house may still cost 50000gp or 100000gp or whatever. A really nice gemstone could sell for more than a +2 weapon in this system, so you can still have rich kings. With this kind of scaling, I think 1gp = 1 modern USD isn't an awful conversion for determining pricings off the top of your head. Because of this you may want to make certain everyday items more expensive. It does however make most magic items into something that a merchant-class family could have if the world is capable of making them.

So now the economic factor comes into play that different cities will have different levels of items they can support. If PCs try to sell something that a city's market is providing, they cannot generally do it for more than 10% of the item's market price: people can just go to the store and buy it, and all those stores already have deals with supply chains to get those items cheaply, so its generally not worth people's time to deal with a random seller who just walked in. Once you exceed the local level however, you can sell for 50% plus 10% per level in excess of the local market immediately (up to the gp cap of a locale, which has also been modified by 10*sqrt). If you have a brick and mortar shop or place an advertisement, you can sell it for up to 100% plus 20% per level in excess, but with only a certain percent chance per week of a successful sale (perhaps based on a Profession check).

Cities might export items to eachother - if this happens, the lower city's level becomes that of the higher level city, but items obtained this way have some markup (20% per level in excess of the city's local production capability, just like if PCs are selling high-end stuff). PCs who want to be merchants could exploit this markup to make money - it is after all how its done by the NPC merchants. PCs who want to be item crafters can similarly make money off of their crafting. The modification in gp costs for items also makes item crafting far more reasonable time-wise.

Modifying Profession would be another thing to do. One should in principle make a gory chart listing 100 different possible choices for Profession and an income multiplier for each choice, so Profession(Farmer) won't make as much gold as Profession(Lawyer), even at the same skill rank. This is where 'how much can NPCs self-optimize' comes in. If anyone can just choose to take ranks in any of the Profession skills, then of course peasants will spontaneously just become Lawyers or Bankers or whatever. If however certain Profession skills are unavailable to those without a particular upbringing, this could be repaired mechanically. Otherwise its probably easier just to say 'peasants never have the in-character opportunity to pick that skill, regardless of the mechanics'.

[Morty]

I agree. Just consider the world runs on a feudal economy and that the PCs are special. I mean, that's what the designers did.

I wouldn't say "special", but as adventurers they do operate outside normal economy. It's a high-risk, high-reward profession; you have a chance of getting really rich at the risk of getting eaten by monsters. Either way, handwaving the economy to look the way you want it to - which doesn't necessarily need to be feudal - spares you a lot of headache.

[Spuddles]

I've been a participant in Psychology experiments before. Also, I've definitely sourced proper experiments in all of these fields in my thesis. That said, the rigor is often lacking and proper experiments are rare (Which is why my thesis is independent statistical analysis)

I mean proper controls and experiments, not giving 30 college kids a survey to fill out. Can you imagine how much you could learn about people if it weren't for IRBs and laws against child abuse?

[ThiagoMartell]

I wouldn't say "special", but as adventurers they do operate outside normal economy. It's a high-risk, high-reward profession; you have a chance of getting really rich at the risk of getting eaten by monsters. Either way, handwaving the economy to look the way you want it to - which doesn't necessarily need to be feudal - spares you a lot of headache.

That's what I meant by special, actually.

[Morty]

Ah. In that case, we're in agreement.

[Doug Lampert]

That's precisely what untrained labor means, yes.

Oh, Peasant means untrained? Odd, I don't find that in the dictionary or the D&D glossary or in your earlier posts. I note that your post above is the FIRST time the word "untrained" occured in the thread.

The average peasant gets profession farmer or a craft, and averages over a GP per day without masterwork tools or an ability bonus.

Even the "untrained" character doesn't make a sp per day unless he's an idiot, because that 1sp per day is in the CRAFT skill description, and craft is explicitely and clearly stated to be usable untrained and to be usable for half check GP per week. So with an Int of 3 and taking10 on zero ranks you STILL do far better than 1sp per day (over 4 times as well actually).

One of the reasons D&D doesn't have an economic model is stuff like the above. This is all in one short skill description. Untrained craft (which is defined and clearly possible) produces 5 GP a week, but "unskilled labor" (not actually defined) produces 1 SP per day, or about 1/7th the income.

So just who are the unskilled laborers?

[Doug Lampert]

Another version is the three-tiered economy of Frank Trollmann and K, found in the current version of the Tome of Awesome (http://code.google.com/p/awesometome/downloads/detail?name=Tome0.7rev139.pdf):


Doesn't work with 3.5. They use the 3.0 wish which is limited to items worth at most 15,000 GP, the 3.5 wish does not have this limit.

[Doug Lampert]

I too want to complain on this one.

Lack of experimental-ness does not a science unmake. Also, economics can very much be experimental, and I would wager that they have been, repeatedly. It's just that it would be "cruel".
The game show Deal or No Deal strikes me as OBVIOUSLY some economist's experiment to determine how risk adverse or risk loving actual people really are.

Doing the experiment requires enough money to actually change people's marginal utility from having more money. The game show host regularly points out that X is enough money to change your life (aka utility should change).

The expected cash return of continuing as a ratio with the offer to stop tends to drop as the game goes on. So we can find out how much money and how much risk causes people to stop.

Really, it's a beautifully designed economic experiment, and I'm fairly sure people are doing disertations based on the show.

[Hecuba]

The game show Deal or No Deal strikes me as OBVIOUSLY some economist's experiment to determine how risk adverse or risk loving actual people really are.
[. . .]
Really, it's a beautifully designed economic experiment, and I'm fairly sure people are doing disertations based on the show.
It's a fairly well settled problem actually: it's called the Monty Hall problem (or for you old-types, the three prisoners problem). It's fairly settled in terms of probability, economics, and game theory, but there is some interesting related work being done in cognitive and behavioral psychology (which could potentially lead to some interesting work in behavioral economics, but that's hard to separate from behavioral psychology anyways).



