City generation, Profession, thoughts on Dungeonomicon years later

[Fizban]

So a recent thread got me thinking about 3.x's city generation and demographics rules again, and how to fix them. Now don't get me wrong, I love them for the most part, but they also use a flat list of PHB classes while also generating a bunch of weirdly high level members of NPC classes. I went looking for something I remembered reading in the old Frank and K stuff and ended up re-reading Races of War and Dungeonomicon (before needing to google up the three economies, which weren't part of that series apparently and had what I was actually looking for).

Specifically I was looking for their numbers on caloric requirements, which I eventually found (here (http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10821)), because I remembered they made a point about adventurers requiring a bunch more food, which would in turn be very useful for determining how many adventurers a place could actually support (the part wish economies I don't agree on or care about). The numbers I found were 1,000C for peasants, 2,000C for specialists, and 5,000C for adventurers.

The problem is that these numbers rather offend modern sensibilities, and aren't really accurate over long-term. Telling people they can't just play some mysteriously perfect ascended street urchin is one thing, but telling them their Good-guy champion of the people needs to eat five times what the vast majority of the population is scraping by on, is not fun. And while I know bodybuilders each a ton (and spend hours and hours working out every day), and modern soldiers likely eat quite a bit more on duty, the fact remains that even super elite physical people today don't eat that way from birth. And furthermore, the "intellectual" caster classes aren't bodybuilders, so blanket assigning them the same caloric requirement is ridiculous. And farming is a labor intensive activity that would require more calories. This breakdown might work for an aggressively Iron-Age setting where peasants are constantly oppressed, but not for what I'd call modern DnD.

So Dungeonomicon is very heavy on its re-conceptualization of DnD as an Iron Age setting. In addition to the numbers from this post, they say tax rates should be 50-100%, and directly equivocate taxes with repeated raiding and particularly looting. But I've read plenty of things that say, no, medieval taxes were more like 20%, and people giving those numbers are vastly overexaggerating. 20% is the number the DMG uses, and the presentation of most DnD worlds is a late faux-medieval one. Focusing on combat = Heroism and puny peasants not mattering, sure, those caloric numbers and an Iron-Age aesthetic work. But not for normal DnD.

So really, these numbers aren't nearly as helpful as I was hoping. Considering the tiny number of adventurers, and expected ratio of 1/10 people being specialists (non-commoners), and half the expected party being casters, all it really says is that peasants usually get the shaft and a few people at the top are eating a ton. Nothing new there. While rather screwing the sensibilities of most players, who don't want the type of setting they're pushing here. We can't link Elite stats to food without either making all specialists Elite, or making players feel bad.

So instead, the background for adventurers shall only require them to have a specialist level upbringing. Specialists get more food than peasants, but not literally double (say 1.5kC or less, then 1.5kC to 2.5kC), and there is of course wiggle room where particularly prosperous farmers might eat very well every day, while down on their luck or not so skilled specialists and townies are actually eating poorly. Your character can have any background you want, as long as they weren't starving for most of their childhood, or they got some sort of magical fluff nutrition fixing growth potion later. Highly physical people who use those bodies often should probably eat more, particularly starting in their teenage years as they build up those muscles, but I'm not going to draw up new ration requirements or change the price of rations.

But then, from where do Elite stats come from? Elite stats will simply have to be linked to PC classes: An exceptional member of an NPC class might have Elite stats for some reason or a PC-classed one with Average, but generally the people with Elite stats are the ones who get the training to enter PC classes, because the people training them only take those with the most promise. Only a particular dearth of trainers or option in students will cause mismatches.

If all of that seems like a lot of work to end up exactly back where we started: Yes, yes it was.



Speaking of taxes and 20%, that reminds me of the Aiel in Wheel of Time and their "fifth." When they win a battle and loot a place, they take 1/5 of the wealth, and the leader's share is 1/5 of that wealth. (Which I'm pretty sure was based on some historical precedents as well). So if 1/25 of the wealth belongs to the person at the top, we can calculate how much cash the people at the top have, if not necessarily the value of all their buildings and businesses: they'll control 1/5 of the ready cash that the entire population center has.

Values for "average" (center-range) population centers:
-Thorp: 25, hamlet: 38, village: 260, small town: 2,320, large town: 21,000
Cities and larger have multiple power centers, as in multiple people in charge, so divide accordingly:
-Small city: 127,500, large city: 493,333, metropolis (40k is popular): 2,000,000.

And those numbers seem. . . surprisingly workable. Remembering that there should be no more than one metropolis per very large area, really one or two per campaign setting unless you're running something actually as huge as Forgotten Realms, that's fine. The four most powerful people in the most powerful city can call up on 2 million gp worth of movable assets at any one time.

That may sound ridiculous, but it's only the WBL of ten 15th or about three 20th level PC adventurers (who have about 4x the NPC gear). The city itself sports some 40 highest level NPCs, whose individual gear totals about 2,000,000 not counting the lower level NPCs. Their income is measured in taxes*, their outflow is measure in things like armies and castles, and their ability to turn that cash into anything is still limited by the people that can turn cash into things. The biggest problem with these numbers is that revealing them to your players will cause them to expect much higher rewards from people in larger cities. But that would assume they're working for the most powerful person, on something important enough to command a significant expenditure, in one of the few largest cities in the land. There is the "it's the end of the world and you're only giving me $10?" problem, but that was always there anyway.

This number could be further lowered by adding some loss, so that while they're supposed to get 20% of 20%, they actually end up getting more like 10% due to corruption on the way there.

*To calculate rate of replenishment, decide how much money people actually make so you can calculate taxes!

Those ready cash values from the DMG are based on the gp limit for individual items in that city. A completely arbitrary cutoff with little respect for the actual magical or industrial crafting ability of any individuals, but also a convenient statement of relative wealth capacity. A city of larger size has people that can buy/sell more expensive things, measured by the gp limit, and despite always having people at the bottom the overall "average" wealth per person goes up. The calculation is 1/10 times half the gp limit, which seems reasonable: 1/10 is the number of specialists, and enough money to buy one thing of half the most expensive thing sold again *sounds* reasonable as an average of all the people with spending money. No idea if it actually *is* or not, but seems good enough to me.


So, about that number of high level NPCs.

