Performance ... (price not yet determined)The price to engage the services of a travelling minstrel or musician for a minimum of two hours and surely not more than four. Matters such as the scope of the performance, the repertoire of music to be played and the specified time and location always require negotiation that rarely pleases either side of the bargain. While the fee is almost never paid up front, it’s assumed that food and beverages at the event are to be provided gratis on an all-the-musicians can eat and drink basis.
Wouldn't be much, I'd expect, somewhere between 5 and 10 silvers I'd guess, but as I'm working on musical instruments yet, I want prices for the whole collection before calculating from the mean some sort of base price. Easy enough for players to afford, and not likely to be enough for a player bard to pursue, except for the game experience of actually playing in front of live audience of strangers.
The passage exists in the guide because instruments exist, and because for the most part I'm including fees and hiring prices for people who use the equipment included in the book. Whether or not players take advantage of the prices is no nevermind to me; part of the book's agenda is also to include information that might provide inspiration for a storyteller or a writer, who could easily use the guide as a random search engine, jumping through pages just to see what sparks.
But that aside, as I considered the passage today, I found myself wondering, "What if the price of working as a musician was worthwhile for players," which is not to say that I'd consider raising the price. Oh, obviously, a much better musician would rate a higher fee, while maestros and geniuses could rate 30 to 60 times as much ... but that isn't where I'm going.
One of the larger gamebreaking issues of the game is the value of gold, jewels, insundry items and magic that pours into the player's pockets as they hie themselves off to a dungeon. This has been part and parcel of the game's culture from the very beginning, as Gygax et al considered themselves to be portraying the vast riches that fantasy characters were always depicted as obtaining. Jason and his Argonauts obtained the Golden Fleece, Siegfried gets his hands on the Rhinegold, Odysseus loads his ship with treasure from Troy, Wiglaf brings a sample of the dragon's treature to Beowulf before he dies, there were endless stories of El Dorado, Hansel & Gretel discover chests filled with jewels and gold when the witch is burned in her own oven, the Fisherman obtains more and more wealth through wishes granted by the fish, the Golden Goose, Rumplestiltskin and so on.
Yet I can just as easily point out that in any of the original modules released by TSR, setting the standard for treasure hordes, what one gets for killing 30 or 40 fairly ordinary orcs provides a rather comparable pile compared to these literary treasures. A single ogre can yield up a few thousand gold pieces in value for battle given. Granted, Siegfried's treasure is much, much more, but I don't remember any passages in the tale about his "hording up" 20 or 30 thousand coins as he fights battles on the way to getting there. The same goes for a lot of adventure stories, notably King Arthur and his knights, where treasure figures rather negligibly compared to the adventure itself, the mystic elements of the stories and the morality of the quests pursued. True enough, Troy yields up a lot of treasure ... but aside from armour, the acquisition of horses and a few slaves, these soldiers fight ten years before they see their cut of what Troy has.
Now, now, I'm not dissing treasure. The players like it, it's a good motivator to action and yes, it helps the players buy stuff. My general approach to that problem is to make sure there is lots and lots of stuff to buy, but that only goes so far. How many large ships, herds of warhorses, merchant houses and castles can one character really want?
All the long-term player characters in my erstwhile and now dead campaign had accumulated hundreds of thousands of gold, some buried in property and some just buried. Having enough to buy everything they wanted and then some didn't stop them from adventuring. In the long run, it was never the treasure they wanted; this not being 5e, it was experience, and thus levels, and thus more options when adventuring. Treasure was, and is, a means of getting there. Which is why, for a lot of players who aren't indoctrinated in the old ways, being granted a pile of experience or an automatic new level does just as well as a big pile of gold coins.
Rest assured, I'm not preaching that either. Just waving at it as we go by.