I too want to complain on this one.

Lack of experimental-ness does not a science unmake. Also, economics can very much be experimental, and I would wager that they have been, repeatedly. It's just that it would be "cruel".

That depends on how you define an "experiment". The demarcation problem (the question of what is and is not science) may never have a widely accepted answer, but falsifiability (that is, that the hypothesis must have an rigorously and empirically examinable condition that proves it false) is one of the more prominent and long lasting elements in most definitions.

On a related note, there are definitions of "experiment" that are wide enough to include any systemic attempt to rigorously and empirically evaluate a falsifying condition.

[hotjer]

As an economist student I could not leave this topic without leaving this link:

CGE model - MINIMAL
http://www.monash.edu.au/policy/minimal.htm

CGE stands for Computable General Equilibrium. Without going to much into details I will just say that it is a program that contains a ****-load of equations. A little more exact it is a very large matrix. Each equation represent different mechanism in the economy, for instant; households real income, how many is employed in a specific sector etc.

The model's data is based on the economy of Australia. If you are willing to assume that the economy of the region of relevance to your campaign is similar to Australia you have a good starting point for a more controlled economy in d&d.

More about the usage!
Read the short manual. It is quite important to be able to understand the program. You might also need to look of different term online if you are not familiar with economic jargon. In any case, if you just follow the manual from the homepage you can actually get started quite fast.

Scenarios
Let us assume that a plague hits the region of the economy. This will certainly lead to a drop in employment. If you want to see the effect of a plague hitting the region, let us assume it drops the working force with 20%, you can insert that in the model and see HOW it affects all of the industries, household consumption, government spending etc.

You can vary all of the variables in the model easily and make a shock in the economy as it is called.

You can then get a good idea of how the prices are affected since you can see how the production and price either goes up or down as a result of the shocks in the economy.


If you are able to understand the mechanism in the model, which is quite easy if you just follow the manual patiently, you can get a controlled dynamic economy in your d&d world.

I hope it will be useful at least for a few out there!

[ThiagoMartell]

Oh, Peasant means untrained? Odd, I don't find that in the dictionary or the D&D glossary or in your earlier posts. I note that your post above is the FIRST time the word "untrained" occured in the thread.

The average peasant gets profession farmer or a craft, and averages over a GP per day without masterwork tools or an ability bonus.

Even the "untrained" character doesn't make a sp per day unless he's an idiot, because that 1sp per day is in the CRAFT skill description, and craft is explicitely and clearly stated to be usable untrained and to be usable for half check GP per week. So with an Int of 3 and taking10 on zero ranks you STILL do far better than 1sp per day (over 4 times as well actually).

One of the reasons D&D doesn't have an economic model is stuff like the above. This is all in one short skill description. Untrained craft (which is defined and clearly possible) produces 5 GP a week, but "unskilled labor" (not actually defined) produces 1 SP per day, or about 1/7th the income.

So just who are the unskilled laborers?
Please tone down the vitriol.
My conclusion is that the designers did not consider "peasant" a valid Profession skill. I was going to say "the obvious conclusion", but since you didn't reach that conclusion, that is not obvious at all.

[Deophaun]

One major unstated problem to the whole ideo of a D&D economy is training. How does your population even gain the skills to contribute to the economy? School, unfortunately, doesn't do it, nor does hands-on experience. Nope. If you want to get better at farming, you better start killing goblins. Even says in the DMG that, for some strange reason, Commoners will only get better if their village is under siege.

So, I imagine an apprenticeship is one where the master brings in some monster, ties it down, and lets his apprentice kill it until he learns how to glaze a pot or something.

[TuggyNE]

One major unstated problem to the whole ideo of a D&D economy is training. How does your population even gain the skills to contribute to the economy? School, unfortunately, doesn't do it, nor does hands-on experience. Nope. If you want to get better at farming, you better start killing goblins. Even says in the DMG that, for some strange reason, Commoners will only get better if their village is under siege.

So, I imagine an apprenticeship is one where the master brings in some monster, ties it down, and lets his apprentice kill it until he learns how to glaze a pot or something.

Insert Tippyverse shenananananigans here.

[ThiagoMartell]

The DMG just states that commoners gain levels slowly. It's the same reason for wizards to go adventuring - it's high risk, high reward when it comes to both money and knowledge.

[Deophaun]

The DMG just states that commoners gain levels slowly.
Nope. It states they gain XP "the same way that PCs do." They gain levels slowly because while the PCs are slaying storm giants, the commoner is killing the occasional rat. Unless the rat kills the commoner first, of course. Your more skilled commoners are going to be living in the most dangerous places (also stated in the DMG), which means any kingdom's most productive region is a barely defensible countryside rife with bandits and savage humanoids. What ruler would set out to make sure his lands were completely safe and secure with that kind of outcome? As long as the grain gets through, a little blood is good for the soil.

[ThiagoMartell]

Nope. It states they gain XP "the same way that PCs do." They gain levels slowly because while the PCs are slaying storm giants, the commoner is killing the occasional rat. Unless the rat kills the commoner first, of course. Your more skilled commoners are going to be living in the most dangerous places (also stated in the DMG), which means any kingdom's most productive region is a barely defensible countryside rife with bandits and savage humanoids. What ruler would set out to make sure his lands were completely safe and secure with that kind of outcome? As long as the grain gets through, a little blood is good for the soil.

And PCs don't gain level by killing monsters. They gain levels by surpassing challenges.