Discussion on the modern value of the Gold Piece and modern magic item crafting costs

[Segev]

This isn't a new topic, but it's one I've been musing in my head for a while, and I finally came up with something that I think stands the smell test for much of the range of costs of things in D&D. There are a lot of ways to try to fix a dollar value to the gold piece, usually starting by looking at items that exist both in the equipment section of the PHB and in the real world and comparing values. These often wind up with some weird outcomes at various price scales, though, and it's hard to judge how much of that is "D&D is a game, so the economy is designed for adventurers" and how much is "D&D is semi-medieval, and price points are different for things at different tech levels," and how much is just ... mistakes in eyeballing.

However, the approach I took is to look at it from a wages standpoint. This is little different, just happens to be one I think actually holds up pretty well.

1 sp/day is the wage one must pay to hire an untrained hireling (i.e. unskilled day laborer). If we assume this is roughly equivalent to working a burger-flipper job at a fast food joint, and thus ballpark a minimum wage of about $8/hour (which, yes, I know is a bit low compared to mandated wages nowadays, but it works nicely for my numbers, here), then an 8-hour day working for $8/hour gives $64 for a day's wages.

So, then, 1 sp = $64, and therefore 1 gp = $640.

Now, this holds up poorly if you look at "poor means/day" being 1 sp; nobody poor spends $64 on food for a day! But, conversely, a "poor Inn stay" costs 2 sp, or about $128. This isn't too far off from an economy hotel (which is, admittedly, better than a "poor inn," which is probably closer to $64 or $80/night at a motel). It's what I paid just two weekends ago for a single night at a Hampton Inn in a moderately small city in Arkansas. (Well, after tax, I paid closer to $145, but still.)

Where this gets interesting is when you apply it to magical item prices. A +1 spear, for example, is 2,302 gp market price. This isn't chump change to a low-level character, but is reasonably affordable by level 3 or 4, usually. It also is about $1.47 million. ($1,473,280, to be precise.) And, if you compare that to the living wage of unskilled laborers (e.g. farmers), 2,302 gp is what they make in 23,020 days of labor, or 63 years. That's assuming no days off. Easily a human lifetime, and thus more than easily enough to retire on. Even selling for half value, it'd let a man halfway through his life retire, or have a fortune large enough to buy an interest in a business whose income he could live off of. So those farmers with family heirloom +1 swords are right to jealously guard and prize them (unless they're selling them off for a life of ease).

This also paints quite the picture of just how ridiculously wealthy adventurers are, dripping in their christmas-tree ornamentation of magical items galore. Even a simple 50 gp Cure Light Wounds potion is $32,000.

Interestingly, paying a minimal-level cleric to cast remove disease is 150 gp, or $96,000. That actually sounds about right for a cure-all in a magical world: it's a little cheaper than some chronic and life-threatening care can run in the real world, but it's certainly not "anybody can afford it" cheap. (On the other hand, it would make health insurance a lot more affordable, because the amoritization tables would be so much simpler: list the things remove disease can cure, divide by the probability that a given customer will need one of them cured that way, and you've got your rate!)

This also gives some nice, daunting numbers for the aspiring "I started as a mage with little but my own magical knowledge in the modern world" characters to figure out just how much they really need in wealth to craft their magical items. That 25 gp onyx gem you need to animate a single zombie? $16,000. Is a single zombie worth $16,000, really? Depends what you do with it, but probably not as a combatant. This is, ironically, true in D&D, as well, despite the way necromancers will shell out for them: for that same 25 gp, you can hire an untrained spearman who will be just as good in a fight for 250 days. I bet few necromancers' zombie minions last 250 days.

$16000 for a tireless, ceaseless doer of a mindless task, however, might not be so bad. How much zombie-power to produce enough energy to compete with a major power plant? (I have not even begun such calculations.)

You want to outfit your best friend as a magically-armed and armored fighter? That will be literally millions of dollars of magical items, even if you're crafting them yourself for half the market cost.

[GrayDeath]

Sorry, but that leaves things like inflation out of the picture.

In mediival times EVERYTHING except large buildings was much much cheaper than today.

