But we are not talking the average blacksmith. We are talking the average farmer which is a level 2 Commoner who has an about +9 modifier (Lets be kind and add a +1 Trait mod for the sake of rounding. I tend to give NPCs a single trait anyway).
Thats a 2 GP every day he works. Assuming hes lazy and works only 5 days a week.
Thats 10 GP a week. 40 a month. 480 a year. - 100 GP a year for 3 poor meals a day, thats 380 GP to spend on leftovers.
Buying a single farmland would require 15 goods and labor. Thats about 300 GP.
It can even cost less as the book says:
"At the GM's discretion, you might discover a plot of available land that automatically counts as a Farmland at no cost."
So hey.
Now we earn a extra 1 GP per day. Thats 15 a week. 60 a Month. 720 a year. - the 100 fee thats 620 (Add the extra 80 and thats 700). OK then now we can buy TWO extra farmland.
Thats 5 GP a Day. 25 a Week. 100 a month. 1,200 a year.
See how the ball rolls?
Edit: for the sake of fun lets continue this.
From that we now have 1,300 Total GP. Then we can spend on 4 extra farmland (We now have 7).
9 GP a day, 45 a week, 180 a week. 2160 a year. Holy crap. This was only after about 4 years. After about 20 we can be making SO MUCH. And this was in YEARLY chunks. If we split it too max efficiency we can result in enough to become magical empire barons!
I wasn't arguing with you, I was presenting another example of how peasants aren't poor. Or at least as poor as people think. Unskilled laborers are screwed, mind you.
This also proves a comforting truth that most likely farmers a nit quite poor as not too afford some magic items. The common farmer may have a wand or two.
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Modern wheat production is considerably better than pre-commercial fertilizer yields.Magic like plant growth makes tech look silly.Enriching the fields via magic gets you 150% the yield.
Enriching via fertilizer, modern plant strains, pesticides, and irrigation gets you something closer to 600-700% yields over pre-industrial farmers.
And
Dead a few hundred years, and the NPC is probably richer than a farmer iIs today. If an NPC or PC wanted to research a better spell it could be discovered much faster than modern science and genetic knowledge / labs.
In fact thinking about it, low taxes would be about 10%. So the average farmer (with 25 acres who earns 6,000 a year) gives us 600 GP per year or 50 per month.
So you need about 80 decent farmers for a Build point/ per month.
1st ed AD&D DM if I recall correctly. If not there in some number of Dragon. They are both in a box in the basement, so I will not check.Make that thirty odd years. Gygax modeled D&D economy on that of the gold rush boom towns.Hey, the wealth rules don't work in a 3.x variant. That's unbelievable! I mean, it's been true for 13 years, but still! Unbelievable!(in my head as i read this)
ha ha that's ..... 13 years..... god i am oldMaybe, though I don't remember a source for that.
But the model skipped the important part. It's not dynamic. Prices are fixed. They don't change when the adventurer brings in a dragon hoard. They don't change from one region to another.
Sigh, yours are a lot closer to you than mine are to me. I had to put most of the old stuff in storage - too small an apartment to keep it handy.
:(
The best analog I've been able to find for money has actually be in dollars at $1 = 1 CP, $10 = 10 SP, $100 = 1 GP, etc.
This fits pretty well for my purposes. I came to this conclusion not based on the market value of items but based on services such as meals, lodging, etc. It's not perfect but it's much more usable than any other conversion or analog I've ever seen proposed for it (as most are based off things like the value of gold, whereas I've based it off the value of common living expenses and the like).
My group also finds this acceptable and they feel it really puts a lot of things into perspective for them.
People in D&D aren't generally poor however, unless you want to make them poor. Everyone has the option to take 10 on Profession or Craft checks, which means the average untrained laborer makes 5 gp per week, or 20 gp a month (even someone with a 3 in both Int AND Wis can make 3 gp per week). Paying your way is relatively easy, but not getting eaten by whatever is the BBEG this week is less easy. :P
I think that perhaps the costs listed in the Campaign book were thinking only of PCs and adventurers, creating a weird disconnect from verisimilitude (OR perhaps they just didn't get the measurements right). Alternatively, perhaps they are assuming that wheat is not the primary means of business and food for said farmers.
Waaaaayyyyyyy back when White Dwarf magazine included D&D articles, they had an article discussing economics based on the cost of a beer. After all, a laborer who works hard for his money is going to expect to be able to buy a beer at lunch or the end of the day.
