Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding
Historical prices, especially for individual items rather than bulk commodities, is often mostly guesswork, almost all games price based on in-game utility to at least some extent, and utility is dependent on on what the game models and how. Therefore conversions may result in items that players feel are over or under priced compared to alternatives.
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As I like to fondly use as an example too - what if, tomorrow, all records of horse prices were to disappear with the end of our civilization as we know it (say, a bunch of EMP's that destroy computer records and any device that can read digital information). Then further suppose, fifteen hundred years from now, some archeologist unearths a record of a Sheik purchasing a race horse stallion for 6 Million dollars. If that was the ONLY surviving record of horse values, what would our future archeologist think of the price for horses - especially if his document is fragmentary? Same here for medieval prices. They list the local transaction at the time, without noting what it cost overall in other locations, where the item, having been haggled upon differently, might be worth 20 sheep, and one goat, whereas elsewhere, it is recorded that a sword was traded for 10 silver pennies. Was it used and bent? Was it brand new from a neophyte weapon-smith? Was it the price of an established weapon smith?
When a game designer has NO foundation upon which to base their game design upon, their numbers will be whimsical and pulled out of thin air (for some giggles? Read the rules on ATLANTIS: THE SECOND AGE OMNI SYSTEM in which bronze weapons weigh 2/3rds the weight of iron weapons, and a bronze two handed sword weighs 20 lbs. A long sword weighs 10 lbs. Clearly, those numbers are pulled out of thin air <shrug>.
So, Sir_Pudding's comment is right on the money.