GDP boost from magic both arcane and divine (and possibly psionics)

[redking]

It seems to be that most D&D settings are considerably wealthier than their real world counterparts, and this wealth and increased production contributes to the war and strife that are common place in any D&D setting.

The question is, how much more production/wealth does the average D&D setting have over the real world? Without getting into tippyverse stuff, which makes assumptions about highly cooperative epic characters working together, there is still a lot that makes magical settings wealthier and more productive.

A wondrous item of skill boost, whatever it is, increases a workers productivity greatly. Even a +2 skill boost in a 1st level character makes you considerably more able than someone else without that. Take a worker with Craft (weaving) that makes rugs. Let's say this worker has maxed out ranks, 4 ranks in this skill. And an item of skill boost that gives a +2 competence bonus to that skill. That's 6 ranks before making the DC check right there. A human being on earth has no item of skill boost, so the D&D worker is already massively more productive and skilled.

So what is the magical dividend from magic over the real world? How much extra wealth and production are we looking at, based on observation?

[NichG]

Depends on the approach I guess, and how strictly you use the listed prices of items and services and the demographics stuff in the DMG. If you use the listed prices, an unskilled laborer only makes about 36gp a year, so even a +2 skill item is like buying a (cheap) house. At the same time, a spellcaster selling their services could make 100s of gp per day for less than an hour's work. So there's clearly some economic disequilibrium going on - likely the sorts of services that adventurers buy have experienced hyperinflation, and once you go from asking a Druid to cast a Reincarnate on your fallen ally to asking a Druid to cast Plant Growth on your farm, or the local cleric to Create Food and Water to make up for hard times, it'd make sense for the prices to drop steeply or just be donated...

That said, I'd pin it somewhere like 1/2 (well, 'in the middle' - I kept editing this being unsatisfied with a specific number due to log/linear considerations) of the way between medieval economic productivity and modern economic productivity perhaps? Automation gives factors of 10-100 in productivity where it applies. Today the average farmer produces food for about 155 people. Just 60 years ago, that statistic was about 26 people per farmer. I can't find estimates I believe for medieval farming (because they don't take into account members of a farm family engaged in activities other than farming), but it was probably less than 5 or so.

A Lv5 Cleric casting Create Food and Water can feed 15 people per 3rd level spell slot, so maybe 15-30 people. Close to a 1960s farmer, but still farm from a 2020s farmer. A Lv1 Druid with a bonus slot from Wis preparing Goodberry produces 10 'normal meals' on average each day, so I suppose that's enough to keep 10 people from starving but not necessarily fully nourished.

So it feels somewhere in between to me...

[Bucky]

The D&D's rules about economy aren't up to the task of actually simulating an economy. However, in the real world, high-tech tools boost per-person productivity like a wondrous item would, but to a greater degree per worker, with greater specialization, and requiring a larger minimum team size. An Expert with +30 to Craft (Weaving) won't produce anywhere near as much cloth as an industrial loom.

However, we can't make a direct GDP comparison because much of the wealth for each economy comes in forms that don't exist in the other. There is no dollar value for a wand of cure light wounds, nor a gp price for a microwave oven, nor would either of those even be useful if they were transported into the other economy. But these magical/technological items make up a substantial fraction of their respective economies.

[NichG]

I guess if magic items never break down, then they ultimately beat out automation in the very long run. A 'Field Provisions Box' keeps 15 people fed forever for 2000gp, and takes up a lot less space, maintenance, and infrastructure than even a 10th of a modern farmer's footprint. So eventually there are automation paths for magic along the 'pay once, benefit forever' lines, which nothing real can actually match...

[Maat Mons]

How productive the setting can be really depends on how much they've invested into it.

A Trapsmith can fit Fabricate into an Eternal Wand. In the hands of a skilled artisan, that could give you an output of, say, two suits of masterwork full plate per day. If you can actually sell armor at that pace, it only takes five days for the wand to pay itself back.

A single, minimum level casting of Wall of Iron gets you, if my math is right, 2,250 gp-worth of iron. In Pathfinder, it's easy to use Blood Money to eliminate the gp cost.

[ShurikVch]

We don't need the tippyverse standards to see how D&D world is different from the supposed "historical counterparts"

Do you know iron was in shortage for a long long time (up to about the mid-XVII)?
Items which we're used to think as "made of metal" (or, at least, with significant amount of iron) were either completely wooden, or mostly-wooden
Tablespoons? Wooden! (Except for richer families, which owned actual silver spoons)
Rake? Wooden!
Pitchfork? Wooden!
Harrow? Wooden!
Plow? Plough - wooden!
Scythe?! Wooden - with a thin measly strip of iron inserted in the "blade", with amount of iron unlikely much more than in the blades of modern box cutters...

Since nothing indicates such shortage in the D&D world (at least - outside of the Dark Sun) - this world is incomparable to any supposedly-parallel of IRL history

[Gavinfoxx]

You don't need the epic spellcasting to get a LOT of the 'tippyverse' stuff. It helps, but a good chunk of it works fine in an E6 setting.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aG4P3dU6WP3pq8mW9l1qztFeNfqQHyI22oJe09i8KWw/edit