ok so 1 goat is worth 100 chickens and 1 night at an inn is worth 50 chickens and a diamond is worth 500000 chickens but it is only worth 5000gp or 10000nights in a hotel? and plate armor is worth 150000 chickens? For what a ship? I would certainly not hope for a humanoid. a healing potion is worth 500 chickens? why don't we just play DND in terms of chickens and eggs? 12 eggs= 1 chicken. 100chickens= 1 goat, 3 goats=1 sheep 500 sheep= 1 set of plate armor. 1000 sheep=1sloop, 5000 goats=1 diamond?
.... i need to start paying for everything in chickens when we play D&D. "He tells you it'll be 50 gold" OK! I hand over 1667 chickens, Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks you can keep the extra .3 chicken as a tip!!
ok so 1 goat is worth 100 chickens and 1 night at an inn is worth 50 chickens and a diamond is worth 500000 chickens but it is only worth 5000gp or 10000nights in a hotel? and plate armor is worth 150000 chickens? For what a ship? I would certainly not hope for a humanoid. a healing potion is worth 500 chickens? why don't we just play DND in terms of chickens and eggs? 12 eggs= 1 chicken. 100chickens= 1 goat, 3 goats=1 sheep 500 sheep= 1 set of plate armor. 1000 sheep=1sloop, 5000 goats=1 diamond?
Years ago when I was DMing AD&D I simply made my own price tables ... I was fine with the equipment, but for inns, animals, potions, spells from the temple, etc.
Furthermore, as the DM, you are the one also controlling the cash flow from encounters, so if you need to ratchet things up or down, do so.
Ultimately: this is the solution I settled on, basically just toss out the standard prices and make a "general list" of things with ball-park amounts and a range that they can be etc.
If OP thinks that Forgotten Realms has a screwed up money system, they should check out Dragonlance.
Because that's the setting that used steel coins instead of gold. Steel is valuable because of how hard it is to craft in a pre-industrial society. So every steel coin you mint, you're taking away material that could be used to make weapons, armor, or tools. Not only that, but the costs were silly- a longsword could be purchased, then melted down and forged into more steel coins than you bought it for. It was obvious that the people who'd designed the system had just thrown some random numbers down and called it a day.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
A GP to a Dollar has always been just a mental device even back in 1E days. The prices listed should be consider to be tourist price. Yes, everyone is ripping off the adventurers. In the 1990s I could order SCA plate armour in 14 ga to include mitten gauntlets for $750 plus shipping. Finger gauntlets were another $750. And that merchant was the low end and had a six month turn around window. There was one armorer who started at $10K. Yes he was that good. He required a good sized deposit.
Please post your price list. And remember to post the % slide scale for when you are in a nice big city vs small town who have more chickens than people.
I think the OP is posting out of some assumption that there's real economic/monetary policy at play in D&D. There isn't unless a DM has (imho) overbuilt the world. When it comes down to it the coins in all its denominations are basically "points" similar to XP. The difference being where XP is "earned" or more aptly "awarded" and then used to "purchase" character feature enhancements through leveling, "coins" are similarly "awarded" to purchase resources and services of use to the character. I think the price lists are unstable as economics but do make sense if you think of it as strictly resource management. It's not a well thought out system because eventually through the awarding of magic items as well as advancement of class features a lot of those resources will eventually become moot mechanically.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If OP thinks that Forgotten Realms has a screwed up money system, they should check out Dragonlance.
Because that's the setting that used steel coins instead of gold. Steel is valuable because of how hard it is to craft in a pre-industrial society. So every steel coin you mint, you're taking away material that could be used to make weapons, armor, or tools. Not only that, but the costs were silly- a longsword could be purchased, then melted down and forged into more steel coins than you bought it for. It was obvious that the people who'd designed the system had just thrown some random numbers down and called it a day.
By that logic I guess modern day economies are silly as well. Our coins are not made from gold either you know :)
They're also not made from materials that are expensive, hard to produce, and vital in the construction of important things. We produce coins from materials that have been made cheap by our industrial production capabilities. Also, coins aren't the primary currency anymore, we use paper (actually cloth) money or currency-free transactions with checks, credit or debit cards, or direct payments from bank accounts.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
- 1 Longsword - That's your standard, un-enchanted arming sword, a forged, manufactured item, produced from refined metals etc... - 15gp
- 1 Vial of poison - Just a vial of basic poison, which, if you hit, AND your target fails the save, 1d4 poison damage, once... so less than a dagger more often than not. And you could make by boiling the right leaves or finding the right mushroom or frog... - 100gp
Literally every hamlet has a blacksmith. Not a weaponsmith, for sure, but someone who could at least credibly try to forge a sword. Smiths have their trade secrets, but the essentials of forging a blade are known by many. Swords are also items you can buy and own openly without trouble.