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I ran the math for a 1st level Expert Blacksmith (1 Rank, INT12, Skill Focus = Take 10 to get 18, 20 once he buys masterwork tools). In a little over a year (Average upkeep of 10gp/month, Earning 10gp/week), he can afford to earn the capital to buy a Smithy in a little over a year (less if he doesn't save most of his money). Then he jumps to a weekly income of 17gp/week. It will take him longer if he wants a house attached to his Smithy. Assuming a bit of discretionary spending and the want for a house + smithy, he probably works for 3-4 years as a journeyman blacksmith before setting up his own business.
For what it is worth, in my campaing, I go with the assumption that the NPCs manage to gain experience points just for surviving life's little surprises. Most folk are about 3rd or 4th level by the time they are ready to get married, and might make it up to 8th or even as high as 9th(!) by the time they retire and/or die of old age. Of course, they are still only commoners or maybe experts (much less common...) but at least they have those few levels.
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I ran the math for a 1st level Expert BlacksmithFor what it is worth, in my campaing, I go with the assumption that the NPCs manage to gain experience points just for surviving life's little surprises. Most folk are about 3rd or 4th level by the time they are ready to get married, and might make it up to 8th or even as high as 9th(!) by the time they retire and/or die of old age. Of course, they are still only commoners or maybe experts (much less common...) but at least they have those few levels.
I guess it depends when you figure people are getting married. My 'journeyman' blacksmith is probably 18-19 @ 1st level, and as shown, he can get his own forge up and running by the time he's in his early 20's, making enough money to support himself, a spouse and several children at an average lifestyle (10gp/month per person) with cash to spare. A few more levels increases the amount, but not by nearly as much as owning the forge.
IIRC, in our campaign people do get XP for earning a living via Craft/Profession; I think it was XP = GP earned (and ordinary folk were on the slow XP track, so at the end of their careers they were 7th level or so).
... Because it's a freaking game and it's easier to play the freaking game that way than have to work out constant variables and variations that probably have nothing to do really with the game you are actually playing.
Maybe you want to play Economy: the Role Playing Game. Fine, go for it. But that game ain't ever gonna have "Pathfinder" on the cover.
I'll play the fantasy game where I get to slay dragons and... if I want to build a stronghold with the riches I've plundered from the dragon's horde, there's guidelines for me and the GM to use for me to do that... and that's pretty cool. If you want more out of the system than that, you are going to forever be disappointed.
Precisely. In fact, in our campaign that just ended (*sniff*) I didn't even bother with money at all for the past year or two. If the PCs wanted something, they ordered it, and a few days or weeks later it showed up. Treasure was pretty much just hand-waved.
I'm not yet sure how I'm going to use Ultimate Campaigns yet; it's very cool, but it also seems to be aimed at games quite different than the hero-centric campaigns I usually run.
Going to have to read it thoroughly, I think.
Actually thinking about it a Farmer with 25 Acres is making more then 100,000 GP a year.
Watch out. They likely have a army of Golems at the ready.
Your all forgetting about the most powerful financial tool ever created compound interest. An elf who at the age of 30 puts forty gold in an investment that earns a modest 10% interest will have well over 400k gold after a paltry 100 years. If he manages to squirrel away forty gold for ten years an then does nothing else watch out this elf will become richer than most kingdoms.
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Your all forgetting about the most powerful financial tool ever created compound interest. An elf who at the age of 30 puts forty gold in an investment that earns a modest 10% interest will have well over 400k gold after a paltry 100 years. If he manages to squirrel away forty gold for ten years an then does nothing else watch out this elf will become richer than most kingdoms.
If he's got a place to really "invest" it with a regular return rate. Giving the money implies giving it to someone who will utilize the cash for purposes of their own gain and the interest is them paying you for the right to have it.
Fun fact, its a belief that the name bank comes from the fact money changers and usurers would set up their stands by the river, and if they ended up running out of cash when someone came collecting, they'd have the whole thing thrown in the river (the ostensible origin for 'bankrupt.')
The investment system in UC is more like direct investments. I pay 1,000 gp to fund a guy's expedition to the Lands of the Demonic Penguin Women in exchange for a 20 percent cut of what he brings back, and either he succeeds and brings back penguin gold, or gets eaten, or runs off with my money to cavort with demonic women in formal wear.
