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Gary Gygax once admitted that adventurers would horribly distort any local economy the party visited. That was in AD&D days with random item drop tables.
In these PF days, adventuring is the only business to be in. The WBL table suggests 1000gp as a conservative estimate at level 2. That enough for the party to buy a wand of CLW and some Masterwork weapons. That makes them already tough enough to take town a village as well. Luckily, the dumb monsters plaguing the hamlet don't know how to invest their treasure chest.
And it grows. By level 4 a classic party could buy out their local lord.
There is a lovely illustration in an early OotS strip in which the yokels try to take the PC rubes for every penny.
And I don't care how many villagers don't like the party rolling into town, if someone has a high Diplomacy score and the party can throw a couple of hundred GP at the locals they come around soon enough.
But these people must have seen it before. Paizo has been great for LGBT and racial inclusion but they can't get rid of classism. I'm not asking them to, it's a social dynamic that works for adventures. Rich, poor, slaves, owners, subsumed, overlords etc.
Adventurers are outside the traditional three tiered class structure.
They are rich. really rich. Or at least they should be, I will address this later. They are famous, and not in the local way, in a world with Bards and Divination and Enchantment they are properly famous, Jennifer Lawrence or Jose Mourinho level. So they are outside class distinctions.
Class may not mean much to American Parthfinders, but being rich isn't everything. It certainly wasn't in the pseudo-renaissance idea of Golarion. Think of Taldor and Cheliax or the troubles in Galt. You can't just buy in - not that adventurers do, more later.
Does Golarion just accept adventurers and the PF Society as a necessary evil to combat the never ending filth?
Probably, yeah.
PCs have an incredible amount of money. Or at least they should have. I have an 11th level Witch who has never ever drawn her pair of +1 Cold Iron daggers. They have never been used in anger. And nobody cares, she's too rich, even though she has almost no cash to her name.
The balance of the economy is magic items.
Lords spend their money on land, merchant princes spend it on getting more money, but PCs spend it on magic items.
Magic Items are the only reason for deflation on Golarion and they are a vital part of the economy.
Consider a Belt of Incredible Dexterity +2. It is a very standard item for a PC and at 4000gp, chump change to those who can afford it.
Construction Requirements
Craft Wondrous Item, cat's grace; Cost 2,000 gp (+2)
Components V, S, M (pinch of cat fur)
I think the money vanishes into the ether from adventurers' pockets into nothingness, leading to some sort of economic equlibrium. Where does the cash material component of magic item creation go? It disappears.
Either vellum and weird ink suppliers on Golarion are the laziest, richest, most shareholder-curtailed companies, or cash does in fact disappear regularly. Hence Abadar being such a grasping fool about it.
Adventurers destroy economic theory. They amass far more wealth than their locality has, and they spend more than any community can saturate.
But their money barely exists, it's like future bonds. My 8 Str Witch doesn't haul around 100k in gp, she has spent the lot on fancy magic items with a pitiful 50% resale value. She can barely afford a night in a tavern, if the concept of paying for stuff wasn't so distant for her.
And when money is so transient, or at least not an end in itself, and when titles and land are not incentives, but just power without definition, where do the class societies of Cheliax and Taldor and all of them, Nex and Qadira and even the Linnorm Kings go?
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I see adventures as about as relevant to the financial structure of the setting as celebrities and professional athletes and pop stars and pundits with their own talk / radio shows are to our own financial structure. They exist (in relatively small numbers, compared to the general population). They consume conspicuously and spend vast amounts of money on stuff that the rest of us kind of boggle at (Diamond encrusted tooth grills? Pretty much as relevant as a metamagic rod, to those of us who have no use for either, and more important things to spend our much smaller amounts of money upon.).
Right where they are concentrated, there would be cottage industries to support them (craftsmen specializing in pumping out magic items that nobody who isn't an adventurer, or ruler of an entire nation, could possibly afford, for instance), and these would exist at (and for) the convenience of the adventuring community, just as plastic surgeons and agents / managers and high priced companions and personal chefs / trainers all exist to sell overpriced services to the celebrities and athletes and other greatly overpaid people of our world, sucking away (some of) their money and returning it to the economy.
