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Khedrac
2015-07-22, 07:16 AM
OK, this is for a 3.5 campaign, but it's not really a 3.5-specific question.

How much should metal ore/bars cost?

It's a post-(magical)-apocalypse campaign and the party are travelling to a trade town they have heard of to buy the raw materials they need to forge equipment to save their town (and neighbours) from an incoming army.

For a mixture of reasons they are after materials the traders have (in huge quantities) but currently think valueless (which will change when they start asking to buy some).
The have the rights to a load of iron to trade for the material (from the dwarf settlement that will do the forging).
The also have limited funds to buy some direct.

Now they need tonnes, so most of it will come from trading the iron, but I need to work out how much a tonne of wrought iron is worth in a conventional D&D economy.

The benchmark for how much the stuff they need will be is the price of the iron, subject to how well they go about negotiating - hence the need for the value of iron.

Any ideas?

Oh, please don't suggest ideas for how to get round this - currently in the world being potentially able to cast a spell or use a psionic power is lethal so finding a spellcaster is right out, and they are on limited time and budget for other more esoteric ideas. That said, I am sure they will come up with some on their own...

So - can anyone help me with the economics please?

MrStabby
2015-07-22, 07:29 AM
Ok. Not quite sure the best place to begin but...

No price exists in a vacuum. Any price for Iron would reflect how much gold (or whatever the currency is) would be equally useful. In a post apocalyptic scenario it is likely that money may be seen as less useful. Money as a means to pay tax or keep accounts or pay off debts is now much less important so correspondingly traders have to be offered a lot more of it to part with goods.

Given the lack of trade such a world may have, and possibly the lack of spare human resources in societies to craft art Iron could be as useful as gold and command the same price.

Even if the sellers cannot use the Iron directly the fact that they have kept in indoors rather than rusting away outside may suggest that they at least appreciate its usefulness.

Now low level adventurers that can hunt and keep the settlement fed for a couple of weeks could bater animals for Iron, a trade that may be much more appealing post apocalypse.

Yora
2015-07-22, 07:39 AM
I agree. You need some kind of standard unit of value, and neither gold or silver seem useful here. I'd probably go with calculating the value of bulk raw materials in horses, goats, or pigs.

How many pigs someone is willing to pay for a tonne of refined iron depends on how much he wants it and what he would have to pay to other potential sellers.

MrStabby
2015-07-22, 08:23 AM
Value would also fluctuate with the seasons and harvests.

High storage costs of livestock, especially in times like harsh winters will lower their value, but the price may spike again in the spring (shortage as more people slaughtered their animals over the winter).

Knaight
2015-07-22, 08:26 AM
It also depends on a lot of setting details. How much has been mined up, how cheap is energy/labor, what are the mining techniques, what's forge technology like, so on and so forth. With that said, in a post apocalyptic scenario there's a good chance the population is significantly lower and there's a bunch of stuff left (depending on the particulars of the apocalypse), so raw materials may be cheap. Worked stuff is liable to be more expensive, as far fewer people remain who know how to work it.

SethoMarkus
2015-07-22, 08:37 AM
Worked stuff is liable to be more expensive, as far fewer people remain who know how to work it.

I was going to bring up a similar point. If the townspeople have the technology and skill to refine/use the iron plays a big role in whether they place value on it. If no one can work the iron, it will be much less valuable to them than other materials or goods they can use immediately. (Not worthless, mind you, as they can trade it again later on.) However, if they need the iron for creating tools, and if they have the ability to produce the finished products themselves, iron suddenly is a lot more appealing.

I don't think a standard price can be established, since each town will have a different situation. However, if it is truley a post-apocalyptic setting, and is post-society, then currency won't be worth any more than the raw material it is made of.

Lord Torath
2015-07-22, 09:11 AM
Just off the top of my head, I would start with a per-pound value for iron somewhere between copper and silver. How many coins do you get per pound? In 2E AD&D, it's 50 (100cp = 10sp = 1gp). Chainmail costs 75 gp and weighs 40 lbs, so that's 750 silver coins or 15 pounds of silver for 40 pounds of worked steel. So worked steel is worth about four times its weight in copper (150 lbs of copper for 40 lbs of chainmail). That's looking at JUST chainmail. I haven't really looked to see how other types of steel armor or weapons compare. I'd probably put raw iron ingots at about a quarter of that, so roughly equal to its weight in copper. Of course, this is for 2E AD&D. You'll probably want to look at the weight and costs of armor/weapons in the version you're using. But this should give you a decent framework to start from.

Once you've got your base price, you can adjust it as discussed above for its relative usefulness/scarcity in the areas you're buying/selling it.

TheThan
2015-07-22, 11:10 AM
It’s a good idea to look it up, PHB P112.

Iron: 1sp per pound
Copper: 5 sp per pound
Silver: 5 gp per pound
Gold: 50 gp per pound
Platinum:500 gp per pound.

So this is your base starting value. Decide how much more these materials are worth according to the local economy and make appropriate adjustments.

Typically the more useful and harder to acquire materials are going to be more expensive to buy.