YOu might get a more realistic (phew^^) look at it if you compared what D&D says one gets and what a beginning Industrial revolution worker class got, and do the calculations with that.

Otherwise all you will end with is "If one ignores societal and economic evolution and just compares expenses in a fantasy Medi-whateverage with today, magic is hellishly expensive". ^^

[Batcathat]

Sorry, but that leaves things like inflation out of the picture.

Would inflation really matter in this case? Segev is basing the entire comparison on what one day of unqualified labour pays and calculating everything else in relation to that, inflation only matter if you compare two currencies to each other or the same currencies on different points in time (right? I'm no expert).

[GrayDeath]

Inflation (and general evolution of societies) matters as it changes the relationship of "What does a Tageloehner earn a day with "WHat does living cost".

For example (as I recently visited a museoum on the topic) in the area I live in, a Day worker on a farm around 1730 earned about 12 "Stueber" a day (for 12 hours of work).
A Stueber did amount to 16 Heller, where 100 Heller were added for the least of the Taler. Which in turn were added up for the smallest of "Gold pieces" (reality barely used them as payment in my area).
Living for a day required about 7 to 9 Stueber at that time for food, water and such.


Today, also in my region, a minimum wage guy/Gal earns about 9.5 Euros/hour, but living for a day (as above only food, drink,e tc) only requires about 10-15 of those, so a LOT remains.

Thats the point I am making, you cant really compare a "soiciety in which people work only to survive" with one like ours today and assume the same "worth" for your money and then expect any reasonable result.

Thats all I wanted to express.

[Biggus]

Poor people in medieval times had much less money than poor people in first-world countries do nowadays. They generally grew quite a bit of their own food, made their own clothes etc to supplement their income: they didn't buy many items. You can't really equate it accurately because some things were much more expensive back then and some things cheaper, but I'm pretty sure $640 to 1GP is too high for most purposes. I tend to peg it at nearer $200-$300 to 1GP myself.

Even at $200 to 1GP though, a +5 vorpal sword is worth $40 million, so you're certainly right about high-level adventurers carrying a fortune around with them...

[noob]

Poor people in medieval times had much less money than poor people in first-world countries do nowadays. They generally grew quite a bit of their own food, made their own clothes etc to supplement their income: they didn't buy many items. You can't really equate it accurately because some things were much more expensive back then and some things cheaper, but I'm pretty sure $640 to 1GP is too high for most purposes. I tend to peg it at nearer $200-$300 to 1GP myself.

Even at $200 to 1GP though, a +5 vorpal sword is worth $40 million, so you're certainly right about high-level adventurers carrying a fortune around with them...

Who uses +5 vorpal swords?
I believed people used +1 adamentine wounding swords of quickness and other stuff like that.

[Biggus]

Who uses +5 vorpal swords?
I believed people used +1 adamentine wounding swords of quickness and other stuff like that.

People who aren't optimisers?

The point is, that even at my lower estimate of $200 to 1GP, high-level adventurers are carrying around an incredible amount of wealth. A 20th-level PC is expected to have $152 million worth of equipment at that rate.

[Segev]

For things like food and lodging, the shift in value over time matters. But does it for swords and armor? That gets a solid “maybe,” based on rarity vs real quality vs what weapons even are available today.

Where it actually goes the other way is with gems and precious metals, which tend to be assumed as big parts of expensive material components. Now, for magic item crafting, we really have little to go on for what all those gp represent. Monster bits? Gold inlay? Gems? Bribes to extra-planar powers?

For most of the possibilities, modern era living would seem not to benefit from economies of scale or other price-reducing effects.

This is one of the reasons I rejected comparing the cost of living even as I compared the cost of a day laborer’s services.

All of that said, on what would you base the $200-$300 per gold piece estimate?

[HouseRules]

Maybe we should use pre-fiat currency values.
The official values of coinage before fiat currency.
1 troy ounce gold = 20 dollars.
5/7 troy ounce silver = 1 dollar.
1/10 troy ounce copper = 1 penny.

[Segev]

Maybe we should use pre-fiat currency values.
The official values of coinage before fiat currency.
1 troy ounce gold = 20 dollars.
5/7 troy ounce silver = 1 dollar.
1/10 troy ounce copper = 1 penny.