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I see adventures as about as relevant to the financial structure of the setting as celebrities and professional athletes and pop stars and pundits with their own talk / radio shows are to our own financial structure. They exist (in relatively small numbers, compared to the general population). They consume conspicuously and spend vast amounts of money on stuff that the rest of us kind of boggle at (Diamond encrusted tooth grills? Pretty much as relevant as a metamagic rod, to those of us who have no use for either, and more important things to spend our much smaller amounts of money upon.).
these would exist at (and for) the convenience of the adventuring community, just as plastic surgeons and agents / managers and high priced companions and personal chefs / trainers all exist to sell overpriced services to the celebrities and athletes and other greatly overpaid people of our world, sucking away (some of) their money and returning it to the economy.
Great point about Metamagic rods. They may as well be chocolate teapots to the proles.
It is otherwise an exercise in controlling the uncontrolable.
Would there be a stricter emphasis on Old Money instead of new?
Magic items are not only tremendously expensive, the vast majority of them are either useless or priced absurdly out of reach for anybody who isn't an adventurer.
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And given the increased ability to leverage wealth into large-scale changes to the nature and workings of the world (much like technology today allows more things to be done with your money), the fact that only a handful of people control such huge sums of wealth is inherently unbalancing.
Major difference between Pathfinder and real life? SWAT teams don't even have to pretend to care about any "National Constitution" business.
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Class may not mean much to American Parthfinders, but being rich isn't everything. It certainly wasn't in the pseudo-renaissance idea of Golarion. Think of Taldor and Cheliax or the troubles in Galt.
I assume the troubles in Galt you refer to are the tracts appearing in the best selling "Balor Shrugged" novel.
Jose Mourinho level.
Now I understand why you mention spending an eye on cold iron daggers that never paid for their cost.
Magic items are not only tremendously expensive, the vast majority of them are either useless or priced absurdly out of reach for anybody who isn't an adventurer.False??? The post you linked to supports my point. It puts the average farming family as bringing in 38.6 gp/year after living expenses. Four of those families make up a thorp, where there are 1d4 random minor magic items. Looking at the CRB, most minor magic items sell for well over 1,000 gp; at least one (Ring of Water Walking) of them as much as 15,000. The only items I see that a family could afford even if they save up for an entire year are 0-level potions and 0- or 1st-level scrolls, which they can't use. Furthermore, most of the items the family can't afford are things they wouldn't have much use for even if they could somehow save up for generations to get them.
Um... no, you should read the thread. If you do you'll find that it says that the 38.6gp a year is actually the worse case scenario with everything stacked against the farmer and on average he'll actually see closer to 793.2gp for the farmer and his wife in a year, and that's just for the farmer and his wife working 3/4 of the year instead of the entire thing.
In total the output of the village could be put thusly:
So on an average day the town buildings provide:75 goods
36 influence
28 labor
3 magic
13 gpTo arrive at this number I typically took the most diverse of the above options for each building and applied them all together. The 'take 10' was applied to the magic to get it above 30 (specifically a 37) to give a 3 instead of a 2.
Of course doing it this way means each of the people need paid. So it is conceivable to me that if we treat the nobility as managers/owners and had them do a weeks worth of managing each month that would leave 40 weeks a year for the people to earn their own way and still leave the nobility with:
84 days of work:
6,300 goods
3,024 influence
2,352 labor
252 magic
1,092 gpBuying a new village would take about a year if the run over capital was used to instead earn gold each year. Also this could account for magic item production too -- the nobles would have 252 magic points of capital which would convert to 25,200gp worth of magic. Taking that into account means the noble could afford some fun toys blow money and still put up a new village each year (in theory if not in people this would leave 238 magic points).
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Frankly I don't even understand why magic items are so ludicrously priced. Wouldn't it be just as easy to drop a 0 off the end of every magic item and expected player WBL? Functionally the price of magic items stay the same relative to player wealth but makes them appear cheaper and actually accessible.
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OP is correct that adventurers destroy any consistency in the economic model of RPGs.
But magic destroys any consistency in culture as we know it.
Imagine human beings if you could heal the consequences of violence.
Golarion doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it.
Homo Sapiens coexisted with Homo Neanderthal for about 5,000 years, and at the end of that period, in the stone age, Homo Neanderthal was wiped out. Yet in Golarion Orcs and Gnolls and Goblins all have civilizations that are allowed to exist together.
Golarion has over 4,000 years history and hasn't developed internal combustion, which is the easiest technology in the world to harness when you have the ability to heat stuff with magic.
It all devolves into esoteric naval-gazing.
The GM has to have a plan to make sense of it all.
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the whole villagers hate the PCs make no sense
A party strolling into town brings in more wealth then that village can dream off. Plus there are all these people with magic that you could tap into.
