T w e n t y S i d e d
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– Shamus, Wednesday Nov 1, 2006
Woo! Moved on from last week’s nonsense.
Also, I disagree with the ‘store credit’ argument. You’ll never find a shopkeeper with that much on hand, so to accept store credit would be like passing on a curse. Instead, you find a shopkeeper in a huge city with a large stock, preferably including several bags of holding. You trade it to him for store credit, and instead of the incredibly valuable mithril shirt, you now have every low level dumb item ever to imagine. You give him the shirt and dump every single thing he’s selling into the bags of holding. He gets to go find some sucker willing to buy the shirt off of him, and you walk away with a store in your inventory.
Need a rope? Caltrops? Healing potion? Waterskin? Rations? Thieves’ tools? A lute? Weighted dice? Commoner’s clothes? An apple? A notebook? A fountain pen? A jar of Skippy peanut butter? You’ve got it. A billion gold is great, but nowhere near as awesome as having access to every basic item at any given moment.
My DM has a love/hate relationship with my ideas.
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I love the store credit idea because you probably COULD scam somebody into it. MLMs and other scams that require a chain of infinite fools getting suckered into them in order for the previous suckers to cash out obviously get plenty of traction in real life. You could make that work. It would be terribly unethical, but you could totally do it. What’s a bard for, anyway, if not scamming the shopkeep into giving you more store credit than you could ever spend?
And the DM could make a running gag of the party running into shopkeepers around the world who are all desperately hoping to offload this mithril shirt onto the next sucker. “What do I have for sale? Why, this wonderful mithril shirt! I definitely did not trade my entire stock and my firstborn for this amazing piece of armor! It’s definitely not too beautiful and expensive to wear into battle!”
D&D economy makes negative sense (and I’m probably still overestimating the amount of sense it makes) but in the real world something like mythril armor would be worth a king’s ransom, both figuratively and almost literally.
As a produced item, it’d be the result of a commission that involved payment of a LOT of man-hours (elf-hours?). Like, I have zero clue about pre-industrial metalworking but if someone pointed a gun at my head and forced me I’d hazard at least one year of dedicated work for at least one thousand people when including everything (not just the blacksmiths but the miners etc). That’s a lot of cash the final buyer must fork over to cover everyone’s living wages.
As a looted item, you’d sell it not for store credit but for kingdom credit. Which is still a scam but you could probably leverage it for a commission, a minor noble title or something and start exploiting the feudal land. And hey, if someone in the party gets the lemon commission and gets appointed Sheriff of Nottingham that’s the next campaign hook right there.
Yup, absolutely a solid hook to make players saddled with a small holding that’s more trouble than it’s worth (one of Might & Magic games does that, more recently Pathfinder:Kingmaker), or a title that’s effectively a job, for “returning a relic” or “showing their fealty with such a magnificent treasure”.
One of my GMs intended to saddle our party with literally a cartload of stolen money that would not be legal tender yet at the point we obtained it. We were saved by our strong moral values (and good perception rolls).
Reminds me of the Fallout 2 quest where the questgiver is an old ghoul who forgot either that the reward he’s pointing you to is caps or that caps aren’t money in New California anymore, and so accidentally sends you after a “treasure hoard” that’s mostly worthless.
With access to a good mine and source of wood (for charcoal), a single person with the right knowledge, skills and tools could easily make a steel mail hauberk in a year, from mining/smelting the ore to smithing the finished item. A second person could keep them fed and watered over this time, and take a turn on the bellows.
Mithril is a lot rarer (only found in Khazad-Dum in the Third Age), but it was easy to work — I think it was Gimli who said it could be “beaten like copper”. The cost of mithril armour was thus very much based on its rarity and innate properties, not on the difficulty of using it. With, no doubt, an extra charge for the secret elven/dwarven mithril-working skills.
Here’s a good piece on realistic armour crafting times: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/20833/how-long-does-it-take-to-craft-the-kinds-of-armour-worn-by-typical-medieval-warr
It took me about 40 hours to craft a shirt that went down to my waist and elbows. 14-gauge, 1/2″, non-riveted, prefabricated rings. So, adding rivets and having to create the rings myself from spooled wire* would have added a bit of time, but not a full year’s worth. A shirt made for battle would probably go past the waist and go all the way to the wrists as well, but I think Bilbo’s shirt is meant to be somewhat hidden.
