I just did some math (which is arguably worse than meth). Before you get your arithmetic boners twisted, note that I did round up all the numbersand that I may or may not have sucked at math back in High School.
In D&D, average unskilled laborer (AUL) gets a single gold piece per month.
Using this site ( http://eh.net/database/unskilled-wage-index-u-s/ ) we can see that current (2008) AUL has the monthly wage of 1425$. So let's say 1gp = 1425$.
By using this list ( http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/top-10-people-with-the-highest-salaries-in-the-world/?view=all ) we can say that average monthly income of Tim Cook, CEO and Business Exec. of Apple, is 31,499,711$.
That would mean the highest paid person in our world would get 22105gp per month.
JUST 22105gp.
How does this make you feel? And to all you PCs only motivated by wealth, why didn't you fuck off after the first dungeon crawl?
I hold that gold is actually worthless in my game, and has a value determined completely by guild fiat.
Or that 'gold piece' is actually paper money with a PICTURE of a gold piece on it.
>>45880788
What your autistic mind is ignoring is that prices in D&D are for game balance and are not a reflection of reality. Everyone who's not you has already figured this out.
>>45880852
Not my current GM. I just did this calculation to prove a point that such thinking is fantastical in more ways than one.
>>45880788
>Actual
>2008
Pick one.
And I haven't even mentioned how comparing D&D and modern economics is pretty much stupid.
>>45880788
>And to all you PCs only motivated by wealth, why didn't you fuck off after the first dungeon crawl?
The motivation for even more power. Fighting Men don't get castles just by doing one raid on some ruins. Wizards don't get towers just from slaying a single bandit camp.
It's also worth noting that D&D implies a world in decline, or even post-apocalypse. This is why there's so much wealth just laying around in monster lairs.
>>45880987
I found one site that gave AUL hourly wages from 2015 but when I refreshed it I lost the numbers so I just went with pre-calculated annual wage.
>And I haven't even mentioned how comparing D&D and modern economics is pretty much stupid.
That is my point exactly. I am proving my GM wrong for making tavern owner lose his shit in excitement when I left a single gold piece as tip.
>>45881057
A months wage in a single tip would excite most people.
>>45880788
>1% of adventurers loot 99% of dungeons
Occupy Guild Street when.
>>45881119
Of course you'd quickly get hyperinflation from adventurers dumping their loot. It would be like a gold rush town where everything cost 10x as much because people could afford it.
Clever locals may also charge more than they would a resident when rich travellers come to town.
These are all good explanations that save verisimilitude but it's really for game balance. And that's fine.
DnD economy doesn't stack up! More at 11
>>45881057
3.5 PHB, table 7-3 Trade Goods, page 112.
1 gp gets you your choice of = a goat, a whole pound of cinnamon, 100 pounds of wheat, 50 pounds of flour, 50 chickens, 10 pounds of iron, 2 pounds of tobacco.
Yes, your GM is really right going by the established prices, unless they've changed them significantly in whatever ed you're playing. D&D economy is all sorts of retarded.
>>45880788
>How does this make you feel?
Depressed that you can't even see the gaping holes in the logic that whatever argument you're trying to make is predicated upon.
>>45880788
This is silly for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that it assumes that unskilled labor is equally well off in D&D as in contemporary US society. How would your figures change if used Afghanistan as a basis? Well according to what I could find with some quick internet research, the GDP per capita in Afghanistan is somewhere around $60 US dollars a month. But that figure includes the rich as well as the poor (so in D&D terms, you'd be lumping adventurers and kings in with the peasants). So let's take a half of that to represent the pay of unskilled workers and we come up with $30 a month, which means that Tim Cook would be making upwards of 1 million gp a month.
Of course using any sort of modern standard is rather silly, but that at least should be a bit closer to what we want. Also, even your figures have Tim Cook making more than 260 thousand gold pieces a year, which is still a fuckload. And chances are good that the unskilled laborer in D&D doesn't have to pay for housing or taxes, so that gold piece doesn't really represent the same thing as gross wages.
>>45880788
>JUST 22105gp.
According to your math, Tim's earns in a year wealth equivalent to 16th level adventurer's whole savings.
(And off the scale for NPCs)
That's pretty serious amount of gold there.
>>45882225
Oh and on that note, his net worth is 785 million; moving to gp that's 550 thousands.
That's between 18 and 19 level.
>>45881902
Well I'd say that his selection of criteria is ok.
1gp is for an average guy in regular good kingdom.
If you want to take zimbabwe peasants, they're more like slaves in your local setting's Mordor than anything else.
>>45880788
Based don Rosa
>>45880788
You need to measure by what a gold piece can buy in D&D, rather than what its worth in our world.
