I am wondering how large, in gold pieces, my homebrew kingdom's economy should be. My players have reached a level where they are ready to interact on a national level and I find myself wanting to build a kingdom level budget from which the crown can allocate funds to player projects.
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-- BlackLiteMoon Roleplay --
"Beware of Rabbits, They Eat Carrots." -The Man In The Hat
Do you really want the game to become an economics/small business owner simulator?
Don’t worry about how much money the kingdom has, just let there be as much as you need for the story. If you want them to have enough for the project, they do. If you want them to go do something else to earn the money, that’s what happens. Don’t overthink it.
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
If you want to be able to pay the PCs a certain amount for whatever reward you want to give them, then the kingdom has to generate funds in excess of that. It doesn't matter what the actual number is.
You have to consider that everybody's campaign is different and asking us how much your income should be doesn't work when we know nothing about your world. One person might say 15,000 gp another might say 50,000 gp. You have to go with what works in your world. There are so many factors that nobody can really give you a solid answer - magic? no magic? how large is the kingdom? is it self sustaining? island nation? coastal nation? trade partners? rival nations? slavery? religion?
It will be a ton of work to figure out but, if it's fun for you, then go for it. In the end whatever number you come up with will still need to be enough to pay the PCs.
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
Depending on the level of detail you would want to go into, I guess some key things to consider for the kingdom would be the basics of economy - incoming and outgoing
Incomes
Does the kingdom in question own particular natural resources directly, or do they primarily tax the inhabitants that make a trade from those resources. You can then scale relative to the population, or the trade quantity of the resource.
Taxation in general - how harshly do they tax the populace, and trades. Do they issue licenses for certain types of operations to enable extraction of resources.
Tributes and payments from lesser nobles. This can be in the form of taxes, but might also be the nobles paying different amounts to curry favour with the king.
Import/export balance - is the kingdom selling more than it is buying from other kingdoms around - to general a positive trade balance.
Standing wealth - the kingdom might have rich treasures already and be investing some of it in expeditions/adventurers with a view to generate more wealth of course :)
Different parts of the establishment - depending on the kingdom and how tightly/ruthlessly it controls resources and services, it may be that the arcane magic or even part of the church is a formal part of the king's services that generate income for the crown
Outgoings
Administrative - paying the tax collectors, guards, jailers, castles - all the tedious stuff :) Probably some kind of block figure scaled to population works fine (e.g. one tax collector per 1,000 inhabitants, collecting 1,000 gold per year and costing 100 gold per year for example)
Support to churches - even kings and nobles would likely make substantial donations to churches to keep on the good side of the gods.
Standing army? They might rely on the nobles to raise the bulk of the army from local areas, but likely will as a minimum have some element of a professional army/king's guard too
Infrastructure - citizens might petition the king to build a new bridge, mill, or improve the harbour with a view to generate more trade/taxes
Oh - and then there might be loans as well. In history, several kingdoms have been so heavily indebted that while a king was running the country pro forma, the real power lay with the nobles/merchants/churches that effectively funded the king.
These are just some basic thoughts, but if you want to do a fairly quick job of it, I would start by establishing size of population, and available/tradeable resources, and then simply apply some average figures per capita to scale it up to a kingdom level. Since the players are now entering a stage where the might be able to even influence some of the economy, it could potentially all change anyway :)
I'd be really interested in seeing what you come up with later on if you are willing to share.
The kingdom's economy is as large or as small as the project that needs be undertaken. If you've sold the kingdom as "in need of help from a group of altruistic heroes" or more of a "we'll pay well for your help", then that's what it is. Creating an "Economy" in D&D is purely a homebrew task, as there are no game mechanics that govern how much or how little gold a city/state/nation "should" have. It is purely narrative. Or, maybe that kingdom needs to conquer the next nation over to afford to pay the adventurers for their help. But if the kingdom can accomplish that themselves, why do they need the adventurers again?
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Check into the old AD&D DMG. I remember they had a good break down of castles and costs, they may have touched on the kingdom economy as well.
Second on this. I just flipped through 1st Edition DMG and there is a section, all be it short on Economics as well as a section on Duties, Excises, Fees, Tariffs, Taxes, Tithes, and Tolls.
There is no real way of answering this question that gives you what you want outside of "it's whatever you want it to be." It's just way too big of a concept to even begin to address in an accurate way, but I guess you could simulate some things if you want to. Do be aware though that by the time you come up with a usable system that reflects anything realistically and doesn't fall back onto "Because I say it is" then you could have designed another 2 or 3 cool dungeons that the PCs could go to.
But let's try it because I'm recovering from an illness and have nothing but time, and this is a fast and dirty system:
Most important thing is to work out what the economy is.
I have craftsmen earn 1gp per day. This equates 1gp to £100, for £500 per week, which makes a longsword cost £1,500 and a horse £7,500, and a ship costs £1,000,000. This all sounds about right to me, so that's my wage-setting.
To keep things simple, let's say that:
people in abject poverty can gather 1sp per day (5% population)
farmers earn 5sp per day (65% popuation)
craftsmen earn 1gp per day (25% population)
a wealthy merchant might earn 20gp per week (4% population)
a landowner, banker or celebrity is on 100gp per week (1%)
So then work out how many people there are in the country, then set a basic tax rate of 20%. Do the maths and you know what the income is for the crown.
Decide how much the crown spends per month on doing crowny things, and voila you know what their disposable income for projects is.
I'm not sure how much this could help, but there is a 2nd edition book called "Campaign Guide to the City of Splendors" by Steven Schend with Ed Greenwood. It is all you need to know and more about Waterdeep and it covers all the available guilds, and there is a lot, and what it cost to join as well as their price of services which may serve as a good services guide.
Well, I'm interested in the answer as well. Lets start with a few simple ideas.
Kingdoms were divided into Baronies, which answered to higher Nobles, but let's constrain ourselves to understanding the economy of a Barony.
The Barony was led by a Baron and he had the authority to "lease" his land to others in exchange for duties and service. The model often used was a group of farms under the authority of a Manor Lord who owed service and duties to the Baron. He allowed farmers to live in the farm houses if they farmed the land. If they did not produce a set amount of yield from the farm, he would find someone else to farm the land. They also might be called on to do other service for the Manor Lord.
If a Manor comprised eight separate farms in two groups of four and each farmer had a wife and four young children, and each farmer hired four farm hands and gave them the means to till, plant and reap the crops, how would that work out? Lets assume each farmer can handle 120 acres if he has a mule, plow, wagon etc. And lets assume he can provide his farm hands with two more mules, plows, etc. to share among the four of them. And lets assume each of these farm hands can handle 120 acres themselves. This means under each farmer 600 acres is being brought into production. And this is augmented at the Manor house by a foreman and eight more farm hands sewing another 960 acres. The Manor then includes 5,760 acres in production.
A reasonable estimate for grain production in Medieval Europe was 600 pounds of grain per acre. The Manor would produce 3,456,000 lbs of grain. Half of this would need to be retained by the farms for feed and seed. Another 20% would be retained to feed the 100-ish residents of the Manor. This leaves 1,382,400 pounds of grains. This amount of grain can feed 576 people based on 2400 pounds per year required.
In D&D, a pound of wheat costs 1cp, but a pound of flour costs 2cp. If all the wheat became flour it would be best, but much of the wheat is not ground all the way to flour but something coarser called millage. Millage is eaten by the lower classes, and flour is made into bread, which employs many bakers. Using 2cp per pound the value of the grain produced on an average farm is 27,648gp.
In my setting, a Barony is about 20 miles wide. So a person can walk from one barony to another in one day's travel and not have to sleep in the wilderness where it is risky. This results in an average barony being about 360 sq. miles of land. There are 640 acres per square mile. Therefore there are 230,400 acres in a barony. If half of the land in a barony is in productive farm use then there are about 20 Manors in a Barony. Therefore, a barony like this could support 13,520 residents on grains with 2000 of these residents living on manors and doing the production. Cheese, mutton, goat, chicken, pig and vegetables would all be supplemental foodstuffs. Based on a few things I read, grains made up about 75% of the calories consumed by commoners. So we might be OK extending the number of people supported by these 20 Manors upwards to 18,026. This corresponds to 50 people per square mile.