Adventurers should be very welcome
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The simplest assumption is that most of the items for sale aren't "put on a shelf in the hopes that eventually an adventurer will come along who wants that particular item", but are owned by someone who might be willing to sell if approached. Not a Store, but someone's family heirloom or other special item.
That would work cinematically, the starving widow offering the item in order to pay for her muddy, wide-eyed urchins. It'd be a touching scene, the Paladin borrows the heirloom +1 Undead Bane Longsword and promises to restore the village.
On Golarion, that would be chaos. Any divine PC can roll up, cast a bit of Cure Disease and a few CLWs, chuck the poor woman 10gp and set the family back up. Meanwhile, the Orcs from over the hill find out that villagers regularly keep magic items in their hovels. It would be even worse if unscrupulous PCs knew that. It takes just 6 seconds for many classes to Detect Magic within 30 feet.
Magic items have to kept in a safe of sorts, maybe this is Abadar's deal. And most of it is useless to normal folk and vital for adventurers. The Witch's Cackling Blouse which let's you Cackle as a Swift Action. The Orange Ioun Stone which looks ridiculous and gives a +1 caster level (btw, shouldn't Ioun Stones have a massive sneak and disguise penalty?).
Same with GP. If it weren't for money being deleted by magic item creation there would be trouble without a super secret magic safe around.
One way may be a simple gamist solution of banknotes. Golarion has international communication and the money is linked like the Euro. 100gp can be printed as a note with an Arcane Mark for verification. It would be acceptable in most places.
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the whole villagers hate the PCs make no sense
A party strolling into town brings in more wealth then that village can dream off. Plus there are all these people with magic that you could tap into.
Adventurers should be very welcome
Yes they should.
By level 3, most of my charismatic PCs turn up to the local tavern for the night and throw 50gp at the landlord, telling him to feed and drink the whole place. The locals spill the bean, everybody remembers the night Blusto the happily drunk Barbarian came to town.
Except that PCs are either monster magnets or they are looking for trouble. Blusto has to drop that cash to the tavern. No landlord would stand for anything less. Between him and his companion, Shakira the fire Sorcerer and their gravitational pull of horrible monsters the whole pub will be up in flames by dawn.
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In 3rd+ edition there are several problems with dnd's fantasy economy. I think older editions never bothered enough to have problems with it, it was just stuff happens make sense of it.
I any case the problems are:
Set prices: Real economy has supply and demand, while dnd has set prices. Set prices unless they are enforced by anyone are pretty insane.
Magic items: Magic items require gold to create but the components required in their creation are never explained. We have no idea what people need to create magic items, just that it costs X amount of gold.
Selling stuff: You can arbitrarely sell stuff ONLY at half price. (gems etc are the exception)
Some people are intrinsically than others(unlike in the real world): A level 20 wizard or even fighter in a metropolis of commoners is beyond the economy, he essentially lives in an alternate world.
So magic items are weird in that they have arbitrary set prices AND in that they have arbitrary set cost AND in that people buy them only at half price AND in that the people interested in them are beyond the normal world.
In any case the only two reasons for magic items to cost gold are so that adventurers have something to do with the gold they find plus incentive to find it (that' s tradition) and the fact that baldurs gate had items which costed gold.
To answer the original post. Money is never an end to itself, adventurers don't have more money than their locality because no commoner or even noble would want a +5 sword in his hands, and their is no money or amount of magic items they should have, wealth by level is drawn from encounters and monsters also are under not deific law to each have its challenge ratings treasure.
All that doesn't annoy me because the whole game is an abstraction. A realistic economy, no scrap that, a realistic world doesn't work like that.
But you know what? I don't care. I don't want Golarion or any fantasy world to make absolute sense in close inspection. I prefer ease of play.
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OP is correct that adventurers destroy any consistency in the economic model of RPGs.
But magic destroys any consistency in culture as we know it.
Imagine human beings if you could heal the consequences of violence.Golarion doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it.
Homo Sapiens coexisted with Homo Neanderthal for about 5,000 years, and at the end of that period, in the stone age, Homo Neanderthal was wiped out. Yet in Golarion Orcs and Gnolls and Goblins all have civilizations that are allowed to exist together.Golarion has over 4,000 years history and hasn't developed internal combustion, which is the easiest technology in the world to harness when you have the ability to heat stuff with magic.
It all devolves into esoteric naval-gazing.
The GM has to have a plan to make sense of it all.
The Roman empire had the Aeolipile and never did anything with it.