*Or did they simply cast the rings back then?
They would have made wire, casting is far too slow and prone to casting faults. Drawing wire is a laborious and repetitive process to get it down to the right diameter, but spooling it and creating the rings is very easy.
“Dwarf-hours,” surely, for a mithril coat.
French translation here: https://dmoftheringsfr.blogspot.com/2023/06/le-loot-des-anneaux.html
If you believe the mithril shirt is more valuable as currency than as armor for you, there’s no reason to drag it around to random shopkeepers. Figure out who the richest dwarven king in the world is, travel to where he lives, and sell it to him.
Dwarves love rare crafting materials. Dwarves have a lot of gold, gems, and other more spendable treasures.
If you found an original copy of the Magna Carta behind a dusty old painting in the attic, you don’t drag it to every pawn shop in town to see what you’re offered. You get it authenticated, have a well respected authority put out a press release about it, google for which wall street tycoon is a massive history buff, and you make a deal.
That gets into how gems were originally used in D&D, in fact, as an alternate and more portable form of currency. Thousands upon thousands of gold coins were impractical to carry – and even if you’re not tracking weight down to how much gold you’re carrying there’s a point where you say that no, it doesn’t make sense that you’re holding a bank vault’s worth of legal tender in your backpack – not to mention that nobody outside of maybe a bank or a governmental treasury would have that much coinage in one place at any time. But if you could say that, for example, this high-quality emerald or diamond is worth several thousand gold pieces, then a handful of gems could quickly reach an equivalent value to the money you would otherwise carry. Especially if you get into magical fantasy precious gems, which you could say have values eclipsing even the greatest of mundane gems.
So if you have a piece of armor worth a ludicrous amount of coinage, you wouldn’t try to exchange it for coin, you’d exchange it for a much smaller collection of precious gems in trade to whoever wants it (or, more realistically, you’d probably seek to trade out the valuable artifact for a different valuable artifact your party could actually use, but assuming you just want to sell it for cash). Then, you would exchange the gems piecemeal whenever you wanted to dip into that fund – sell this gem for a few hundred gold, use that to buy what needs buying. Maybe directly exchange the gems for high value transactions. But either way, if you wanted to make a high value exchange, that would be the classical way to do it.
Though it’s worth noting, that early D&D assumed that the price of gemstones was largely standardized and stable – an opal you bought for 10 gold would be worth 10 gold in a different city several thousand miles away, disregarding any notion of economy or trade in between. Which worked as a concession for storing money, but it is a somewhat entertaining assumption.
The standardized and stable value is further important because many spells with material component or focus define it through the item’s monetary value. A 100gp pearl for identify, a 1000/5000gp worth of diamonds for resurrection etc. (specifics will vary by edition and are not really that important). Now, I’m sure some particularly malicious GMs have botched a resurrection by stating the party was cheated on a diamond’s worth but imagine if it differed by country or over time!
I always thought the “value” notion was just to give the game a proxy for “quality” – a spell might need a flawless diamond to work properly. Keeping track of the 4 C’s of a diamond is an accounting exercise that adds little in the way of fun to the game, so using “value” as a proxy works ok.
I once had a group who tried to game this. They needed a 1,000 gp ruby for a spell. All they had was a small flawed ruby worth 50 gp. They did have 1,000 gp, but didn’t want to waste the time trying to buy a proper ruby. So they got creative. They had one player character “sell” the small flawed ruby they had to another player character for 1,000 gp. Since they “sold” the ruby for 1,000 gp it must now be a 1,000 gp ruby! The gods were not amused and the spell backfired spectacularly as punishment for trying to trick them.
It definitely is a shorthand for quality of the gems, it’s just an interesting note that gems are given the same value whether it’s from the people who mine and sell them in bulk, the people who buy them in the next city over, and the people a contintent away who only ever see them when they arrive on the odd trading ship.