Of the value of the grain produced by the Manor, the Manor Lord is going to probably need over 6,000gp to pay the workers and he might need more for supplies and things. This would leave, in round figures, 20,000gp x 20 Manors = 400,000gp in value for the Baron. At 2gp per day for skilled hirelings (p.159 PHB) that comes to 200,000 man days of skilled workers the Baron could pay (about 550 yearly employees) or at 2sp per day for unskilled workers that comes to 2,000,000 man days (about 5,500 yearly employees). At 20% government employment, and recognizing that 18,026 is both adult and children in the population (if we assume half the population are children below the age of sixteen) that means the Baron might employ something less than 1,800 people less the Manor Lords, their wives, and the Miller and his wife, already accounted for in our examination.
This isn't the last word on how many people a barony can support because there are a ton of assumptions I have noted. Obviously more than half the land may be in farm production, but I think adjusting many of these numbers upwards sounds a bit risky to me.
The thing I am shocked to see is that this means there would be only one small town per Barony. Every city or even an extra large town is going to suck the resources of the land a great deal. Of course, this is D&D, so we can use magic to supplement the food sources. But look then how little you have to pay the magicians who use their magic for your people this way. It would not be a stretch to think there would be great pressure on the church to support a great number of clerics that can improve the farm yield a great deal.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
The Plant Growth spell's last paragraph is important for a fantasy economy, "If you cast this spell over 8 hours, you enrich the land. All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested."
This can be used to give druids, rangers, or even bards more political power. Yet another guild or religion the local lord has to work with.
The Plant Growth spell's last paragraph is important for a fantasy economy, "If you cast this spell over 8 hours, you enrich the land. All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested."
This can be used to give druids, rangers, or even bards more political power. Yet another guild or religion the local lord has to work with.
That is really great to know. I haven't played a Druid yet, so I'm not aware of all the ways Magic could play into it. A one-half mile radius is quite an area. That would be equal to 125 acres, which is the basic amount of land I figure one farmer could handle with the help of a mule and a plow. So, to enrich all the land, I would need this spell cast 48 times, or more, per Manor. But, doubling the yield, as you can see, gives a monumental benefit to the leaders because everything starts with how many people can you sustain on this amount of land.
Casting this spell 48 times for 8 hours each time, we can treat that as once a day, would take eight weeks and six times a week. A single Druid could improve six Manors in a year, so four Druids could manage a whole Barony in a year. I would think a Baron could find the money needed to compensate the Druids for this service, and as it happens, I have factored into my setting a number of Druid Enclaves.
In the next step, I am figuring out how many trees a typical Manor would harvest in the "season between planting and harvest" when everyone is needed for the fields. Right now I believe there would be 100 good days for harvesting trees in the routine for a Manor. Each Manor has a "companion" Hamlet, a small 200 person group of homes located along the roads where good water is available. The Hamlet is the center for folks that do either herding or woodsman things. So the principal products from a Hamlet will be timber, wool and mutton. However, this production will make a baron more wealthy but does not allow the baron to increase the number of people his lands will sustain.
The Plant Growth spell's last paragraph is important for a fantasy economy, "If you cast this spell over 8 hours, you enrich the land. All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested."
This can be used to give druids, rangers, or even bards more political power. Yet another guild or religion the local lord has to work with.
That is really great to know. I haven't played a Druid yet, so I'm not aware of all the ways Magic could play into it. A one-half mile radius is quite an area. That would be equal to 125 acres, which is the basic amount of land I figure one farmer could handle with the help of a mule and a plow. So, to enrich all the land, I would need this spell cast 48 times, or more, per Manor. But, doubling the yield, as you can see, gives a monumental benefit to the leaders because everything starts with how many people can you sustain on this amount of land.
Casting this spell 48 times for 8 hours each time, we can treat that as once a day, would take eight weeks and six times a week. A single Druid could improve six Manors in a year, so four Druids could manage a whole Barony in a year. I would think a Baron could find the money needed to compensate the Druids for this service, and as it happens, I have factored into my setting a number of Druid Enclaves.
In the next step, I am figuring out how many trees a typical Manor would harvest in the "season between planting and harvest" when everyone is needed for the fields. Right now I believe there would be 100 good days for harvesting trees in the routine for a Manor. Each Manor has a "companion" Hamlet, a small 200 person group of homes located along the roads where good water is available. The Hamlet is the center for folks that do either herding or woodsman things. So the principal products from a Hamlet will be timber, wool and mutton. However, this production will make a baron more wealthy but does not allow the baron to increase the number of people his lands will sustain.
