Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
A lot of job skills have much the same problem, you only roll against them for monthly job rolls. Requiring a monthly Housekeeping for pretty much everybody and inflicting some minor injury, illness or substantial repair expense on a critical failure wouldn't actually be unreasonable. Hm, maybe a model based on freelance jobs with margins of success reducing your monthly cost of living instead of generating "real" income.
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That actually seems to me to be a completely sound method of doing it. If you look at a man getting married in a traditional domestic economy, he's getting cooked meals without having to eat at a restaurant, mended clothes without going to a tailor, laundry done without having to hire a laundress, cleaning without hiring a housemaid, and a whole bunch of other valuable services—which he probably hasn't enough time to do for himself and possibly doesn't know how to do. That's worth a significant amount of money. In return, of course, he has to support his wife. But, in effect, her labor is paying for a large share of her cost of living, by the outlays it saves him. I'm not sure precisely what the computation ought to be, but it's the kind of thing a job roll could represent.
A datum: I recently looked at a column by Megan McArdle that estimated that women a century ago spent 30 hours a week in the kitchen; now it's 5.5 hours. Back then it was nearly a full time job.