PCs, NPCs, & Economic Injustice in D&D [3.5]

[Duke of Urrel]

In this thread, I would like to discuss the crass economic advantages that PCs have over NPCs, following the written rules as I understand them. I will discuss, in the following four postings:

(1) income,

(2) expenses, and

(3) taxes.

Finally (4), I will propose some in-game reasons to account for the economic unfairness that bothers me so, as well as some house rules to lessen it a little.

[Duke of Urrel]

1. Income

PCs can earn money using some kind of Craft skill – indeed, presumably using any kind of Craft skill.

You can practice your trade and make a decent living, earning about half your check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work. You know how to use the tools of your trade, how to perform the craft’s daily tasks, how to supervise untrained helpers, and how to handle common problems.

PCs can also earn money using some kind of Profession skill – indeed, presumably using any kind of Profession skill.

You can practice your trade and make a decent living, earning about half your Profession check result in gold pieces per week of dedicated work. You know how to use the tools of your trade, how to perform the profession’s daily tasks, how to supervise helpers, and how to handle common problems.

Suppose a PC happens to be a first-level barbarian who has only one rank in Profession skill as a cook, just for flavor, in every sense of the word. (Sadly, the party has no wizard who can cast Prestidigitation.) This barbarian, let’s call him Biff, can earn money as a cook, though probably not much, because his Wisdom score is nine. Still, let’s see how he fares in one ordinary work week.

Biff takes 10 on his Profession check, which adds +1 for his single rank in Profession skill and -1 for his below-average Wisdom. His score equals exactly 10. Divide this by two, and we see that Biff makes 5 gold pieces working as a cook for one week. In only one day, I assume that Biff makes one-tenth this amount, or 5 silver pieces. My reason for this assumption is this passage from the description of Craft skill.

You can make checks by the day instead of by the week. In this case your progress (check result × DC) is in copper pieces instead of silver pieces.

Since one copper piece is worth one-tenth of one silver piece, I assume that one work day is one-tenth of one work week; therefore, a week has 10 days. At any rate, this assumption makes the math easy.

Also for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that in our rough medieval fantasy world, weekends haven’t been invented yet, so that in one month of 30 days, Biff works for exactly three 10-day weeks and makes 15 gold pieces.

Now, let’s look at a NPC who also happens to be a cook, but who is in every other respect the opposite of Biff. Let’s call him Boeuf. He has non-elite ability scores, and he’s a first-level character, but he’s no fighting hero. Boeuf belongs to the commoner class and has tried to optimize his Profession skill as a cook. Unlike Biff, Boeuf has maxed out his Profession skill ranks at 4, and he adds a Wisdom bonus of +1. He’s acquired the Skill Focus feat, which adds +3 to Profession (Cook) checks, and he uses masterwork kitchen tools, which bestow a circumstance bonus of +2. Therefore, when Boeuf takes 10 on a Profession check to earn money as a cook, he scores a 20. When he works in the world of NPCs, he surely must prosper, making 1 gold piece per day, 10 gold pieces per week, or 30 gold pieces per month.

Unfortunately, it is Boeuf’s bad luck that a party of PCs has recently hired him to cook for them. Now, he must follow the dismal rules of the Dungeon Master’s Guide (which appear here in the SRD) that make the daily wage of a Cook the same as the wage for a Laborer, a Maid, or a Porter, namely: 1 silver piece per day, 1 gold piece per week, or three gold pieces per month.

Poor Boeuf! As a NPC commoner who cooks for a living, he’s twice as skilled as the PC barbarian, Biff, who cooks only as a hobby. But because Boeuf is a NPC and has the misfortune to work for PCs, he makes only one-fifth the money that Biff makes when he works for NPCs. Is this fair?

[Flickerdart]

The path to riches through adventuring is paved with the dead bodies of your predecessors. If you actually look at the statistics that the CR system provides, only a slim percentage of all would-be adventurers will ever reach level 2. The PCs, as protagonists, are exceptions because the DM's job is to not let them die.

[Duke of Urrel]

2. Expenses

When Biff the PC barbarian works as a cook, he makes 5 silver pieces per day. Biff also likes to eat, and the convenient thing about being a cook is that you can eat some of your own work. However, let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that Biff is now working at a vegetarian restaurant and hates what he has to prepare, because he believes everything tastes better wrapped in a double layer of bacon. But can he afford to eat what he likes?

Fortunately, Biff has taken advantage of the rules that appear on page 225 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide II v. 3.5 (2005). He’s joined a guild, using the last of the money he made on his last looting expedition (most of which he spent on banquets, wild parties, and a masterwork battleaxe).

As a general rule, a guild’s entrance fee is 25 gp.

In addition, guild members are expected to pay a monthly fee equal to 5 gp per character level.

All guildhouses include barracks and kitchens, so that every member can be guaranteed food and a safe place to sleep while she’s in the vicinity. In smaller guilds, she might need to cook for herself, but the food is supplied.