Yeah, it might make more food, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to more demand for food. If the extra wheat is rotting in a silo somewhere, it seems more likely it’s having a negative economic impact, as your supply outstrips demand and prices fall, so the farmers make less money, and on up the chain. (And not for nothing, but where are you getting all these friendly druids with nothing better to do than act as glorified fertilizer.)
Kind of what I was saying in my first post. You can make an economic model, with greater or lesser complexity, but in the end, all of the inputs into that model will be based on arbitrary DM fiat (They made X amount of wheat because you said so, not because of soil and weather conditions and the farmer’s skill and how many pests there were that year, etc.). So why not just cut out the middleman and say, the kingdom has X amount of treasure it can use to hire the PCs for a job. And really, what happens if you do your modeling and the number that comes up is, say, they have 32gp and 7 sp is all that’s left in the treasury. Do you have the king tell the PCs they have to wait a few years until there’s a bumper crop before they can hire someone?
It can be an interesting exercise for a DM, and if it’s fun for you, then by all means go for it. But it’s not something the players will ever see or realize, and it does precious little to advance the story. IMO, your time is better spent fleshing out the villian’s motivation, or just prepping for the next session.
I'm just working this out because I like the idea of the setting making sense. For example, I am annoyed if monsters are rampaging throughout the countryside. Monsters can be going crazy in the frontiers, but within the kingdom it doesn't make any sense because the farmers have to do their thing to feed the people.
The basis of a medieval economy is farming, because you have to be able to feed the people. The "Assumptions" you attribute to DM fiat, well the ones I am using come from papers written on medieval living. I am not sure if one farmer can manage 40 acres or 140 acres, but the yield per acre is based on historical information. Once you get a yield, then you have to save half for seed. With the grain that remains, grains made up 80% of the diet of the typical resident. Since it was a smaller percentage for the upper classes, I rounded the 80% down to 75% overall. This establishes the maximum population the land can support.
Once you know the max population, you can deduct the number of people involved in farming. Now you have the non-farm labor pool. Once you deduct an appropriate number of people for town guard and stuff, you find there is a small number of people left to do other things.
The next step will be to estimate how many people are involved in different tasks like blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, wheelwrights, ... so we can get an idea of what the wage base looks like. Then we assume a tax rate and see how much revenue is available to the Baron. We check the "government employment" against the available revenue to make sure we are in the right ballpark. Then, we just need to figure how many baronies are in the kingdom.
None of this is precise, but it is at least an order of magnitude better than the model hidden in the D&D ruleset.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
First, as I said, if it's fun for you, go ahead. I'm not trying to say you shouldn't. I'm just saying that trying to make D&D make economic sense simply does not work.
That said, using papers is still DM fiat. Papers on medieval living on Earth aren't necessarily relevant on Toril, or Oerth, or Theros, certainly not on Athas. Earthlings never had to deal with dragons, or necromancers, and an injured farmer on earth couldn't get a local cleric to cast a spell and fix him up. And medieval farmers didn't have to deal with some kind of global cataclysm every time there was an edition change. And those papers, I imagine are probably pretty euro-centric, and therefore could not really extrapolate crop yields on the rest of earth, let alone what is going on in a fantasy world that might not even have the same number of hours of daylight, or length of seasons, or soil conditions. If you use them, you are deciding that your world is close enough to the world in those papers that they are relevant. That is absolutely a choice you can make, but it's still DM fiat.
But more importantly, the economy in D&D, such as it is, is not based on trying to model the actual value of goods and services. It's based on game balance. A suit of plate mail costs 1500 gp no matter where in the multiverse you go. It doesn't matter how easy or hard it is to get iron, how far from the mine you are, if the smith is especially skilled, what the current regional demand is for a suit of plate mail, what the tax rates are, or any of the 101 factors that go into the pricing of goods in the real world. It is priced so that it becomes available to characters at a certain point in their adventuring career when it makes sense for their AC to hit a certain number. Trying to reverse engineer a national level of economic activity based on, for example, the price of flour in the PHB is bound to give you a number which is, at best, flawed, because, in a real economy, it's impossible that the flour would cost the same no matter where you go. Cinnamon has a price in the PHB, but in a real economy, it will be more or less expensive based on where you are in the world, and how easy or difficult it is to transport them to from the places they are grown to where you are. But in D&D, you can be next to the cinnamon tree, and it will cost you the same as if you are half a world away -- it's a game balance price, not an economic model price.