A single gold piece can buy one dagger. How much can you buy a dagger for now? $20?
>>45882973
>rather than what its worth in our world.
But they didn't do that.
They measured by the line of "what kind of a guy earns this much".
>>45880842
The only way adventurers could reasonably travel around and pay with several hundreds, if not thousands, pieces of gold coins at a single time would be if they used bank notes. Just assume that whatever treasures they find are instantly deposited at the local bank, perhaps taverns in your world double as banks as well, which then hands the PCs a receit that can be exchanged for the same amount of gold coins at any other bank and is therefore treated as and traded with instead of gold.
>>45880788
a copper would be worth $14.... Try harder and make a more realistic price based off of the trade goods.
If you put me to it, I would say a copper is 50 cents, a silver is $5, and the gold of course is $50.
Alternatively, currency is pegged to a weight. For instance, a single gold piece= the current worth of 1oz gold, etc. Like denarii, talents, shekels, deben.
Or, like Venetian ducats, there could be an internationally accepted currency with an arbitrary value dictated by the central mint of a state.
>>45881131
>Occupy Guild Street
Legit kek'd.
>>45880788
Based on 1gp per dagger, and a random handmade dagger that cost 88.20$, I got 357,1340 gp as Tim Cooks yearly D&D income.
>>45880788
In which D&D? Because in Pathfinder, 3.5, 4e, and 5e you're wrong.
Pathfinder and 3.5 both have unskilled Laborers earning 3 gp a month (with 1 sp a day), 4e ignores the idea entirely, and 5e says the pay for unskilled laborers is 2 sp a day, so assuming that's slightly inflated for adventurers, and employment might not be consistent, they likely average around 1 sp a day for the same 3 gp estimate.
So, already, you're operating at 33% of correct capacity.
Now, I can't be certain, since I have trouble parsing exactly what that index you used is, but it's not hard for me to do the math on my own.
Because modern workers in entry level unskilled positions AREN'T often given full time positions, because that would require the business to provide benefits. It's more like the person would only get 20 hours a week at one job, and 20 somewhere else.
Discounting the necessary losses that transit would require, and assuming that this represents a 1:1 relationship (I would more likely assume that a single 20 hour a week job represented the type of minimum being discussed, but that's just me.)
Then the ACTUAL end number is 61,296 gp a month.
Further, your claim of "JUST 22,105 gp" is rather facetious. 22,000 a month is 264,000 a year. In 3.5, no character is expected to have a TOTAL wealth of 264,000 gold pieces until level 16.
So the richest person in the world, by your 1/3 of correct calculations, is making as much a year as a level 16 character has accumulated in their entire lifetime. At level 20, they've accumulated triple this value, which is the ACTUAL end value.
So the richest person in our world makes as much in a year as D&D expects a level 20 adventurer to have made in their entire career.
>>45884269
Whoops, used an inaccurate phrase in my last line.
"Highest salaried person in our world".
I'm certain there are richer people than Tim Cook.
>>45884213
Sorry, monthly.
Since when were all coins minted out of pure gold or silver?
>>45880788
Why are you assuming that inequality is proportionally the same in our world and the game world?
There is no equivalent of the Apple CEO in most fantasy RPGs.
>>45882323
Modern technological society with minimum wage and socialized programs (yes, in America) isn't really a very good equivalent to a medieval-ish society. Also, the US isn't an average country by any means. It ranks somewhere around 10th in the world in GDP per capita, and most of the countries that beat it are tiny little nations like Qatar, Singapore and Brunei. If you want an average country in terms of GDP per capita, you're looking at somewhere like Peru, Egypt or Indonesia. But again, a modern nation state isn't going to bear much resemblance to a medieval-ish kingdom.
Why don't you find the average wage in other countries.
One factor is that Minimum wage laws change how much average unskilled laborers make in the world.
>>45884726
Check the trade goods prices.
1 gold coin = 1/50 of a pound
1 pound of gold = worth 50 gp
In D&D, gold coins are literally 100% gold.
>>45880788
99% of the World's gold reserves were minted by long-forgotten civilizations or hoarded by dragons.
One of the main drivers for the funding of Adventuring Expeditions is the promise of actual gold to prop up your nation's/city's/whatever's currency.
>>45880788
This math is deeply flawed. In preindustrial economies the cost of goods and materials is proportionally much higher than it is today where human labor is by far the biggest expense that goes into most things. See something like this: http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html
A CEO in preindustrial times is barely a position that could exist and their pay would not be in the same proportion to a modern day unskilled laborer because they wouldn't provide the same proportional value.
>>45880788
>implying the average real income of a medieval peasant is the same as the average real income of the average modern-day person