Tried that once. The size of gold pieces based on weight is unrealistically tiny for coinage (we're talking smaller than dimes, out of a flimsier metal). This means that we need to abstract what a "gold piece" is, rather than treat it as directly convertable by weight to real-world gold.

But, to toy with it again and pretend that gold pieces that are .32 ounces will somehow retain shape and be large enough to handle practically, this would make a gold piece (1/50 of a lb.) worth $6.40 in pre-fiat USD. In modern USD, gold looks to be priced at about $1475 per ounce, which comes to $472 per gp.

We could round that to $470 for ease of math. (At least as easy as $640.)

Probably creates semi-reasonable price estimates for magic item crafting costs. I mostly reject it based on .32 oz gold pieces being so impractically tiny that I must assume that "gold pieces" in D&D do not translate to real-world gold in pure volume/mass.

Let's say my wizard-in-the-modern-world wants to enchant a +1 merciful gun. Leaving the price of the base gun itself out, and assuming that "masterwork" still has to be paid for separately (+300 gp), the +2-equivalent enchantment is another 8000 gp, for a total "enchanted item cost" over the base price of the gun being 8,300 gp.

Using $640 per gp, that comes to a market value of $5.312 million, plus the price of the gun. $2.656 million in "special materials" the wizard must use to enchant this gun.
Using $472 per gp (because I'm using a calculator, so rounding isn't needed), the market price would be $3.9176 million, or $1.9588 million in "special materials" the wizard must use to enchant the gun.

A clearly large difference. Both very, very expensive. Which strikes people as more "realistic" for how you'd imagine a magical gun that KOs more effectively than normal but never kills anybody to cost?

[Chauncymancer]

Something to think about here is relative supply. A Gargantuan creature is 400ft2. We can sort of squint and average dragons to "On average, dragon's that are Old or older are Gargantuan."
In the entire history of the real life planet Earth, only enough gold has been mined to allow for 110 dragons of Old or older status to recline on beds of gold coins. There are ten different kinds of core dragon. If there's exactly one dragon for each Old or older category of each kind, then that's 50 dragons right there. You make it a mating couple, that's 100. If dragons are not an endangered species (i.e. there's more than 250 non-juveniles) then your dungeons and dragons world already has at least 150% more gold than the entire history of Earth, before you give even a single gold coin to a non-dragon. So there's no real reason to assume that gold's ratio of effort to mass is anything like Earth's.

[Gnaeus]

But it’s also presumably not 2000 GP crafting cost because the cost itself is magical. It’s presumably 2kgp because that was the cost of the components. I wouldn’t think that 100 GP of diamond dust for stoneskin is going to be dependent on whether the Russians or South Africans flood the diamond market. It’s a placeholder for convenience.

If the DM determines that the crafting cost is stuff like salt or incense, it would be a tiny fraction of what it would cost in a medieval European setting. If it’s stuff like mistletoe harvested in moonlight on a leap year it might be very expensive. If stuff like fairy wings or dragon talon it might be unobtainable at any price. I don’t think there’s any good way to determine

[tiercel]

I can’t help but wonder, if trying to bring real-life physics into D&D kills catgirls, then what does trying to bring real-life economics into D&D do? :wink:

I mean... saying D&D economics is “problematic” is a ridiculous understatement, given that the only real effort of the monetary system would seem to be to act as some kind of rough guideline for regulating magic item loot levels.

Putting that to one side, I suppose another calibration point would be how to represent starting gold for PCs in dollars/whatever: at $640/gp, a bog-standard stereotypical savage from beyond the edges of pseudo-medieval civilization (Barbarian 1) starts with $64000 in physical goods presumably carried on foot at age 16 or so. A part of that probably includes a 2gp/$1280 backpack, fantasy MREs/trail rations at 5sp/$320 per day of food, a 1gp/$640 coil of hemp rope....

Those prices might arguably be off by an order of magnitude, if we are striving for modern-day equivalency (insofar as that’s even possible), but it’s not necessarily clear how a handmade bespoke pseudo medieval leather backpack “should” be priced either

[Segev]

I can’t help but wonder, if trying to bring real-life physics into D&D kills catgirls, then what does trying to bring real-life economics into D&D do? :wink:

I mean... saying D&D economics is “problematic” is a ridiculous understatement, given that the only real effort of the monetary system would seem to be to act as some kind of rough guideline for regulating magic item loot levels.