Like others here, I'm not interested in simulating an entire economy, so I tend to flip these things over and come at it from the other side.
What are your player goals? How much money do they need to accomplish them?
If you have those two answers, you just mete out that much money in the general amount of time that you want them to receive it, plus or minus 20% if you want their choices to have an effect on it.
Your players and their goals are far more important to the game than how accurately you have reproduced a medieval economy. Use those values as your baseline and extrapolate from there however much you want. This is how they came up for the price of plate mail in the PHB.
I'm just working this out because I like the idea of the setting making sense.
Economies that make sense and dungeons don't really intersect, and D&D has some particular nonsense that is hard to root out (for example, the ratio of meat animal cost to grain is off by a factor of 5-10; a chicken should not cost the same as a pound of flour), but depending on the total composition of the workforce, total annual per capita gdp is probably in the low hundreds of gp.
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I am wondering how large, in gold pieces, my homebrew kingdom's economy should be. My players have reached a level where they are ready to interact on a national level and I find myself wanting to build a kingdom level budget from which the crown can allocate funds to player projects.
-- BlackLiteMoon Roleplay --
"Beware of Rabbits, They Eat Carrots."
-The Man In The Hat
Do you really want the game to become an economics/small business owner simulator?
Don’t worry about how much money the kingdom has, just let there be as much as you need for the story. If you want them to have enough for the project, they do. If you want them to go do something else to earn the money, that’s what happens. Don’t overthink it.
Well, thanks for your opinion I guess but I wasn't really looking for someone to explain why I shouldn't want my question answered.
-- BlackLiteMoon Roleplay --
"Beware of Rabbits, They Eat Carrots."
-The Man In The Hat
That's quite the interesting project TyniBrian
I'm thinking you might get some ideas from the the doomsday book here's a good BBC Bitesize on it -> BBC Bitesize The Doomsday Book
good luck would be very interested to hear your conclusions
edit just found this thread on DDB homebrew which might be interesting player-kingdom-management-5e-supplement
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt, It lies behind stars and under hills, And empty holes it fills, It comes first and follows after, Ends life, kills laughter.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
I have to agree with Xalthu.
If you want to be able to pay the PCs a certain amount for whatever reward you want to give them, then the kingdom has to generate funds in excess of that. It doesn't matter what the actual number is.
You have to consider that everybody's campaign is different and asking us how much your income should be doesn't work when we know nothing about your world. One person might say 15,000 gp another might say 50,000 gp. You have to go with what works in your world. There are so many factors that nobody can really give you a solid answer - magic? no magic? how large is the kingdom? is it self sustaining? island nation? coastal nation? trade partners? rival nations? slavery? religion?
It will be a ton of work to figure out but, if it's fun for you, then go for it. In the end whatever number you come up with will still need to be enough to pay the PCs.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Depending on the level of detail you would want to go into, I guess some key things to consider for the kingdom would be the basics of economy - incoming and outgoing
Incomes
Outgoings
Oh - and then there might be loans as well. In history, several kingdoms have been so heavily indebted that while a king was running the country pro forma, the real power lay with the nobles/merchants/churches that effectively funded the king.
These are just some basic thoughts, but if you want to do a fairly quick job of it, I would start by establishing size of population, and available/tradeable resources, and then simply apply some average figures per capita to scale it up to a kingdom level. Since the players are now entering a stage where the might be able to even influence some of the economy, it could potentially all change anyway :)
I'd be really interested in seeing what you come up with later on if you are willing to share.
The kingdom's economy is as large or as small as the project that needs be undertaken. If you've sold the kingdom as "in need of help from a group of altruistic heroes" or more of a "we'll pay well for your help", then that's what it is. Creating an "Economy" in D&D is purely a homebrew task, as there are no game mechanics that govern how much or how little gold a city/state/nation "should" have. It is purely narrative. Or, maybe that kingdom needs to conquer the next nation over to afford to pay the adventurers for their help. But if the kingdom can accomplish that themselves, why do they need the adventurers again?
