Sifting from the Stream of Knowledge

A simple price-setting benchmark

I was listening to last week's Readings and Reflections podcast for the Hero Tier Sly Flourish Patrons, where Mike Shea was reading a chapter on Lazy World Building from his new book Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster (Aside: there is a KSer going on, it is fantastic - full of tons of great ideas and advice; check out the free preview to see if you might like it!). As he often does, Mike reminds us to keep our world building from getting too detailed or too complicated, and to focus on some simple foundations that will help us improvise at the table. One aspect of the advice that caught my attention was the section on economics: rather than having a complex economic system, when you're deciding how expensive something should be just use a simple benchmark like the daily income of a skilled laborer.

I absolutely agree about having something simple and intuitive to use as a benchmark for deciding on economic facts, like prices (like the Lazy Encounter Benchmark for gauging encounter difficulty). I certainly don't want to have to use a big spreadsheet to figure out how much something should cost (even though I love spreadsheets!). However, I don't find the daily wage number very helpful. The 5e DMG says that a skilled laborer earns 2gp per day. I can easily remember that number, but it doesn't help me very much for deciding how much it should cost for something I need to come up with on the spot (like how much it should cost my Eberron party to get front row seats to the Mayor of Sharn's speech). "A day's wage for a skilled laborer" isn't the kind of monetary value that I come across very much in my daily life.

So, I decided to use that 2gp per day number as a starting point, but map that onto a few typical purchases in our modern economy, to have something that better fits my experiences that I can reason and extrapolate from. Step one is to have a good current dollar approximation for "daily wage of a skilled laborer". I'm a nerdy economist, so I looked up BLS data on the average annual wages for various skilled labor job categories (e.g. plumber, electrician, different kinds of mechanics, welder, carpenter, machinist, bric kmason, etc.). They're all generally landing in the $60K-$70K per year range. With say 250 working days per year, that's approximately $250 per day. So that gives us a conversion rate of 1gp ~= $125.

If we think about a handful of reference purchases, we could consider:

Let's see if this seems reasonable. 10-20gp is the cost range for most weapons, an arcane focus, or most tool sets. So "a nice or really nice laptop" feels right - the tools to do your job, which are a feasible expense but a non-trivial cost if you need to replace one. A warhorse or a breastplate costs about the same as a new car - a pretty big expense, but something you can manage as a necessity of work. Plate armor costs 1500gp, which is "halfway to buying a house" - that also feels right as something you'd really need to save up for, and definitely wouldn't want to do more then once in a handful of years. If something new comes up, I can imagine asking myself "is this more like buying a laptop, buying a car, or buying a house?" It is grounded in that daily wage number, but turned into something more familiar.

If we make this into rounder numbers, we can call this our Simple Price-Setting Benchmark: