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02-22-2020, 09:08 PM | #11 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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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.
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02-22-2020, 09:16 PM | #12 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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People's perception of both risk and reward from high-risk situations are not very good. There are people who risk life in prison to steal a few days' minimum wage, or throw their lives and treasures down a pit on Oak Island without evidence that anything is buried there, let alone its value. Mercenaries etc. earn anything from Struggling (tenant farmers or beggars rounded up at gunpoint and told that they are going to a foreign land to fight the wicked ...) to Very Wealthy (members of what is becoming the dominant ethnic group sucking the old elite's money away). Often, they are motivated by the possibility of one day becoming independently wealthy (ie. not having to work for a living) or gaining enough Wealth to support a certain Status; just as often, their personalities mean that they lose money as fast as they gain it.
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"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature Last edited by Polydamas; 02-22-2020 at 09:20 PM. |
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02-22-2020, 09:44 PM | #13 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
There was a mercenary in the sample characters in WEG Star Wars whose partner was betrayed and killed by the Empire. He now works as a soldier for the Rebellion, but his code doesn't allow him to take on personal crusades without being compensated. So he requested one credit per day.
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02-22-2020, 10:09 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The deep dark haunted woods
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
Professional adventurers are basically pirates (or pirates are basically adventurers). Wouldn't pirates in the Age of Sail be a better model for adventurer economics?
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02-23-2020, 03:51 AM | #15 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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3sp/day is a lot more than your basic commoner working as a labourer gets, so even if it is an actual high-risk job it pays this much there'll be people willing to hire on - at least until the party comes back minus hirelings.
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02-23-2020, 03:56 AM | #16 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
I'd rather hire ninjas than pirates. Look at the pickle Squire Trelawney got himself into!
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02-23-2020, 03:58 AM | #17 | |
Join Date: Jan 2015
Location: UK
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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This would mean that he regularly sells "liberated artifacts", not just that one time. That said, Indiana Jones is strongly implied to rely on his day job of teaching archaeology, and that his adventures are the exception. More on topic, I don't think that "adventurer" is a job that (reliably) gets one rich. In a (lower-case) dungeon fantasy setting, "adventurer" is far more likely to be a full-time occupation, but I don't think it is a particularly lucrative one. Paladins and clerics do it for the glory of their god, for justice, or to protect the innocent. Warlocks and wizards do it for power and knowledge, and regard money only as a means to that end. Bards do it to seduce everything that moves, and a few things that don't. And so on. Thieves are the only exception I can think of right now. Best case, you are basically a mercenary. You get paid better than a soldier, which is probably what you were before, but only the desperate or the thoroughly amoral would hire you, which limits your income stream. Who would pay a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits when you have regulated, obedient soldiers/peacekeepers who do it mostly out of loyalty, plus a soldier's salary? This is just me, of course, but most of my dungeon fantasy characters are thoroughly broken individuals who for some reason don't fit into the life of a peasant, craftsman, city guard or guild magician, and raid lich tombs and goblin dens more out of desperation/necessity than a quest for riches. The rest are plain grave robbers/tomb raiders/lich looters and/or the aforementioned mercenaries. If it goes well, their unreliable, sporadic windfalls average out to slightly more than they could have made in a "civilian" life, once you subtract item repairs, healing potions and nights spent drinking and wenching in taverns. Of course, if your players need to see their gold counters go up to get the feeling that they are "winning" the game, and feel cheated if they don't find a powerful magic item for every character in every dungeon, you need to be more generous. Last edited by CeeDub; 02-23-2020 at 04:46 AM. |
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02-23-2020, 07:31 AM | #18 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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02-23-2020, 09:02 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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So you try and compare apples to apples and you pick something that's of central importance to both systems. That's how I ended up with longswords/Thrusting Broadswords. 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. 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. :)
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02-23-2020, 10:27 AM | #20 | |||
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Working Stiffs or: How Much Should Professional Adventurer's Realistically Make?
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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. Quote:
*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.
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