The easiest thing to fix here is the rigid PHB list- It's no longer the 11 specific PHB classes, it is now 10 or 12 PC classes of your choice.
The second problem is the ridiculous NPC class rolls: Commoner is 1d4+CM, Adept, Aristocrat, and Expert 1d6+CM, and Warrior 1d8+CM. Each NPC class gets twice as many rolls as a PC class would get.

Though really, to preserve ratios, the Commoner should get 100 rolls, Warrior 5 rolls, Expert 3 rolls, Adept and Aristocrat fudge to 1 roll each. But you can't roll 100 commoners for a thorp with less than 100 population, and no one wants to roll that many commoners anyway. And if PC classed people soak up all the xp, there shouldn't be that many in the NPC classes getting levels, but it just feels weird to have the same number of them- this is why the DMG had them roll really high to generate more, but that's even weirder so no, just roll twice.

Dungeonomicon says that NPCs gain levels from doing things appropriate to their class, and since studying books is less lethal than fighting, that's why NPC spellcasters reach high levels. This is only true if you decide that's how it works. Xp is normally gained by overcoming challenges, particularly lethal or at least livelihood destroying challenges, which the vast majority of people never face enough of to level up- for PCs, with NPCs gaining it however the DM says.

But when such a situation arises, the most skilled will be called upon (or seek it out) to answer it, and the world turns even with no PCs (whose difference is marked out almost entirely by just so happening to get waaaay more treasure than NPCs did). They get xp, and eventually level up, making them capable of facing greater challenges for more xp, etc. The xp will always flow towards the few who are best able to deal with it, because most people don't want to walk out there and die. Even Dungeonomicon's own business rules acknowledge that a static location attracts Encounters, so why *wouldn't* NPCs be gaining levels from those encounters? That's where a city's high level NPCs come from: clearing out and defending the city from all sorts of problems in the background.

How many people should this be? Well, if 1/10 of people are specialists, 1/10 of that being the best of the best seems appropriate. And indeed, you get somewhere around that number with the DMG's generation. But the high level individuals are generated first.

We could instead go backwards: 1% of the population is PC-classed, split between 10 classes, and for each two of level X there are one of level X+1. But this will barely produce a 5th level character in a 40k metropolis, and that's just doesn't work with PC levels.

But it doesn't seem to make sense to have PC classes left out of the remaining population percentages. It creates a weird situation where two cities of the same rank but one with double the population (which happens at every rank on the table), will have the exact same number of 1st level PC-classed, or the larger one will even have less if they rolled lower.


So shave 1% off the Commoner value: instead only 90% of the non-rolled population is Commoners, and add a new 1% which is then divided between the PC classes.
But from there we can do some more magic: if there's a school of some sort, instead half of that 1% is shifted to whatever PC class the school teaches (two or more schools split the 1% evenly). Note that this 1% even on a 40k metropolis is only 400 people, but that's enough that you can plonk down a "wizard college" and support 200 extra 1st level wizards.


It might seem like it would be easy to change the total number of top NPCs to work off of population, but all you'd really do is either cut the smallest (and most numerous) population centers down to basically no members of PC classes (which may in fact be desireable, in which case go ahead and do it), or inflate the top even more.

But wait- dipping into Medieval Demographics Made Easy (here (https://takeonrules.com/assets/downloads/medieval-demographics-made-easy.pdf)) and comparing the baseline numbers I'm giving to PC classes (1% divided between 10-12 classes), gets very interesting. That's 1/1000-1200 for a given PC class. Which is actually more than say blacksmiths (1/1500), only half as many as carpenters (1/500), and actually twice as many as inns or tanners (1/2000). So by adding that tiny fraction of a percentage, due to the large number of discreet jobs that need doing, even a massive city ends up with "Wizard" common enough to rate against other well-known professions. So. . . maybe PC classes shouldn't gain a flat scaling percentage? Anything less than 1% is so low that you might as well just leave it at those generated from the top.

Yeah, that basically just amounts to a realization of "Hey, only like 1% of the population is PC spellcasters, but if you add another 1% because reasons, suddenly you have a bunch more!" But it puts it in really nice terms and juxtaposes it with the commonality of actual professions. And if you want to say Plant Growth should be resulting in more skilled people, then hey, here's an example of how converting even 1% of the Commoners in the biggest city to PC classes results in a lot more PC-classed.


Since the default city is humans, and humans have bonus skill points and bonus feat that allow them to multi-specialize, one could say that specialist goods in cities of other races (when they don't match the local specialties) are more expensive.


Dungeonomicon also wants to get rid of the Profession system, to which I somewhat agree and disagree. The problem is, it's extremely effective as a simplifying tool. Their business system sounds nice, having profits and operational costs limited and based on the overall "resources" and also limited by the buy limit of the local population, but also basically boiling down to just being an alternate method of framing encounters for the PCs. But it's also essentially a license to infinitely generate encounters (and again makes it weird that they say elsewhere that NPC martials can't level up without war) that only avoids breaking background NPC xp assumptions because elsewhere they insist encounter-based xp must also be removed. There's also still an easily cheesable lack of definition: the DM must already know how many competitors you will have in order to calculate what sort of profit you can make, and there is zero information on that normally. How many competitors are you expected to have? Who knows! Furthermore, you can just create a business so specific that you can't have any competitors (bring something "new" to the region), and hey look instant monopoly.

So while it has some improvements vs DMG2, and the core concept of "A business is just a stronghold which attracts encounters and you make an appropriate amount of money" is very strong, in the end it's just a bunch of extra fine-tuning that needs evaluation and still can't actually be used at scale, just for individual things the PCs create or might heavily interact with.


Expanding the wage table, now that's something I can get behind. Complaining about a "really good scullery maid" having BAB +5, and completely divorcing the concept from the skill system not so much. The level required to be good at a profession is entirely up to the DM. Bonuses of +10 can be reached with 1st level characters. As long as scullery maids have tasks of DC 20 or less and aren't under threat, your maids can all be 1st level. And the skill system which allows a solid PC-relevant connection between the game mechanics and the differences in racial capability on a macro scale is good. It's one of the things they harp on about in Races of War, races with extra HD and ability scores being the best at everything. Human skill point (and feat) bonus and variable average stat array vs non-humans with the same array and potential Int penalties, actually shows the differences. Saying Profession is bad and trying to dump it entirely misses one of their own points.

Sadly, their expansion of the hireling wage table fails as far as I'm concerned. They change it to weekly, but laborers are still 1sp, so something is immediately off. I've no idea where they're drawing any of this from, but I do know I've checked a couple DMG numbers when researching which actually lined up well, so between the two I'd prefer to stick with the DMG.

