The Price Of Slaves

[scc]

While B518 gives the price of a slave as five times annual wage (And Monster Slavers offers some further advice) this figure is a bit controversial and as I want to include the material in Monster Slavers in a potential future game I thought I might try and figure out some better prices.

Banestorm mentions slave houses that breed slaves, and this is actually a good place to start as the cost to raise a slave sets the floor for how much a slave costs, sort of (More on that later). If we assume that slaves aren't normally sold before 12 years old (Because any younger and they aren't that useful) so we take this time in months and multiply it by Cost of Living to determine how much a slave costs. The lowest CoL is $100, which gives a figure of $14,400 (Interestingly twice what Monster Slavers offers as a starting price) but these sort of slaves aren't going to be much desired, they'll be malnourished, wracked by diseases, and otherwise in poor general condition, raising the CoL to $300 increases asking price to $43,200.

Pleasure slaves, arena slaves, and slave soldiers are exceptions to the above, it is best to wait and sell these only once they reach full maturity at 16 years, and the CoL increases again to $600, bringing total cost to $115,200, but this is only a floor, not a ceiling! For pleasure slaves the default is likely that she (or he) cleans up pretty, each level of Attractive adds +50%. For arena slaves and slave soldiers each point of DX above 10 or weapon skill above 12 raise price by 10%, traits like Enhanced Defenses or Weapons Master are likely worth more. And for arena slaves knowing how to use 'exotic' weapons or social traits also increase value, innate DR and social traits are a very well selling pair as it allows them to go unarmored.

Now these figures seem like a lot, and they likely are, but these are assuming that slaves are primarily brought from breeders, if captured 'barbarians' are the primary source then prices are lower by a factor of at least ten, and if the PC's are trying to sell slaves instead of buy them, as in Monster Slavers, prices are lower still.

Some further notes:
If needing to sell children, decide it they are in poor or good condition (representing the CoL $100 or $300+) and they sell for $500 and $1,000 respectively.

Any modifiers from Monster Slavers that I haven't mentioned still apply.

Slaves require upkeep, this is equal to the CoL in the above calculations.

How much do people think any monsters the PC's bring in should be worth?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by scc

How much do people think any monsters the PC's bring in should be worth?

Most of them aren't worth anything except as curios (for arenas and zoos). If you think something might actually be worthwhile, the basic process is to figure out the amount of useful work they can do, subtract their upkeep cost, subtract security costs (what it takes to keep them under control), and multiply the resulting value by 5 years. Monsters are prone to not being all that good at anything but killing, and for the cost of keeping them under control you can just hire ordinary guards, so not that valuable, but there will be exceptions.

[AlexanderHowl]

In the US South before the Civil War, slave owners forced their slaves to support themselves, meaning that slaves were pure profit after they were paid off.

[whswhs]

Are you using cost of living figures for adults? Cost of living for children is almost certainly lower. I would approximate it as multiplied by (child ST/adult ST)^2.

In many societies, an adult male's wages are expected to be enough to support a family. This assumes that he is having food prepared, clothes made and mended, and cleaning done mostly by his wife; if he isn't married, he has to hire someone to do such things, which costs a lot more. But in a slave breeding facility, there is very likely a dedicated kitchen that makes food relatively economically, probably with the slave children helpiing out as soon as they can follow directions. I don't know how much to lower the CoL, but it should be less than suggested by relative body mass.

In my current campaign, I guesstimated human food requirements as in a ratio of 5:4:3:2:1, implying ST values of 10, 9, 8, 4.5, and 3; that is, quantity of food for a family is 3x that for a single man. If it costs the same for a family to prepare food as for a single man to purchase meals, then food preparation is two-thirds the cost of those meals; ergo, buying the ingredients costs one-third as much. If a 10-year-old has ST 8, he consumes 64% of adult food, and if it costs one-third as much, buying the ingredients costs 21% as much. All of this is handwavy, but some approximation along these lines should apply, and will give you much lower cost for children who (a) are smaller than adults and (b) help prepare their own meals. You'll have to pay for a supervisor, but I think you can still feed them for a lot less.

