I was just whipping up a level 1 character who I wanted to equip with a journal, mostly for flavor-text purposes, so that she could write down her travels.
Imagine my pain at discovering a plain, ordinary journal costs 10 gp, and a vial of ink 8 gp!
I realize that literacy is not a universal thing in the world of Golarion, and that printing presses prooobably don't exist, save for possible gnomish experiments or in a few isolated incidents, but.... dang, seriously?
By the table of pricing, a night's stay at a 'good' in is two GP. So one ounce of ink costs quadruple the state of a night's lodging? O_o Obviously, mass production isn't a thing in Golarion, but to place that against modern prices would give me... say $60 USD for a night's stay at a decent hotel, and $240 for an ounce of ink.
To make this even stranger, I can buy an ounce of GLOWING ink for 5 GP-- less than the cost of regular ol' ink. Buh?
I'm aware this is a really minor detail, but as someone who likes to keep track of my in-character money down to the copper, it forces me to make a painful choice between buying things that may keep my character alive, like a vial of acid, and buying a fine, flavor-texty addition to my character-- a blank journal.
Were these costs by any chance mistyped in the materials? And if not, can I petition for cheaper versions? ;)
Ink and books both require a degree of skill to make. For good, permanent ink that has some resistance to fading (like your 8 gp example) takes a not inconsiderable amount of time to make as well. Until the advent of printing presses, there wasn't a demand for paper (as most documents were recorded upon parchment of vellum, which also is not cheap or easy to make in vast quantities). So skill + time involved = high price. If your GM is willing to reduce the cost of these items in exchange for less durable material, you might want to talk to them about that. Or skip the ink and have your character make charcoal from his campfire.
bookbinding is hard
just buy parchment instead
Were these costs by any chance mistyped in the materials? And if not, can I petition for cheaper versions? ;)
A regular vial of ink has been 8gp since at least 2nd edition AD&D. Its price isn't a type. A 100 page spellbook costs 15gp, while the 50 page journal costs 10gp. You could argue that the journal should cost 7.5gp, or the spellbook 20gp.
But I have to concede - that glowing-ink price is not right at all!
Unless the glowing ink is meant to be impermanent. Given its likely Underdark/Darklands origin, I would say that its lightfastness is...wanting.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
For real horror at the mind-blowing amount of wealth your character carries around, look at the wage for an average unskilled worker: 1 sp per day. At current US federal minimum wage, that's $58 per sp. So, that suit of full plate is about $870,000 and it only goes up from there.
Adventurers are the equivalent of rap stars driving gem-encrusted SUVs.
On one level, I get that in a faux-medieval setting, paper WAS rare and the product of a very specific and specialized set of skills.
However, fantasy worlds in general, and Golarion in specific, are not actually remotely realistic representations of a genuine medieval technology level.
Lincoln argues (correctly), that modern woodpulp is the result of specialized chemical treatments. Fair and good, but.... Golarion has magic, and Golarion has alchemists, and Golarion has multiple, huge academies of people (wizards) who do an awful lot of studying from vast libraries of books and scribing scrolls onto paper. There are spells in this universe specifically built for keeping books safe from elemental damage; does it not make sense that enterprising alchemists and others have put their efforts towards making more affordable paper and binding techniques, given that there is obviously a market for them in every temple and wizard's academy?
The setting has thousands of individuals capable of casting an effortless spell that transforms the colors of objects.
It's all well and good to advocate for 'a realistic historical price' of pigments and paper, but it seems to me to fly into direct contradiction of the logic of there being hundreds of things in the setting that are NOT bound by realistic historical prices.
For real horror at the mind-blowing amount of wealth your character carries around, look at the wage for an average unskilled worker: 1 sp per day. At current US federal minimum wage, that's $58 per sp. So, that suit of full plate is about $870,000 and it only goes up from there.
Adventurers are the equivalent of rap stars driving gem-encrusted SUVs.
Yeah, that has always made me laugh. At level 1, not a big deal, but as you get into the higher levels, it's basically like there are two Golarions: the Golarion in which the average person lives and breathes, and the Golarion that supports the adventurer economy, which is on a completely different scale. That masterwork item you guys casually sold for half-cost just because nobody in the party uses that weapon? The gold from that would feed a family for a year, etc, etc.
Hmm, I think Prestidigitation could scorch writing into paper (seems to be within the limits of the spell, imho). No ink needed then!
But Prestidigation only lasts an hour, right? So for purposes of creating a long-term record.... heh.