The best solution would be to create a table with various jobs vs thresholds of skill, with the wages appropriate for each. That way you can have your untrained laborers and servants and cooks, but also "porters" or "trained laborers" and master chefs and ladies' maids and whatnot. Some jobs can also run on other skills or even feats or features (Run or Dash for a runner or Ride for a horsed messenger, BAB for armsmen, etc)

Of course, the problem with any of that is the same as it always has been, that trying to get a comprehensive list of jobs and wages is literal historical research, with the best sources often being actual published books or articles behind paywalls. If Dungeonomicon had indicated they did additional research, I would gladly crib their numbers, but alas. I wonder if Pathfinder changed any (and gave reasons)?

In light of that, a simpler option might be to merge the two. Use the normal Profession check system, but instead of everything gaining 1/2 the result in gold pieces, they gain some percentage of the result based on how valuable/in-demand the skill is. For PCs of course, the literal 1% elite of the elite, any skill is equally available, but NPCs not so much. Though you might also need to deal with the question of how skilled is skilled- 4 ranks, or 4 ranks and skill focus? And if you're working backwards from established values such as the 1sp/day laborer or anything else on the DMG hireling table, you're essentially just going to end up with flat percentages: +4 skill up from +0 unskilled is +40%, +7 is +70%, +10 is +100%. Are these reasonable ratios? Dunno.


Actually there's a massive problem with the "1sp/day laborer," which is kinda the reason everyone latched onto the "Farmers make plenty of money" example with Profession and crafting food at 1/3: the 1sp/day laborer flat-out doesn't work. It's enough to pay for PHB Poor meals, but no accommodations. The DMG has a "self-sufficient" upkeep category that says you already own a house (or presumably live in the open) and grow your own food and make your own clothes, but that precludes being a laborer. Farming is a full-time job, a laborer is not a farmer. The next upkeep of "meager" at 5gp per month, more than double, explicitly says you might need to hunt your own food and sleep outside sometimes. The 1sp/day economic base only works if no one has to pay for housing and "crafts" food at 1/3 price. So I guess- live-in servants and functionally indentured farmers and whatnot?

It's extra ironic because whenever I see someone fixate on the 1 sp/day value, they don't seem to realize it doesn't really work- and also that it came from the DMG and the same people that wrote the profession check rules.

But wait!- The hireling table even gives the daily wage for such skilled and invested professions as mason, craftsperson, teamster, and smith. Guess how much they make? 3-4sp per day, for a total of 2.1 to 2.8gp per week. So apparently the standard rate for skilled workers is around half the amount gained by the average +0 Profession result. For a trained-only skill. It would seem the only ones that line up are the Alchemist and Barrister, with a flat +4 from ranks, to 1gp/day.

So yeah, there's 'ya problems. The "laborer" value assumes you either sleep on the street or work in a place that includes room or food or both, the skilled labor wages are based on that, and then the Profession skill starts at double the skilled wages.

This could be taken the other direction, and make Profession skills only exist for business owner professions where the check result comes from the combination of your work and managing employees you pay as little as possible and cutting deals with people for as much advantage as possible etc. This clashes with non-adventurer skills lumped under profession, particularly vehicle piloting, but it shouldn't be too hard to resolve by making those their own skills. Meanwhile any job you work for someone else (and as an adventurer you don't because you don't live stably in one place) gets a wage, which the DM could fill out but won't because it's not important until you're staffing your own stronghold.

(There is of course the other question of how functional the PHB prices are and thus how suitable they are for determining appropriate wages, at which point you're just re-writing everything).


And. . . I think that about wraps it up. Anyone have some more good sources on realistic medieval-ish wages? Thoughts on effectively adding a new 1% of extra 1st level PC-classed NPCs or how common they are vs normal professions? The amount of ready cash for local rulers?

[Thane of Fife]

Some comments:

First, I think your calorie estimates look off. I mean, it's Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia article on medieval diets suggests that a peasant man's diet is typically estimated at about 2,900C, and a noble's probably higher than 4,000C. I saw elsewhere that 1,000C is the recommended daily intake of a child under the age of 5. It is likely that people occasionally lived like that in times of hardship, but I can't imagine that people who did hard labor for a living survived like that over the long term.

Second, on real medieval wages, well, one book I have here - Doris Mary Stenton's English Society in the Early Middle Ages cites that in 1281, the community of the Leicester gild merchants "determined that wool wrappers should be paid both winter and summer a penny a day with food, and flock pullers three halfpence without food and a halfpenny with food." I'm guessing these are both fairly unskilled jobs, and if the difference of 1 d between the flock pullers with and without food can be considered about equal to the value of the food, hen we could estimate that (at that time and place), food was about 1d per day and you got paid something like 1.5 to 2 pence per day, once the value of the food is taken into account.

Third, I don't think you're going to get a functional medieval economy using the prices in the PHB. Even leaving aside the question of how much research went into them in the first place, almost all of the prices in 3e come more-or-less direct from 1e, which is itself explicit that they're supposed to represent an economy that is being wrecked with massive inflation due to adventurers bringing in lots of gold. In that sense, you could almost say it's working as designed - all of those kids out there who are willing to go into dark holes in the ground and face certain death for a chance to strike it rich are doing so because they don't have any other way to make a living.

[Duke of Urrel]

Actually there's a massive problem with the "1sp/day laborer," which is kinda the reason everyone latched onto the "Farmers make plenty of money" example with Profession and crafting food at 1/3: the 1sp/day laborer flat-out doesn't work. It's enough to pay for PHB Poor meals, but no accommodations. The DMG has a "self-sufficient" upkeep category that says you already own a house (or presumably live in the open) and grow your own food and make your own clothes, but that precludes being a laborer. Farming is a full-time job, a laborer is not a farmer. The next upkeep of "meager" at 5gp per month, more than double, explicitly says you might need to hunt your own food and sleep outside sometimes. The 1sp/day economic base only works if no one has to pay for housing and "crafts" food at 1/3 price. So I guess- live-in servants and functionally indentured farmers and whatnot?

It's extra ironic because whenever I see someone fixate on the 1 sp/day value, they don't seem to realize it doesn't really work- and also that it came from the DMG and the same people that wrote the profession check rules.