Poisoncraft on the other hand is pretty much secret. Which ingredients are available to make them varies wildly from one region to the next - jungle will have many plants and animals, forest may only have a few plants, mountains might only have mineral sources readily available - and you have to know both how to harvest and prepare those ingredients to create a poinson that's both effective and stable. On top of that, poisonmongers typically don't advertise their wares and skills because no honest and god-fearing person should have use for them.
That's why swords are cheap and poison isn't.
That's some bloody impressive post hoc rationalization for something that makes no sense in universe, and no sense out of universe either.
- In-universe: making a sword would take ANY smith a good chunk of resources and time to make; steel, leather, etc.
- Out of universe: the sword is functionally infinitely useful provided you don't roll a 1 and your DM makes it fall down a chasm.
- In-universe: poisons are just refined from plants, fungi or animals, any alchemist ought to be able to put that together.
- Out of universe: the poison is functionally worthless; the amount of cost and effort to add so minimal a bonus could not possibly be worth it.
No matter how you slice it: from a universe logic standpoint, or a gameplay standpoint, this is ludicrus.
To add another data point to this: from the PHB, for the same cost as 2 of those vials of poison, you can buy an elephant... a TRAINED elephant...
The elephant's ludicrous. The rest, not so much.
"making a sword would take ANY smith a good chunk of resources and time to make; steel, leather, etc": yup, and there are many smiths doing so, often in sizeable quantities, with your average sword not even a commission item but something you can buy off the rack, making swords easy to find and affordable "poisons are just refined from plants, fungi or animals, any alchemist ought to be able to put that together": what is "just refined"? Is it not fairly esoteric knowledge to know whether something needs to be boiled or dried, how to ensure a poison doesn't lose potency, how to disguise the taste, etc? How common are alchemists, and how competitive do their rates have to be? How big is the demand for poisons, so how likely is it to find one ready made?
... I beg to differ; considering uncontracted tribes people in the Amazon use poisons: find the frog that kills things that lick it, then wipe your arrows on it.
... I beg to differ; considering uncontracted tribes people in the Amazon use poisons: find the frog that kills things that lick it, then wipe your arrows on it.
That is a single data point - the tribes use the poison on the skin of highly colourful frogs, easily spotted and conveniently located.
Can you give any examples from any other part of the world, at any time? The romans used swords and javelins, the greeks used swords, the medievals used swords, the American Indians used arrows, the saxons used swords... Or, to put it a different way - take one of those amazon tribespeople and take them to a forest in the UK (with poisonous mushrooms available), or anywhere with the facilities to make poison, and ask them to make you poison - they won't be able to do it. Take a swordsmith to anywhere with the facilities to make a sword, and they can make a sword.
Alternatively, find someone who can make poison from mushrooms, take them to the amazon and ask them to make you poison from the frogs. They'll pick up the frogs (like they would a mushroom), take them to their equipment ready to boil them down (like they might for the mushroom), then drop dead because they touched the frog. You don't have such issues asking someone who can make steel swords to make you a sword out of bronze - they might take a few attempts, but those attempts won't be fatal to them if they fail!
Just want to point out that the topic of efficacy and availability of poisons isn't really relevant to this discussion
Apologies, I was trying to point out that the danger & knowledge involved in making poisons is going to contribute to the prices of them, particularly compared with weapons like swords!
I guess I never actually got round to writing that final conclusion in there XD
... I beg to differ; considering uncontracted tribes people in the Amazon use poisons: find the frog that kills things that lick it, then wipe your arrows on it.
That is a single data point - the tribes use the poison on the skin of highly colourful frogs, easily spotted and conveniently located.
Can you give any examples from any other part of the world, at any time? The romans used swords and javelins, the greeks used swords, the medievals used swords, the American Indians used arrows, the saxons used swords... Or, to put it a different way - take one of those amazon tribespeople and take them to a forest in the UK (with poisonous mushrooms available), or anywhere with the facilities to make poison, and ask them to make you poison - they won't be able to do it. Take a swordsmith to anywhere with the facilities to make a sword, and they can make a sword.
Alternatively, find someone who can make poison from mushrooms, take them to the amazon and ask them to make you poison from the frogs. They'll pick up the frogs (like they would a mushroom), take them to their equipment ready to boil them down (like they might for the mushroom), then drop dead because they touched the frog. You don't have such issues asking someone who can make steel swords to make you a sword out of bronze - they might take a few attempts, but those attempts won't be fatal to them if they fail!
"Can you give any examples from any other part of the world, at any time?"
