This is nothing special. It is the equipment list I’m working with at the moment; occasionally I add things to it, as the party requests. The list is broken up into the district of the city (or the shop, if you prefer) in which the item would be sold. I like to keep it this way, rather than alphabetically, because it enhanses the sense of the party having to actually search for the items.
I have considered making up rules for how many “shops” can be bought from in the space of a day, but I haven’t gotten that anal yet.
There are mistakes here; anything this big, there are bound to be mistakes. Some of them are programming errors, some are just simple translation problems. I would imagine most would be in the dimensions part of the list. Let me know about them and I'll make the necessary fixes.
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For those who may be interested, later Equipment lists that are updates of this table appear throughout the months of June and July of 2011.
It's really hard to take all your work serious when you have some obviously dumb numbers like a 6.5 oz gold chain being worth 4775 gp. It takes 47 lbs of gold to buy 6.5 oz of gold? What's the point of all this if your economy is as broken as what comes with D&D?
ReplyDeleteReally, mhensley, have you never heard of "workmanship"? Has it not perhaps occurred to you that the cost of the 47 lbs. of gold are comparable to the relative rarity of goldsmiths? Or is it that you have never been inside Tiffany's?
ReplyDeleteOr that you fail to recognize that this is high quality gold, and not the "gold chain" you buy at your local Walmart's?
It's really hard to take your criticism serious(ly) when you can't seem to know anything about the creation of a gold chain.
Did you forget "mark-up?"
ReplyDeleteThat just isn't going to wash. I go over to the Tiffany website, not exactly Walmart, and an 18" 18k gold necklace only costs $300. A one ounce gold coin runs about $1000. The value of jewelry made from precious metals is mainly from the metal itself, not any workmanship.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to gold and products made of them you pay for the weight of gold and then bid on the craftsmanship. Since the value of gold is the back bone of the economics 6.5 oz of gold is worth 13 gp. thats a wopping 4762 gp for the craftsmanship. is that realistic? he could live his life in an inn for a year if he just manages to sell that chain to anyone.
ReplyDeleteBut that might actually be realistic, because if you craft something out of gold, you might damn well make sure that the craftmanship is good. its a gold chain yes, but not a simple gold chain. every link n the chain is a masterpiece of its own rights, and together they make a unique craft of beauty and style, with tastefull sumbols engraved everywhere. Perhaps some small gem or other materials will be used in order to complete the craft. its a gold chain sure, but not just a gold chain from walmart or other factory produced nonsense.
Tauman makes some good points. Part of the misunderstanding here is the old Gygax conception that a ten gold coins ought to be equal to a pound. From a numismatics point of view, that's ridiculous. A typical gold coin in the real world weighed only 7 grams, one fourth of an ounce, and typically only 40% of that was actual gold. This is the system for gold coinage that I use.
ReplyDeletemhensley: did you check the weight on that $300 chain? I doubt it was 3/8 of a pound.
Love the million gold piece pipe organ! It's practically an artifact without any magic. How many of those have you accounted for in your world? I think I'd feel obligated to enchant it after I had it built, and the cost to enchant would probably seem a bargain in comparison.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Vinter looks like a pretty lucrative job. A keg of brandy worth almost $150,000 gp? Talk about a party!
Do you ever have issues with PC looking to get around this workmanship and materials cost with magic? I had a player who wanted to build an entire town using Rock-to-Mud and Mud-to-Rock spells cast on loose stone poured into what were basically concrete forms. How often do your players choose magic-using classes?
Carl,
ReplyDeleteYour mud-to-rock guy better have had some masonry experience, or the town is going to look like it was made by Soviet contractors.
You may have never read it: the stonedowners in the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen R. Donaldson would fashion their buildings in a similar fashion, merely shaping the liquid stone into buildings without the use of forms. The effect described was the buildings looked like they were made of playdough.
The whole vintner thing...that's a laugh. That's what happens when you haven't yet added France to the pricing system. But when you think of it, what would a keg of brandy be doing in Transylvania? Germans prefer sherry and kirschwasser.
Those high prices for cognac should disappear in a few months. Let's say that the season was bad this year.
At present, my players have 2 clerics, 2 druids, 4 fighters, a fighter-mage, 2 paladins, a ranger, a mage, a mage-thief, an illusionist, a thief, a monk and a bard, counting both main characters and henchmen. Two assassins have been attempted and two have died. The party seems disinterested in thieves...I don't know why.
No, no one has tried to get around the workmanship. Probably for the reasons above, that being a mage doesn't make you a weaponsmith or a carpenter. One of the druids is building a house with plant growth. Eventually I'm sure one of the party members will remember they have a secondary skill and start making use of it.
It would appear that a darak at 1,000 GP is priced as such because tortoise shells are extremely rare in this market and in a market where tortoise shells are common, this item would be fractions of the cost?
ReplyDeleteSour milk is almost twice as valuable as fresh milk? That seems... unusual. :P
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid Hensley is right about the gold: the craftsmanship is worth almost nothing compared to the raw material. After all, the craftsmanship, however fantastic, is the work of one man, while an ounce of gold takes dozens of people to make (what with the digging and the smelting and the woodcutting and all that). D&D fails to recognize this (with its standard 1/3 material cost) and I am afraid my own economic rules do no better.
That is becuase you are confusing "sour milk" with "spoiled milk" ... not the same thing at all. Sour milk is a food product, in the more modern sense referred to as fermented milk or cultured milk. It was called "sour" in medieval times and I try to retain the more archaic terms for things.
ReplyDelete