[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

By design and from the beginning Gurps weapons that do not have to be made of sword steel are far cheaper than weapons that do need to be made of sword steel. D&D weapons are priced either by random or by damage done.

Correct, and therefore basing the exchange rate on one of the items that has the most relative difference between the two systems (GURPS swords are really expensive compared to just about everything else mundane, while D&D swords... aren't) is going to create an exchange rate that throws everything off.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Speakign of things that are important, 1 GP equalling $10 is what the world of D'y'r't used but that was mostly for magic item buying. It seemed to work well.

Indeed, and from the perspective of the players, the cost of magic items is pretty much the centerpiece of the D&D economy, everything else is small enough to be secondary. Let's take the most expensive single melee weapon in D&D, the 75 gp Falchion, and cheapest single melee weapon in D&D, the 0 gp (seriously, the cost line is "-") Club, and give them the weakest available enchantment, a +1/+1 enhancement bonus. Being masterwork (necessary to be magic) adds 300 gp; the +1 adds 2000 gp. We're now looking at a 2375 gp +1 Falchion and a 2300 gp +1 Club. That's less than a 5% difference between most expensive and least expensive base item. The difference is a bit more for ranged weapons, where the 400 gp Heavy Repeating Crossbow vs the 0 gp Sling gives us 2700 gp vs 2300 gp for a +1 enchantment, but that's still only around a 15% difference (and drops below 5% for +2, for 8700 gp vs 8300 gp).

The primary reasons one would want to convert from gp to GURPS $ would be to be able to make use of D&D's lists of goods and services, make use of D&D treasure results (or their magic item design system, which I'll admit a fondness for)*, or in edge cases (such as our own here) to figure out how much money an adventurer "should" make. Aside from the goods and services - which GURPS already has covered elsewhere - everywhere else the amount of money involved is tied into D&D's magic item economy (because that's where characters above ~level 3 or so are going to spend all their money), so that's the best place to base your conversion rate off of. The 1 gp = $10 (or 1 sp = $1, as I listed it) seems the best fit there.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

As to hirelings I've never been in a group where low level adventurers had the money to hire them. The 2e Monstrous Compedium (probably quoting an even older source) says hirelings were seldom seen below the 3rd level of the dungeon.

Hiring people to guard your camp or especially your horses goes back to Runequest and not D&D. :)

I think the only case my group ever made use of hirelings was in an Evil campaign where we decided to get some ships and attack some of the local Good settlements to take them over (there was another campaign where one of the characters got the Leadership Feat, but his followers were all just background support). The SRD mentions both warriors and craftsmen for its 3 sp/day, so safer duties may be intended (it mentions that some hirelings will be markedly more expensive; I interpreted that as referring to higher-level hirelings, but those who wanted extra hazard pay would make sense as well).

*I'll admit this never really occurred to me - using D&D treasure results and magic items - but I think would work out fairly well. Some results might need to be reinterpreted or outright rerolled (Keen doesn't work with critical hit chance not being a function of the weapon, and Vorpal's limited instant death crit isn't quite as useful when a crit has a pretty solid chance of downing an enemy anyway, for example), but monetary treasures would certainly work outright. While I've already designed a magic item creation system for my Oubliette DF setting, I'm not terribly happy about the pricing scheme or lack of a loot generation system, so I may see what I can steal from D&D. As my system involves building enchantments with character points, I may opt to use the D&D pricing scheme with each [5] in my system being worth the same as a +1 in D&D.