I don't have the correct references at hand but there is a tale than while one of the big temples on Rome hills was being constructed a crafter proposed a steam powered lifting machine. The Cesar of the time rewarded him for his cleverness but said "I can't use it, it will put a lot of people out of work and my peasant need to work to live. I don't want revolts."
Using magic or technology to solve engineering problems isn't automatically the only way to go. You need a willingness to use the magical/technological solution instead of other solutions. And the appropriate resources. One of the reasons why the Romans weren't interested in steam engines is that they hadn't access to easy sources of coal or wood. Roman technology - The energy constraint.
Golarion non magical energy sources have a similar problem: they are plagued by monsters (and the maps of the Inner Sea show relatively few wooded areas). We don't know if using large amounts of magical energy has aftereffect like magical pollution or draining of ambient magical energy, but we can assume that there is a problem.
That would work cinematically, the starving widow offering the item in order to pay for her muddy, wide-eyed urchins. It'd be a touching scene, the Paladin borrows the heirloom +1 Undead Bane Longsword and promises to restore the village.
On Golarion, that would be chaos. Any divine PC can roll up, cast a bit of Cure Disease and a few CLWs, chuck the poor woman 10gp and set the family back up.
You are forgetting a few things:
- the divine PC should have memorized the Remove disease spell;- his deity should approve his use of it for free for a poor starving children;
- then he should beat the Caster Level check DC, something that isn't so automatic unless your CL is decidedly high;
- and even the mightiest cleric would be unable to cure more than a couple dozen persons even if he were devoting every level 3+ spell slots he had only to Remove Disease spells.
CLW is excessive for almost any wound a 1st level commoner can get with normal activities while surviving.
- * -
My playing group has made a rough estimate of the purchasing power of 1 gp. It is around 40-50 €.
500 € is a nice gift but it will solve nothing long term.
Magic item are pricey ... Well, the Leica APO Telyt R 1600mm f/5.6 telephoto lens did cost more than 2 million dollars. About 40.000 gp for something that is used for recreation.
A 20th level character has a suggested WBL of 880.000 gp. A capital of 44 million euro. Well, David Beckham while playing for the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club was paid 36 million euros (sponsors included).
His home in London is worth almost 9 million €, the home at Beverly Hills is valued about 17 millions €.
Adventurers are rich, but they are far from being the richest men on the planet.
Which is why at least one GM I know refuses the magic shop emporium style of items. Either you find it in the wild (loot from an enemy or ancient tomb), hire the rare people able to make items (in major cities) to craft one for you or get gifted something by a retired adventurer. Small towns may have one or two ancestral items around but they're not for sale and places smaller than that don't even have that much or if they do its an ancestral cold iron blade not a magical one.
You just basically described my attitude towards magic items, which hearkens back to pre-3rd ed. D&D norms. I think it was a mistake to "normalize" magic items, to make them readily available and an expected part of one's "build", rather than something truly rare and special that should be treasured and guarded jealously.
In the earlier editions, even fairly simple magic items were these amazing, epic things which truly felt special. Sadly, the mithril chain shirt that saved Frodo would hardly be worth a mention these days.
So magic items are weird in that they have arbitrary set prices AND in that they have arbitrary set cost AND in that people buy them only at half price AND in that the people interested in them are beyond the normal world.Other than the last, the same is true for everything in the economy. Even normal items have set costs, that are exactly twice the cost of the raw materials.
So prices in the real world are arbitrary, building sth has an arbitrary set cost and people buy stuff from you only at half the price they are sold at?
Here's what I wrote before the part you quoted.
Set prices: Real economy has supply and demand, while dnd has set prices. Set prices unless they are enforced by anyone are pretty insane.
Magic items: Magic items require gold to create but the components required in their creation are never explained. We have no idea what people need to create magic items, just that it costs X amount of gold.
Selling stuff: You can arbitrarely sell stuff ONLY at half price. (gems etc are the exception)
Also
It's not an economic simulator.
All that doesn't annoy me because the whole game is an abstraction. A realistic economy, no scrap that, a realistic world doesn't work like that.
But you know what? I don't care. I don't want Golarion or any fantasy world to make absolute sense in close inspection. I prefer ease of play.
We are in agreement.
the whole villagers hate the PCs make no sense
A party strolling into town brings in more wealth then that village can dream off. Plus there are all these people with magic that you could tap into.
