Dimensionfold Wiki

See also travel

Inns and taverns pop up along the road, with

• meals costing d20 copper pieces
• lodging costing d20 silver pieces.

5e commoner life and economy tables based on social status. Relevant pages are 157 - 159 in the PHB, and 127 in the DMG.

the DMG lifestyle cost is intended for an adventurer. It assumes he buys all his meals, rents lodging and pays for the reparation of weapons and tools. Clearly, this is not the case for all NPCs. Thus, we have to reduce the lifestyle expense of NPCs to accommodate for preparing their own meals, fixing their own stuff and owning their own home. Disclaimer: Many NPCs, especially of the lower classes, would probably in fact be renting and not owning, while the higher classes would not be preparing their own meals or fixing their own stuff. Regardless, I have decided to reduce all lifestyles equally for the sake of 5e simplicity. As we will see later, it generally works out anyway. The question is how much we reduce it by. Of course, there are not guidelines in the books regarding this, but the average today is between 40 % and 70 %, from what I can gather. I'll go with 50 %.

Second, the table only accounts for the NPCs lifestyle expenses. They also have a business to maintain. This is where the difference from our reduction in lifestyle evens out. The poor classes might have to rent, but they generally don't have to maintain their business, as they work for someone else. The homeowners, however, often have a business maintain. So now we pull up the DMG on page 127 and look at maintenance costs. Sadly, it is a complete mess. The maintenance for a farm is 5 sp per day, and that includes the pay for a skilled worked and two unskilled ones. The DMG states we can find the details of skilled and unskilled workers in the PHB. We already did that, and a skilled worker earns 2 gp per day. The minimum maintenance cost of a farm would therefore be 2 gp (for the skilled worker) plus 4 sp (for the unskilled workers), and that is excluding repairs, feeding the animals, maintaining equipment etc. What WoTC were thinking when they made those tables we will never know. I tried playing around with the numbers for maintenance cost for a while, and ended up with it being a third of monthly income. Remember, the farmer farms his own farm, so again the cost is lower than for an adventurer.

There are as many ways to tax poor peasants as there are rogues in a roll20 campaign, but yet again I went for simplicity: A form of poll tax. Every commoner over the age of 14 pays a set tax based on his social status, not his actual income. I am a kind ruler, the tax is 10 %. You can obviously set it as high or low as you want according to the avarice of your ruler or whether or not money is needed for an incoming war/building of a giant statue. The commoners will start losing money at 17 %.

This seems okay. We see that the commoners of DnD are not so freakishly poor as some believe, and if a community pools together its savings they might be able to pay some helpful heroes. Quite a large sum flow through them in the course of a week, but they don't have a lot to spend. Many of them have a family to take care of, spends some nights a month drinking at the tavern, or have to pay for unexpected stuff not covered by lifestyle and business maintenance, so their actual savings each month will generally be lower than their profit. A poor worker can spend 1 silver a week on beer at the tavern, but he won't be saving much if that's his choice. It will take a modest NPC a bit over a year to save up for a healing potion, two years for the antitoxin for his sick daughter. The comfortable smith can buy a second set of tools after 5 months of hard work, while the successful merchant can buy a magnifying glass to more accurately assess gems in about a year. After little more than a month the minor noble can buy a vial of acid to stop the mouth of that pesky guild leader. Everything seems to line up quite nicely with the prices in the PHB.

• Money is an abstraction. More often than not, the NPCs will not see their pay in the form of coins, but of produce or services. The same applies to their taxes.
• The monthly costs are also abstractions. Some NPCs might get their pay on a weekly basis, while others only get their money a few times a year.

see business

250 up front for guild licencing and 1000gp for renovations taking 12 days

(or similar business; small inn, general store, busy local specialty)

Every tenday, roll percentile. For OPTIMAL results, run Advertising at 30gp/tenday to add 30 to roll. (WDH p41)