Hahahah, yeah. I'm playing in an 'ordinary townspeoeple become adventurers' campaign right now, and my character was supposed to take 145 gp worth of loot after defeating the raiders. I'm like..... she has literally no comprehension how much gold that is, it's a non-fathomable amount of wealth to her, heh. She just gave it away. I guess that makes her the Socialist Good alignment. ;)
I realize that literacy is not a universal thing in the world of Golarion, and that printing presses prooobably don't exist, save for possible gnomish experiments or in a few isolated incidents, but.... dang, seriously?
Actually, there are printing presses in Absalom, Nex, and Qadira. Andoran, Cheliax, Galt, and Nex even have movable-type presses!
Printing presses specifically cannot be used to create scrolls or spellbooks, but otherwise can be used for mass distribution of information.
In that case, if there ARE printing presses, then my original point about journals being overpriced stands, in my opinion. :P
I thought I had remembered something about the Pathfinder Chronicles being printed, but I could be wrong about that.
You might want to consider checking out the pricing from Spellbooks and Scrolls Variant Rule. I spent a lot of time back calculating the per page cost of ink and pages and figuring where the various material types fit in. Writing materials are still pricey (since they are meant for spellbooks in this case), but it may give you a starting point and you can also make some pretty blingy and highly protected journals with these rules.
Interesting reading! I'll look through it, although the goal here is not really to make a blingy journal, just a personal diary for a character's non-magical observations, hee. Thanks for the link, though!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Socialist Good alignment? Isn't that, like, Chaotic Lawful or something? :D
For real horror at the mind-blowing amount of wealth your character carries around, look at the wage for an average unskilled worker: 1 sp per day. At current US federal minimum wage, that's $58 per sp. So, that suit of full plate is about $870,000 and it only goes up from there.
Adventurers are the equivalent of rap stars driving gem-encrusted SUVs.
The problem with this is that the modern, largely urbanized, economy is very different from the agricultural economy in a D&D game. This is tied to the reason money was invented in the first place - to make trade easier and avoid the coincidence of wants.
Consider a druid hermit far from any settlement. He has essentially 0 need for money. His living standard is completely independent of that. A farmer isn't as independent, but he still lives largely off his own land and products. He needs some money, but not much. In a city, people are highly specialized, and can't survive without trading with others. The greater the need for trade to survive, the greater the need for money. That silver piece, then, actually represents a lot more than the minimum wage in an agrarian society, which is what most of Golarion is.
For real horror at the mind-blowing amount of wealth your character carries around, look at the wage for an average unskilled worker: 1 sp per day. At current US federal minimum wage, that's $58 per sp. So, that suit of full plate is about $870,000 and it only goes up from there.
Adventurers are the equivalent of rap stars driving gem-encrusted SUVs.
I think the 1 sp per day is the unskilled worker's profit, or at least it was in D&D 3.X - I recall something about peasants at least owning their own house and feeding themselves from their garden, or that unskilled labor still usually comes with room and board (i.e. workhouse conditions).
I back-of-the-enveloped this a while ago, and I came to a conclusion closer to 1 sp = $5. Which still makes Full Plate unfathomably expensive to your average joe. Just luxury car, not gem-encrusted luxury car.
Well, untill you get it literally gem encrusted or magicked up. Or both.
Thousands out of a population of Millions is still 0.1% - and PF magic is a far cry from 24-7 industrialization and mass production. The prices work fine.
...That masterwork item you guys casually sold for half-cost just because nobody in the party uses that weapon? The gold from that would feed a family for a year, etc, etc.Hah! Good point! See, this is why "Socialist Good" never took off as a popular alignment choice...
Barbarian: "We sell all the jewels and stuff that the bandits stole from the locals for the past three years, and give the money back to them!"
GM: "What, the bandits?"
Witch: "No, the locals! I'd love to buy a new 3rd-level spell, but that money could clothe an awful lot of impoverished children this winter!"
Rogue: "Hey, everybody - let's go help our NPC friends raise a barn!"
(general cheers from the players)(sniff) Instead they squabble over who gets to cut open Lord Vilefiend to see if he swallowed any jewels. What a world... what a world.
Huh. In all the games I've ever played in or run, Good aligned characters have always given hundreds and hundreds of gold pieces to charities and the poor and the common people who help them. That was always just the way Good people acted; Good. We would always give quite a bit of our money to the poor, sometimes as much as a quarter of whatever we got from a particular adventure.
