The Campaign Builder's Guild

My setting takes many inspirations from Anglo-Saxon England, especially in the form of war gear and social hierarchy.  However, instead of being a direct copy-paste job, I made a few changes here and there, including a growing industrial and urban base.  I have found a thesis that expresses the cost of certain pieces of war gear c1294-1339, and I'm considering using it as a basis for making the price list of equipment for my adventurers.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040622001514/medievalhistory.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/

From what I recall, a wage worker (who cleared fields and did the regular grunt work tasts) in the same period made ~3 pence a day (though not paid daily, more like weekly).  According to Randal Storey (who wrote that thesis), the most expensive hauberk of maille he found was 264 pence, or 122 days of "pay" for these wage workers.  At the cheapest, it's only 20 days pay (60 pence, probably from records directly after a major battle).  Average is 46 days pay.

In vanilla DnD, the same kind of worker gets a silver piece a day.  Armor of the same class, simply called "chain mail" in the PHB, runs 150GP -- 1500 of these silver pieces.  This means the same kind of armor is just over four years worth of work.  Note that in the 8th century, most people could survive on one "Solidi" worth of income a year (as most people would have been growing their own food and had the skills to make their own stuff), and a coat of maille could cost 33 Solidi -- 33 years "worth" of income.

Subsequently, an "adjusted" set of "chain mail" should cost 122 silver coins (264 pence at 3 pence to the silver) at the most; this is 8% of the original maximum cost.

Other factors, like availability, come into play.  Not often does one sell maille coats directly to the public, as few people have reason to buy them.  Armories and professional soldiers (knights and the like) make far more regular customers, though they make up a small portion of the population (rarely does any one lord have just one of a particular item in his arsenal when we inventory them).  This is likely solved by simple yes/no tables; most towns wouldn't have maille makers who sell to you unless you custom order it; all their goods manufactured are probably being shipped directly to already paying customers.

So what do you all think about using these reduced costs?

M.

In reality, it shouldn't matter except that you'll be able to afford all mundane equipment at first level rather than second level.

The main problem with D&D economics, in my opinion, is that there is such a major break between the 'regular' economy that the majority of the world deals with, and the adventurer economy that sees payments of a thousand gold pieces, twenty-seven years of work's worth, as a regular, trivial matter. Not to mention the ridiculously high price of things that are in both of these categories, such as real estate, some services, and titles.

Kudos to you on trying to recitfy bits of it, but I suggest you also drop the price of everything else accordingly (including magic).