This works out wonderfully for Biff. He doesn’t need to pay anything for room and board except five gold pieces for a whole month! Think about what a great deal this is. Even the modest accommodations of a Poor inn cost 2 silver pieces per day, according to the table that appears on page 129 of the Player’s Handbook v. 3.5 (2008), and even Poor meals cost 1 silver piece per day. So without his guild, Biff would have to pay 3 silver pieces a day, or 9 gold pieces per month, for Poor food and lodging. With his guild, Biff gets both food and lodging for only 5 gold pieces a month, or for no more than 1 silver piece and 7 copper pieces per day. Since he makes 5 silver pieces per day as a cook, he has at least 3 silver pieces and 3 copper pieces left over every day, so according to the aforementioned table in the Player’s Handbook, he can buy a Chunk of Meat every day if he likes.

Now, let’s contrast the sad case of Boeuf, who works for a busy party of PCs. As a hireling, he makes only 1 silver piece per day. When we consider that even Poor food costs 1 silver piece per day, this wage looks extremely meager. With no guild barracks to come home to and no money to spend on lodging, where is poor Boeuf going to sleep after a long day of preparing gourmet meals for the PCs? And even if we assume that Boeuf eats some of his own work, he only saves one silver piece per day. He would have to make 2 silver pieces per day in order to afford even Poor accommodations at an inn every night.

[noob]

It depends of the campaign if the players are following the law they might play taxes they might even pay more than npcs because they have more.
Pc's income is solely campaign dependent.
Pc's expenses depends essentially of players while npc's expenses depends only of gm and often will not be accounted(for example for that built church the gm might not even care about the cost).
4: there is campaigns where there is no economic injustice and it is 1000% independent of home-rules and such since the way the economy works is not something home-ruled it is something role-played in the campaign(the hiring price in GM manual is not something true it is just a potential price you might put)

[Duke of Urrel]

3. Taxes

According to page 140 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide v. 3.5 (2012):

Taxes paid to the queen, the emperor, or the local baroness might consume as much as one-fifth of a character’s wealth (although these expenses can vary considerably from land to land).

Might taxation somehow even out the crass difference between what PCs make when they work for NPCs and what NPCs make when they work for PCs? After all, NPC hirelings who work for PCs clearly don’t make enough money to tax, whereas PCs do.

Suppose Biff the barbarian pays one-fifth of his earnings in taxes. (He only robs when he’s out looting; when he works as a cook, he’s on vacation, so he lets the Law be the Law and enjoys himself.) Remember that he makes 5 silver pieces per day. Taxes reduce this to 4 silver pieces to day. Biff’s daily expenses as a member of the cooks’ guild cost him 1.7 silver pieces per day, so that he has only 2.3 silver pieces left over. Taxes take a big enough bite out of Biff’s income that he can no longer buy a Chunk of Meat every day, but he can still buy one every other day.

In contrast, Boeuf may live tax-free, but that doesn’t change the fact that his bare minimum wage compels him to sleep outdoors every night in a tent.

[Duke of Urrel]

4. Proposals

Maybe Boeuf, the NPC commoner for whom cooking is a vocation, longs to join a guild one day, but since he lives literally from hand to mouth, he wonders how he’ll ever save up the 25 gold pieces he needs. Why did he ever agree to work for PCs? Indeed, why would any NPC ever agree to work for PCs, considering how poorly PCs pay them? The meta-game answer to this question is: They get persuaded by means of Diplomacy skill – another obvious advantage that PCs have over NPCs. But is there any in-game answer?

4a. Economic Injustice is Built Into Medieval Society

In a medieval society, some people belong to guilds, and others don’t. Guild membership is restricted in many ways, so that it is by no means only merit that enables somebody to join a guild. Not only is there a 25-gold-piece entry fee, which is probably prohibitively expensive for many commoners, but there are other reasons why guilds may reject new members, including the concern to preserve their profits by limiting production and simple, blatant prejudice.

According to the Dungeon Master’s Guide, about 91% of NPCs are commoners and 3% are experts. Following the rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide II, about 12% of the population (1,234 in an adult population of 10,000) belongs to some guild or other.

Since guild members outnumber the entire expert class, I believe all experts are likely to be guild members. However, the commoner class is divided between guild members and non-members, and the latter group is much bigger. We might distinguish a class of freefolk, which enjoys the privileges of guild membership, and a class of peasants, which does not. Within the class of peasants, we may also distinguish those who have enough land to prosper, despite the heavy tax burdens imposed upon them, and those who don’t.

Perhaps the NPCs who work for PCs are all commoners who were born into the peasantry and would like to join the freefolk, but know that they may never succeed. Even worse, perhaps they are NPCs born into the peasantry who have inherited too little land to sustain themselves, so that they will accept any work at all, no matter how poorly paid.

4b. But Injustice Should Affect Everyone

If it’s hard for NPCs to join guilds, then perhaps it should be hard for PCs as well. PCs may or may not belong to the freefolk by birth. If they were born peasants, they should have to prove themselves worthy of guild membership. Simply having 25 gold pieces to pay may not be enough. Maybe PCs should have to make an unusually high Craft or Profession check – one that must be rolled and that cannot take 10 – to demonstrate their worthiness to join a guild. Maybe sometimes guild membership should be closed off altogether, unless a PC can make a high enough Diplomacy check to convince the guild’s leaders otherwise. After all, there should be some reason why some PCs turn toward Chaos rather than Law, and that reason is usually that a Lawful society dominated by morally Neutral individuals is economically unjust in a way that harms PCs themselves.

4c. And Alignment Should Matter, Too

NPCs belonging to privileged economic classes who benefit from the Law that protects their privileges will probably be Lawful themselves. NPCs belonging to the social and economic underclass may tend toward Chaos. But Good NPCs should favor more economic justice, simply out of principle. Evil NPCs, in contrast, should favor more economic injustice, simply out of the selfish ambition to make themselves the rulers and exploiters of generally oppressed subjects.

PCs should have similar alignment-based attitudes toward economic justice. As a modest proposal, let me suggest that at the very least, Good or morally Neutral PCs who engage a NPC hireling should pay for his or her food and lodging in addition to the wages listed in the Player’s Handbook. The rules may not require it, but considering the amount of booty PCs acquire, is it really too much to ask?
…

Well, that’s all I have to say so far. I welcome your comments and criticisms.

I’m on a world-building kick now, so I’m interested to know how productive peasants should be in the world of NPCs and how heavily taxed they should be, because this determines how rich the aristocrats will be. NPCs who are paid as hirelings, no more than one silver piece per day, are too poor to be taxable. If there are too many NPCs at this level of poverty, then even the NPCs who rule them won’t be very rich, because there will be too little wealth to tax. A certain amount of tax revenue should also go to NPCs of the warrior class, which, according to the rules, comprises about 5% of the NPC population. Like commoners, warriors may include both insiders and outsiders. Insiders will have enough land to live comfortably from tax revenues, whereas outsiders will have too little and will supplement their unsatisfactory income by hiring themselves out as mercenaries.

So I’m wondering how many NPC commoners are economic insiders, able to prosper despite structural economic injustice, and how many are economic outsiders, desperate enough to live as menial servants for minimal pay. I’m also wondering how many NPC warriors are comfortably wealthy and how many want to earn money as mercenaries. There needs to be a balance here, and I would be happy to hear from knowledgeable medievalists, as well as from savvy character optimizers, any advice on how best to strike that balance.

[noob]

All the stuff in master manuals are only advice for gms and are not stuff you must vaguely follow at all.(also personally I do not think the GM manual 2 is a good manual)
Trust me a cook will want good wages and a work place even if the player have 444444444444444444444444444444444444^4444444444444 44 diplomacy he will not turn it into a slave working for 1 pc per century but if the player use mental manipulation it is another story.
also crafting rules are absurd trying to apply crafting rules will lead to matter creation(like for example the player says here that snow have no value so I can for nothing create 3kg of snow from one Kg of snow now I roll my craft check this week I produce a total of 1 pc of snow so infinite snow so I create a black hole in 0 second and destroy the earth)

[Duke of Urrel]

The path to riches through adventuring is paved with the dead bodies of your predecessors. If you actually look at the statistics that the CR system provides, only a slim percentage of all would-be adventurers will ever reach level 2. The PCs, as protagonists, are exceptions because the DM's job is to not let them die.

What you say is true of NPCs who belong to NPC classes; their rate of advancement does lie at 2% or below. But NPCs who belong to PC classes, which I call PC-NPCs, advance at a much more favorable rate, between 40% and 50%. I get this from using the "Random Town Generation" table and the "Power Centers" table on page 137 of the Dungeon Master's Guide and the "Community Modifiers" table and the "Highest-Level Locals" table on page 139. For example, suppose you have a community the size of a small city, with 10,000 adult inhabitants. The two highest-level monks in this community will be, on the average, one 8th-level monk and one 9th-level monk (the two median results for 1d4 +6), and there will be four 4th-level monks, eight 2nd-level monks, and sixteen 1st-level monks. Add them all up, and you get thirty monks in all, of which sixteen are 1st-level and fourteen are advanced. That's an advancement rate of 46+2/3%.

The low advancement rate among NPCs is probably due to lack of motivation and, indeed, lack of economic justice. It is probably also explained by the notion that advancement always means combat prowess, which NPCs fail to develop because most of them aren't well suited for combat and therefore avoid it.

It depends of the campaign if the players are following the law they might play taxes they might even pay more than npcs because they have more.
Pc's income is solely campaign dependent.
Pc's expenses depends essentially of players while npc's expenses depends only of gm and often will not be accounted(for example for that built church the gm might not even care about the cost).
4: there is campaigns where there is no economic injustice and it is 1000% independent of home-rules and such since the way the economy works is not something home-ruled it is something role-played in the campaign(the hiring price in GM manual is not something true it is just a potential price you might put)

Yup. It's up the DM, and I am asking in behalf of DMs here. What do you think we should decide?