Adventurers should be very welcome
This assumes that money is the only thing valued by people. Earth history has plenty of examples of rich technologically (magically) advanced peoples visiting new places. In many cases they were viewed with suspicion, and their strange moralities conflicted. Look at 19th century Japan. They benefited from trade and cultural exchange for a season but then closed up and became insular because they feared loss of their own culture.
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I any case the problems are:
Set prices: Real economy has supply and demand, while dnd has set prices. Set prices unless they are enforced by anyone are pretty insane.
Magic items: Magic items require gold to create but the components required in their creation are never explained. We have no idea what people need to create magic items, just that it costs X amount of gold.
Selling stuff: You can arbitrarely sell stuff ONLY at half price. (gems etc are the exception)
Some people are intrinsically than others(unlike in the real world): A level 20 wizard or even fighter in a metropolis of commoners is beyond the economy, he essentially lives in an alternate world.So magic items are weird in that they have arbitrary set prices AND in that they have arbitrary set cost AND in that people buy them only at half price AND in that the people interested in them are beyond the normal world.
In any case the only two reasons for magic items to cost gold are so that adventurers have something to do with the gold they find plus incentive to find it (that' s tradition) and the fact that baldurs gate had items which costed gold.
To answer the original post. Money is never an end to itself, adventurers don't have more money than their locality because no commoner or even noble would want a +5 sword in his hands, and their is no money or amount of magic items they should have, wealth by level is drawn from encounters and monsters also are under not deific law to each have its challenge ratings treasure.
I uses the prices as guidelines not set prices. I do this for everything. I am famous for asking my players to find the listed price while I deal with something else. When they tell me the price I always adjust it up or down. Even if I don't want to rp every sale. I will tell them mundane items are available at +10% list price. There is a 75% chance that you can find alchemical gear and after an after noon of gathering info you find these randomly rolled items are available for sale also at +10% list. The next town will be different. I will allow the party face to try to diplomacy a better deal through haggling and gain a 10 or 20% discount one way or the other. Some stuff you just can't fence.
The biggest thing that could say about magics effect on economy is to gauge how common I want magic to feel. One of the things I liked about Golorian is that after a few levels I felt the PCs were major contributors to the city or region rather than just one of several hundred random adventures around many of whom are higher level and every point of interest has an epic level NPC handling the "real problems." I mean after 5th or 6th level in Curse of the Crimson Throne I felt awesome. There was no 24th level Elminster or 23rd level Drizzist to be the real mover and shaker. We were Korvosa's only hope, even the captain of the town guard thought so and the BBEG of the whole campaign was threatened by us.
Don't confuse the fact that every time you play there is magic going on and strange ruins to explore to mean its not special or unique to the world at large. You may not be the only wizard in the world but you might be one of the few people have ever met.
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That's the way it should be. Adventurers are exceptional, I mean real adventurers usually the pcs and exceptional individuals, not just people with heroic class levels because if you want to compare them:
level 20 real heroic character: 880 000 gp
Level 20 npc heroic character: 159 000 gp,
A Level 20 royal guard fighter, have a couple of decent magic items and is probably legendary but nothing compared to Level 20 Thunderscar real fighter adventurer who is rocking almost 6 times whatever possession the royal guard has.
As you can see, the difference is huge.
Yeah some regular people have more gold and wealth than the pcs but those individuals are few and far in between.
We are. I wasn't contrasting to the real world economy, just pointing out that it wasn't just magic items, but prices and crafting of mundane items followed the same rules.
Ah sorry, I got confused.
Sadly, the mithril chain shirt that saved Frodo would hardly be worth a mention these days.
To be fair, the mithril used in Tolkein's universe was basically a combination of both adamantine and mithril, in that it was both light and incredibly protective.
There is a substance in 3.5 D&D Forgotten Realms that has those properties, it's called glassteel and is deliriously expensive.
And it grows. By level 4 a classic party could buy out their local lord.
Nobility pay their select NPC underlings, such as doctors or scribes, more in a single year than an equivalent level NPC adventurer's entire wealth.
A 5th level experienced doctor, for example, is by the hireling rules usually employed full time at 5-10 gp per day. A chronicler, 5 gp per day. A prostitute of the non-streetwalker variety, 10 gp/day. A sage, 15 gp per day. A mapmaker, 10 gp per day.
All these people can pull in thousands of gp a year, and we haven't even touched on the actual aristocracy (or whatever other topmost crust exists in a particular fantasy nation). A prominent aristocrat might support all of the above plus dozens of lesser (but still wealthy) underlings, and still have money to spare to pay adventurers to solve problems too.