And yeah, keeping track of the rarity and quality of your individual gems is a massive headache for little gain, and standardized values simplifies bookkeeping. But imagine if the semiprecious gems your players can buy for a few coppers a piece at home command princely sums in some faraway realm!
Now you’re into trade simulation (which would actually make a great campaign if you wanted to do it) – have goods with different values in different places, load up the wagons or ships, have pirates/brigands show up and fight them off. Either fun in itself or as a launching point for a “real” campaign. In fact, the tabletop campaign that this site was originally named for sort of used that as part of the initial hook for launching the game – they players hitched a ride on a ship that was gunrunning weapons to rebels for profit.
Of items to have different prices in different places, gems are less likely to have wildly varying market prices geographically – they’re small and easy to transport, so if there was a huge price difference over a travelable distance someone would come around and exploit it. They’re also mined in various locations, so it’s not like there’s a single source that everything has to come from.
Wow. I hit the mod queue for the first time in forever. Really curious what in my post above triggered it, but I always wonder that. Miss you, Shamus.
I have no idea. Some things get triggered, but I haven’t been able to find any correlation or where to set up the filters. Which sucks, because I could really use it to filter our some really nasty hate mail I’ve been having to hand-mod, which seems to be dodging being banned by use of a VPN.
In reply to your last paragraph: in the Renaissance era, there was a particular kind of blue dye called “ultramarine” in Europe, so-named because it was made of ground up lapis-lazuli from Afghanistan, or “over the sea”*. It was literally worth more than its weight in gold because it was so hard to get. (Which is an interesting detail to know when you spot its distinctive presence in various old paintings!) We could certainly get into a discussion about whether lapis-lazuli is a “true” gemstone or not**, but just because something’s small and easy to transport doesn’t preclude it from having immense value changes over long distances where it’s not available locally. (Admittedly I don’t know exactly how valuable it was considered in Afghanistan where it was mined, but surely it must’ve been valued less or there wouldn’t have been a long-distance trade route as it wouldn’t have been profitable.) Of course a fantasy world could have lodes of precious metals/gems more equally distributed (as you mentioned), which might help equal out price differences.
*It’s still in use ? and still beautiful – (I’ve used it in various paintings), but we can synthesize the molecule responsible for the blue color now, making it ironically among the cheapest paint colors you can get nowadays.
**There’s also the fact that it’s being “used up” rather than accumulating in gem form, which might change its economic value, but D&D also has ways to use up gemstones, so maybe it’s a more apt comparison for that.
I see your fact on ultramarine and raise you “ruby red” glass!
Indeed, red stained glass is one of the rarest and most expensive colours (especially in the pre-modern era before we developed durable coating techniques) because it can only be achieved by adding gold impurities to the glass.
It’s a fact that, like the use of ultramarine in paintings, can tell you a lot about the artwork you’re looking at in terms of stained glass windows and glassware.
In particular in medieval churches, the more red is used (and the size of the pieces), the more expensive the commission (and the more evident the power and wealth of the patron behind the window!)
Oh, I’d heard of ultramarine but never ruby red stained glass – learn something new every day! It’s always fascinating when you can look at a piece of artwork and can tell a lot about its creation and the environment surrounding it by taking note of the materials in it.
One of my favorite examples of the phenomenon is looking at different dyes in clothing, though cloth is harder to preserve and so it’s harder to get good examples compared to paintings or stained glass. Most everyone knows about royal purple, but there was a wide variety in dyes and rarities available, even in the same color – earthy or rusty reds were fairly common and easy to acquire for anyone on the street, but more vivid reds were much rarer and more expensive, and you could tell a lot about a person’s class and status not even from the style of clothing they wore, but just the coloration.
At times this was even enforced through sumptuary laws, regulating that even if you saved up money or got lucky and acquired an expensive dye, you weren’t allowed to wear anything with it if you weren’t a part of the proper social class. So judging peoples’ class by their clothing became codified in law.