[Flickerdart]

I get this from using the "Random Town Generation" table and the "Power Centers" table on page 137 of the Dungeon Master's Guide and the "Community Modifiers" table and the "Highest-Level Locals" table on page 139.

Well, there's your mistake. We just don't know how these guys got to their level. Meanwhile, if you look at the CR system like I said, you'll see that none of these people would survive for long if they went back out to adventure.

[Duke of Urrel]

Well, there's your mistake. We just don't know how these guys got to their level. Meanwhile, if you look at the CR system like I said, you'll see that none of these people would survive for long if they went back out to adventure.

Well, okay. Suppose it would be right for us to reject the random "Highest-Level Locals" generator in the DM's Guide in favor of a thoroughgoing CR analysis. What does this have to do with my proposals here?

[noob]

I think salary is a case per case story and depends a lot of what the adventurers give and of the situation of the person for example you might want to recruit a cook if he is in a restaurant and living his life well and have a family you might need a lot more gold for recruiting him(or you might not be able to recruit him) than if he is an young dying orphan in a city full of plague were he have no job and where someone wants to kill him because he have seen too many. In the latter case in exchange of a cure disease and some gold coins per week he might follow you out of this awful city and he might renegotiate his contract if he finds a new city where he thinks he can have a better job.
Also everyone is particular if the adventurers are recruiting on a small scale and if they are recruiting on a huge scale some percent will still make stories(like some of your servitors are diseased or one of them just wants to change his job and goes away etc(The latter becomes a lot more frequent if you do not pay them a lot and that they find their contract not advantageous or if you simply except from them absurd things(like stay in a row and pole railgun at this mountain))).
Else the money the adventurers gains is essentially dependent on how much you want them to have but making them interested in employing people can be a good idea for plot creation and making the adventurers do something else than murder hoboing(Like for example make them think about how to make optimal use of their employees and make them think about notions like market value or even make them design their awesome castle for shelter of the employees in time of trouble).
Also the taxes can make the work of gaining money a lot harder and make adventurers think about how to hide the money they get from adventuring and so on giving new activities other than just "Let us find the phylactery of the lich for murdering it".
Also taxes are a good argument for not having the players say "we wait 400000000000000 years while crafting the headband of +88888 int for one shooting opponents and pwn and know everything" You might just say "if you do that you run dry after 20 years because of that tax of 1/10 of your wealth per year and there is other taxes and the employee who is charged of managing business might go away with your money because he might not like you after 5 years if you never contact him and then he will not feel like he is betraying anyone since you will be forgotten"

[Berenger]

Also for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that in our rough medieval fantasy world, weekends haven’t been invented yet, so that in one month of 30 days, Biff works for exactly three 10-day weeks and makes 15 gold pieces.

For the Middle Ages, you can assume between one fifth and one third of all days to be holidays (religious or otherwise).

[Brookshw]

We just don't know how these guys got to their level.

Now that I think about it, if we optimized the world every town should really have a 'ye olde training dungeon with low cr traps that couldn't actually kill the dungeon user but still grant xp. Rig a couple of them up, let someone go until they're at actual risk, then let them bail. A level 1 commoner could easily jump to level 2 in a few weeks. Toss in a local cleric with some vigors and the training time cuts even further. We could probably farm level 20 commoners over the course of a year pretty easily.

Oh, OP, personally I just ignore that stuff, the rules for npc wealth and world economics don'take a heck of a lot of sense.

[Duke of Urrel]

For the Middle Ages, you can assume between one fifth and one third of all days to be holidays (religious or otherwise).

Thank you for this. It confirms some of my own views.

Simplicity aside, I am planning a campaign in the weird world of Greyhawk, which has an explicit seven-day week, in which the fourth day, Godsday, and the seventh, Freeday, are the most obvious candidates for days off. This means that I tend to treat 10-day weeks as biweekly periods of 14 days, in each of which there are exactly ten work days (each consisting of 10 work hours) and four days off. I assume that people will distribute this 50-hour work week – or 100-hour "work-fortnight" – in various ways, so that for example entertainers will work on Freeday and priests will work on Godsday.

I assume that magic helps increase the agricultural productivity of the world. Particularly these three spells play a role.

Ray of Frost = food preservation (freezing and refrigeration by means of ice boxes)

Purify Food and Drink = sterilization

Plant Growth = fertilizer.

Obviously, not everybody has magic, and certainly not everybody has access to a 3rd-level spell like Plant Growth. On the other hand, the Plant Growth spell only needs to be used once per year on a very large piece of land to increase its productivity by a third, and clerics are likely to want to make friends of farmers in order to get tithes, so the Plant domain might be more popular among NPC clerics than among PC clerics, and the Plant Growth spell may be widely used, since it's clearly in everybody's interest to have cheap food.