You'r underestimating the wealth of the middle and upper classes of non-adventuring society.
Yeah again, for just 12 weeks a year a noble acting as a manager for a single village will earn the following:
So on an average day the town buildings provide:
75 goods
36 influence
28 labor
3 magic
13 gp
To arrive at this number I typically took the most diverse of the above options for each building and applied them all together. The 'take 10' was applied to the magic to get it above 30 (specifically a 37) to give a 3 instead of a 2.
Of course doing it this way means each of the people need paid. So it is conceivable to me that if we treat the nobility as managers/owners and had them do a weeks worth of managing each month that would leave 40 weeks a year for the people to earn their own way and still leave the nobility with:
84 days of work:
6,300 goods
3,024 influence
2,352 labor
252 magic
1,092 gp
Buying a new village would take about a year if the run over capital was used to instead earn gold each year. Also this could account for magic item production too -- the nobles would have 252 magic points of capital which would convert to 25,200gp worth of magic. Taking that into account means the noble could afford some fun toys blow money and still put up a new village each year (in theory if not in people this would leave 238 magic points).
That's just for the noble working. If we assume this is his cut of the taxes and he does this for each of his villages he could do 4 villages a year by himself, making 4 new villages and still having 238 magic points left over to capitalize on (with 4 weeks off too).
This still leaves enough time for the individual farmer and his family to make the 793.2 gp a year mentioned earlier.
We are literally talking over 100,000 gp and a new village each year for the noble that only controls 4 villages to start with.
However that shouldn't be the norm. A noble with 4 villages should be be getting 10-20 goods from them plus trade goods he can smell for some more. 100,000 GP per year is the kind of income I associate with massive empires spanning multiple continents.
Normative statement.
Disqualified!
So your bias is off. That happens. 100,000gp is really not that much.
You are talking 800 people in the villages, and then figure that the noble is supporting off that 100,000 gp his retinue of say 50 people so 850 people. That sort of return isn't that insane, and in fact builds up to support the sort of numbers we see in the prices for both normal and magical goods.
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100,000 GP per year is the kind of income I associate with massive empires spanning multiple continents. For a more modest kingdom maybe a few thousand per year if they sell off the rice and other taxed items.
I don't know if you are at all interested in calibrating your numbers to any real life continent spanning empires, but if you are, when I did some napkin math some time ago to convert the (typical) annual income of the Principate-era Roman emperor to Pathfinder gp, I arrived at a range between 15-50 million Pathfinder gp or so.
Before. If you wanted to know how much ready cash an emperor might have in the treasury, that would vary much more sharply depending on the circumstances. A prosperous emperor with a mind to savings might have stored up two or three years' revenue in ready cash, a more spendthrift one might be in debt.
As far as local barons go, at least in the Roman system (and most feudal systems too, I would think), the income of the local noble landowner wouldn't be part of state revenue at all, but rather part of the much, much larger overall economy.
Going back to strict PF, though, 100k in disposable income doesn't seem too excessive to me. That seems like what a truly wealthy noble might piss away on one really decadent celebration, say - so putting it as the annual income of a less wealthy aristocrat doesn't seem too far off.
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Who invented Inflation the the D&D world? It's not like Demons created ....Demoncracy ;)
Before or after supporting their court? I was under the impression this 100k was what a four village baron is getting after all their expenses are met. That's a lot of disposable income for a minor noble.100,000 GP per year is the kind of income I associate with massive empires spanning multiple continents. For a more modest kingdom maybe a few thousand per year if they sell off the rice and other taxed items.I don't know if you are at all interested in calibrating your numbers to any real life continent spanning empires, but if you are, when I did some napkin math some time ago to convert the (typical) annual income of the Principate-era Roman emperor to Pathfinder gp, I arrived at a range between 15-50 million Pathfinder gp or so, depending on how you choose to calculate the exchange rates.
Whoa -- I've said nothing about the noble's expenses. That's just what the villages are earning him -- not what he's spending or how he's spending it. This doesn't cover his retinue, his family, the new mansion he wants built, the palace, or the upkeep of existing property.
That's just his income, gross not net.
Who invented Inflation the the D&D world? It's not like Demons created ....Demoncracy ;)
If you think you should profit from your work then you are a source of inflation.
The primary source of inflation is profit by very definition of the word -- anything above and beyond cost that you receive for a product. The product is worth the cost of the product, if you sell it for more than that you have caused inflation and received profit for it.