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Check into the old AD&D DMG. I remember they had a good break down of castles and costs, they may have touched on the kingdom economy as well.
Second on this. I just flipped through 1st Edition DMG and there is a section, all be it short on Economics as well as a section on Duties, Excises, Fees, Tariffs, Taxes, Tithes, and Tolls.
There is no real way of answering this question that gives you what you want outside of "it's whatever you want it to be." It's just way too big of a concept to even begin to address in an accurate way, but I guess you could simulate some things if you want to. Do be aware though that by the time you come up with a usable system that reflects anything realistically and doesn't fall back onto "Because I say it is" then you could have designed another 2 or 3 cool dungeons that the PCs could go to.
But let's try it because I'm recovering from an illness and have nothing but time, and this is a fast and dirty system:
Most important thing is to work out what the economy is.
I have craftsmen earn 1gp per day. This equates 1gp to £100, for £500 per week, which makes a longsword cost £1,500 and a horse £7,500, and a ship costs £1,000,000. This all sounds about right to me, so that's my wage-setting.
So then work out how many people there are in the country, then set a basic tax rate of 20%. Do the maths and you know what the income is for the crown.
Decide how much the crown spends per month on doing crowny things, and voila you know what their disposable income for projects is.
I'm not sure how much this could help, but there is a 2nd edition book called "Campaign Guide to the City of Splendors" by Steven Schend with Ed Greenwood. It is all you need to know and more about Waterdeep and it covers all the available guilds, and there is a lot, and what it cost to join as well as their price of services which may serve as a good services guide.
Well, I'm interested in the answer as well. Lets start with a few simple ideas.
Kingdoms were divided into Baronies, which answered to higher Nobles, but let's constrain ourselves to understanding the economy of a Barony.
The Barony was led by a Baron and he had the authority to "lease" his land to others in exchange for duties and service. The model often used was a group of farms under the authority of a Manor Lord who owed service and duties to the Baron. He allowed farmers to live in the farm houses if they farmed the land. If they did not produce a set amount of yield from the farm, he would find someone else to farm the land. They also might be called on to do other service for the Manor Lord.
If a Manor comprised eight separate farms in two groups of four and each farmer had a wife and four young children, and each farmer hired four farm hands and gave them the means to till, plant and reap the crops, how would that work out? Lets assume each farmer can handle 120 acres if he has a mule, plow, wagon etc. And lets assume he can provide his farm hands with two more mules, plows, etc. to share among the four of them. And lets assume each of these farm hands can handle 120 acres themselves. This means under each farmer 600 acres is being brought into production. And this is augmented at the Manor house by a foreman and eight more farm hands sewing another 960 acres. The Manor then includes 5,760 acres in production.
A reasonable estimate for grain production in Medieval Europe was 600 pounds of grain per acre. The Manor would produce 3,456,000 lbs of grain. Half of this would need to be retained by the farms for feed and seed. Another 20% would be retained to feed the 100-ish residents of the Manor. This leaves 1,382,400 pounds of grains. This amount of grain can feed 576 people based on 2400 pounds per year required.
In D&D, a pound of wheat costs 1cp, but a pound of flour costs 2cp. If all the wheat became flour it would be best, but much of the wheat is not ground all the way to flour but something coarser called millage. Millage is eaten by the lower classes, and flour is made into bread, which employs many bakers. Using 2cp per pound the value of the grain produced on an average farm is 27,648gp.
In my setting, a Barony is about 20 miles wide. So a person can walk from one barony to another in one day's travel and not have to sleep in the wilderness where it is risky. This results in an average barony being about 360 sq. miles of land. There are 640 acres per square mile. Therefore there are 230,400 acres in a barony. If half of the land in a barony is in productive farm use then there are about 20 Manors in a Barony. Therefore, a barony like this could support 13,520 residents on grains with 2000 of these residents living on manors and doing the production. Cheese, mutton, goat, chicken, pig and vegetables would all be supplemental foodstuffs. Based on a few things I read, grains made up about 75% of the calories consumed by commoners. So we might be OK extending the number of people supported by these 20 Manors upwards to 18,026. This corresponds to 50 people per square mile.