This isn't enough to transform our medieval fantasy into a full-blown 19th-Century steampunk fantasy. But I do think it is enough to give Greyhawk's peasants some time off from their otherwise arduous 10-hour workdays. I also think it's enough to enable significantly more urbanization and more economic diversification (read: more production of high-value manufactured goodies like magic items) than our own Middle Ages ever had.

[Jay R]

Player-character adventurers are not like normal people. Really. The rules are different.

[noob]

Peasants have seasons where they work really a lot then there is seasons where they have no particular agricultural job to do and so they usually craft stuff,cut trees,feed animals and have free time in those seasons.

[Duke of Urrel]

I think salary is a case per case story and depends a lot of what the adventurers give and of the situation of the person for example you might want to recruit a cook if he is in a restaurant and living his life well and have a family you might need a lot more gold for recruiting him(or you might not be able to recruit him) than if he is an young dying orphan in a city full of plague were he have no job and where someone wants to kill him because he have seen too many. In the latter case in exchange of a cure disease and some gold coins per week he might follow you out of this awful city and he might renegotiate his contract if he finds a new city where he thinks he can have a better job.
Also everyone is particular if the adventurers are recruiting on a small scale and if they are recruiting on a huge scale some percent will still make stories(like some of your servitors are diseased or one of them just wants to change his job and goes away etc(The latter becomes a lot more frequent if you do not pay them a lot and that they find their contract not advantageous or if you simply except from them absurd things(like stay in a row and pole railgun at this mountain))).

The rules do allow for elite hirelings, called "specialists," who are in fact very expensive and are described in the Dungeon Master's Guide II. A really good restaurateur would probably be a specialist – and correspondingly expensive.

You're right about the opposite case: the poor victim of catastrophe may be cheaper, and may also serve as a story hook.

I don't usually envision recruitment of NPC hirelings by PCs on a huge scale. This is what the Leadership feat and followers are for, and I believe followers are actually peasants who live on land that you also must acquire (following my house rule) when you get the Leadership feat in order to attract followers. If you don't acquire land, then all you get with the Leadership feat is a cohort.

Else the money the adventurers gains is essentially dependent on how much you want them to have but making them interested in employing people can be a good idea for plot creation and making the adventurers do something else than murder hoboing…

I agree with this. I always like to provide my players with opportunities for heroism and do-gooding. This requires more than just economic pressure, though. It requires creating some interest in political, social, or economic injustice. The bad guys in my world need lots of creative ways to be bad, and causing widespread economic misery is one way to be bad. I also think it's good for it to be done with techniques other than just crushing taxes. That's a nice part of the tradition of Evildoing, but it's much cleverer to manipulate a class of rich insiders, such as ambitious petty nobles and grasping guildmasters, and to draw them onto your side as collaborators in stomping on the poor.

Peasants have seasons where they work really a lot then there is seasons where they have no particular agricultural job to do and so they usually craft stuff,cut trees,feed animals and have free time in those seasons.

This is true, though there is still some winter work that increases, such as patching up your thatch hut and gathering firewood. You may also have to do some hunting and fishing to avoid hunger during the lean months. Hunting and fishing belonged to the rights of peasants during the early Middle Ages, but I believe these rights were curtailed during the later Middle Ages as greedy land barons seized more and more of their land for private recreation and profit. The result was peasant revolts…

[Telonius]

Boeuf would typically not accept a job from adventurers at 1sp a day if he can earn 5gp independently. His untrained assistant (who currently has no ranks in Craft: Food [EDIT: or Profession: Chef] and is making 1sp a day) might take them up on the offer.

If Biff had no ranks in Craft: Food (EDIT: or Profession: Chef), he'd also be limited to 1sp a day, if he can find work as a hireling.

[Gemini476]

Well, there's your mistake. We just don't know how these guys got to their level. Meanwhile, if you look at the CR system like I said, you'll see that none of these people would survive for long if they went back out to adventure.

Sure they would. Have you taken a look at the random encounter tables lately? As long as they don't go too deep into a dungeon or head to high-EL wilderness areas they'll probably be fine, although they might need more than the standard 13.33 encounters to level up. (This is assumed, apparently - the sidebar on page 41 says as much.) Also, they could go in oversized groups in which case they'll need proportionally more encounters to level up but they'll be significantly safer. A hundred archers might be able to defeat the dragon, but they'll receive one twentieth of the reward a five-person party would have. (Or a bit more than that, depending on level differences and deaths. 3E's XP rules are complicated.)

Actually, don't the rules for NPC Gear Value (p.127) kind of imply that? "Elite" NPCs still aren't running around with as much cash as PCs, so clearly they're splitting it somewhere.

Also, do note that you don't need to kill a monster to defeat the encounter - you could defeat a guard by sneaking past it or pursuers by escaping them, for instance. As long as you achieve your goal and overcome the obstacle in some way you get the XP.