You surely can't really believe this is a difficult undertaking can you? Poisons were used broadly and commonly in history, and yes even among the commoners. They were used on weapons for hunting long before they were used for killing each other in a very wide cariety of manners.
For your one example: did you know ingesting hemlock leaves can kill a person? Its roots and seeds are even more poisonous. I'll let you look up the documented instances of its use in history yourself; truly, it takes very little effort. Then you may want to think about how much of its use would have been undocumented.
That's one, there were litterally thousands more. Many were not hard to make, nor particularly uncommon knowledge. In fact, I would imagine many were first learned about from farmers' animals eating or being fed something poisonous; this would become common knowledge to avoid. Weaponizing something into a poison often doesn't take a dofficult set of skills or high level of intellect.
"The romans used swords and javelins, the greeks used swords, the medievals used swords, the American Indians used arrows, the saxons used swords."
Really look into any of those cultures and you will find poison used, often commonly.
"Take a swordsmith to anywhere with the facilities to make a sword, and they can make a sword."
You may be surprised if you took a european blacksmith with no knowledge of japanese smithing techniques, dropped them in Japan with no guidance or aid. Japanese blacksmiths needed to learn entirely different techniques to make useable weapons from their poor iron. This is ignored that weapon smithing itself was definitely going to be a higher skilled trade, that also often employed, if not outright required, multiple workers/assistants and a decent chunk of time for even a single weapon.
Regardless, all of that is irrelevant, its a silly argument brought forth I presume because you dislike that some people have a problem with an element of the game you consider trivial. As is always pointed out, 5e is supposed to be about simplicity. Worrying about poison material efficacy, stability, and regional availability are definitely things that should be left to the purview of the dm and whether they want to bother with elements that complez and gedious or not; not something that should have been worried about or provided in the rules themselves. However, what should have been provided is an intelligible and consistent monetary system that at least gave the pretense of having thought put into it.
CaptainCorvid is right. In universe or out of universe, the pricing of poison doesnt make sense. Or alternatively, the pricing of other items don't make sense relative to poison.
For all those arguing that the system was designed for balance rather than to be a realistic economic system. Thatst fine, thats what it should be designed for, but if it really was properly so, it would inherently feel more consistent and realistic as a side effect. I cantt think of a single video game I've played wherr the currency and economy of the game ISN'T developed around game balance. The devs reasonably aren't going to go into all the intricacies of regional supply and demand and how hard or easy matrrials would be to procur and assemble. It's all designed around game balance, but because of that it develops an internal consistency that at least lends it a forgivable and tolerable aense of realness WITHIN the world provided.
5e's system on the other hand, feels like it never got past the first draft stage of 10 different people who hadn't communicated and had no knowledge of other pricings all being told for different items "just put a number down that feels close and we'll circle back and fine tune in the end".
It is true that poison has been used in the past in other places - but has there ever been a documented situation in which someone coated their weapons in hemlock?
Poisons in real life are used to kill people without leaving an easily followed trail - poisoning someone can kill them weeks later (such as poisoning a bottle of wine in their cellar), whereas in dnd it's generally shown as covering a blade in poison and then stabbing them. That's the equivalent of taping a poison dart frog to a wrecking ball and then smacking someone with it - the poison is the least of their worries, they've just been stabbed!
True, a smith couldn't make a Japanese sword in japan, but they could still make their own style with relative ease. An Amazon in the UK would be disappointed at how un-poisonous the frogs are.
Back on topic with the value of these things, I still think it makes sense for poisons to be rarer and more expensive than swords. For one thing, it's along the same lines as when people (in real life) charge ludicrous amounts of money for mongrels (like cockerpoos and labradoodles). They say they're doing it to stop people buying them for badger-baiting and dog fights, and that might have been true at first, but as their sales didn't dip, they kept upping the prices to see how far they could stretch them. I imagine poison is the same - they price it high so that people don't just buy a cheap vial of poison to settle an argument with someone without needing to actually face them. They claim it's "being responsible", but it's also degenerated into greed - in the same way as people charging thousands of pounds for dogs "to make sure the owners are responsible".
Also, poison should do a lot more than it does. But that's another topic, and we're already getting too bogged down in poison - what about that ultra-cheap elephant?!?
For your one example: did you know ingesting hemlock leaves can kill a person? Its roots and seeds are even more poisonous. I'll let you look up the documented instances of its use in history yourself; truly, it takes very little effort. Then you may want to think about how much of its use would have been undocumented.
Hemlock needs to be ingested to be poisonous and takes 2-3 days to kill, so it's not really something you'd use to coat a dagger with. Crafting poisons for a specific purpose (maybe it has to adhere to a blade or arrowhead, maybe it needs to be odorless and tasteless, it should certainly remain potent over a decent amount of time, etc) can be somewhat more complicated than finding a funky looking mushroom.