Putting that to one side, I suppose another calibration point would be how to represent starting gold for PCs in dollars/whatever: at $640/gp, a bog-standard stereotypical savage from beyond the edges of pseudo-medieval civilization (Barbarian 1) starts with $64000 in physical goods presumably carried on foot at age 16 or so. A part of that probably includes a 2gp/$1280 backpack, fantasy MREs/trail rations at 5sp/$320 per day of food, a 1gp/$640 coil of hemp rope....

Those prices might arguably be off by an order of magnitude, if we are striving for modern-day equivalency (insofar as that’s even possible), but it’s not necessarily clear how a handmade bespoke pseudo medieval leather backpack “should” be priced either

Yeah, one reason I looked to day wages rather than cost-of-living is that the prices of mundane equipment are nearly impossible to map adequately to real-world equivalents in modern dollars. The economies of scale, the greater wealth overall of modern Westerners, and the often-spitballed prices in the PHB that are there at least as much for game balance as for verisimilitude make it just a little too hard to guage.

I admit that "what it costs to hire an unskilled minion" isn't much better; I like it mainly because it comes up with numbers that don't seem TOO terrible with the high-end stuff.

When you consider what you can spend on a camping backpack today, and how sturdy adventurers' packs must be to survive as unscathed as they so often do, $1280 doesn't sound so unreasonable.

[Doug Lampert]

Tried that once. The size of gold pieces based on weight is unrealistically tiny for coinage (we're talking smaller than dimes, out of a flimsier metal).

Huh? The D&D gold piece is 1/50lb, that's about twice the weight of a byzantine gold solidus, which was one of the highest value and heaviest gold coins in medieval times. The silver penny/denier was 240 to the troy pound, and the troy pound is LIGHTER than the modern pound.

Seriously, D&D coins are far too heavy on a historical scale. Medieval coins were SMALL, and flimsy is a BONUS for them since they could be broken in half for change (which was regularly done with silver coins).

[SquidFighter]

I noticed Inflation was already mentionned, but it might be better to compare living wages based on the ealry 2000's estimated costs of living, when it was all first published.

Also keep in mind that industrialization skews the costs of production for most basic needs, including food and sheltering. That may render difficult to evaluate the ''appropriate'' cost of a single day's ration, or wage meant to feed someone for a day.

On a side note, I really enjoy reading such threads, keep at it !

[Ashtagon]

You can't even compare things just by using day wage rates and assuming inflation accounts for differences over time evenly.

Average UK house prices are currently about 10 times average income. Back in the 1980s, it was closer to six times. It's not just that the numbers go up, it's that the numbers for different items go up at different rates. As another example, the price of silver relative to gold has varied quite considerably through history. Currently, gold is about 16x the price of silver, but has been as much as 50x in the past.

Incidentally, you're not the first to contemplate this idea by a long stretch. Back when Games Workshop covered D&D (early 80s), they did a series of articles expounding on economics and the "ale standard", noting that a D&D beer was 1 sp, and coincidentally, a beer was about a pound at then-current prices, and using that to extrapolate other prices (comparing a warhorse to an SUV, for example, or a racing horse to a fast car). This series made it into one of their "Best of White Dwarf" compilation issues, if you want to hunt for it.

[Biggus]

All of that said, on what would you base the $200-$300 per gold piece estimate?

I looked at the prices of a range of items, and the incomes quoted for different groups, and there was a huge variation, anywhere between $50 and $1000 to a GP IIRC (I can't find, now, where I did the calculation). The average seemed to be somewhere around $200.


Something to think about here is relative supply. A Gargantuan creature is 400ft2. We can sort of squint and average dragons to "On average, dragon's that are Old or older are Gargantuan."
In the entire history of the real life planet Earth, only enough gold has been mined to allow for 110 dragons of Old or older status to recline on beds of gold coins. There are ten different kinds of core dragon. If there's exactly one dragon for each Old or older category of each kind, then that's 50 dragons right there. You make it a mating couple, that's 100. If dragons are not an endangered species (i.e. there's more than 250 non-juveniles) then your dungeons and dragons world already has at least 150% more gold than the entire history of Earth, before you give even a single gold coin to a non-dragon. So there's no real reason to assume that gold's ratio of effort to mass is anything like Earth's.