In the game I ran just yesterday night, the very first thing the PCs did during the session was donate 3 mithril daggers and 2 mithril longswords they had acquired to the local Ranger outpost, who patrol to defend against Hobgoblin raids. A few sessions earlier they had donated 4 masterwork longswords to a different outpost. At the end of the session, they gave 1/5 of the money they had won in that adventure to the local poor, street urchins, and the local Monk temple who had lent them a hand. Several hundred gold pieces.
We just figured it was just part of having a Good alignment.
Yeah, my players are always donating the minor magic weapons, the lesser coinage...currently lesser = silver and under...exectera to the locals around them.
Charities, orphanages, good hearted local leaders...you name it. They always have a pretty good rep with the locals.
I had this issue when I was doing worldbuilding.
The fairly oppressive quasi-feudal society uses prices as written and does have a crazy wealth inequality that figures into the plot.
Other societies operate on barter, credit, or moneyless economies based on their level of advancement and how firmly their alignment is cemented into their racial makeup.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When I play good characters I tend to have them donate/help out wherever they can, but it seems that often as not I'm adventuring with parties that lean strongly towards neutral.
My paladin funded his own Home for Wayward Young Women In Need of New Careers, though. And was constantly undermined by the rest of the party trying to convince the girls to give them discounted, ah, services.
I'm running a campaign with a mostly CN party (with one CG and one CE), and the last big hull they got (spoils from the bandits they captured), they only kept maybe a half-dozen magic items (mostly +1 resistance cloaks and some potions, and a +1 armor). They turned everything else back over to the mayor and the village council. It actually surprised me, considering they turned over like a dozen masterwork weapons among the spoils. They did keep the most valuable things (+1 fullplate and four +1 cloaks of resistance, and the CE beastbrood tiefling kept all the non-magical jewelry), and they collected a 1,000 gp bounty that was offered on one of the bandits, but they did turn back over to the town at least 2,000 gp worth of other lesser materials, including multiple masterwork simple and martial weapons, and a few paintings worth almost 500 gp.
I was surprised. While they did torture the bandits to find-out where the hoard was hidden, they didn't kill anyone and even let one of the bandits go (with only a traveler's outfit so make him decent) after he swore he'd never come back to the region. He showed them where the bandit's hoard was, and pointed out the traps he knew about, and begged them to let him go and he'd return to Cheliax, so they let him go with a warning that they would kill him if they saw him again.
After they went to all the trouble of torturing the bandit NPCs for the location of the treasure, they turned around and gave all but the most valuable items to the village.
Anyway, my thought is go ahead and buy the book and ink at the set price unless you think you're going to be out of town very soon after the adventure start and not to be returning. Soon enough you'll have the gold, and the campaign knowledge, to fill-in any perceived gaps in gear.
|
Books are pricey. If your GM won't let you have a discount/free journal as an RP tool (gift from parents when leaving home?) then you could always make do with a bit of parchment and maybe charcoal for first level and having your character excitedly purchase a proper journal once he/she saves up enough money. By level 2, 18gp for RP isn't bad.
On donations, I've also seen good-aligned PCs making significant donations or otherwise performing large amounts of community service - one group easily spent a total 50,000-100,000 gold on improvements to our home settlement, everything from ballistae for the wall to a dedicated hospital. On the other hand, if good-aligned PCs are fighting serious evil threats, they have to weigh the utility of donating their gold to end hunger in their community, versus spending it on gear to make sure they can stop the ancient dragon / demon army / master lich from destroying everything.
If you have it as a cantrip from a class, then you can cast it as much as you want, however. Since it allows all effects during its duration, I'd imagine you'd pretty much have it active all the time anyhow.
While you're sleeping?
Today's gold price is $41.57 per gram; 453.592 grams per pound; $18855.81944 for pound of gold; 50gp per pound of gold;
1gp = $377.1163888
That's a lot of dollars for 1gp what will buy you 50ft of hemp rope...
Clearly gold is more plentiful/less valuable in PF.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Lois Griffin: Hey everybody. Wait til you see this.
Peter Griffin: Oh my God! Movable printed type. We must keep this from the serfs, lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry.
Serf: What have you got there, my lord?
Peter Griffin: Nothing! Back to your turnips!
Thousands out of a population of Millions is still 0.1% - and PF magic is a far cry from 24-7 industrialization and mass production. The prices work fine.
Couldn't agree more!
|
....instead of Books you could do what they did in the olden times: Sticks!!