But wait!- The hireling table even gives the daily wage for such skilled and invested professions as mason, craftsperson, teamster, and smith. Guess how much they make? 3-4sp per day, for a total of 2.1 to 2.8gp per week. So apparently the standard rate for skilled workers is around half the amount gained by the average +0 Profession result. For a trained-only skill. It would seem the only ones that line up are the Alchemist and Barrister, with a flat +4 from ranks, to 1gp/day.

So yeah, there's 'ya problems. The "laborer" value assumes you either sleep on the street or work in a place that includes room or food or both, the skilled labor wages are based on that, and then the Profession skill starts at double the skilled wages.

I agree with all of this. This is why I make it a house rule that the wages for basic hirelings (not specialists) that appear in the Dungeon Master's Guide do not include room and board. When you bring hirelings with you on a voyage, I require you have to pay them three silver pieces per day in addition to the standard wage given in the tables. I call this a "room-and-board allowance." If a voyage is likely to be dangerous, the hirelings who you bring along will also demand hazard pay, as explained in the DMG. (PCs should be rich enough to pay for all these things.) In my understanding, all hirelings except for specialists are paupers, that is, poor laborers who own no land and are willing to work for less than guild wages because no guild work is available to them. They're too poor even to be taxed, as peasants and guild members are. (The taxable classes are the ones who actually earn money by means of Craft or Profession skill, so if you're a PC and you earn money with Craft or Profession skill, I require you to pay taxes, usually 15%, unless you're willing to risk breaking the law.*) Unless hirelings of the pauper class work for PCs, they work as servants on somebody else's property and get room and board from them. The "one silver piece per day" wage is what these menial servants get in addition to room and board – unless they're slaves.

On the other hand, if you have the Leadership feat, I assume that you also have land and that all of your followers live on your land. Those followers who are peasants or guild members pay rent or taxes to you, and from this income, you can pay all the followers who don't pay rent or taxes to you. Moreover, room and board, for every follower who lives on your land, comes with the territory. You don't make a profit as a low-ranking landlord, because I assume that your expenses and obligations toward higher-ranking gentry cancel out your surplus income; however, since you own your own property, and since your taxes pay for servants to care for your stronghold, you yourself (and your adventuring comrades and guests) get room and board for free. However, even if you have the Leadership feat, I still require you to pay a standard hireling wage – plus a room-and-board allowance, plus probable hazard pay – whenever you hire one of your followers (or anybody else) to travel away from their home.

As you can probably tell, my house rules also enable me to avoid having to do a lot of math. Another useful thing to remember is that in a medieval society, lots of wealth doesn't even come in the form of money. Peasants do a lot of bartering, and they deal in trade goods more than coin. They even pay a lot of taxes in the form of trade goods rather than money. So there's no need to figure out how to monetize absolutely everything.

I long ago started a thread of discussion about PCs and NPCs and the economic discrepancies between them. It's here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?428035-PCs-NPCs-amp-Economic-Injustice-in-D-amp-D-3-5) if you're curious.

________________________________________________
*Usually, when you earn money with Craft or Profession skill, I require you to join a guild and to pay guild dues, following the Dungeon Master's Guide II. This is over and above the 15% tax. Of course, belonging to a guild also gets you room and board, access to a workshop and tools, and other benefits.

[Crake]

I just want to point out that eating five times the calories doesn't mean eating five times the volume of food. Adventurers just eat more nutritiously dense and caloric dense food. Oily, fatty food for example is notoriously dense in calories, meats and eggs are dense in protein and fat, so it could be that peasants live on vegetables and bread, while adventurers eat a 2 pound steak.

[Fizban]

First, I think your calorie estimates look off. I mean, it's Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia article on medieval diets suggests that a peasant man's diet is typically estimated at about 2,900C, and a noble's probably higher than 4,000C. I saw elsewhere that 1,000C is the recommended daily intake of a child under the age of 5. It is likely that people occasionally lived like that in times of hardship, but I can't imagine that people who did hard labor for a living survived like that over the long term.
Not my estimates- those were Frank's. Mine only in the sense that I remembered and searched them out, only to end up disappointed. Indeed, googling for medieval wages for the heck of it actually found a lot more than I was expecting compared to the last time I did something similar (one person just put up a huge list of excerpts from books they had available), including one where someone was working everything starting from caloric requirements.


if the difference of 1 d between the flock pullers with and without food can be considered about equal to the value of the food, hen we could estimate that (at that time and place), food was about 1d per day and you got paid something like 1.5 to 2 pence per day, once the value of the food is taken into account.
Interesting.


Third, I don't think you're going to get a functional medieval economy using the prices in the PHB. Even leaving aside the question of how much research went into them in the first place, almost all of the prices in 3e come more-or-less direct from 1e, which is itself explicit that they're supposed to represent an economy that is being wrecked with massive inflation due to adventurers bringing in lots of gold. In that sense, you could almost say it's working as designed - all of those kids out there who are willing to go into dark holes in the ground and face certain death for a chance to strike it rich are doing so because they don't have any other way to make a living.
Very interesting, I'd never heard that. Plenty of speculation/suggestion, but it's actually explicit in the older books? My googling suggested A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe included a better price table- Saintheart reviewed it recently but didn't mention a new price table as part of the haggling system, I guess I should go ask them. If nothing else it's a whole 200 page book of this stuff to pick and choose from. Full price though.


I agree with all of this. This is why I make it a house rule that the wages for basic hirelings (not specialists) that appear in the Dungeon Master's Guide do not include room and board.
That might not even be a house rule now that I think about it, depending on reading. Followers explicitly depend on you to keep them fed (and equipped), and hirelings are described after. While it might look like hirelings are a separate thing, their embedding in the the section and the statement under "PCs as Leaders" suggesting that these people following may be seeking employment, could be taken to mean that hirelings are actually a type of follower, and thus their daily wage is explicitly not part of keeping them fed or equipped (or housed). And that you're not even able to hire people without the feat.

The 3.5 headings go: friends, allies, cohorts, followers, replacing cohorts and followers, hirelings. The similar section in the 3.0 book goes: friends, allies, cohorts, hirelings, with leadership in a completely different section. The Leadership section says to refer to Cohorts on p147 for how followers work- but there is no mention of followers. It says there is no limit to the number of cohorts you can "employ," but the only mention of follower is that sometimes a cohort might be a fanatic follower who seeks no pay, but it's rare. 3.5 mashed the Leadership section into the lineup of types of friendly NPCs and made it look like followers are different from hirelings, without making it any clearer what a follower actually is. So you only get one cohort, but multiple followers- are followers mini-NPC-classed cohorts? Heck, there's even a line in the 3.5 under friends: "Allies and hirelings have different relationships with PCs than cohorts and hirelings do," which sounds like a Freudian slip even if it's just a typo.

