Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If I was going to do a conversion based on commodities (whicc is what I did in my long World of D"Y"R"T game) I wouldn't use anything as unimportant to D&D as bread. I'd base it on longswords (a Gurps Thrusting Broadsword). The price of a D&D longsword has been very stable from edition to edition at 15 GP.

D&D swords are ridiculously cheap compared to everything else, at least when comparing to GURPS. In GURPS, a full-sized mace costs 1/12th as much as a Thrusting Broadsword ($50 vs $600), while in D&D a full-sized mace costs 4/5ths as much as a Longsword (12 gp vs 15 gp). Most else follows a similar trend - GURPS daggers are 1/30th the cost of a Thrusting Broadsword ($20 vs $600), while D&D daggers are 4/30ths the cost of a Longsword (2 gp vs 15 gp). I feel $1 = 1 sp probably comes closest in most places.

Incidentally, I happened to look up the rates for hirelings in the SRD*, then thought to look at DF15. From that, hirelings worth [250], if available, can be hired for $120/day, with pay rates scaling linearly with point value (so roughly $0.5 per character point per day). Of courses, that is a guaranteed daily rate, rather than being the expected reward, so my suggested $250/day for a quest that may take more or less time than expected (and that the hirer doesn't tag along for) may not be too far off.

*D&D hirelings are practically willing to risk life and limb for peanuts. Really, the base cost (which I assume corresponds to a level 1 character) for a trained hireling (so probably Warrior or Adept - the NPC equivalents of Fighter and Sorceror/Wizard, who don't get all the bells and whistles PC's enjoy - rather than Commoner) is only 3 sp per day. That's only enough to pay for the most basic food and lodging for a day, with nothing left over.