Now I don't mean a straight piece of wood, I'm talking the Ezekiel 37:15-17......I've lost y'all haven't I?
here's what I'm talking about. In the olden times instead of books they would get small wooden frames and fill them with wax. They would then use a stylus to write on the wax what they needed to and the use hinges or other such things in order to close them and hold a bunch of sticks together
interesting, eh?
Today's gold price is $41.57 per gram; 453.592 grams per pound; $18855.81944 for pound of gold; 50gp per pound of gold;
1gp = $377.1163888
That's a lot of dollars for 1gp what will buy you 50ft of hemp rope...
Rope was pretty expensive when it had to be braided by hand. Also, to a certain extent it was like glass in that the people who knew how to make it kept the manufacture process a secret to drive their price up.
|
|
....instead of books they would get small wooden frames and fill them with wax. They would then use a stylus to write on the wax what they needed to and the use hinges or other such things in order to close them and hold a bunch of sticks together...The Inca used quipu, a sort of Morse code for string (no, really). The type and location of knots on a cord, together with various markers, was used for record-keeping & such. Quipu have appeared in AD&D's The Sea Devils as the ocean-dwelling sahuagins' equivalent to writing - which makes sense when you think about the difficulties paper, and ink, and applying ink to paper while you're underwater. I've stolen that notion for almost all aquatic races in my setting (for regular texts, not spellbooks.) After some deliberation I decided that comprehend languages works on a quipu, since it's still a communication form.
There's also what the Chinese did, writing on lengths of reed and tying them together into a large fan-like codex
...of course the reason why sticks and reed-codices worked was due too how much could be written with their respective languages (sticks where written in Hebrew or Reformed Egyptian) with very few character or actual writing.
|
|
If you have it as a cantrip from a class, then you can cast it as much as you want, however. Since it allows all effects during its duration, I'd imagine you'd pretty much have it active all the time anyhow.While you're sleeping?I misunderstood you. I thought you were complaining about writing speed.
Prestidigitation can make permanent changes "Any actual change to an object (beyond just moving, cleaning, or soiling it) persists only 1 hour." I think scorching or even inking/staining a page is in the realm of a kind of soiling. And that would last indefinitely.
That was my first post, so you didn't misunderstand me, you misunderstood another poster and then I misunderstood you. I thought you were suggesting keeping Prestidigitation cast constantly in order to keep the writing in effect (which I don't think would work anyway since the effect should wear off when the first casting does). I don't know if I'd consider careful marks to be "soiling" and therefore permanent - the term to me indicates a more general "magically dunk this object in mud" effect. So I don't think I'd allow permanent writing with prestidigitation. But your interpretation isn't unreasonable.
That was my first post, so you didn't misunderstand me, you misunderstood another poster and then I misunderstood you. I thought you were suggesting keeping Prestidigitation cast constantly in order to keep the writing in effect (which I don't think would work anyway since the effect should wear off when the first casting does). I don't know if I'd consider careful marks to be "soiling" and therefore permanent - the term to me indicates a more general "magically dunk this object in mud" effect. So I don't think I'd allow permanent writing with prestidigitation. But your interpretation isn't unreasonable.If you have it as a cantrip from a class, then you can cast it as much as you want, however. Since it allows all effects during its duration, I'd imagine you'd pretty much have it active all the time anyhow.While you're sleeping?I misunderstood you. I thought you were complaining about writing speed.
Prestidigitation can make permanent changes "Any actual change to an object (beyond just moving, cleaning, or soiling it) persists only 1 hour." I think scorching or even inking/staining a page is in the realm of a kind of soiling. And that would last indefinitely.
You could use Prestidigitation to impress charcoal dust onto a surface, doing nothing more than "soiling" the medium and therefore remaining permanent. You could use coal dust, dirt, watery mud, or chalk dust, or use a mixture of all of them to create a "Prestidigitation Ink" - or just use actual ink, if you weren't concerned with the price, which I realize was the initial point of this thread. A nice, handy, minor automatic writing system.
I would also easily allow Prestidigitation to scorch or otherwise mark text unto paper, wood, or another easily markable medium, and consider that a pretty clever use of the spell. It's not gaining any actual advantage, but it is a rather cool visual effect, and isn't that the entire point of that spell, anyway? I've had several characters who routinely used Prestidigitation to keep their hairstyles in perfect shape, and their clothes always spotless, or to create temporary cups and eating utensils of glowing magical force, just to look impressive in front of the local village people. All of the mages I play have a Prestidigitation spell continuously active, recasting it as necessary, just to be able to create cool looking, non-combat effects.