And, of course, the DMG has an entire page on non-combat XP awards on page 40. Those are very fuzzy, though, and basically amount to "XP as CR equal to party level or less, must be a challenge". There's also roleplaying awards that amount to 5% of the XP to the next level per adventure, and thus they're really slow. Although the DMG assumes that they're used instead of getting experience from killing monsters, which is a bit... eh. Not my jazz, although I do get why they did it (WBL is why they did it).

[ShaneMRoth]

I recommend against allowing a Take 10 on earning a weekly living check.

The earn a living check strongly implies freelance work, which is potentially more lucrative than stead work, but also more risky.

Even so, there is an entire valid reason why player characters are able to earn more than an NPC.

Imagine some bandits are planning on robbing a tavern.

There are two taverns.

Tavern A employs Biff the Barbarian.

Tavern B employs Beouf the Commoner.

One of the bandits returns to the group and gives his report:

Bandit One:"Okay, we are robbing Tavern B. Forget Tavern A."

Bandit Two: "Why? Tavern A does better business, there's more money to be had from robbing Tavern A, right?"

Bandit One: "Right, but there this guy working in the kitchen in Tavern A who is probably a murderhobo. He looks like trouble. His muscles have muscles. He has at least one masterwork weapon that I could see. Maybe it's a magic weapon, maybe it's not. Don't know, don't care. Tavern B is staffed entirely by commoners."

Bandit Two: "Oh... well, then, Tavern B it is."

Player characters bring more to the table than their Profession or Craft skill.

It stands to reason that this would cause them to be able to earn more money.

[Duke of Urrel]

Thank you for your comments. I've been busy, but here are some replies.

Boeuf would typically not accept a job from adventurers at 1sp a day if he can earn 5gp independently. His untrained assistant (who currently has no ranks in Craft: Food [EDIT: or Profession: Chef] and is making 1sp a day) might take them up on the offer.

If Biff had no ranks in Craft: Food (EDIT: or Profession: Chef), he'd also be limited to 1sp a day, if he can find work as a hireling.

The DM's Guide definitely does draw a line between skilled and unskilled laborers. The problem is where to draw the line. I find it hard to believe that a commoner will not at least try to optimize the one skill that he or she depends upon for a living. So I don't think it's a matter of choosing either a skilled commoner with at least one rank of Craft or Profession skill or an unskilled commoner with no ranks in any Craft or Profession skill at all, because I'm not sure that the latter exists.

Some commoners, of course, may just have the bad luck to have been born with below-average Intelligence or Wisdom. This might make them effectively unskilled despite having spent some skill points on their own chosen Craft or Profession skill. There might be a lot of commoners who are unskilled in this manner, particularly when we reflect that only about 1% of them advance beyond the first level.

I recommend against allowing a Take 10 on earning a weekly living check.

The earn a living check strongly implies freelance work, which is potentially more lucrative than stead work, but also more risky.

Hmmm. The DM's Guide suggests that hazard pay, that is, double the normal daily wage, should be required when a hireling is expected to face some danger, for example when traveling with PCs. This does suggest that some kinds of dangerous work are better rewarded simply because they are dangerous.

However, I'm not sure that it's generally true that freelancers make more than workers with steady jobs.

• Guilds hate freelancers, of course, and I think they would hate them even more if freelancers made more money than guild members. So there's a built-in danger right there.

• On the other hand, if freelancers could charge more than guild members, then why would anybody hire a freelancer, especially when doing so would risk getting into trouble with a guild, and probably the Law as well?

• On the other other hand, there may be a class of domestic servants who are of lower class than guilds and demand lower wages, such as the wages that the DM's Guide suggests for hirelings. Maybe it's only guild members who are able to earn according to their true skill level.

• On the other other other hand, all of the foregoing assumes the existence of powerful guilds. Maybe there are some Chaotic societies, such as elven societies, in which there is a freer market, so that merit counts more than guild membership. In these societies, freelancers might be the ones who have the most skill and the most earning power.

Even so, there is an entire valid reason why player characters are able to earn more than an NPC.
…

Player characters bring more to the table than their Profession or Craft skill.

It stands to reason that this would cause them to be able to earn more money.

This is a good point, and I especially appreciate your vivid example …! Yes, versatility is important. This is also a clear advantage that NPCs of the expert class have over those of the commoner class. Experts are able to invest in several kinds of Craft or Profession skill, whereas commoners get only enough skill points to become good at one single thing.

[Endarire]

In D&D, wealth exists purely because the GM says so.

If you want to get more complicated than that, you can make complicated systems to try to model reality. Ultimately, it's a game with many, many aspects there for the enjoyment of the real life players playing their characters. The Law of Conservation of Detail plays into this.

When I play D&D, I understand that many aspects of the game world are abstracted. Commoners are unimportant unless:

1: I'm playing one.

2: I'm playing with one.

3: There's one in the world near where I am right now that the plot has deemed important.

But, fortunately for you, if you want to change how things work, you can. It's your game when you GM.

[Telonius]

So I don't think it's a matter of choosing either a skilled commoner with at least one rank of Craft or Profession skill or an unskilled commoner with no ranks in any Craft or Profession skill at all, because I'm not sure that the latter exists.