A farmer would 6 SP per bushel for wheat. They 4 bushels per acre and hav 20 acres of land. They lose say 1/4 to all it due to environmental conditions like fire, hail, drought and such. So lets say they lose 1/4. So 15 acres is 60 bushles at 3 SP (half normal price). That's 18 GP a year if they are lucky. So 9 GP a year isn't much when you consider an untrained hireling earns 1 SP per day for 365 SP (36 gp AND 5 sp) a year, a little over 4 times as much as a farmer.
With added income comes added expense, the hireling probably lacks the free source of food that the farmer has. Likewise I agree with everyone who's pointed out that ownership of things such as farms and acres is usually not bought with gold, but with blood, sweat and words.
Landowners usually cant outright sell or buy lands at the calculated prices for that would be ludicrous, but that's why people fight war.Land-workers couldn't dream of owning a land till pretty recently in human history.
A big reason why anyone would ever want to sell his land is prohibitive poverty, the farmer would sell his land for a meagre sum just to be rid of it and hire himself to work elsewhere.
Also there's ancestral farmsteads, one normal man earns but 9 gold a year, but usually that man has his entire family working the farm too, that means a wife, one or two young kids, a farmhand and often an older teen, between them said group of people can bring in about as much work as 5 workers. Then there's his parents before him and the grandparents before that and so on until you get to whoever founded the farm (and didn't pay for it cause it was just lying around waiting to be farmed).
Your all forgetting about the most powerful financial tool ever created compound interest. An elf who at the age of 30 puts forty gold in an investment that earns a modest 10% interest will have well over 400k gold after a paltry 100 years. If he manages to squirrel away forty gold for ten years an then does nothing else watch out this elf will become richer than most kingdoms.
Back in those days, you paid banks, not the other way around.
And, I'd love to have an investment that paid a steady and guaranteed 10% even today.
Your all forgetting about the most powerful financial tool ever created compound interest. An elf who at the age of 30 puts forty gold in an investment that earns a modest 10% interest will have well over 400k gold after a paltry 100 years. If he manages to squirrel away forty gold for ten years an then does nothing else watch out this elf will become richer than most kingdoms.Back in those days, you paid banks, not the other way around.
And, I'd love to have an investment that paid a steady and guaranteed 10% even today.
UCa's investments can, for all practical purposes, yield about a 2.4% RoI annually. Much higher than 2-3% the risks escalate quickly compared to the potential payoffs (generally speaking).
Today you don't see anywhere close to 10% compounding interest rates, at least not at the Joe Consumer level. You're lucky to see much better than 1%. 10% RoI hasn't been a factor in a long, long time. :)
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Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I think this could be "an important topic" about a real loophole and I think plugging it would be wise. Some people just don't quite understand what the fuss is all about, but my calculations, based on a character with even 1 rank in the skill and a net +0 in the profession could, due to the +10 bonus currently added to Farmland, "take 10" and net 2gp per day per unit of Farmland and thus, if owned even one acre of land, net just over 12,700gp per year. Thralls & serfs don't own the land but a yeoman (free farmer) does and the thought of farmers having to build underground vaults to hide their wealth strikes me as beyond all reason.
Now then, basing a "grain farmer" on the Pig Farmer, and giving him skill focus in Profession: Farmer yields at least a +8 to skill roll, but I will use the additional +1 used below ..
But we are not talking the average blacksmith. We are talking the average farmer which is a level 2 Commoner who has an about +9 modifier (Lets be kind and add a +1 Trait mod for the sake of rounding. I tend to give NPCs a single trait anyway).
Thats a 2 GP every day he works. Assuming hes lazy and works only 5 days a week.
No, you are forgetting to "take 10" which, added to the +10 and skill bonus, yield 2gp 9sp PER DAY. I am skill shaking my head at planting and harvesting every day, but to continue ..
Thats 10 GP a week. 40 a month. 480 a year. - 100 GP a year for 3 poor meals a day, thats 380 GP to spend on leftovers.
Buying a single farmland would require 15 goods and labor. Thats about 300 GP.
1,058gp 5sp, and assuming a farmer, wife, and 2 kids, that could take u 438gp .. it could be more but after a certain age (likely age 6 or 8) the kids would be earning 1sp/day as "unskilled laborers" so could be assumed to "skate for free" ;)
Now we earn a extra 1 GP per day. Thats 15 a week. 60 a Month. 720 a year. - the 100 fee thats 620 (Add the extra 80 and thats 700). OK then now we can buy TWO extra farmland.
