Establishing an economy

[Betrayd by Dice]

I've been in the proccess of desiging my own campaign world for the past year or so. I have maps, magic, alchemy, etc.... the problem is how to establish the economy in my world. I have no ideas how to base the cost of living, rate of taxation, cost for supplies, and individual coin value. to give a rough time frame, the setting is around 13th-14th century. I am not knowledged about ecomonics or anything similar. Any help would be greatly apprieciated.

[Barwickian]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

Given that you freely admit to being not particularly knowledgeable in the field, I'd be inclined to rip a price list off.

 

If you don't have a game one you like, try this one - a collection of English medieval prices and wages:

 

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html

 

Taxation is really tricky. If you're wanting to model a medieval economy, there's be nothing quite so simple as income tax (the closest thing would be the 10 per cent tithe to the church - but that didn't affect royal income). The English medieval economy had numerous small taxes, supplemented by court fines, gifts, aids, fees and many more.

 

If you're prepared to do the reading, there are lots of links on this site; otherwise I'd be inclined to sweep the tax issue under the carpet:

 

http://www.css.edu/users/dswenson/web/Medieval/medievalhome.html

 

Somewhat less user-friendly, but full of atmosphere, are the primary sources at the ORB (online reference book for medieval studies)

 

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1j.html

[Fenixcrest]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

I've been in the proccess of desiging my own campaign world for the past year or so. I have maps' date=' magic, alchemy, etc.... the problem is how to establish the economy in my world. I have no ideas how to base the cost of living, rate of taxation, cost for supplies, and individual coin value. to give a rough time frame, the setting is around 13th-14th century. I am not knowledged about ecomonics or anything similar. Any help would be greatly apprieciated.[/quote']

There's a couple of ways to do it, in my experience:

The first and easiest is to just rip off the one from D&D.

 

The second, and most potentially rewarding is to develop a formula along these lines:

Take the smallest unit of currency in your campaign area. We'll call it the CP.

Ask yourself: How many CP does the average laborer make per month? How high is the average laborer's standard of living? Based on that, how many of those CP are required per month for housing, food, entertainment, transportation, clothing, tools, and medicine/hygeine? Does he usually have any left over after that?

Who is likely to own a weapon? Does every average laborer own a weapon? Can he afford to buy and upkeep it without overextending his monthly CP? Do only guards, soldiers, and richer-than-laborers own proper weapons? Are there restrictions on who is allowed to own weapons? Are certain materials difficult to come by for some reason?

What are the local crops and animals? Is meat a common food, or a luxury reserved for the rich? How about liquor?

And so on. All based on the laboror's monthly CP, and moving up the social ranks from there.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

Generally I peg the campaign currency to real currency somehow. The standard I've pretty much settled on was swiped from Dangerous Journeys when it turned out to have nearly the same system I like but with a more comprehensive price list.

 

In this system a bronze piece is about equal to a modern dollar. A copper piece is five bp or $5, a silver piece is 20 bp, a gold piece is 1000 bp.

 

Now you have to look for some analogues. A cheap meal in the modern world runs about $5 at a fast food place, so buying meat-on-a-stick from a street vendor in your fantasy world would run about 1 cp. A nicer meal runs about $20, so 1 sp for the inn's meal of beef, bread, cheese, etc. An expensive meal can be $100 (depending of course on where you go), so the meal at a posh restaurant in the nobles' district would be about 5 sp.

 

Extend this to more abstract analogues by making modern firearms into fantasy world swords (an AR-15 runs about $800 every time I've priced one, so a well-made longsword would be 40 sp), modern cars into fantasy world beasts of burden (a used Chevette equivalent to an ass, a Hummer equivalent to a warhorse), etc.

 

Then, when your players, for some reason known only to them, want to buy a wheelbarrow, you can figure out how much a wheelbarrow costs ($40) and convert (8cp). Too easy.

 

Of course, this is actually just another tack to get to the same place as Fenixcrest....