*****

On the other hand, breeding slaves is not the normal way to acquire them in a lot of societies. Slaves are often either debtors who sold themselves (or were sold by their parents) to pay off loans, or prisoners of war whose lives were spared for the sake of their labor. The costs of raising either would not have been paid by their owners and would not figure into what they were sold for.

[Bengt]

Doesn't cost of living include rent, clothing, some entertainment and so on? One would assume slave breeding cuts that down a lot with dormitories, simple uniforms and no entertainment. Presumably you don't need that much personell to keep children inline so security costs shouldn't be that high either.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bengt

Doesn't cost of living include rent, clothing, some entertainment and so on? One would assume slave breeding cuts that down a lot with dormitories, simple uniforms and no entertainment. Presumably you don't need that much personell to keep children inline so security costs shouldn't be that high either.

It does. But at low TLs, the great majority of economic output is food.

[Joe]

Originally Posted by whswhs

On the other hand, breeding slaves is not the normal way to acquire them in a lot of societies. Slaves are often either debtors who sold themselves (or were sold by their parents) to pay off loans, or prisoners of war whose lives were spared for the sake of their labor. The costs of raising either would not have been paid by their owners and would not figure into what they were sold for.

Quoted for truth.

I'm not an expert on this, by any means, but my understanding is that there was very, very little "slave breeding" in the classical world, precisely because raising new people from birth is incredibly labor intensive (in fact, it's one of the most labor-intensive activities in any society - something that people trained in conventional economics sometimes tend to overlook, since the majority of that labor takes place in the home, without any kind of wage, etc. But I digress...) Instead, classical slave systems relied on a constant supply of new prisoners of war - and indeed the whole system tended to falter when the POW supply dried up.

Putting things really simply, those slave systems were economically viable (from the perspective of the slave owning society!) precisely because the slave-owning society didn't have to pay the vast cumulative costs of raising new people from birth. Instead, other societies paid the vast costs of raising new people, and the slave societies simply stole those people once they were ready to work (thus, in a way, also stealing all the labor that had been put into raising them).

This is one contrast between classical slavery and modern (i.e. 17-19th) century slavery. Modern slavery begins looking something like classical slavery, in that people raised outside the slave-owning society are kidnapped en masse, taken to a new place, and put to work. But by the time modern slavery is coming to an end, it no longer much resembles classical slavery, in that the final holdouts (the US south being the inevitable example) have actually been running breeding programs for some time, in a manner quite different to the classical slavers.

That's my understanding, anyway (put very roughly and schematically). I could well be wrong!

[Joe]

To bring it back to GURPS, your calculations strike me as nice in that they show:

(1) how vast the cost of raising a single person from birth is;
(2) how very expensive slaves become if their sale price is actually made to reflect the cost of raising them from birth;
(3) how much cheaper it is just to enslave your neighbors' children, once they've grown up. (Just as you say: "if captured 'barbarians' are the primary source then prices are lower by a factor of at least ten").

(Of course CoL in GURPs isn't really a very good approximation of any kind of real-world economic value, and nor is it meant to be. But still...)

[AlexanderHowl]

If I remember correctly, wars often caused guts on the slave market. During the Julius Caeser's Gaelic Wars, there were supposedly so many Gaelic women and girls on the markets of Rome that the meanest Roman man could afford one or two, and many wealthy Roman men bought dozens for their bedchambers. While a beautiful Gaelic virgins would have probably been valuable, the majority of the women and girls had been raped repeatedly by Roman soldiers before being sold to slavers, so the value of such women and girls were in their rarity.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

In the US South before the Civil War, slave owners forced their slaves to support themselves, meaning that slaves were pure profit after they were paid off.

Actually, that just means that the owner is diverting some of their productive capacity to support. That is, support is still an expense. It doesn't change the math Anthony outlines in this case: productivity - support.

The "pure profit" is lower than the gross profit without devoting that effort to support would be. If you train slave blacksmiths and slave doctors so that you don't have to pay the free ones, then those slaves aren't raising cotton any more, and you have less of your cash crop to sell. It doesn't matter what form the "- support" comes in.

Whether or not you want the slaves to support themselves, or whether you want them to do more work to earn more money that you then use to pay for their support, is simply a matter of who can do the support work most efficiently -- just as is true with workers paid a wage. Maybe you do it yourself, maybe you use your income to hire someone else.