The early editions of D&D were heavily influenced by Tolkien, and I suspect this is an example of that. In the early ages of Middle-Earth, gems and precious metals were explicitly much more common than they are nowadays and that certainly seems to be the case in D&D, at least in the more high-fantasy settings.

[tiercel]

When you consider what you can spend on a camping backpack today, and how sturdy adventurers' packs must be to survive as unscathed as they so often do, $1280 doesn't sound so unreasonable.
I was going to reply with “let’s see what kind of backpack” only to realize that 3.5 doesn’t seem to say what a backpack even holds in terms of volume or weight — a handy haversack does, but not a standard rucksack? If we are in invisible leather TARDIS (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=984) territory then $1280 admittedly doesn’t sound too outrageous....

[Segev]

I was going to reply with “let’s see what kind of backpack” only to realize that 3.5 doesn’t seem to say what a backpack even holds in terms of volume or weight — a handy haversack does, but not a standard rucksack? If we are in invisible leather TARDIS (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=984) territory then $1280 admittedly doesn’t sound too outrageous....

Heh. In the 5e game I'm running that has the PCs traipsing through jungles and canoeing over rivers, they tend to lump all their gear in spare space on their canoes, and then portage the whole things with NPC labor helping out. They just drop the non-combat gear when fights start. I don't know that anybody but the wizard HAS a backpack.

[Quertus]

Let's say my wizard-in-the-modern-world wants to enchant a +1 merciful gun. Leaving the price of the base gun itself out, and assuming that "masterwork" still has to be paid for separately (+300 gp), the +2-equivalent enchantment is another 8000 gp, for a total "enchanted item cost" over the base price of the gun being 8,300 gp.

Using $640 per gp, that comes to a market value of $5.312 million, plus the price of the gun. $2.656 million in "special materials" the wizard must use to enchant this gun.
Using $472 per gp (because I'm using a calculator, so rounding isn't needed), the market price would be $3.9176 million, or $1.9588 million in "special materials" the wizard must use to enchant the gun.

A clearly large difference. Both very, very expensive. Which strikes people as more "realistic" for how you'd imagine a magical gun that KOs more effectively than normal but never kills anybody to cost?

Eh, I'd argue that "masterwork" would, like the gun, cost per modern pricing. Any gun experts care to hazard a guess how much more a gun which gives an estimated 5% accuracy boost over the base model would be worth?

Still, depending on the the value of the GP, we're looking at this gun costing in the order of magnitude range of "millions of dollars".

I think most people would be better off just loading rubber bullets, and calling it a day.

And… if there was an economy, one would be strongly Incentivize to sell magical loot at those prices.

[Segev]

Eh, I'd argue that "masterwork" would, like the gun, cost per modern pricing. Any gun experts care to hazard a guess how much more a gun which gives an estimated 5% accuracy boost over the base model would be worth?

Still, depending on the the value of the GP, we're looking at this gun costing in the order of magnitude range of "millions of dollars".

I think most people would be better off just loading rubber bullets, and calling it a day.

And… if there was an economy, one would be strongly Incentivize to sell magical loot at those prices.

To be fair, one could make the same claim about magical loot in classic D&D settings. Thousands to tens of thousands of gp buy very comfortable lifestyles for those willing to just retire on them. Adventurers make WEIRD life choices by continuing to adventure, unless they have supremely powerful incentives (up to and including coersion by the world not leaving them alone) to adventure rather than settle down.

Less than 10 gp per day supposedly buys you a "Wealthy" lifestyle. A single +5-equivalent weapon would let you live that way for 2,500 days, or 6 years, 10 months, and 5 days. Any work at all on doing some investing and such could make this self-sustaining. And this is assuming you sell at "adventurer selling prices" of half the "market value." An adventurer who sold one piece of loot every 5 years or so, and adventured once a year or so, would live extremely comfortably if he wanted to.