Of the value of the grain produced by the Manor, the Manor Lord is going to probably need over 6,000gp to pay the workers and he might need more for supplies and things. This would leave, in round figures, 20,000gp x 20 Manors = 400,000gp in value for the Baron. At 2gp per day for skilled hirelings (p.159 PHB) that comes to 200,000 man days of skilled workers the Baron could pay (about 550 yearly employees) or at 2sp per day for unskilled workers that comes to 2,000,000 man days (about 5,500 yearly employees). At 20% government employment, and recognizing that 18,026 is both adult and children in the population (if we assume half the population are children below the age of sixteen) that means the Baron might employ something less than 1,800 people less the Manor Lords, their wives, and the Miller and his wife, already accounted for in our examination.
This isn't the last word on how many people a barony can support because there are a ton of assumptions I have noted. Obviously more than half the land may be in farm production, but I think adjusting many of these numbers upwards sounds a bit risky to me.
The thing I am shocked to see is that this means there would be only one small town per Barony. Every city or even an extra large town is going to suck the resources of the land a great deal. Of course, this is D&D, so we can use magic to supplement the food sources. But look then how little you have to pay the magicians who use their magic for your people this way. It would not be a stretch to think there would be great pressure on the church to support a great number of clerics that can improve the farm yield a great deal.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
The Plant Growth spell's last paragraph is important for a fantasy economy, "If you cast this spell over 8 hours, you enrich the land. All plants in a half-mile radius centered on a point within range become enriched for 1 year. The plants yield twice the normal amount of food when harvested."
This can be used to give druids, rangers, or even bards more political power. Yet another guild or religion the local lord has to work with.
That is really great to know. I haven't played a Druid yet, so I'm not aware of all the ways Magic could play into it. A one-half mile radius is quite an area. That would be equal to 125 acres, which is the basic amount of land I figure one farmer could handle with the help of a mule and a plow. So, to enrich all the land, I would need this spell cast 48 times, or more, per Manor. But, doubling the yield, as you can see, gives a monumental benefit to the leaders because everything starts with how many people can you sustain on this amount of land.
Casting this spell 48 times for 8 hours each time, we can treat that as once a day, would take eight weeks and six times a week. A single Druid could improve six Manors in a year, so four Druids could manage a whole Barony in a year. I would think a Baron could find the money needed to compensate the Druids for this service, and as it happens, I have factored into my setting a number of Druid Enclaves.
In the next step, I am figuring out how many trees a typical Manor would harvest in the "season between planting and harvest" when everyone is needed for the fields. Right now I believe there would be 100 good days for harvesting trees in the routine for a Manor. Each Manor has a "companion" Hamlet, a small 200 person group of homes located along the roads where good water is available. The Hamlet is the center for folks that do either herding or woodsman things. So the principal products from a Hamlet will be timber, wool and mutton. However, this production will make a baron more wealthy but does not allow the baron to increase the number of people his lands will sustain.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
On page 157 of the PHB their is a lifestyle chart.
Squalid is 1 sp/day
Wealthy is 4 gp/day.
Aristocrat is 10+ gp/day
Yeah, it might make more food, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to more demand for food. If the extra wheat is rotting in a silo somewhere, it seems more likely it’s having a negative economic impact, as your supply outstrips demand and prices fall, so the farmers make less money, and on up the chain. (And not for nothing, but where are you getting all these friendly druids with nothing better to do than act as glorified fertilizer.)
Kind of what I was saying in my first post. You can make an economic model, with greater or lesser complexity, but in the end, all of the inputs into that model will be based on arbitrary DM fiat (They made X amount of wheat because you said so, not because of soil and weather conditions and the farmer’s skill and how many pests there were that year, etc.). So why not just cut out the middleman and say, the kingdom has X amount of treasure it can use to hire the PCs for a job.
And really, what happens if you do your modeling and the number that comes up is, say, they have 32gp and 7 sp is all that’s left in the treasury. Do you have the king tell the PCs they have to wait a few years until there’s a bumper crop before they can hire someone?