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This is just another necessary stress fracture due to the duality of the game. It's trying to be both a game and a simulation, and those things have different demands.
The simulation is trying to be realistic and reflect prices in an impossible world that had medieval technology but also magic that has capabilities beyond our modern day technology. That's a tough one even if it stood alone.
The game wants to price things based on how available they should be to adventurers. The poison vs. longsword is a good illustration of that - there's really no good justification of their relative prices from a simulation standpoint, but the game side really wants to make basic gear affordable while also firmly restricting additional sources of damage.
When you favor the game over the simulation, it requires some twists of logic to justify in order to preserve immersion but it can be done. I think pang is illustrating that pretty well. It's not perfect, but WotC has decided that it's better than the alternative - when you favor simulation over the game, parts of the game just break down. Some things would become basically unusable while others would be highly abusable.
Finding the balance between game and simulation is tough and is not ever going to feel right for everyone.
It is true that poison has been used in the past in other places - but has there ever been a documented situation in which someone coated their weapons in hemlock?
If you wish to impose criteria on requested answers to a question, next time please do so upon asking. Your comment that I responded to, and the one that preceded it, dealt merely with the unfounded supposition that poisons IN GENERAL were uncommon and required prestigious knowledge; in fact one of your points was eve that they needed to know "how to disguise the taste"...I suppose if you were trying to poison a weapon to kill a sword swallowing bard....but do you see how you moved the goalposts? That's fine though, it doesn't make the answer anymore difficult to provide, which is why it's still sad that you don't bother to look into any examples yourself.
First, do you really think that if someone did coat their weapon in a poultice made of hemlock, or more properly a concentrated extract from hemlock, and then used that weapon to deliver that poison into the bloodstream that it would have no effect? Here's a hint, the Native Americans did as such with Water Hemlock.
the poison is the least of their worries, they've just been stabbed!
They may not have been stabbed, they may have only received a minor cut, they may have been stabbed but are still moving, and running, and getting way; less likely if they're feeling the effects of poison delivered into their veins.
But you wanted more examples. Monkshood. Hellebore. Oxbane. Snake venom. Poisonous beetles (obviously named one is the arrow poison beetle). Blood. Dung. All were used, and many others.
Poisons in real life are used to kill people without leaving an easily followed trail
Poisons in real life were used for a myriad of different purposes (even medicinal), but I would guess that most commonly, when applied to weapons, they were used for hunting as I already pointed out in my first comment. Poisoned arrows were widely common, and the Aleut used poisoned spears to hunt from kayaks. That said, there are certainly recorded instances of poisoned weapons being used in war. Look into the Greek accounts of the Scythians or Alexander the Great's troubles with poisoned arrows in India.
True, a smith couldn't make a Japanese sword in japan, but they could still make their own style with relative ease.
It has nothing to do with the style. It has to do with the poor iron and resources the Japanese had available. The smith could possibly make a sword, but unless they already had the knowledge of what was required to make Japanese steel usable it likely would have been a very arduous struggle, and very easily would have ended up as garbage. Eastern sword-making wasn't made much more difficult just because they felt like it, it was that way because it had to be, they had much poorer quality steel to work with and it took entirely different techniques to make it usable.
I imagine poison is the same - they price it high so that people don't just buy a cheap vial of poison to settle an argument with someone without needing to actually face them.
There's really no basis for this realistically, the closest is that in many cultures the use of poisons for warfare could be looked down upon as dishonorable, but people that were going to use poisons could just make poisons. That said, its a perfectly reasonable world-building explanation that could create interesting in game societal elements.
Also, poison should do a lot more than it does. But that's another topic, and we're already getting too bogged down in poison - what about that ultra-cheap elephant?!?
The elephant is just as silly as the cost of the vial of poison. Again, the point is the entire system is pretty much whack.
Hemlock needs to be ingested to be poisonous and takes 2-3 days to kill, so it's not really something you'd use to coat a dagger with. Crafting poisons for a specific purpose (maybe it has to adhere to a blade or arrowhead, maybe it needs to be odorless and tasteless, it should certainly remain potent over a decent amount of time, etc) can be somewhat more complicated than finding a funky looking mushroom.
See the first part of my response to ThorukDuckSlayer above. Concentrated ingestion of hemlock can kill you much faster than that, and I'm sure concentrated extract from its roots could be applied to a weapon. As I mention above, Native Americans used just such from the roots of the Water Hemlock to poison arrows.
"can be somewhat more complicated than finding a funky looking mushroom" Very frequently it's just not though.
All the various pricing systems in every single edition of D&D have always been made that way, looking a bit haphazard because the rules made for creating them were mostly done for balance (and honestly, it's been the same in almost every game I've seen, even really well built consistent ones that only target one setting and not any type of setting across a multiverse of settings).
