Calculating net present value of draconic slaves

[Rupert]

As for the value of a dragon slave, well I'd base it on the return on investment. If investing in other things can be expected to have an ROI of 10% per annum, buying a dragon egg needs to have a similar expected ROI, once all costs and risks are allowed for. Buying an older dragon will be more expensive, because the raring and training costs are already covered. Buying one getting close to emancipation will be cheaper, because the investment will be lost in a certain time.

I'd just use the starting cash for the dragon's TL and wealth level (as it's always 10 months income after cost of living is deducted) x (1 / ROI). So for 10% ROI at TL4 and Comfortable wealth we get: (2000 x 2) x (1 / 0.1) = 40,000. If slaves are kept in conditions below that you'd expect for a certain job, the return will go up (and the price likely will go down, undercutting free labour), but it sounds like dragons aren't treated like that.

[AlexanderHowl]

If you are using Pathfinder dragons, they get big really quickly and they are exceptionally dangerous to boot. A juvenile green dragon, which is age 26-50 and SM+2, possesses the equivalent of Magery 0, is capable of mind controlling people, and can deal 8d corrosive damage in a 40' cone. Considering that they can turn their masters into a puddle of goo pretty easily, I doubt that enslaving them will be that effective.

A possibly more realistic scenario would be the Shepards from Fantasy (or stories like the Bazil Brokentail series or the Temeraire series). Dragons would protect communities or join armies in exchange for food and pay. When they retire, they would produce the next generation of dragons to work with communities or serve in the armies.

A TL4 army that uses juvenile dragons as an aerial corps would have a massive advantage over any that does not. While white dragons would be only useful for message or package delivery during their 25 years of service, they would be able to fly at 50 mph, meaning that they could probably make deliveries as far away as 400 miles in a day. Larger dragons are faster, but they are better for combat, so they would really not be message or package delivery.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

If you are using Pathfinder dragons, they get big really quickly and they are exceptionally dangerous to boot. A juvenile green dragon, which is age 26-50 and SM+2, possesses the equivalent of Magery 0, is capable of mind controlling people, and can deal 8d corrosive damage in a 40' cone. Considering that they can turn their masters into a puddle of goo pretty easily, I doubt that enslaving them will be that effective.

The masters are strongly implied to be mainly older dragons or individuals with enough power and status to deal with older dragons as equals. The more I look at it, the more it looks like an apprenticeship with the option to be bought and sold, which is a thing that happened historically. If the Dragon behaves until they're 50, they'll have a decent education and connections.



Now, if you use them in ways that aren't a customary part of the system and you're not a dragon, you're probably in trouble.

[strange7person]

Originally Posted by ericthered

The masters are strongly implied to be mainly older dragons or individuals with enough power and status to deal with older dragons as equals. The more I look at it, the more it looks like an apprenticeship with the option to be bought and sold, which is a thing that happened historically. If the Dragon behaves until they're 50, they'll have a decent education and connections.



Now, if you use them in ways that aren't a customary part of the system and you're not a dragon, you're probably in trouble.

This is mostly an accurate assessment. The sort of heroic humanoids who can afford to buy young dragons as slaves likely also have the personal prowess to at least make the outcome of a one-on-one fight uncertain, could buy magic items which would provide further advantages, and would more likely be dealing with older dragons in terms of "your majesty, I've got this lovely idea for an aqueduct, only I'm short of cash at the moment, would it be possible to arrange some sort of loan?" rather than either strictly as equals or "it is Godzilla, we must flee."

As for non-customary behavior, there's a lot of room for eccentric innovation (apart from a taboo on "experimental alchemy," secretly meaning gunpowder, and even more secretly meaning almost any deep inquiry into the nature of magic, or establishment of channels for sharing such research fast enough that it would become impossible to suppress if something bad were rediscovered), provided you're willing to take responsibility and clean up your own messes. If you mean actual abuse, leaning too heavily on the stick rather than the carrot... yes, ending up with an adult dragon who hates you personally is more or less universally considered an undesirable outcome.