Thats 5 GP a Day. 25 a Week. 100 a month. 1,200 a year.
See how the ball rolls?
So, then follow the remarks below, then realize that a unit of farmland in Pathfinder is only 1/20th to 1/40th of an acre, so an "average" freeholder with 32 acres of land would, even if working only 30ac, be netting 600k-1.26 million gold pieces per year. Yup, that be broken.
So, how to fix it? Rig the system so the average freehold farmer only makes 450gp/year on X acres of land. I use "X" because depending on the era and yields, a single person could live on as little as an acre of land (3#'s of food per day, half for seed/etc, puts needed wheat yield at about 30-40bu/ac) and put garden yields on the same level (croft & toft, aka ALL farm houses come with a garden, but though yields may be as high or higher products are not usually as marketable (aka, not trade goods thus half price, etc, so 80% is about right, otherwise entirely consumed by family).
One way is to just state that Farmland only "produces" when the crop on it produces (aka, once per year) and although requires Labor to prep it 2-3 times in the year only the week (or so) of harvest counts towards yield. Thus one acre is 20-40 units of farmland and with a +8 (+9) for skill one week yields 392-784gp of yields. That is still over 650bu/ac, but it is a start ;)
If you limit it to just one day then, to get that "magic" 450gp/person given 1/20th of an acre the farmer would need about 7.76 acres under cultivation .. people with knowledge of 2-field rotation probably just realized that means 16ac of land with half fallow if 1/20th of an acre or half that if 1/40th and that puts it much closer to actual medieval yields.
The other way is to "rig" the system such that the farmer has to "take 20" to earn net a few silver, aka the Earnings per unit of Farmland is say -25 rather than +10 thus a Farmer with +8 in Profession: Farmer would earn 3sp/20days per unit of Farmland (54sp/year) and thus only 216gp/year per acre (at 40 square per Farmland) and need at least 2-4 cares of land minimum to survive.
So, there you have it, the problem and a couple potential solutions :)
(aka, "keep the peasants hungry")
Probably increase all the numbers of acres needed by a bit if you assess taxes on top of that or, in the case of the -25 to roll, taxes are included.
One last point, most copyholders (serfs & villeins, aka, not-entirely-free peasants) owed a half-week labor per week to the lord of the manor. This is not an issue with the case of limiting yields to one week per year but is an issue if a negative modifier is applied, so consider dropping the negative to say -15 to -20 but stick them with 3 days per week for the Lord of the Manor, and on average 1 day per week on holy days so even though able to earn more still only making 3-6sp/21 days (aka, 1sp/week), if you wish to be that cruel.
compound interest
One of our GMs researched medieval banking. They charged you interest to hold your money for you. The great convenience was depositing $ in one city and drawing on it in another. They also got paid when they loaned money, just like now. The Templars let the King have too much on account and he turned them out.
My solution was to seriously change the numbers on farmland, gardens, and greenhouses, increasing the size of the first two, and decreasing the cost and bonus on all three. My stats:
Farmland: Earnings gp or Goods +1
Cost: 1 Goods, 1 Labor (40 gp); Time 4 days; Size 250–500 squares (~.25 acre)
Garden: Earnings gp or Goods +2
Cost: 1 Goods, 2 Labor (60 gp); Time 7 days; Size 25-50 squares
Greenhouse: Earnings gp, Goods, or Influence +5
Cost: 4 Goods, 3 Labor, 1 Influence (90 gp); Time 16 days; Size 10–20 squares
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compound interestOne of our GMs researched medieval banking. They charged you interest to hold your money for you. The great convenience was depositing $ in one city and drawing on it in another. They also got paid when they loaned money, just like now. The Templars let the King have too much on account and he turned them out.
Which is fine if you are running a medieval game that involves the Roman Catholic Church during times when there was a ban on Catholics charging usury (the ban was based on the reported "incident in the temple").
Thing is, what you stated was not the case: a) for non-Catholics, b)in earlier periods, nor c) in later periods. Most cultures allowed usury and we have reports from the the time of the Roman Empire through the medieval period of people charging interest on loans (aka, usury), and them being despised for it (and other reasons) and being killed, driven out, or forced to live in ghettos.
The GM in question apparently did not do enough research or did not explain in context the section of medieval banking he was talking about. The subject is much more complicated, but is only a religious taboo. If you want a good example of the ban on usury in action during the historic period check out Medici on Netflix :)
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My solution was to seriously change the numbers on farmland, gardens, and greenhouses, increasing the size of the first two, and decreasing the cost and bonus on all three. My stats:
Farmland: Earnings gp or Goods +1
Cost: 1 Goods, 1 Labor (40 gp); Time 4 days; Size 250–500 squares (~.25 acre)
OK, let me try this again.