So the excuse is that the system is bad because its always been bad? Again, I already tackled the arguments that it is for balance; it doesn't hold up, and multiple points of evidence have been provided to demonstrate that.
I'm not defending that price table that much, but honestly, who cares ? It might be somewhat useful at level 1-3, but it should not be the center of the game, and its usefulness will fade very quickly anyway. As a side note, for the poison prices, they are just there for the balance, trying to find a price that would restrict more dangerous poisons to slightly higher levels, that's all.
Evidently the answer for who cares is: other people. If you don't that's fine, but it begs the question of why it bothers you that others do. What's even the point of designing a price list that's only relevant for 3 levels? No, it shouldn't be the center of the game, but it should be at least relevant to the actual game. The price of the basic vial of poison has no bearing on how restricted more dangerous poisons are.
As usual, it's easy to criticise, but I'm still waiting to see anyone come up with a price table that made unanimity. So instead of criticising and waiting for "someone" to come and do the job for you, why don't you have a stab at it, publish it, and then see how it feels to be criticised ?
You're right, it is easy to criticize a system that has no consistency and very little apparent effort to establish the balance that is being argued for the reason it is the way it is. It's even easier when it's pointed out that they've had 5 editions (including those in between) to get better at it and still fail. That said, I don't believe I said anything about "someone" coming along and doing the job for me. What I did imply was that Wizards should have done the job better in the first place...you know..the company we gave money to for the product that contains this system. The company comprised of professional game developers. The company whose had multiple editions worth of history to already do a better job. Or is the argument to be that customers have no right to be annoyed, disappointed, and (gasp) critical of elements of the product they paid for? And trust me, the monetary system is hardly the only thing worth criticizing, it's just such an obviously lazy effort that it's silly seeing people trying to defend it rather than just brushing it off as "eh, yeah it's silly but it doesn't bother me" or just, you know, moving on because it doesn't matter to them.
"why don't you have a stab at it, publish it, and then see how it feels to be criticized?" Why presume that I'm not? I have no desire or intent to "publish" anything though. That said I receive plenty of criticism from my players on many elements because I encourage them telling me what is and isn't working for them so it can be made better, and I do believe I handle criticism of my own work much more calmly than you seem to be handling criticism of someone else's.
Holy crap people: I'm not even a botany expert: but walk out my door and I can list you 3 or 4 different plants within 5 minutes walk of my home that are poisonous...
THE POINT: was that the pricing model doesn't make sense from EITHER a "realism" standpoint, OR a "gameplay" standpoint.
My evidence for that claim:
- 15 gp value - Longsword, a manufactured item from refined materials
- 100 gp value - Vial of poison... just a vial of poison, that can be used once to deal the equivalent damage of a dagger... once... if they fail a piss-easy con save.
- 200 gp value - Trained bloody war elephant... 2 vials of poison buys you one of the rarest, most devestating war animals in human history
- 100 gp value - COMMON magic item; an item imbued with bloody magic; same cost as that functionally worthless poison
Obviously: things will shift in value from location to location based upon availability etc... but these base prices are ludicrous. As stated previously: my point isn't so much "poisons are weak" as it is "this doesn't make sense from EITHER an in-universe logic, OR a gameplay standpoint". The BEST argument I've heard for this is that "supplemental damage is a resource that can easily break the game balance"... but then let's do a direct comparison: a dagger that does 1d4+proficiency+str/dex = 2 gp, the poison that does 1d4 sometimes = 100 gp, the +1 dagger that is superior to the first = 100 gp as well.
THE POINT: is that the "default" pricing and values of items in standard D&D's tables don't make sense.
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.... i need to start paying for everything in chickens when we play D&D. "He tells you it'll be 50 gold" OK! I hand over 1667 chickens, Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks you can keep the extra .3 chicken as a tip!!
Ultimately: this is the solution I settled on, basically just toss out the standard prices and make a "general list" of things with ball-park amounts and a range that they can be etc.
If OP thinks that Forgotten Realms has a screwed up money system, they should check out Dragonlance.
Because that's the setting that used steel coins instead of gold. Steel is valuable because of how hard it is to craft in a pre-industrial society. So every steel coin you mint, you're taking away material that could be used to make weapons, armor, or tools. Not only that, but the costs were silly- a longsword could be purchased, then melted down and forged into more steel coins than you bought it for. It was obvious that the people who'd designed the system had just thrown some random numbers down and called it a day.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
A GP to a Dollar has always been just a mental device even back in 1E days. The prices listed should be consider to be tourist price. Yes, everyone is ripping off the adventurers. In the 1990s I could order SCA plate armour in 14 ga to include mitten gauntlets for $750 plus shipping. Finger gauntlets were another $750. And that merchant was the low end and had a six month turn around window. There was one armorer who started at $10K. Yes he was that good. He required a good sized deposit.