Anyway, yeah. Remembering that the hireling wages are for hirelings, who would be eating and sleeping whatever you brought for the expedition, and are jumbled in with followers who expect you to feed and equip them, makes it pretty obvious those wages can't have room/board subtracted. And as such, expanding the hireling wage table does nothing to fix NPC earnings- though with a two-tier system of "live-in" wages and business owner/guilded/etc skill checks, it can still work out just fine.

When you bring hirelings with you on a voyage, I require you have to pay them three silver pieces per day in addition to the standard wage given in the tables. I call this a "room-and-board allowance."
Ehhh, I wouldn't go quite that high. There's no need for a housing allowance except when you roll into town, and if you're on the road then you should be handling that as part of the logistics on the trip. But then I'd go back that high and say that most people do expect "common" meals, which are given at 3sp per day. Which is actually 1sp per day before being run through a cook, who costs 1sp plus 1sp for their food and can support X people, and. . .

In my understanding, all hirelings except for specialists are paupers, that is, poor laborers who own no land and are willing to work for less than guild wages because no guild work is available to them. They're too poor even to be taxed, as peasants and guild members are. (The taxable classes are the ones who actually earn money by means of Craft or Profession skill, so if you're a PC and you earn money with Craft or Profession skill, I require you to pay taxes, usually 15%, unless you're willing to risk breaking the law.*) Unless hirelings of the pauper class work for PCs, they work as servants on somebody else's property and get room and board from them. The "one silver piece per day" wage is what these menial servants get in addition to room and board – unless they're slaves.
All reasonable extensions from the Skill Check for gp= "Legitimate Business" setup.

On the other hand, if you have the Leadership feat, I assume that you also have land and that all of your followers live on your land.
Ehhh, I'll disagree there. Leadership means people follow you, but owning land specifically gives a benefit to it rather than being a requirement. Taking Leadership and then acquiring land as you realize you need to better take care of your followers is a fine direction. The feat for automatic land (and a huge pile of materials, labor, etc) is SBG's Landlord.

Those followers who are peasants or guild members pay rent or taxes to you, and from this income, you can pay all the followers who don't pay rent or taxes to you.
This seems a bit odd, but I suppose it works as a balancing act. In this scenario since followers don't work for free and only certain people can actually make money, it makes sense that you would only be able to "tax" (sounds more like a tithe to me) certain followers, and would try to recruit enough to finance or at least mitigate the costs of other operations.

Moreover, room and board, for every follower who lives on your land, comes with the territory.
So you've tied Leadership to land control (effectively generating your own little thorp), and by controlling that land you automatically feed all your followers? But what if none of them actually produce food?

I long ago started a thread of discussion about PCs and NPCs and the economic discrepancies between them. It's here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?428035-PCs-NPCs-amp-Economic-Injustice-in-D-amp-D-3-5) if you're curious.
I will but not right now, getting late.

*Usually, when you earn money with Craft or Profession skill, I require you to join a guild and to pay guild dues, following the Dungeon Master's Guide II. This is over and above the 15% tax. Of course, belonging to a guild also gets you room and board, access to a workshop and tools, and other benefits.
I'm not sure every guild having a barracks and free food for all their members really makes sense. Guild monopolies preventing anyone from practicing the trade without paying in, sure, but this seems like a very adventurer/can't be bothered to track food oriented benefit. For something that really isn't that much of a bother IMO.

Ya know, looking the "benefits" given for guilds there, I'm not sure it's worth it. If it's required to make checks to earn money, well it's sure got a lot of costs in there to keep the earned money down. Unless you're getting a 10% discount on magic items or really want one of their guild feat benefits, I'd rather just handle my adventuring cash better.


I just want to point out that eating five times the calories doesn't mean eating five times the volume of food. Adventurers just eat more nutritiously dense and caloric dense food. Oily, fatty food for example is notoriously dense in calories, meats and eggs are dense in protein and fat, so it could be that peasants live on vegetables and bread, while adventurers eat a 2 pound steak.
True, I hadn't been thinking about that. Painting it as bread slathered in whatever vs bread wouldn't look so bad, if the 1:5 thing was a thing, and it was only being conveyed via description. But if a player had that background numerical information and didn't want to play in such a lopsided setting, I certainly wouldn't blame them (clearly I wouldn't either).

[Bayar]

If you think spellcasters don't have any justification to require a high caloric intake, you obviously never seen Slayers.

[Thane of Fife]

Very interesting, I'd never heard that. Plenty of speculation/suggestion, but it's actually explicit in the older books? My googling suggested A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe included a better price table- Saintheart reviewed it recently but didn't mention a new price table as part of the haggling system, I guess I should go ask them. If nothing else it's a whole 200 page book of this stuff to pick and choose from. Full price though.

The exact text from the 1e DMG is:


There is no question that the prices and costs of the game are based on inflationary economy, one where a sudden influx of silver and and gold has driven everything well beyond its normal value. The reasoning behind this is simple. An active campaign will most certainly bring a steady flow of wealth into the base area, as adventurers come from successful trips into dungeon and wilderness. If the economy of the area is one which more accurately reflects that of medieval England, let us say, where coppers and silver coins are usual and a gold piece remarkable, such an influx of new money, even in copper and silver, would cause an inflationary spiral. This would necessitate you adjusting costs accordingly and then upping dungeon treasures somewhat to keep pace. If a near-maximum is assumed, then the economies of the area can remain relatively constant, and the DM will have to adjust costs only for things in demand or short supply - weapons, oil, holy water, men-at-arms, whatever.

This is followed by some further text saying that things have also been inflated because it is more heroic (in the sense of Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) to be throwing around gold and gems than copper and silver.


The 3.5 headings go: friends, allies, cohorts, followers, replacing cohorts and followers, hirelings. The similar section in the 3.0 book goes: friends, allies, cohorts, hirelings, with leadership in a completely different section. The Leadership section says to refer to Cohorts on p147 for how followers work- but there is no mention of followers. It says there is no limit to the number of cohorts you can "employ," but the only mention of follower is that sometimes a cohort might be a fanatic follower who seeks no pay, but it's rare. 3.5 mashed the Leadership section into the lineup of types of friendly NPCs and made it look like followers are different from hirelings, without making it any clearer what a follower actually is. So you only get one cohort, but multiple followers- are followers mini-NPC-classed cohorts? Heck, there's even a line in the 3.5 under friends: "Allies and hirelings have different relationships with PCs than cohorts and hirelings do," which sounds like a Freudian slip even if it's just a typo.