[PhilFleischmann]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

In my FH game, I deliberately leave the economics vague. I don't keep strict track of how much money the players have or get from an encounter, nor do I require them to. I just know how rich the PCs are (not very), and what they could reasonably afford in the game. I want them to concentrate on fulfilling the quest and roleplying, not on accumulating treasure. I want the players to be heroes, not accountants.

 

A common laborer gets paid in copper. Skilled laborers, artisans, military in silver. Gold is almost exclusively for nobility. That's the whole system, almost.

[Old Man]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

Take whatever system you eventually end up with and don't use coins to represent it. Might add some spice to your campaign.

 

Lacquered wood, colored feathers, scales from rare fish or reptiles, strips of treated leather *shrug*

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

A lot of trade in worlds with fantasy-level technolgoy is done in barter. Contrary to what some mvoies would have us believe, the typical farmer or farm worker in meideval times never paid his taxes with money. Instead he paid them with labor (spend a set period of times working the lord's fields rather than your own, or take time off from farming to serve in the lord's levies during wartime) or in goods (Give the lord a portion of your crops). Tithes to the church were often paid the same way (give the first tenth of your crops to the local monastery tof eed the monks).

 

Selling a share of the crops was about the only time the faremr saw money, which he then used to pay for thinngs that he couldn't make himself or barter for directly. It's easier to give the blacksmith some coins to fix your plow than to figure out how much barley fixing your broken plow was worth. And a farmer never sold ALL of his crops, he alwasy kept some for himself to feed his family, not to mention store as seed corn for the next year.

 

for there to be much actual money circulating pretty much requires the presence of cities, urban economies, skilled trades and a powerful merchant class. Since these are all present in most fantasy worlds, you will find money in cirulation. Howveer, almost nobody will carry a fortune on their person iof they can possibl4y avoid it. the rich moneylender keeps a lot of coins in his counting house, but only enough to meet his immeidate needs. The rest he stores in a bank, where it accrues interest and is safe from robbers. the King may have a lot of gold coins in his basement, but usually that's where they stay -- they'll only move if the LKing needs to make a really big transaction, usually with another giovernment.

 

Many other things that we do today as monetary transactions might be in the form of mutual favors. we see it all the time in fiction -- "I will do X for you if you will do Y for me first". A person who deosn;t ahve tons of actual money might still be in a powerful enough positioon to grant very potent favors. Money would only be a side effect of that kind of power, not the source of the power itself.

 

There are innumerable forms of wealth. A powerful wizard may have little use for money but have other ways to recompense PCs for services rendered. (the classic example is from The Wizard of Oz, where the Wizard offers to perform a variety of services for Dorothy and her friends if they do a service for him first.)

[Betrayd by Dice]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

Captain Obvious.......

I like you're idea the best, but i have a question about one thing. How do i price something like, glass. Today you can buy panes of glass for a few dollars a piece. Back in this time period glass was rare, hard to produce, and very expensive. other rare things of the time period and similar products present me the same problem..... any ideas?? And thanks to everybody else as well!

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

There is a problem there, because sometimes it's easy to think too literally...glass is glass, right?

 

But, most people of that time period didn't use glass in their windows. They used oiled paper, at best, and usually just closed them with shutters if it was too cold to keep them open. Give oiled paper the same price you would for window glass in the modern day, and make fantasy-world-glass cost at least 10 times as much, or even more, if you really want to make it rare. For modern drinking glasses, the fantasy analogue would be wooden or earthenware cups. Drinking glasses in the fantasy world would be equivalent to fine crystal in the real world, and fantasy fine crystal would be some multiple of that.

 

This system can also be used in future worlds, too. For some reason, I just thought of some guidelines given in 4th Ed Cyber Hero, where it said most electronics in the cyber future would run about 10% of what they do in the modern day. A printer ran about $5, a desktop computer about $80, a laptop about $120. Of course, these computers didn't hold a candle to a real cyberdeck....

[Curufea]

Re: Establishing an economy

 

And to answer the question on how to find the value of historical items during historical time periods, there can only be one

Read some history....

 

I refer you to all the wonderful living history and re-enactment club websites, as well as the many full text resources online that are OCRs or scans of historical documents.