Please post your price list. And remember to post the % slide scale for when you are in a nice big city vs small town who have more chickens than people.
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I think the OP is posting out of some assumption that there's real economic/monetary policy at play in D&D. There isn't unless a DM has (imho) overbuilt the world. When it comes down to it the coins in all its denominations are basically "points" similar to XP. The difference being where XP is "earned" or more aptly "awarded" and then used to "purchase" character feature enhancements through leveling, "coins" are similarly "awarded" to purchase resources and services of use to the character. I think the price lists are unstable as economics but do make sense if you think of it as strictly resource management. It's not a well thought out system because eventually through the awarding of magic items as well as advancement of class features a lot of those resources will eventually become moot mechanically.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
By that logic I guess modern day economies are silly as well. Our coins are not made from gold either you know :)
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They're also not made from materials that are expensive, hard to produce, and vital in the construction of important things. We produce coins from materials that have been made cheap by our industrial production capabilities. Also, coins aren't the primary currency anymore, we use paper (actually cloth) money or currency-free transactions with checks, credit or debit cards, or direct payments from bank accounts.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
... I beg to differ; considering uncontracted tribes people in the Amazon use poisons: find the frog that kills things that lick it, then wipe your arrows on it.
That is a single data point - the tribes use the poison on the skin of highly colourful frogs, easily spotted and conveniently located.
Can you give any examples from any other part of the world, at any time? The romans used swords and javelins, the greeks used swords, the medievals used swords, the American Indians used arrows, the saxons used swords... Or, to put it a different way - take one of those amazon tribespeople and take them to a forest in the UK (with poisonous mushrooms available), or anywhere with the facilities to make poison, and ask them to make you poison - they won't be able to do it. Take a swordsmith to anywhere with the facilities to make a sword, and they can make a sword.
Alternatively, find someone who can make poison from mushrooms, take them to the amazon and ask them to make you poison from the frogs. They'll pick up the frogs (like they would a mushroom), take them to their equipment ready to boil them down (like they might for the mushroom), then drop dead because they touched the frog. You don't have such issues asking someone who can make steel swords to make you a sword out of bronze - they might take a few attempts, but those attempts won't be fatal to them if they fail!
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Just want to point out that the topic of efficacy and availability of poisons isn't really relevant to this discussion
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Apologies, I was trying to point out that the danger & knowledge involved in making poisons is going to contribute to the prices of them, particularly compared with weapons like swords!
I guess I never actually got round to writing that final conclusion in there XD
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"Can you give any examples from any other part of the world, at any time?"
You surely can't really believe this is a difficult undertaking can you? Poisons were used broadly and commonly in history, and yes even among the commoners. They were used on weapons for hunting long before they were used for killing each other in a very wide cariety of manners.
For your one example: did you know ingesting hemlock leaves can kill a person? Its roots and seeds are even more poisonous. I'll let you look up the documented instances of its use in history yourself; truly, it takes very little effort. Then you may want to think about how much of its use would have been undocumented.
That's one, there were litterally thousands more. Many were not hard to make, nor particularly uncommon knowledge. In fact, I would imagine many were first learned about from farmers' animals eating or being fed something poisonous; this would become common knowledge to avoid. Weaponizing something into a poison often doesn't take a dofficult set of skills or high level of intellect.
"The romans used swords and javelins, the greeks used swords, the medievals used swords, the American Indians used arrows, the saxons used swords."
Really look into any of those cultures and you will find poison used, often commonly.
"Take a swordsmith to anywhere with the facilities to make a sword, and they can make a sword."
You may be surprised if you took a european blacksmith with no knowledge of japanese smithing techniques, dropped them in Japan with no guidance or aid. Japanese blacksmiths needed to learn entirely different techniques to make useable weapons from their poor iron. This is ignored that weapon smithing itself was definitely going to be a higher skilled trade, that also often employed, if not outright required, multiple workers/assistants and a decent chunk of time for even a single weapon.
Regardless, all of that is irrelevant, its a silly argument brought forth I presume because you dislike that some people have a problem with an element of the game you consider trivial. As is always pointed out, 5e is supposed to be about simplicity. Worrying about poison material efficacy, stability, and regional availability are definitely things that should be left to the purview of the dm and whether they want to bother with elements that complez and gedious or not; not something that should have been worried about or provided in the rules themselves. However, what should have been provided is an intelligible and consistent monetary system that at least gave the pretense of having thought put into it.