To sorta circle this tangent back to D&D, back when sumptuary laws were a thing mercenaries were often given a specific exemption from them. They had a fondness for bright outfits and a variety of colors – look up the kinds of outfits that the Landsknecht mercenaries wore, they had a lot of color there – and also were necessary and armed enough that no country really wanted to piss off their mercenary forces (I believe the official reasoning was something like “their lives are short and violent, therefore they can be allowed a little extravagance over the common man). I could fully imagine a nation with sumptuary laws in place keeping exceptions open for adventurers, to avoid scaring off potential problem solvers. It would probably be an interesting bit of flavor to have an adventurer, with not just their magical equipment but the clothes they wear, to stand out from most of the people they run into.
Ooh, that could be a fun idea; you run into clothings laws with mercenary exceptions so in order to keep your gear you have to be able to prove you’re in the middle of a quest. Finished the quest? Better start another one before you get back to town, and make sure you’ve got the papers.
Ah, yes, I’d heard of that but forgotten about it. (It’s so strange how colloidal solutions of gold nanaparticles look red, but that’s physics for ya!) I got into painting some years back and there are tons of interesting stories to tell about the pigments humanity uses; some are cutting-edge synthetic creations made in labs, others are literally still made by scooping clay out of the ground – the exact same pigments our ancestors used in cave paintings. What appear to be two slightly different shades of the same color of paint can have a 10-fold price difference due to the pigment involved, and can have very different characteristics. And so on and so forth.
A GM who tried this nonsense would likely not have any players afterwards.
Someone in Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines once said something along the lines of “true power doesn’t come from wealth, but from the things it affords us.” Stuff like this makes me think he was right.
A shirt giving you damage resistance Eleventy Billion/ – on a quest where you have to protect a single person doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you should be hawking anyway.
The quest isn’t to protect one person. It’s to protect one item.
Even if Frodo were immune to damage (he’s not – there’s plenty of places a shirt doesn’t cover), he’s very susceptible to being overpowered/captured/dragged off to wherever. This was basically Sauruman’s plan the whole time. Or just, y’know, having the ring taken from him.
If you (like Sauruman) want to capture Frodo more than you want to loot the ring from his bloated corpse, having him with high armor could in some ways be a disadvantage – if you could blast the party with a massive fireball or rain down arrows from a great height and know he’d be the only one to survive could make capturing him a lot easier than having to battle up close in person with his companions.
D&D and most other fantasy economies vastly underestimate how valuable ordinary things are (though also how valuable gold is!) That mail shirt that you get as starting equipment at level 1 and discard as trash the instant you find better? That’s a massive investment of time and materials, pretty much unaffordable for anyone that isn’t nobility.
There’s a great series of articles on this and similar subjects at acoup.blog; https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/ is as good a place to start as any
What’s wrong with untangling a single ring off it Dane-style? Entire shirt is worth princedoms, and thus basically not-sellable at anything resembling it’s value, but a small piece of mithril will still solve all the party’s local needs while leaving the shirt basically fully funcional – it’s not a magical item after all, DR comes from craftmanship combined with material.
I can only speak for myself and my campaigns, but I think Shamus is right. It just FEELS a lot nicer getting “a perfect ocean-blue sapphire set in a gold ring shaped to resemble twining strands of coral” than the DM telling you that you find “a 500g sapphire ring”. I even had one player who made a habit of keeping especially beautiful(ly described) weapons, armor and jewelry and enchanting them to turn them into magic items for the party. :)
Oh absolutely – lovingly described loot makes the game world seem more real, and the treasures seem more unique. And honestly, a player hearing the description of some jewelry and liking it so much they keep it for themselves instead of just pawning it off for some equipment just seems like some great roleplaying, and makes the characters more real.
Because hey, those characters have tastes and preferences too! And it only makes sense they’ll be taken with some of the treasure they find and keep a hold of it.
That mithril shirt fits hobbits just fine but was originally made for an “elf prince”. Elves as roughly human-sized, so who would invest that much time and money in armour that somebody is going to grow out of?
Although that would explain why it was still sitting around the Lonely Mountain.
“After months of pain-staking effort, we completed your son’s armour.”
“Sorry, he had growth spurt. He’s now three sizes larger.”