It's probably true that almost everybody has a rank in some sort of craft or profession, but the Profession skill description spells it out that the "untrained laborers and assistants" designation goes to people that have no ranks in a particular Profession skill. (Craft doesn't spell it out quite as explicitly, but it's pretty clear that's the intent). I'd suppose that the sort of person who would take 1 sp a day would be somebody who wants to learn how to do the job, or whose particular Craft or Profession isn't currently in demand at the moment. (Maybe the crops have already been harvested, or the Druids have said no more chopping down trees for the season). Basically, an unemployed person who'd think that 1sp a day is better than 0sp a day.

[Duke of Urrel]

In D&D, wealth exists purely because the GM says so.

If you want to get more complicated than that, you can make complicated systems to try to model reality. Ultimately, it's a game with many, many aspects there for the enjoyment of the real life players playing their characters. The Law of Conservation of Detail plays into this.

When I play D&D, I understand that many aspects of the game world are abstracted. Commoners are unimportant unless:

1: I'm playing one.

2: I'm playing with one.

3: There's one in the world near where I am right now that the plot has deemed important.

But, fortunately for you, if you want to change how things work, you can. It's your game when you GM.

Thank you for your reference to the Law of Conservation of Detail! It's nice to learn new things.

I surely don't want to subject my players to lengthy, boring descriptions of the political economy of my world. However, as the DM, I want to know myself how it works, so that I can make things make sense to my players. There's a lot of randomness built into the game of D&D. I like to balance that with orderliness, because it gives the players more autonomy when they can make good guesses about what to expect, at least part of the time.

One example of the need for orderliness is the placement of traps. Sure, a DM can put traps in any unexpected place, but the players have more autonomy when the traps appear in likely places, so that the players' success or failure to avoid them depends on their skills and not merely upon luck.

I have a very vague, undeveloped idea about a magical economic crisis brought about by a little-known underground or perhaps interplanar trade network. In order to make this plausible, I have to figure out how the local economy normally works – so that players will notice when it all starts to go wrong, and so that soon after they do, they'll be able to figure out why.

[Endarire]

Duke: Glad to help! I understand your desire to want to make things more logical. However, in my years of of playing and running and making D&D, my best solution was The Metaphysical Revolution, a world where magic is industrialized and the average NPC has the same general goals as the average PC: Adventure and politics.

[Duke of Urrel]

It's probably true that almost everybody has a rank in some sort of craft or profession, but the Profession skill description spells it out that the "untrained laborers and assistants" designation goes to people that have no ranks in a particular Profession skill. (Craft doesn't spell it out quite as explicitly, but it's pretty clear that's the intent).

I interpret this rule as a warning specifically to players that their PCs must buy at least one rank in some Profession skill in order to make more than one silver piece per day with this skill. You are surely right that this rule is implied for earning money with Craft skill as well.

You are also right that the game designers seem to have imagined "untrained laborers and assistants" among NPCs. My challenge is to give some in-game reasons why they exist. If you can make so much more money merely by buying a single rank in Craft or Profession skill, then why won't you just do that? What else would a NPC of the expert or commoner class prefer to spend skill points on, anyway?

I'd suppose that the sort of person who would take 1 sp a day would be somebody who wants to learn how to do the job, or whose particular Craft or Profession isn't currently in demand at the moment. (Maybe the crops have already been harvested, or the Druids have said no more chopping down trees for the season). Basically, an unemployed person who'd think that 1sp a day is better than 0sp a day.

I completely agree with this. There's poverty built into medieval society, some of it because of its prejudiced, class-based culture and some of it because of the same problems that all economies have because of supply and demand. Probably the number of people who can't demand any more than one silver piece per day is a significant portion of the population, including laborers who don't belong to guilds (at least not yet) and peasants who don't have enough land to live on, and these two groups may overlap. I think many so-called unskilled NPCs fail to make money not because they completely lack skill, but because their society is unfair.

[Scheming Wizard]

I think the problem with this is comparative advantage. Yes Biff could use his profession to make money and spend his days doing that, but why would he when he can make so much more gold adventuring? Biff only has so much time to spend working.

Boeuf on the other hand can't adventure and therefore his best option is to work at his profession to make money.

It makes more sense financially for Biff to spend his time adventuring while paying Boeuf to cook for him.

Think of it like this. A brain surgeon can type twice as fast as his secretary, but time he spends typing is time he isn't doing brain surgery. Given how much more profitable being a brain surgeon is for him he should leave the typing to his secretary and stick to brain surgery.

Boeuf also lives a pretty low risk life. Most npc's will die of old age or plague/illness. Most adventurers will die by trap/dragon/orc. It's why crab fisherman make a lot more money than fast food workers. Some of the crab fishermen might not survive the season.

[Duke of Urrel]

Sorry, I had to delete my last posting. I think what you wrote, SchemingWizard, is a bigger challenge than I thought.