CaptainCorvid is right. In universe or out of universe, the pricing of poison doesnt make sense. Or alternatively, the pricing of other items don't make sense relative to poison.
For all those arguing that the system was designed for balance rather than to be a realistic economic system. Thatst fine, thats what it should be designed for, but if it really was properly so, it would inherently feel more consistent and realistic as a side effect. I cantt think of a single video game I've played wherr the currency and economy of the game ISN'T developed around game balance. The devs reasonably aren't going to go into all the intricacies of regional supply and demand and how hard or easy matrrials would be to procur and assemble. It's all designed around game balance, but because of that it develops an internal consistency that at least lends it a forgivable and tolerable aense of realness WITHIN the world provided.
5e's system on the other hand, feels like it never got past the first draft stage of 10 different people who hadn't communicated and had no knowledge of other pricings all being told for different items "just put a number down that feels close and we'll circle back and fine tune in the end".
It is true that poison has been used in the past in other places - but has there ever been a documented situation in which someone coated their weapons in hemlock?
Poisons in real life are used to kill people without leaving an easily followed trail - poisoning someone can kill them weeks later (such as poisoning a bottle of wine in their cellar), whereas in dnd it's generally shown as covering a blade in poison and then stabbing them. That's the equivalent of taping a poison dart frog to a wrecking ball and then smacking someone with it - the poison is the least of their worries, they've just been stabbed!
True, a smith couldn't make a Japanese sword in japan, but they could still make their own style with relative ease. An Amazon in the UK would be disappointed at how un-poisonous the frogs are.
Back on topic with the value of these things, I still think it makes sense for poisons to be rarer and more expensive than swords. For one thing, it's along the same lines as when people (in real life) charge ludicrous amounts of money for mongrels (like cockerpoos and labradoodles). They say they're doing it to stop people buying them for badger-baiting and dog fights, and that might have been true at first, but as their sales didn't dip, they kept upping the prices to see how far they could stretch them. I imagine poison is the same - they price it high so that people don't just buy a cheap vial of poison to settle an argument with someone without needing to actually face them. They claim it's "being responsible", but it's also degenerated into greed - in the same way as people charging thousands of pounds for dogs "to make sure the owners are responsible".
Also, poison should do a lot more than it does. But that's another topic, and we're already getting too bogged down in poison - what about that ultra-cheap elephant?!?
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Hemlock needs to be ingested to be poisonous and takes 2-3 days to kill, so it's not really something you'd use to coat a dagger with. Crafting poisons for a specific purpose (maybe it has to adhere to a blade or arrowhead, maybe it needs to be odorless and tasteless, it should certainly remain potent over a decent amount of time, etc) can be somewhat more complicated than finding a funky looking mushroom.
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This is just another necessary stress fracture due to the duality of the game. It's trying to be both a game and a simulation, and those things have different demands.
The simulation is trying to be realistic and reflect prices in an impossible world that had medieval technology but also magic that has capabilities beyond our modern day technology. That's a tough one even if it stood alone.
The game wants to price things based on how available they should be to adventurers. The poison vs. longsword is a good illustration of that - there's really no good justification of their relative prices from a simulation standpoint, but the game side really wants to make basic gear affordable while also firmly restricting additional sources of damage.
When you favor the game over the simulation, it requires some twists of logic to justify in order to preserve immersion but it can be done. I think pang is illustrating that pretty well. It's not perfect, but WotC has decided that it's better than the alternative - when you favor simulation over the game, parts of the game just break down. Some things would become basically unusable while others would be highly abusable.
Finding the balance between game and simulation is tough and is not ever going to feel right for everyone.
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If you wish to impose criteria on requested answers to a question, next time please do so upon asking. Your comment that I responded to, and the one that preceded it, dealt merely with the unfounded supposition that poisons IN GENERAL were uncommon and required prestigious knowledge; in fact one of your points was eve that they needed to know "how to disguise the taste"...I suppose if you were trying to poison a weapon to kill a sword swallowing bard....but do you see how you moved the goalposts?
That's fine though, it doesn't make the answer anymore difficult to provide, which is why it's still sad that you don't bother to look into any examples yourself.
First, do you really think that if someone did coat their weapon in a poultice made of hemlock, or more properly a concentrated extract from hemlock, and then used that weapon to deliver that poison into the bloodstream that it would have no effect? Here's a hint, the Native Americans did as such with Water Hemlock.
They may not have been stabbed, they may have only received a minor cut, they may have been stabbed but are still moving, and running, and getting way; less likely if they're feeling the effects of poison delivered into their veins.
But you wanted more examples. Monkshood. Hellebore. Oxbane. Snake venom. Poisonous beetles (obviously named one is the arrow poison beetle). Blood. Dung. All were used, and many others.