2e is specific that hirelings are people who join you specifically for money, followers are people drawn to you personally by your reputation (but who still expect to be paid), and henchmen are like sidekicks or fellow adventurers who would normally be given a (lesser) share of the treasure. 3e cohorts are kind of like the 2e henchmen.


True, I hadn't been thinking about that. Painting it as bread slathered in whatever vs bread wouldn't look so bad, if the 1:5 thing was a thing, and it was only being conveyed via description. But if a player had that background numerical information and didn't want to play in such a lopsided setting, I certainly wouldn't blame them (clearly I wouldn't either).

Historically, I believe the difference was mostly meat. Peasants would fairly rarely get to eat any meat at all, whereas a noble person could expect to eat a fair amount of meat with every meal.

[Tiktakkat]

The best thing to do is accept that the economic "system" in D&D is non-functional and simply move on. Seriously. Go out and make an adventure involving beating up monsters and handwave all the bookkeeping and realism and what not. If you insist on analyzing the problems, some of which were touched on in the linked article about the multiple economies. They include:

First, the switch from wealth as a means of keeping score to a hard-wired Wealth By Level element of character power means that any money invested in followers and the like is a functional reduction in character power. Unless you hand out wealth above the WBL guidelines, which means PCs who do not invest in followers wind up stronger than PCs who do. Unless you specify the excess wealth as only for followers. Which then requires characters to play the follower mini-game or be excluded. Which . . . just continues to compound the problem.

Second, in AD&D, becoming name level and getting followers included assumptions about getting territory with taxpaying residents. Or tithe-paying for clerics, or a territory being robbed for thieves, or apprentices paying for tuition for wizards and such. That was lost in D20, and exacerbates the WBL issue above.

Third, at a certain point, the costs for items becomes absurd. Never mind masterwork equipment, a simple +1 sword is 40 pounds of gold just for the +1, and another 120 pounds for +2. The absurdity grows from there. You could replace all of that with gems, but even that quickly reaches a limit of needing a hefty supply of 1,000 gp and 5,000 gp rubies, sapphires, and diamonds for those 50-100K gp items. It is worse if you include the xp costs in all of that.

Fourth, most "fixes" involve extensive systems aspiring for realism. Not only do they require their own set of system mastery skills, but they are typically written by role-players for role-players, and so are quite easy to game, with disastrous effects for WBL. Or they involve things like heavy tax rates and the like, something most players will be less than thrilled with, no matter how much you explain that they are really receiving extra rewards to compensate for the taxation so they will remain within WBL guidelines.

Fifth, that leads into one of the basic premises touched on in that linked article regarding how it is more "fun" for players to be able to throw around gold and gems on their sprees. It really is, but hidden within that is one of the elements of "Appendix N" stories involving such. Namely, that rather than obsessing about their WBL equipment so they can handle level appropriate challenges, characters like Conan and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser routinely lost fortunes as quickly as they gained them, sometimes starting with little more than the clothes on their back at the start of a story. Even a character like Tarzan, a nobleman, who owned an estate, with tons of followers, had several adventures that began with him facing financial ruin and having to go on an adventurer to find loot to pay off his debts. Wealth in those stories is a Push or a Pull and a Macguffin - something that drives the story but is never really realized. This is vastly different in D&D, redoubled with WBL. Which compounds why none of the system makes sense - it is not supposed to! It is just supposed to be an excuse to adventure - to get enough money to save the farm, or go on a month long party, or to attract thieves, or any of a number of other things, none of which include paying for an Item of Awesome Awesomeness in order to survive the next encounter. This is supposed to be covered with the 100 gp/level/month lifestyle cost, but that is something players like as much as they like paying taxes, compounded by adventures where the action is constant, and players reach 20th level in 20 game months, if not weeks, rather than 20 years.

Sixth, another issue with huge treasure hordes is claiming them. AD&D was full of items to subvert that, from floating disk to bags of holding and portable holes. While they still exist in D20 versions, trying to include "realistic" dragon hordes means telling players they cannot carry it all home, again causing intense player angst. And while this does appear in the Inspirational Reading - even Tolkien featured it in one of his short stories, Farmer Giles of Ham, it is yet another thing that requires a work around.

There are other issues, but they all showcase just how many issues there are with the economic "system", and how many game and player issues must be addressed in order to "fix" it.
Ultimately, after years of study of real world medieval economics and social systems, other years of reading inspirational material, and too many months of trying to reconcile and build a "proper" system, I came to the conclusion that the best solution was to handwave the details, improvise the interactions, and focus on providing explanations to encourage the players to head off to the next part of the adventure.
"You want a castle? Well, the locals need this quest completed."
"You want magic items? Well, that ruin over there has the lost ancient lore you need to make them."
"You want fame, and fortune, and everything that goes with it? Well, that last level end boss you beat said his boss was plotting to destroy/take over/sell into perpetual demonic servitude the world, and stopping him will get you all of that. Plus extra loot and stuff."
"How much does it cost? You can afford it. Well, if you complete the next stage of the adventure and all."

[Fizban]

If you think spellcasters don't have any justification to require a high caloric intake, you obviously never seen Slayers.
Oh, I have- one of the few particularly old bits now in my big tweaks and brew doc is my actually my version of Ragna Blade. But in DnD magic is generally portrayed as independent from that- the Weave, infinite use SLAs and magic items (some of which create food themselves), and of course spell slots just poofing back every day.

That would be a heck of a setting element: every spell has a caloric cost. If you don't eat enough, you can't recover spells. And since easy access to lots of food requires money and civilization. . .



The best thing to do is accept that the economic "system" in D&D is non-functional and simply move on.
Not if I think it's fun and useful for world-building.

First, the switch from wealth as a means of keeping score to a hard-wired Wealth By Level element of character power means that any money invested in followers and the like is a functional reduction in character power. Unless you hand out wealth above the WBL guidelines, which means PCs who do not invest in followers wind up stronger than PCs who do. Unless you specify the excess wealth as only for followers. Which then requires characters to play the follower mini-game or be excluded. Which . . . just continues to compound the problem.
WBL spent on followers is redirection of power, not a loss. And also not something anyone seriously suggests? Cohorts explicitly get their own half share of treasure, which they will spend on their own equipment, unless the DM/group has allowed a cohort in a way not as directed by the DMG. Followers don't need combat magic items, they just need food and basic equipment, but in any case if they're "power" then you've spent your money to get power, as expected.