It can be an interesting exercise for a DM, and if it’s fun for you, then by all means go for it. But it’s not something the players will ever see or realize, and it does precious little to advance the story. IMO, your time is better spent fleshing out the villian’s motivation, or just prepping for the next session.
I'm just working this out because I like the idea of the setting making sense. For example, I am annoyed if monsters are rampaging throughout the countryside. Monsters can be going crazy in the frontiers, but within the kingdom it doesn't make any sense because the farmers have to do their thing to feed the people.
The basis of a medieval economy is farming, because you have to be able to feed the people. The "Assumptions" you attribute to DM fiat, well the ones I am using come from papers written on medieval living. I am not sure if one farmer can manage 40 acres or 140 acres, but the yield per acre is based on historical information. Once you get a yield, then you have to save half for seed. With the grain that remains, grains made up 80% of the diet of the typical resident. Since it was a smaller percentage for the upper classes, I rounded the 80% down to 75% overall. This establishes the maximum population the land can support.
Once you know the max population, you can deduct the number of people involved in farming. Now you have the non-farm labor pool. Once you deduct an appropriate number of people for town guard and stuff, you find there is a small number of people left to do other things.
The next step will be to estimate how many people are involved in different tasks like blacksmiths, tailors, carpenters, wheelwrights, ... so we can get an idea of what the wage base looks like. Then we assume a tax rate and see how much revenue is available to the Baron. We check the "government employment" against the available revenue to make sure we are in the right ballpark. Then, we just need to figure how many baronies are in the kingdom.
None of this is precise, but it is at least an order of magnitude better than the model hidden in the D&D ruleset.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
First, as I said, if it's fun for you, go ahead. I'm not trying to say you shouldn't. I'm just saying that trying to make D&D make economic sense simply does not work.
That said, using papers is still DM fiat. Papers on medieval living on Earth aren't necessarily relevant on Toril, or Oerth, or Theros, certainly not on Athas. Earthlings never had to deal with dragons, or necromancers, and an injured farmer on earth couldn't get a local cleric to cast a spell and fix him up. And medieval farmers didn't have to deal with some kind of global cataclysm every time there was an edition change. And those papers, I imagine are probably pretty euro-centric, and therefore could not really extrapolate crop yields on the rest of earth, let alone what is going on in a fantasy world that might not even have the same number of hours of daylight, or length of seasons, or soil conditions. If you use them, you are deciding that your world is close enough to the world in those papers that they are relevant. That is absolutely a choice you can make, but it's still DM fiat.
But more importantly, the economy in D&D, such as it is, is not based on trying to model the actual value of goods and services. It's based on game balance. A suit of plate mail costs 1500 gp no matter where in the multiverse you go. It doesn't matter how easy or hard it is to get iron, how far from the mine you are, if the smith is especially skilled, what the current regional demand is for a suit of plate mail, what the tax rates are, or any of the 101 factors that go into the pricing of goods in the real world. It is priced so that it becomes available to characters at a certain point in their adventuring career when it makes sense for their AC to hit a certain number. Trying to reverse engineer a national level of economic activity based on, for example, the price of flour in the PHB is bound to give you a number which is, at best, flawed, because, in a real economy, it's impossible that the flour would cost the same no matter where you go. Cinnamon has a price in the PHB, but in a real economy, it will be more or less expensive based on where you are in the world, and how easy or difficult it is to transport them to from the places they are grown to where you are. But in D&D, you can be next to the cinnamon tree, and it will cost you the same as if you are half a world away -- it's a game balance price, not an economic model price.
Like others here, I'm not interested in simulating an entire economy, so I tend to flip these things over and come at it from the other side.
What are your player goals? How much money do they need to accomplish them?
If you have those two answers, you just mete out that much money in the general amount of time that you want them to receive it, plus or minus 20% if you want their choices to have an effect on it.
Your players and their goals are far more important to the game than how accurately you have reproduced a medieval economy. Use those values as your baseline and extrapolate from there however much you want. This is how they came up for the price of plate mail in the PHB.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Economies that make sense and dungeons don't really intersect, and D&D has some particular nonsense that is hard to root out (for example, the ratio of meat animal cost to grain is off by a factor of 5-10; a chicken should not cost the same as a pound of flour), but depending on the total composition of the workforce, total annual per capita gdp is probably in the low hundreds of gp.