Poisons in real life were used for a myriad of different purposes (even medicinal), but I would guess that most commonly, when applied to weapons, they were used for hunting as I already pointed out in my first comment. Poisoned arrows were widely common, and the Aleut used poisoned spears to hunt from kayaks. That said, there are certainly recorded instances of poisoned weapons being used in war. Look into the Greek accounts of the Scythians or Alexander the Great's troubles with poisoned arrows in India.
It has nothing to do with the style. It has to do with the poor iron and resources the Japanese had available. The smith could possibly make a sword, but unless they already had the knowledge of what was required to make Japanese steel usable it likely would have been a very arduous struggle, and very easily would have ended up as garbage. Eastern sword-making wasn't made much more difficult just because they felt like it, it was that way because it had to be, they had much poorer quality steel to work with and it took entirely different techniques to make it usable.
But as demonstrated, they would have plenty of other things to use.
If we're relating all of this to the real world as we have been, historically that just absolutely isn't the case.
There's really no basis for this realistically, the closest is that in many cultures the use of poisons for warfare could be looked down upon as dishonorable, but people that were going to use poisons could just make poisons. That said, its a perfectly reasonable world-building explanation that could create interesting in game societal elements.
The elephant is just as silly as the cost of the vial of poison. Again, the point is the entire system is pretty much whack.
See the first part of my response to ThorukDuckSlayer above.
Concentrated ingestion of hemlock can kill you much faster than that, and I'm sure concentrated extract from its roots could be applied to a weapon. As I mention above, Native Americans used just such from the roots of the Water Hemlock to poison arrows.
"can be somewhat more complicated than finding a funky looking mushroom"
Very frequently it's just not though.
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So the excuse is that the system is bad because its always been bad? Again, I already tackled the arguments that it is for balance; it doesn't hold up, and multiple points of evidence have been provided to demonstrate that.
Evidently the answer for who cares is: other people. If you don't that's fine, but it begs the question of why it bothers you that others do. What's even the point of designing a price list that's only relevant for 3 levels? No, it shouldn't be the center of the game, but it should be at least relevant to the actual game. The price of the basic vial of poison has no bearing on how restricted more dangerous poisons are.
You're right, it is easy to criticize a system that has no consistency and very little apparent effort to establish the balance that is being argued for the reason it is the way it is. It's even easier when it's pointed out that they've had 5 editions (including those in between) to get better at it and still fail. That said, I don't believe I said anything about "someone" coming along and doing the job for me. What I did imply was that Wizards should have done the job better in the first place...you know..the company we gave money to for the product that contains this system. The company comprised of professional game developers. The company whose had multiple editions worth of history to already do a better job. Or is the argument to be that customers have no right to be annoyed, disappointed, and (gasp) critical of elements of the product they paid for? And trust me, the monetary system is hardly the only thing worth criticizing, it's just such an obviously lazy effort that it's silly seeing people trying to defend it rather than just brushing it off as "eh, yeah it's silly but it doesn't bother me" or just, you know, moving on because it doesn't matter to them.
"why don't you have a stab at it, publish it, and then see how it feels to be criticized?"
Why presume that I'm not? I have no desire or intent to "publish" anything though. That said I receive plenty of criticism from my players on many elements because I encourage them telling me what is and isn't working for them so it can be made better, and I do believe I handle criticism of my own work much more calmly than you seem to be handling criticism of someone else's.
Holy crap people: I'm not even a botany expert: but walk out my door and I can list you 3 or 4 different plants within 5 minutes walk of my home that are poisonous...
THE POINT: was that the pricing model doesn't make sense from EITHER a "realism" standpoint, OR a "gameplay" standpoint.
My evidence for that claim:
- 15 gp value - Longsword, a manufactured item from refined materials
- 100 gp value - Vial of poison... just a vial of poison, that can be used once to deal the equivalent damage of a dagger... once... if they fail a piss-easy con save.
- 200 gp value - Trained bloody war elephant... 2 vials of poison buys you one of the rarest, most devestating war animals in human history
- 100 gp value - COMMON magic item; an item imbued with bloody magic; same cost as that functionally worthless poison
Obviously: things will shift in value from location to location based upon availability etc... but these base prices are ludicrous. As stated previously: my point isn't so much "poisons are weak" as it is "this doesn't make sense from EITHER an in-universe logic, OR a gameplay standpoint". The BEST argument I've heard for this is that "supplemental damage is a resource that can easily break the game balance"... but then let's do a direct comparison: a dagger that does 1d4+proficiency+str/dex = 2 gp, the poison that does 1d4 sometimes = 100 gp, the +1 dagger that is superior to the first = 100 gp as well.
THE POINT: is that the "default" pricing and values of items in standard D&D's tables don't make sense.