Second, in AD&D, becoming name level and getting followers included assumptions about getting territory with taxpaying residents. Or tithe-paying for clerics, or a territory being robbed for thieves, or apprentices paying for tuition for wizards and such. That was lost in D20, and exacerbates the WBL issue above.
So. . . bring them back, or use what exists. Duke of Urrel just went over their own rules for it. Stronghold Builder's Guide has a feat that gives you that assumption of territory, and a stronghold can generate income via taxing the locals. DMG2 has its business rules, including those random bandits. Dungeonomicon doesn't like those rules so they changed them. I don't like their rules, but I might hack together part of theirs, and DoU's, and layer it over SBG, and maybe rope in PHB2 Affiliations if I can.


Fourth, most "fixes" involve extensive systems aspiring for realism. Not only do they require their own set of system mastery skills, but they are typically written by role-players for role-players, and so are quite easy to game, with disastrous effects for WBL. Or they involve things like heavy tax rates and the like, something most players will be less than thrilled with, no matter how much you explain that they are really receiving extra rewards to compensate for the taxation so they will remain within WBL guidelines.
Dungeonomicon's business system is, literally, "You make an amount of money appropriate to an encounter, as long as you keep dealing with the encounters." It can only violate WBL by the fact that they allow the profit check, which is a flat ability score+circumstance check, to increase the profits, which can simply be removed. Or as I noted, Duke of Urrel is applying so many guild dues and taxes and seems to only be allowing a certain portion of followers to make money at all, and they specifically call out the situation as normally making you lose money. Basic profession checks even without any other rules have a flat limit per amount of time, and the DM is the one who controls the timeline of the campaign unless stated otherwise. So it would seem that your claim that no system can avoid destroying WBL is incorrect?

Furthermore, the true use of WBL is not meant to be money or worldly assets, but the total of appropriate, useful gear for adventuring against level-appropriate foes. A bunch of money pulled out of nothing and used to equip followers means nothing to WBL unless those followers are making a difference in progressing the adventure. Which they generally shouldn't be capable of at all, making the entire thing a side-show.


Fifth, that leads into one of the basic premises touched on in that linked article regarding how it is more "fun" for players to be able to throw around gold and gems on their sprees. It really is, but hidden within that is one of the elements of "Appendix N" stories involving such. Namely, that rather than obsessing about their WBL equipment so they can handle level appropriate challenges, characters like Conan and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser routinely lost fortunes as quickly as they gained them, sometimes starting with little more than the clothes on their back at the start of a story. Even a character like Tarzan, a nobleman, who owned an estate, with tons of followers, had several adventures that began with him facing financial ruin and having to go on an adventurer to find loot to pay off his debts. Wealth in those stories is a Push or a Pull and a Macguffin - something that drives the story but is never really realized. This is vastly different in D&D, redoubled with WBL. Which compounds why none of the system makes sense - it is not supposed to! It is just supposed to be an excuse to adventure - to get enough money to save the farm, or go on a month long party, or to attract thieves, or any of a number of other things, none of which include paying for an Item of Awesome Awesomeness in order to survive the next encounter. This is supposed to be covered with the 100 gp/level/month lifestyle cost, but that is something players like as much as they like paying taxes, compounded by adventures where the action is constant, and players reach 20th level in 20 game months, if not weeks, rather than 20 years.
I'm not sure what your complaint is here. Now it sounds like you're saying WBL is bad because it prevents people from slinging money around on frivolities. But the DM can support as much of that as they want, by giving the PCs extra treasure that they can sling it around on frivolities. And you can run a game where the PCs lose all their equipment, and then find or loot a bunch of new more powerful equipment, as long as you account for the change in difficultly while they're under-geared. Of course WBL doesn't make sense. It's a mechanic- actually just a guideline, for helping you make sure your party isn't too over or under powered. The same as "character level."


Sixth, another issue with huge treasure hordes is claiming them. AD&D was full of items to subvert that, from floating disk to bags of holding and portable holes. While they still exist in D20 versions, trying to include "realistic" dragon hordes means telling players they cannot carry it all home, again causing intense player angst. And while this does appear in the Inspirational Reading - even Tolkien featured it in one of his short stories, Farmer Giles of Ham, it is yet another thing that requires a work around.
. . . What? So 2e gave out "realistic" as in ridiculously huge treasure hordes, and also little tricks to let the players loot more than they could possibly carry, and this let them have fun flinging money around because they didn't need to buy magic items, and this was good and also can't be done in 3.x? The value of this giant pile of 2e money is essentially nothing but roleplaying points: if it has no mechanical value to the game (of dungeoneering combat), then it doesn't matter what you spend it on. Meanwhile nothing is stopping you from giving out ridiculous dragon hoards in 3.x, and then letting the players throw the money around on booze or fortresses or other things that give them no actual benefit. The DM has control of what cities exist, how big they are, what NPCs exist, and what is available to buy. If you want piles of cash that can't convert into character power, run the campaign with no cities larger than Large Town, for example.


Ultimately, after years of study of real world medieval economics and social systems, other years of reading inspirational material, and too many months of trying to reconcile and build a "proper" system, I came to the conclusion that the best solution was to handwave the details,
"You want a castle? Well, the locals need this quest completed."
"You want magic items? Well, that ruin over there has the lost ancient lore you need to make them."
"You want fame, and fortune, and everything that goes with it? Well, that last level end boss you beat said his boss was plotting to destroy/take over/sell into perpetual demonic servitude the world, and stopping him will get you all of that. Plus extra loot and stuff."
"How much does it cost? You can afford it. Well, if you complete the next stage of the adventure and all."
That sounds interminably dull to me. I would rather play a found-loot only megadungeon, than just have sufficient everything spring out of nowhere out in the "world," because that's not a world. A planned adventure or campaign that will include some things but cannot include others, still better. If the DM is just waving their hand to make things happen, I don't much care about those things. 5e's skill system is a joke because there are no DCs, no rules, no point. If I wanted things to just happen because the DM said so, I would play a narrative-driven game, not DnD. 3.x has some rules for these things, and they can be expanded upon or at the very least a situation that ignores them can be given a good and specific reason for how and why it is doing so this particular time.