It was determined around the mid 1800's that it took about 250-300 hours to get a (grain) crop from about 5 acres of land, including all the plowing, planting, harvesting, etc. That was using a plow, scythe, etc, before threshing machines and other mechanical devices were introduced. This puts a fairly good number to estimate the amount of labor and why if you have a 30 acre virgate (aka, supposedly the amount of land needed to feed one PERSON, at least during the earliest medieval period) you often needed extra help as that is 1500-1800 hours per year and at 260-312 work days per year (aka, no weekends or no Sundays respectively) that comes to 1 hr per 5acres or 6 hours per day per virgate .. at 40 acres it becomes 8 hour days .. and that assumes you can work every season of the year instead of having to take 3 months off and not messing with crops after they are sown so more like 12 hours/day. If you want to talk medieval serfs with copyholds who owed 3 days per week to the Lord of the Manor it gets even more complicated.Now then, using your numbers, let us talk yields.
Wheat goes for 1cp/pound so at +1 yield that is 11sp/week for taking 10 or 110# of wheat, per week. In reality you get only 1 wheat harvest per year so 52x that mean a totally incompetent farmer is harvesting 5500# of wheat per quarter acre (or 22000#/acre .. yeah, 11 tons). Since wheat weighs 60#/bushel that is 91-92 bushels per quarter acre or almost 367 bushels per acre. Um, no, still WAY too high (aka55gp/year from a 1/4 acre of land). No, the reality is you planted 2-2.5 bushels per acre and the gross yield was about 7-15 bushels per acre after putting in 5-8 weeks of labor (depending how you count of week of labor .. 60hrs or 40hrs) over the course of the year.
The reason 99% of the population was directly involved in agriculture is that it took that many to do the work to feed the rest. If we take it with a grain of salt that all the other room yields are correct (they are not, so maybe a pound of salt?, but can be made to work and most are closer if cp rather than sp per week) then we seriously need to toss out gardens & farmland entirely as they do not work even scaled down by a factor of 10. Yields of 5500# of wheat per year is the best you would expect on about a 120 acre Hide of the best soil with a druid or cleric with Plant Sphere casting a spell to increase crop yields by 33%. Make farmland per Hide and your numbers come closer :)
I take the Downtime rules to be "price for adventurer"... Like a lot of things adventurer are charged more than the others...
The price include not only the land but the rax free right since there's no rule on tax for adventurer working the land... :p
If you want to put this in perspective if you own the land and want to plant farm in a Hex it cost you about 8000GP (2BP) to construct the farms and to convince 100 people to come work for you that is in addition to the 100 people who come to live there without you doing nothing... so 200 peoples...
And each month those guys will give you for 8000GP ( 2 BP) of food... :D
Immediate return on investment... :D
Those adventurers wanting to buy some of my land won't give me a dime... So I have to sell them the land for much more, while the guys who will work for me I spend money to build them house and pay for they transportation... :)
Oh and if it's about how many crops you can plant and harvest my players hired Druids to help the farms... :p
The OP mentioned a Yeoman farmer, who owned the land he lived on.
Actually, he more likely "leased" (many medieval taxes were "rents") the land in exchange for military service. From a practical standpoint, yeoman farmers did effectively own the land in that they could do what they wished with it (as long as it didn't infringe on another rent/license/privilege of the nobility). Land was rarely sold, merely rented out by the nobility.
However, Golarion tends to go out of its way to avoid feudalism, so while Yeoman Farmer may refer to a lifestyle, few nations or regions in Golarion really attempt to model feudalism on any significant level.
All of that aside, I agree you're not going to really replicate farming via Ultimate Campaign. I utilize the rules heavily for the things it handles better - building construction, running a business, etc. None of those are perfect, either but they're close enough for game purposes.
For farming economics I generally turn to 3rd-party publisher sources like A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (highly recommended) and Town of Glory. Since farming isn't crafting an item or running a business, subsystems that simulate things along longer cycles like months or seasons will provide better outcomes.
I still utilize Profession (Farmer) & the Downtime rules for general farming knowledge and for profession checks at certain times, random events, or vs. unexpected challenges, but never for day-to-day farm simulation.