Consider what the game might be if players could not count on girding themselves up for a little dungeon delving, whenever their cash flow looked a bit thin. Suppose that there still were the orcs, the ogres, the giant snakes and all the other big baddies ... but like we might expect of creatures who have no personal use for money, they don't actually have any. Suppose that in toto, our clan of 50 orcs has some 50 copper pieces "between the seats of the couch," as it were, randomly discarded into a vessel here and there, punched and made part of a bone necklace, used as eyes for some kid's doll, as a button for clothing or kicked off into some corner of a rough cavern? After all, there's no reason to keep these coins in a special chest made for the purpose; chests can be useful for storing things, and for most orc clans, coins aren't. What are these orcs going to do with them? Visit the local village market and buy a few peaches?
Suppose the orcs do pile up a few hundred gold, and that they know somewhere they can take them ... the lair of some group of human outlaws, who have the choice to take a bath and visit a town. Wouldn't it make sense for the orcs, upon accumulating any coins, run off to the outlaws and make a trade for better iron, pottery jars, medicines, or whatever they can get? Why hold onto this useless hunks of metal, when they can be traded for something useful?
Oh, sure, we can argue these orcs might want to keep some gems, as these are pretty. But would these gems be anything more than somewhat ordinary shiny stones? The early settlers in the Americas came across large "gems" in the hands of the natives, but these weren't cut and polished as if from Antwerp. Compared to European-gems, these were stones found in rivers, worn smooth, but far, far from being worth hundreds of gold pieces. And there were always more rivers, and more stones, and the natives knew where to go to get them. This is not a question of something in short supply, but rather, how many do we really want to carry home?
In my childhood, our cabin was near a lake that had beaches made of quartz and agate. Any day I could walk along the water's edge and find pounds and pounds of beautiful, mottled pieces of agate and glistening white quartz as big as my thumb, or bigger. But none of these had any real value, unless time was taken to tumble the pieces, and clean them with acids, and polish them with rock blankets, until they'd shine enough to sell for $2 a piece at a rock shop. It's not the stone being paid for; it's the work that goes into the stone. There are rivers in Burma and Ceylon that produce rubies and sapphires in the quantities that my lake in Alberta produces agate; but they don't look like rubies and sapphires in a Burma stream. They just look like rocks. Smooth, pretty rocks, but if you weren't a geologist, or a local that's been taught, you'd never know which was a ruby and which wasn't.
So sure, the orcs have "gems" ... or rather, pretty rocks. Maybe fifty or sixty of them, scattered around. Some worth a few coppers apiece, and some worth nothing. Because the orcs aren't jewellers. They're not learning which stones the market is craving. They're just picking up rocks that please them, that they see in a stream.
Oh, someone can argue around this. The Incas and the Aztecs had some very nice stones, which the Europeans recognised as having terrific value, and these were brought to Europe and cut a little better and polished a little better, and some of them found their way into crown jewels around the continent. But these were also stones that accumulated over a very large area, that of Mexico and Peru; and not in one generation, but over scores of generations, whose very best rocks were slowly plundered and gathered into the hands of monarchies. We're not talking about the players knocking off some orc king, whose ancestors have ruled for a hundred years, in a land that's built on three other previous empires going back 2,000 years. We're talking 40 orcs in a hole in the ground. What are they doing with such a rock?
Just suppose, is all I'm saying. Suppose the players can go out and kill the orcs, and get the experience from that, and rid the neighbourhood of orcs, and have a fine adventure, and feel good about their service. And suppose, when they get back, all that effort isn't enough to pay for three nights at an inn and more than a half dozen meals. And suppose there's no expectation that the next adventure is going to bring in any more. What about then?
What does the game become? That's all I'm asking. Does it stop being D&D, because the money tap is turned off? Is there something inherently game-breaking about the players agreeing to help a small family plough their land this spring, in return for a hundred pounds of food? Does it ruin everyone's good time if the bard has to get a gig, today, to pay for the party's lodging tonight? Or are we just talking about a set of completely subjective assumptions about what the players are entitled to?
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