True, if making money with Profession skill is something that I can't do cheaply, because of the risk involved, then I will demand more money for my work. But the game of D&D doesn't provide any mechanism to impose the real-world economic consequence of this, which is that by demanding a higher price, I reduce rather than increase my own profits, because my potential customers shop elsewhere for the services I want to provide.

If we created some kind of mechanism to reflect the fact that higher prices drive away customers, then Boeuf, with his lower price for services, would get more work and make more money, while Biff, whose service as a cook is way overpriced, would get less work and make less.

If we simply follow the rules of D&D, then by demanding a higher price, Biff makes more money than Boeuf. The guild-centered economy of a medieval fantasy world may account for this kind of inefficiency to some degree. It may also be the exception rather than the rule that anybody is allowed to do freelance work without a guild, regardless of how high or how low a wage one demands. Work outside of a guild may be allowed only for hirelings whose employers, mostly aristocrats and PCs, are powerful enough not to be subject to guild rules.

Or maybe there are simply some guilds that are poor, while others are rich. Maybe the guild of Laborers can't guarantee their members better wages than the ones listed in the DM's Guide for hirelings. Of course, in this case, the guild can't make much money in dues and doesn't have much corporate wealth to defend.

[Yahzi]

Finally (4), I will propose some in-game reasons to account for the economic unfairness that bothers me so

I approached all of this from a different angle.

It's long been established that 1 lb of wheat = 1 cp. So: how much wheat can a peasant grow?

The answer varies, depending on which time period you're talking about, but a decent compromise is about 8,000 lbs of wheat a year, using about 40 acres (half of which are fallow every year). Set aside 2,000 lbs for seed, and that leaves you with 60 gp of income per peasant farm per year.

How much does a peasant eat? Something around 2 lbs of grain a day is the minimum. I use a 10-day week and a 400 day year, just to make the math easy (and because my world is not Earth, so how weird would it be if it had the same orbit). That means my farm family eats about 3,000 lbs of wheat a year, assuming the kids eat a bit less than a full-grown man. This is a bare subsistence diet; even raising vegetables and chickens and hunting a bit means a hard life. But then, that's what most people lived on for most of the time.

This leaves 3,000 lbs of wheat for taxes. Which is far higher than historical, but my world doesn't have freemen farmers. It only has serfs, because my world has something else Earth never had: competition, in the form of monsters. The lords own the land because only they have the power to hold it; the peasants are all share-croppers, not landowners.

If 75% of your population are farmers paying 30 gp a year in tax, the remaining 25% can consume 90 gp a year. So my craftsmen make 100 gp a year, or 2.5 sp per day (not accounting for holidays). Which is reasonably close to the DMG's 1-4 sp for various levels of skill. Poor laborers make 1 sp and eat like peasants; master craftsmen make 5 sp and live like minor nobles.

Now we come to PCs. All PCs share one thing: they have a class level. Despite all the fluff to the contrary, the mechanics of class levels are unmistakable. A 1st level wizard does things that no peasant can ever do. It's not a matter of training or intelligence; the wizard can do magic, and you can't. Fighters are equally supernatural, if not so obviously; but that extra D6 of hit points is hard to explain away.

So what does one do with a class level? There is only one answer: fight monsters. The entire reason class levels exist is so that humans can contend with monsters. In my world having a class level makes you a noble, and nobles do not practice professions. They fight. That is their job. That is why the spell list and the feat list are almost exclusively focused on combat, rather than industrial processes. Because what humanity needs out of their nobles is violence, not industry.

In my world XP is tangible; you get 32 XP when a peasant dies of old age, and the XP you need doubles at every level. Admittedly a bit of a departure from RAW, but not that much, since the book flat-out states that 1 XP = 5 gp. So 1st rank nobles make 1 gp a day (just like the book suggests for PCs), half of which they save for their next advancement (about 13 years). Just working for a living means they'll make it to 3rd level before they retire, but of course their job is violence. Most of them will either die or gain levels faster than that.

This means that about 1% of the population has class levels (which is kinda close to the percentage of nobles on Earth). It means that the local ruler is reasonably high level (5th to 9th). It means that PCs are encouraged to go out and adventure, because taking XP from the monsters benefits the entire community.

By adopting this basic idea - that XP is a resource like gold - I can justify a whole pile of how we actually play D&D, which is very different than how real medieval history worked. And we get a game where going off adventuring is a viable, real career, that the in-game NPCs understand and respect.

(Another factor: D&D is not actually medieval, it is Iron Age Greece. There are small, isolated kingdoms with wilderness between them which nonetheless speak the same language and use the same technology, while monsters roam around at will and even occasionally destroy whole nations. The continental politics of France and England simply do not fit in; any empire with millions of people will have dozens of high-level casters, and shorty after that comes the Tippyverse.)

I cover all of this in exhausting detail in Lords of Prime over at DriveThruRPG.

TL;DR: The wage difference between PCs and commoners is explained by their different jobs. One works and the other fights monsters.