(I even had one character create a magical hair clip which emanated a permanently active Prestidigitation effect to keep his hair always perfect, clean and shiny.)
Of course, the act of affixing a writing substance to the surface medium through Prestidigitation, by scorching it, embedding ink, dust, or another material into it, or otherwise marking it, would probably be no less mentally taxing than physically writing, nor really be any faster, or give any other kind of real benefit, but DAMN; it would sure look cool, and impress the villagers.
I was just whipping up a level 1 character who I wanted to equip with a journal, mostly for flavor-text purposes, so that she could write down her travels.
Imagine my pain at discovering a plain, ordinary journal costs 10 gp, and a vial of ink 8 gp!
I realize that literacy is not a universal thing in the world of Golarion, and that printing presses prooobably don't exist, save for possible gnomish experiments or in a few isolated incidents, but.... dang, seriously?
Actually printing presses are noted to exist in Golarion, specifically.
By the table of pricing, a night's stay at a 'good' in is two GP. So one ounce of ink costs quadruple the state of a night's lodging? O_o Obviously, mass production isn't a thing in Golarion, but to place that against modern prices would give me... say $60 USD for a night's stay at a decent hotel, and $240 for an ounce of ink.
To make this even stranger, I can buy an ounce of GLOWING ink for 5 GP-- less than the cost of regular ol' ink. Buh?
I'm aware this is a really minor detail, but as someone who likes to keep track of my in-character money down to the copper, it forces me to make a painful choice between buying things that may keep my character alive, like a vial of acid, and buying a fine, flavor-texty addition to my character-- a blank journal.
Were these costs by any chance mistyped in the materials? And if not, can I petition for cheaper versions? ;)
Use charcoal instead. Charcoal is made by burning wood indirectly. You can do it on your campfire when you're are adventuring, all you need is a small iron pot to stuff the charcoal in, then you just let it heat overnight. 20 lbs. of firewood is 1 copper pieces. This means that you can make huge amounts of charcoal to write with (charcoal is also extremely light, which means even 1 lb. of it would give you more charcoal than you'd likely use).
Today's gold price is $41.57 per gram; 453.592 grams per pound; $18855.81944 for pound of gold; 50gp per pound of gold;
1gp = $377.1163888
That's a lot of dollars for 1gp what will buy you 50ft of hemp rope...
I'd actually imagine that the coinage is more of a gold alloy, mixing other metals along with gold.
I'd actually imagine that the coinage is more of a gold alloy, mixing other metals along with gold.Today's gold price is $41.57 per gram; 453.592 grams per pound; $18855.81944 for pound of gold; 50gp per pound of gold;
1gp = $377.1163888
That's a lot of dollars for 1gp what will buy you 50ft of hemp rope...
Gold coins are likely extremely small. A typical 1 lb. gold bar is about 1.65354 inches long, 0.944882 inches wide, and 1.25984 inches deep. You then make 50 coins out of these bars that are roughly 1.5 x 1.5 x 1 inches in size.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Journals for 10 gp? What is this newfangled nonsense! I remember when we had to buy blank spellbooks for 15 gp to use as journals!
And any infernal contracteur will tell you that blood is perfectly serviceable as ink, and much, much cheaper. (Especially if it's not your own. Any adventurer worth his ten foot pole is probably hip deep in the stuff, on any given day.)
Journals for 10 gp? What is this newfangled nonsense! I remember when we had to buy blank spellbooks for 15 gp to use as journals!
And any infernal contracteur will tell you that blood is perfectly serviceable as ink, and much, much cheaper. (Especially if it's not your own. Any adventurer worth his ten foot pole is probably hip deep in the stuff, on any given day.)
Bah, blood fades too easily for journals. This fading is a feature for contracts, such a joy to whip out the gem of true seeing and point out the extra clauses in the margins which have faded.
Why bother when so much of Golarian is against literacy to begin with?
I was just whipping up a level 1 character who I wanted to equip with a journal, mostly for flavor-text purposes, so that she could write down her travels.
Imagine my pain at discovering a plain, ordinary journal costs 10 gp, and a vial of ink 8 gp!
I realize that literacy is not a universal thing in the world of Golarion, and that printing presses prooobably don't exist, save for possible gnomish experiments or in a few isolated incidents, but.... dang, seriously?
By the table of pricing, a night's stay at a 'good' in is two GP. So one ounce of ink costs quadruple the state of a night's lodging? O_o
Hewlett-Packard's reach extends beyond the planes.