You want a castle? Well how do you want it- quest reward, Landlord feat, Affiliation growth or benefit, spell, magic item, pursuit of extra high-value quests to bank money and pay straight cash? Those are all different and interesting ways of doing it, all of which can involve dungeoneering combat.

How much does it cost? This or this or this or this much, and depending on your approach you could afford it here, here, here, or here, so which approach then?

and focus on providing explanations to encourage the players to head off to the next part of the adventure.
And what about people who haven't studied all the same stuff you have which lets you make up those explanations?

Having an idea of what sort of resources NPCs have is critical to making those explanations something other than hand-waving.

[Martin Greywolf]

Specifically I was looking for their numbers on caloric requirements, which I eventually found (here), because I remembered they made a point about adventurers requiring a bunch more food, which would in turn be very useful for determining how many adventurers a place could actually support (the part wish economies I don't agree on or care about). The numbers I found were 1,000C for peasants, 2,000C for specialists, and 5,000C for adventurers.

I don't have the patience to go through that post, mostly because I get the urge to slap someone across the internet.

That figure of 5000 calories? That comes from the daily ration given to Royal Navy sailors in Age of Sail. See here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChhUFyw4qf8) for much, much more details. Nothe that this is Age of Sail, medieval rowers would need more than that just to not die.

Actual caloric estimates for medieval paesants tend to go in the 2000-7000 range, with most being in the 3000-5000, depending on several factors, such as how warm the climate is and what the person in question did that day. A day of chopping wood will have bigger requirements than weeding a garden. A paesant that has 1000 calories a day will die, it's just a matter of how quickly and from what. Average medieval female farmer is estimated at 2200 calories a day, and that's about as low as it goes.

As for caloric intake being dictated by social class, that is pretty much pure myth. Again, that 5000 calories figure comes from common sailors in the Royal Navy. What your social class determined is how good the food was, and the variety of it - but even the common paesant still had access to meat, if not from hunting, then at least from livestock, at least once or twice a week. Not to mention bacon and other small meaty seasonings.


And. . . I think that about wraps it up. Anyone have some more good sources on realistic medieval-ish wages? Thoughts on effectively adding a new 1% of extra 1st level PC-classed NPCs or how common they are vs normal professions? The amount of ready cash for local rulers?

There are none, at least not in the way you want them. There is no source that will be able to tell you "this is roughly what things cost and wages are in a medieval city". Hell, even if we change medieval to renaissance to actually reflect what era DnD is set in, we still end up empty-handed.

Well, there are already linked medieval demographics, and you kind of can't get anything better by definition.

Medieval economics are characterized by their localization and volatility, which is to say that the price of a loaf of bread in one city will vary wildly as months go by, and costs will vary even more once you move even as little as one village over. This is even worse for prices of items that aren't essential.

It's not just a matter of available resources either, you have bandit problems, weird local noble taxes, increased taxes because the king's daughter is about to have a wedding, inflation (yes, even with currency based on precious metals) and a host more. To give you an example of how bad this could get, two horses, both of the same quality and type, bought within 5 years of each other in the same kingdom went for anything from 1 to 10 hrivnas of silver (1 hrivna could be anything from 300 to 400 silver denars). Which means you have a potential difference of one horse for 300 sp, the other for 4000 sp, over thirteen times more.

The best you can get is a list of what the prices were in a particular place at a particular time, which means you need to stop googling for "medieval economies" and start to go for "taxation of London in 1240s". Of these, you can find a lot.

[Tiktakkat]

Not if I think it's fun and useful for world-building.

World-building? Sure. I studied all that stuff so I could build better worlds.
Game play? Not so much.


Furthermore, the true use of WBL is not meant to be money or worldly assets, but the total of appropriate, useful gear for adventuring against level-appropriate foes.

In which case you have just contradicted most everything you have said previously, as wealth redirected to followers and buildings is not wealth being spent on useful gear for adventuring against level-appropriate foes.


. . . What? So 2e gave out "realistic" as in ridiculously huge treasure hordes, and also little tricks to let the players loot more than they could possibly carry, and this let them have fun flinging money around because they didn't need to buy magic items, and this was good and also can't be done in 3.x?

Pretty much. And again, you wind up with contradictions in your previous statements by objecting to this.
Either the WBL mechanic is relevant for level appropriate encounters or it is not.
If it is, then violating it for "frivolities" means disrupting the system. Which is what the Landlord feat recognized and was meant to try and address. Except in doing so, it costs a feat, which could be better spent on increasing combat effectiveness.


That sounds interminably dull to me. I would rather play a found-loot only megadungeon, than just have sufficient everything spring out of nowhere out in the "world," because that's not a world.

And yet it does. It springs from nowhere with a feat, or from non-combat encounters with other systems. What it does not spring from are the core type of encounters defining D&D.


If I wanted things to just happen because the DM said so, I would play a narrative-driven game, not DnD.
Then;

You want a castle? Well how do you want it- quest reward, Landlord feat, Affiliation growth or benefit, spell, magic item, pursuit of extra high-value quests to bank money and pay straight cash? Those are all different and interesting ways of doing it, all of which can involve dungeoneering combat.

Which is the same thing - development by narration. All I am suggesting is skipping the bookkeeping portion of the development.


And what about people who haven't studied all the same stuff you have which lets you make up those explanations?

It is precisely those people who benefit!
Rather than having to spend 20 years studying the subject, and that is only for the socio-economic and socio-political parts, not the really hard stuff of crop yields, weather patterns, and such, they can engage that kind of development through simple narrative supplement to the WBL rewards of standard adventuring.
(Although if you want a quick overview you can try Frances and Joseph Gies, "Daily Life in Medieval Times" and "Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel". They are highly recommended throughout the field, and I learned an extreme amount in a very short time from them.)
Oh, and with the dozens of hours to learn another subsystem and roll dice to maintain it.


Having an idea of what sort of resources NPCs have is critical to making those explanations something other than hand-waving.

NPC equipment is always DM hand-waving, barring mandatory allotment of specific resources within the rules.
The moment you start customizing encounters is the moment the DM starts waving his hands. They are the somatic component of the "Create Adventure" spell he casts for every session.

[jedipilot24]

The easiest way to fix it so that high-level NPC's are rare is to use the Eberron demographics table:

http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20040712a