[Mizr]

Given a dnd coin is 1/50th a pound, looking at the modern price of gold... $1,478.75 per ounce. Calculate it out, and a single GP is $473.50 in modern money. A potion of cure light wounds is thus... $23,660.

[Yahzi Coyote]

As others have said, you can't really compare modern prices. Mass production has made many things cheaper and a few things more expensive. Food, in particular, is cheaper relative to other things than it was in the medieval world.

D&D pretty explicitly has an excess of gold, to the point where it's surprising that heavy metal poisoning ought to be a concern.

However, you can make a functioning economy where 1 cp = 1 lb of wheat, poor peasants make 1 sp a day, adventurers spend 1 gp a day to live, and so on (Check out Merchants of Prime on DriveThruRPG). Magic items do represent staggering wealth, but so did a knight's horse and armor, or for that matter, an attack helicopter. Societies still fund those things because they are necessary. We need attack helicopters to fend off the Russians and D&D kingdoms need magic swords to fend off the monsters.

[Firechanter]

Yeah well, the initial assumption is flawed, that 1sp = 8hrs at minimum wage.
Keep in mind that modern day lower class lifestyle is probably more comfortable than upper class in pre-modern times. You have light, heating, running hot water... the food may be a wash, but you probably get more meat than at least middle class back then.

1sp/day is probably closer to minimum dole (social aid) today, if that. Where I live, that's about 330€ per month if memory serves.

So by that metric, 1sp ~ $10, 1GP ~ $100.
But even that is still too high, I think.

1sp/day is really DIRT POOR if you take the price lists at face value. These people can never afford any new clothes - not without going hungry for a week or so, anyway. Compared to that, $64/day is luxury.

[Biggus]

Yeah well, the initial assumption is flawed, that 1sp = 8hrs at minimum wage.
Keep in mind that modern day lower class lifestyle is probably more comfortable than upper class in pre-modern times. You have light, heating, running hot water... the food may be a wash, but you probably get more meat than at least middle class back then.

1sp/day is probably closer to minimum dole (social aid) today, if that. Where I live, that's about 330€ per month if memory serves.

So by that metric, 1sp ~ $10, 1GP ~ $100.
But even that is still too high, I think.

1sp/day is really DIRT POOR if you take the price lists at face value. These people can never afford any new clothes - not without going hungry for a week or so, anyway. Compared to that, $64/day is luxury.

Yeah, this is more or less what I was thinking. As I said, in pre-industrial times, poor people grew a lot of their own food and made a lot of their own clothes (and other things too, like making toys for their children): their wages alone weren't enough to live on.

[HouseRules]

Yeah well, the initial assumption is flawed, that 1sp = 8hrs at minimum wage.
Keep in mind that modern day lower class lifestyle is probably more comfortable than upper class in pre-modern times. You have light, heating, running hot water... the food may be a wash, but you probably get more meat than at least middle class back then.

1sp/day is probably closer to minimum dole (social aid) today, if that. Where I live, that's about 330€ per month if memory serves.

So by that metric, 1sp ~ $10, 1GP ~ $100.
But even that is still too high, I think.

1sp/day is really DIRT POOR if you take the price lists at face value. These people can never afford any new clothes - not without going hungry for a week or so, anyway. Compared to that, $64/day is luxury.

The meat issue has to do with the Government Subsidy.
1950s -- iron deficiency is a major problem.
Solution -- subsidize meat industry from 1950 to 1990.

[Firechanter]

So long story short, a gold piece is nowhere near $600. Compare to regular mundane equipment: a normal sword 15gp, Masterwork 315gp. Chainmail 150gp. At no point in history was a coat of mail the equivalent of $100.000.

A more reasonable conversion rate would be something in the ballpark of $20 to $50 per gp. Personally I think 1gp == $20 is a pretty good match for many purposes.

As for magic items, first off we should probably recall that these prices are not based on simulation or ingame plausibility but solely on game balance. The prices are the way they are - and scale quadratically, not linearly - to make sure that killing a dozen Orcs and looting their chainmails doesn't buy you a +5 sword.

That said, I think a +1 weapon being roughly the equivalent of ~50.000 makes a lot more sense than if you think about it as a million dollar heirloom.