Even killing them shortly before emancipation wouldn't be a sufficient precaution. Rather than a simple sacrifice of mineral wealth, the material cost of Raise Dead, Resurrection, or True Resurrection in my setting has to come mainly in the form of a collective, ritualized outpouring of grief. This means such spells take notably more time to set up outside a major city, where only so many professional mourners are available for hire, but a genuinely beloved public figure might be brought back from the dead with little or no actual cash expenditure on the part of their immediate allies. (Picture the movie It's A Wonderful Life, but with the suicide attempt a success, "Potterville" being a sound stage set up in the afterlife, and a grisly interlude possibly involving candles, pentagrams, and goat's blood, quickly skimmed over, right before he wakes up on the slab and finds Zuzu's petals in his pocket, plot proceeding mostly unchanged otherwise.)

The fact that murdering somebody and being sure they'll stay down often requires at least as much work put into character assassination as the more conventionally literal kind means anyone who understands politics can (at least in principle) pose a deadly threat even if they couldn't possibly smack you down in a duel. Thus, an abused dragon's vengeance might be accomplished from far away, with little or no need for direct confrontation.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Justifying the next jump to Very Wealthy is hard: being more useful than 20 people is a hard task. I'd reserve it for truly exceptional stats. Which higher end Juvenile dragons probably have. (IQ 14 + 680 skill points for a juvenile gold)

Any particular reason to stop at 20? Going by the formula for freelance teachers in Low-Tech Companion 3 it seems like a juvenile gold with maxed-out Teaching skill and remaining points mostly 1 each in various History specialties could earn at least fifty times as much as Average wealth.

Or, if the "apprentices and masters" sidebar is a useful guideline, and superhuman levels in craft skills are well integrated into society with a hierarchy of journeymen, masters, grand-masters, great-grand-masters, and so on delegating tedious tasks downward and challenges beyond their skill upward, would each additional +2 to skill justify another step along that progression?

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by strange7person

Any particular reason to stop at 20? Going by the formula for freelance teachers in Low-Tech Companion 3 it seems like a juvenile gold with maxed-out Teaching skill and remaining points mostly 1 each in various History specialties could earn at least fifty times as much as Average wealth.

Or, if the "apprentices and masters" sidebar is a useful guideline, and superhuman levels in craft skills are well integrated into society with a hierarchy of journeymen, masters, grand-masters, great-grand-masters, and so on delegating tedious tasks downward and challenges beyond their skill upward, would each additional +2 to skill justify another step along that progression?

I personally would never allow 50 specialties of history, literature, or mathematics to count as increasing a teacher's salary every time. I also wouldn't count teaching as a freelance job, so it doesn't get modified on a success for failure. Its worth paying a little extra for a polymath, but I'd cap the bonus at 100%, if not sooner.


Actually producing multiples more than another person is a hard task. I may be faster at a job than you and do better work, but its hard for me to make 5 times as many widgets, teach 5 times as many people, or account for 5 times an many transactions as the next guy.



Its possible for me to do work that you just can't do. This is how the "Proffessional" Careers make their money, and why a college education is highly recommended if you want to make money. But in the end, that won't propel you into the range that lets you command the labor of 20 of your fellows.



I can think of a few ways to actually increase wealth by many times that of your fellows, and I don't think the young dragon's have access to many of them:


increase the productivity of others. This can be done through management, or through invention. I don't think you want every single young dragon inventing/designing significant ergonomic and industrial techniques, or you'll hit a singularity. On the management front, they don't just have to improve the productivity, they've got to do it above standard. Actually, this is where I assume the ones earning 5 and 20 are doing things. The trick with management is you've got to give the manager a bit of power, and there are reasons you'll want to limit that power to small scale for an apprentice dragon.



Be the best in a very competitive field. The very best lawyers, coaches, chefs, artists, athletes, and so forth can command dozens of times the income of their lesser competition. This is not because they're dozens of times better, but because they are the best. The young dragons won't have access to this (at least not routinely), because their older kin will take all of these slots. Economics really only cares about the cheapest viable product, the pretty solid product, and the very best. Everything else migrates to one of those three categories. If there are skill 30 smiths around, I don't care if my "Good" armor was made by a guy with skill 20 or skill 25. Its not the best, but its good enough. Shaving off fractions of a percent doesn't matter for the vast majority of a market.



The last way is to be fast enough to make X times the goods of the average worker. This is HARD. Arguably, using the freelancer rules you can move X everytime you spend [40] on a job, because each [4] gets you a +1 to skill and a 10% increase in income. I'm not seeing the young dragons being able to use this method to be a hundred times faster than the worker off the street.



This is why I suggest capping wealth at about x20.