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Originally Posted by seycyrus
Are the prices or anything in DF realistic? I have known that salt was off for some time now, but assumed that prices for fabrics and gems etc. were more in line with reality.
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One thing to remember about price lists is that none of them will ever be that close to reality. Even here in the modern world where we ship stuff from all over the planet and deploy dozens of different technologies to ignore growing seasons stuff varies in price by a factor of 2 from day to day in the same location (just think of all the times you've seen something go into an ad Buy One Get One Free or 50% Off). A historical price list that rounded everything off to a power of 10 would be as realistic as anything, but nobody would take it seriously.
There are also sometimes serious hidden assumptions. Gems are one of those - historically gem prices were independent of modern ideas of what "kind" of stone was involved - because none of the buyers or sellers had any idea what it was made of! We often can't tell in historical records - for example Pliny's discussion of gemstones are usually translated to refer to the most esteemed of gems as diamonds, which is the stone we use the descendent of the word he does to refer to, but many the properties he describes them as having better fit quartz than carbon crystals.
Historical pieces of jewelry with stones of wildly different values set in equivalent positions, or centerpieces of stuff we'd consider vastly less precious than stuff used on the periphery are not uncommon. We laugh (or protest the injustice of) historical stories of people taken in by glass beads, but in fact those were just as fair deals as diamonds would have been - it was a trade based on how pretty they look, not what they are made of well into the 18th if not the 19th century.