Khedrac
2015-07-22, 11:41 AM
Thanks for all the advice - and I can't believe I forgot to check the PHB... :smallredface:

Most places are operating on barter, this town is a spacial case because of the nature of the traders. I don't know if any of my players are on this forum, but just in case
There is a bunch of Xorvintaal dragons which survived the apocalypse (having lost their spellcasting). However before the collapse most coinage had transferred to magically enchanted disks of a special metal (i.e. I haven't decided what it is yet) which all became featureless disks so most of their hoards stopped counting as "treasure".
The have supplies of interesting things which they are willing to trade for gold (so basically a standard D&D economy but the merchants are greedy) as gold is more important to them than most magical items. They still have the featureless "coins" as they won't throw anything away but they have no known use (very hard to smelt and not useful if one succeeds).
The player characters come from an area with a heavy parallel Fey presence who hate iron (which puts the dwarf town under a semi-permanent state of siege) and they Fey are about their only chance of holding off the goblinoid etc army coming their way.
The PCs have discovered that although the coin metal is thought to be useless, it alloys with iron to produce a metal that is effectively stainless steel - and doesn't annoy the fey with its mere presence. They now need several tons/tonnes of the coins to alloy with the iron, then the dwarves can produce enough weapons and armour for the PC's town, the dwarves and the Fey who will be able to help (time permitting).
So the town is one of the few places with a fairly conventional D&D economy, but it is also the only place which has the material in bulk.

Everywhere else it's as you all predict.

Thanks again all.

PS it's 50 coins to the pound in 3rd Ed/3.5 as well, I had forgotten that it changed for 2nd Ed.

Wardog
2015-07-22, 06:18 PM
How post (and how apocalyptic) is this setting? That will affect how easily people can acquire metals, and how much they will be in demand.

And how rare is iron or iron ore (and other metals/minerals)?

Copper can be used for things iron can't. Its softer, which means its bad for most weapons and tools, but good for anything where ease of shaping is more important than harness. And it doesn't rust, and conducts heat (and electricity) better. It's better for cooking pots, wiring (if you have electricity), roofing, plating ship hulls to prevent fouling or rot/corrosion, jewelry, water pipes, and magic healing bracelets (dubious IRL but perfectly possible in a fantasy setting).

It's also rarer (at least in the real world - your setting may be different).


Some real-world prices:
Commodity prices:

Currently, in the real world,
* Iron ore:60.04 USD/t
* copper is 5,475 USD/t.
* silver is 14.82 USD/ozt (432,250 USD/t)
Source: http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/

(Note: those are the prices for metalic gold and silver, but iron ore).

UK scrap-metal prices:
Metal Type Scrap Metal Price UK Guide
Copper £2.60 – £3.60 / kg
Aluminium £0.25 – £1.50 / kg
Lead £0.42 – £1.00 / kg
Brass £0.90 – £2.80 / kg
Copper Wire £3.60 – £3.90 / kg
Steel (Heavy) £0.05 – £0.14 / kg
Steel (Stainless) £0.55 – £1.00 / kg
Iron £0.04 – £0.08 / kg
Titanium £1.40 – £2.00 / kg
Gold £8.80 – £23.46 / g
Silver £0.13 – £0.26 / g
Platinum £20.14 – £22.36 / g
http://www.scrapsales.co.uk/

IN the real-worl present day, copper is a lot more expensive than iron. (Approx. 52x, according to the scrap prices). Judging by the prices TheThan gave, in D&D-land copper is either much commoner or much less in demand.

Knaight
2015-07-22, 07:43 PM
Currently, in the real world,
* Iron ore:60.04 USD/t
* copper is 5,475 USD/t.
* silver is 14.82 USD/ozt (432,250 USD/t)
Source: http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/

This runs into some big issues though. For one thing, mining under modern conditions where you've got access to explosives, huge mechanical mining tools, advanced chemical seperatation techniques, and all that sort of stuff makes a huge difference. Then once refinement starts there's the matter of how cheap energy is compared to just about any point in history. Iron is far cheaper than it has historically been just about anywhere. Aluminum went from a highly precious metal to one of the cheapest, largely because of the chemical separation and cheap energy (the coal input: aluminum output ratio is really high, about an order of magnitude over that for iron). In short, hundreds of years of technological advancement tend to skew prices a bit.

Coidzor
2015-07-22, 10:41 PM
A short ton(2000 pounds) of iron is, standardly, a quantity of trade goods (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/wealthAndMoney.htm#wealthOtherThanCoins) worth 2000 sp or 200 gp or 20 pp in D&D 3.5's system.

Wrought iron may just be the same as raw, smelted but unworked iron or it may be a bit more or a bit less depending upon how usable it is. The nature of the apocalyptic setting will also affect this.

Surpriser
2015-07-23, 12:24 PM
I would turn the question around:
How much of that (post-)magical metal do they need?
The value of the iron is then quite a bit less than that, so they either have to get creative to get the rest, be good at bartering or return with less metal than expected (leading to more problems later).

Both due to the post-apocalyptic setting and the unspecified nature of the sought metal, the price of iron can be whatever is most convenient for the narrative.

Since you mention using the metal in combination with more iron to form an alloy, I would imagine that this alloy only contains a small fraction of the metal (otherwise it would be nearly impossible to lug that much of it back to the town - although they seem to already have a cart and this might be an adventure in itself).
Let's simply assume that with about 1000lb of the metal enough of the alloy can be created to equip everyone back home with weapons and armor.

Then the base value for their ton of iron is about 600lb of metal discs. If they are clever and don't tell the dragons why they need the discs (and negotiate well enough), they can convince them to part with up to double that amount (some reserves can never hurt).
However, if they openly announce their desperate need for the discs, then the price of the iron suddenly drops to 300lb of metal discs, as the traders are unwilling to part with their "precious and important" stock.