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I was listening to find the path and they were talking about how a characters journal with all their notes was stolen and it got me wondering how long would the 50 page journal you can buy last if one were writing in it. The modern journal writer depending on amount of writing and size of journal seem to get from a couple of months up to a year for the 200 page variants or small entries. At 50 pages you could be looking at between 2 to 4 journals a year easily. At 10 GP per purchase that's not bad 40 gold a year for your records. Plus storage. However if you want to have your character having kept journals growing up or a few years before starting the campaign that cost adds up. 1 year = 40 gold, 2 years = 80, 3 years = the maximum starting wealth of several classes.
Not complaining here just bemused a simple 10 gp item can go from a minor expense over a campaign to a near crippling expense for a starting character if you want a few journals of backstory.
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i dont mean to poo poo on the parade but who cares?
wise man one said "play stupid games win stupid prizes"
sure, i guess having tons and tons of books probably means something to this fictional character, but really just get over it. who is reading all these journals? other PCs arent. Are they some contrived excuse for "i wanna make a knowledge check, i saw one of these as a kid, its in my journal!"
honestly if a character has more than a couple paragraphs of backstory its a red flag for me as a person. they are usually a mary sue/gary stu, a try-hard, or have main character syndrome.
Journals of backstory? Aint no one got time for that
OP, are those actual in-game issues, or are you just browsing the books and trying to come up with abstract problems to discuss with other people? Because a lot of your threads sound like your main interaction with the game is reading the rulebooks and bemusing their content without any real play context.
An untrained laborer earns 7 silver per week, a trained hireling earns 21 silver (2 gold and 1 silver) per week.
The cost of living for an "average" living is 10 gold a month, so a trained hireling can't even afford that so they're going to be "poor" with a cost of living that's 3 gold a month. (An untrained laborer is living as "destitute" even though the entry says that most untrained laborers and commoners are living as "poor").
So if they don't spend anything else it will still take nearly 2 months to earn enough money to buy a 50 page journal. Imagine putting nearly 2/3rds of your real-life earnings towards a journal.
The economy in PF1 makes no sense when you look at what PCs have and compare it to how little an insignificant NPCs can afford.
The cost of living is priced for adventurers. Adventurers are like tourists in that people overcharge them as much as they can get away with. It also assumes short term agreements that allow them to leave on a moment’s notice without any penalty or forfeit.
Personally, I figure that an NPC’s earing ability is after expensive. It represents their disposable income, not total earnings. Many jobs are going to include room and board. Most apprentices live with their master. Craftsman usually live in their place of business as well.
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As to the cost of journals you are basing it on modern writing styles. The writing styles of the Middle Ages is quite different than how modern people write. Cheap paper and almost universal literacy have changed how things are written. Computers also altered how people write. When paper is expensive you learn to write extremely small to make the paper go farther. The declaration on independence was written on a single page including the signatures. When I paste in the text to the declaration of independence into MS word it takes about 3 pages not including signatures. If you have ever seen the document or an accurate copy it is incredibly hard to read because the writing is so small.
Near universal literacy has raised the bar on proper spelling and grammar which tends to be longer and wordier. Take a look at some of the historical records of the colonial era and you will see a lot of spelling errors and or abbreviations. They also tend to be lacking in detail. Journals were often more of a way for someone to remember something than a completely accurate record. They often skipped large chunks of time where nothing of significance happened.
Combine these two things and the 50-page journal is going to last a lot longer than a few months.
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OP, are those actual in-game issues, or are you just browsing the books and trying to come up with abstract problems to discuss with other people? Because a lot of your threads sound like your main interaction with the game is reading the rulebooks and bemusing their content without any real play context.
That is my main interaction, I live in an area with no games or way to reach other players except online and even if I could find a play by post or the like my work leaves me with no ability to commit to a game as I work varying shift times and locations. I spent the entire last week on night shifts 6 pm to 4 am where I was living in a hotel away from home.
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Relatively cheap, low-quality paper was available even in the Renaissance. Some of Galileo's notes about the expenses of his tenants were written on brown paper used by his butcher. Paper used to write important stuff instead was expensive and durable. The paper for a notebook almost certainly is of the latter type, made to last for centuries.
@ Mysterious Stranger: I have read books and letters from XIII century onward for work. Some are as you describe them, especially if they are personal notes, others are well readable. A lot of people read and wrote by candlelight. With that kind of illumination, you can't write that small.
@ Warped Savant: The cost of living is tiered and not well connected with the pay for laborers, and especially the cost of hiring labor.
The average lifestyle in the rules is that of people living a good life, it says:
The PC lives in his own apartment, small house, or similar location — this is the lifestyle of most trained or skilled experts or warriors. He can secure any nonmagical item worth 1 gp or less from his home in 1d10 minutes, and need not track purchases of common meals or taxes that cost 1 gp or less.
The cost of living is very different today, we take for granted stuff that, in the past, wasn't available unless you were extremely wealthy, but I would equate that style of living to the top "blue collar" and mid to high tier "white collars" of today (well, a really top tier welder can go around in a Maserati and do the hours he wants, so probably they fall in the wealthy bracket).
Note that it says:
Hireling, Trained: The amount given is the typical daily wage for mercenary warriors, masons, craftsmen, cooks, scribes, teamsters, and other trained hirelings.
This value represents a minimum wage; many such hirelings require significantly higher pay.
The other thing to consider is that in many cases room and board was provided by the person employing the hireling. In many cases the craftsman and his workers lived in the place of business. Cooks and other servant typically live in the house along with the person they work for. The accommodations were not luxurious, but they usually had a roof over their heads and enough food to eat.
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For my more bookish characters, I will frequently buy a journal with starting cash to represent the fact that they write about their adventures (as well as other subjects). But I've never bothered tracking how much space they fill over time, because there are no rules for that, and no real need for any. It's not a spellbook, which has specific rules about page counts, and it's not a consumable in the same way that ammunition or scrolls are, so "I have at least one of these" is sufficient for my needs. It's just flavor.
The RL price of books in the past varied enormously based on the technology available. Imperial Rome had ample supplies of papyrus, so cheap books were common (even to the extent of what amounted to trashy paperback fiction). But after the fall of Rome and the loss of Egypt to the Muslims, Europeans used parchment (= vellum, ie sheepskin) which was vastly more expensive so literacy plummeted until paper turned up from China.
So arguably the cost of a journal should vary greatly depending on where you are: countries adjoining the Inner Sea or the Sellen can probably get papyrus from Osirion, but others around there use parchment. The far east uses paper. Other technologies may exist, such as writing on leaves (as in South Asia).
But quite honestly, in this case it's just flavour so it need not cost anything significant.
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Yet another use for all that extra hemp fiber floating around made by the Robe of Infinte Twine.Hemp and other plant fiber products were used in Europe to make paper at least from the XII century. It was still costly but it was available in large quantities.
Golarion is more or less equivalent to our world XVI century, so paper and the printing press are available in the more advanced areas.
Nice, a magic item that will pay itself in 2 days of use. Producing 100' of rope every minute isn't much in modern, industrial times, but it is a lot and easy to sell in a world like Golarion.