[Kalkra]

It's already been pointed out numerous times over the years that nobody on 1 sp a day could really afford just about anything. You need to work a full day to afford some peasant clothes, and you won't be eating or sleeping indoors that day. I mean, a simple house is 1,000 gp, which probably explains why literally everybody just lives out of an inn, barring the joke about making a house out of quarterstaves and clubs.

Honestly, those house prices look kinda exorbitant. 1,000 gp for a one-to-three room wooden house with a thatched roof? That seems like something a person could make on his own with moderate training and sufficient time. Unless all forests are so filled with monsters that lumber is just extremely expensive and impossible for an ordinary person to obtain on his own.

Seriously, who would build an inn for what must be at least 1,000 gp and then only charge 2 sp a day? Plus 1 sp for food, but still. I'm guessing people who earn 1 sp/day spend that on food and sleep outside.

[noob]

It's already been pointed out numerous times over the years that nobody on 1 sp a day could really afford just about anything. You need to work a full day to afford some peasant clothes, and you won't be eating or sleeping indoors that day. I mean, a simple house is 1,000 gp, which probably explains why literally everybody just lives out of an inn, barring the joke about making a house out of quarterstaves and clubs.

Honestly, those house prices look kinda exorbitant. 1,000 gp for a one-to-three room wooden house with a thatched roof? That seems like something a person could make on his own with moderate training and sufficient time. Unless all forests are so filled with monsters that lumber is just extremely expensive and impossible for an ordinary person to obtain on his own.

Seriously, who would build an inn for what must be at least 1,000 gp and then only charge 2 sp a day? Plus 1 sp for food, but still. I'm guessing people who earn 1 sp/day spend that on food and sleep outside.

It is relatively simple: people do not live in houses they instead live in tents with added bedrolls for isolation.
Yes most people in dnd are hobos.
Kings on the other hand lives in wooden houses and adventurers live in magical items or spells.
Only villains gets castles and then only for style(they live within magical items or spells within the castle).

[Firechanter]

Yeah, forget those housing prices completely. They make absolutely no sense. Now TBH I don't know how medieval people exactly acquired their houses, but my first guess is they would build them themselves - prolly with mutual help within their community. Poor buggers, day labourers etc would have hovels or huts if they lived in a town, or if they worked on farms or vineyards etc the employer would put them up in a barn or a servant's house, free of charge (or food and lodging as part of the wage).

Apart from some complete flukes - 1sp/day labourer wage and real estate cost, above all - many of the prices actually aren't too far off from historical price lists. I suppose someone did some research at some point, at least.

Nevertheless, if you look at the net worth of an upper-echelon adventurer, the weirdness returns. For instance, level 12, WBL around 100k GP - by my conservative approach that's still $2million, more than enough to live an entire human life comfortably even if you get zero interest or dividend. And worth a lot more if you actually invest it. Instead the game expects you to put your life on the line time and again. That just doesn't quite work if you assume a murder hobo -- the character needs a reason to do it, be it "to protect loved ones" or flat out "save the world". Or of course, making the character not a murder hobo but an actual landed noble who will want to protect is holdings out of self-interest if nothing else. Pre-3E editions had that hardcoded into the level progression.

[Gauntlet]

Nevertheless, if you look at the net worth of an upper-echelon adventurer, the weirdness returns. For instance, level 12, WBL around 100k GP - by my conservative approach that's still $2million, more than enough to live an entire human life comfortably even if you get zero interest or dividend. And worth a lot more if you actually invest it. Instead the game expects you to put your life on the line time and again. That just doesn't quite work if you assume a murder hobo -- the character needs a reason to do it, be it "to protect loved ones" or flat out "save the world". Or of course, making the character not a murder hobo but an actual landed noble who will want to protect is holdings out of self-interest if nothing else. Pre-3E editions had that hardcoded into the level progression.

I'm pretty sure that 'adventurers are very much not normal / rational people' is a reasonably unsurprising stance to have regarding a standard 3.5 setting.

Also, if someone has made it to level 12, they have probably gathered enough enemies and unresolved plot threads that just settling down and never interacting with anything dangerous again is probably going to be quite difficult.