Looking for fantasy/medieval weapon & equipment lists

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Icelander

While your main point is helpful, this statement is, in fact, not accurate.

If cream, as it indeed does, spoils quickly, the dairyman does have a compelling reason to sell all his cream quickly. The fact that it is worth nothing (or very little, at least) once it spoils. So if the people living near the dairyman can consume only a limited amount of cream, he might be forced to sell the rest to butter-makers, simply to avoid throwing it away.

If he's breaking even on the butter he's would then be making [supernormal] profits on the cream, and people will invest in cows. If he's not breaking even on the butter then he will slaughter and eat some of his cows.

Transient prices reflecting a short-run disequilibrium do not make good fixed price-lists.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I grant that medieval markets are slower to reach market clearing prices. Nonetheless, I believe that over the long run, they did move toward equilibrium, and any prices that were sustained for long enough to become recognized as customary were close to equilibrium prices, or at least to average equilibrium prices.

There are some exceptions, most notably a persistent prejudice in favour of growing grain when an analysis of the records suggests that hay was the most profitable crop. English farmers didn't start an large-scale transformation of grain output to hay output until the 16th or late 15th century.

Perhaps this is explicable in terms of portfolio theory and uncertain prices. Perhaps mediaeval peasants and farmers* were actually to unsophisticated to work out the full value of their hay crop. I haven't seen any studies of why this anomaly persisted for so long.

Note well that the exceptions do not consist of anything so blatant as churning butter or smoking bacon running at an actual loss.

The very fact that we are discussing the difference between locally produced cream and butter sold in towns and cities after being transported evidences that we are assuming a significant volume of trade.

Good point.

Note also that unsalted butter doesn't keep very long. I don't know whether mediaeval butter was usually salted, but the English and French traditionally eat their butter unsalted (unlike Australians).

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Novembermike

Butter is going to be less expensive in a cold climate because it goes longer without spoiling,

No. It is more valuable in those circumstances, and costs the same to make.

In a long-run equilibrium the price of butter will be equal to the cost of making butter (absent monopoly power), including "normal profits" (i.e. rent and interest on land an capital). The thing that will determine whether butter is cheap or dear will be the price of grazing-land and of meadows for making hay.

Note that in the case of places that import their dairy produce. The "cost of making" butter and cream includes shipping. Perishable products are more costly to ship than non-perishable ones, so cheap butter such as is listed in that price list might be found somewhere that imports butter but uses locally-produced cream from its expensive land. It would also have to be a fairly rich place to be able to afford cream at twice its food value. Perhaps cream was dearer than butter in London, Paris, and Milan, and no butter was churned in dairies in those environs. I am, however, suspicious. And a price list for a place with such geographical variations certainly ought to note where listed prices pertain.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Brett

If he's breaking even on the butter he's would then be making [supernormal] profits on the cream, and people will invest in cows. If he's not breaking even on the butter then he will slaughter and eat some of his cows.

Transient prices reflecting a short-run disequilibrium do not make good fixed price-lists.

Consider the following:

Of all the families within a village, 90% of them have a goat or a few sheep, or perhaps a milk cow. Of all the milk produced, some 1/4 to nearly 1/3rd of the whole milk might be cream that separates out of whole milk (I don't know about the other animals, but it appears that milk from cattle works out to that level). Now, if every family makes their own butter, who within the village is going to buy the surpluses? If salt is in short supply for most of the families, who is going to sell it to the merchant who MIGHT show up to buy any surpluses? In the end - it boils down to the simple realization that although everyone was hurting for good cold hard cash, it wasn't easily gotten. You, and I, and many others, are so used to a cash society, that we forget just how much commercial transactions took place in the form of barter. There wasn't a magic formula that everyone agreed upon, where they said "Butter is worth 2 farthings a pound, and a hen is worth 2 silver pennies, so one hen should be worth 4 lbs of butter. Some looked at the apparent health of the hen before saying "um, that looks like the sickest excuse for a hen I've ever seen. I wouldn't part with even 2 lbs of rancid butter for that scraggly thing." Price lists of medieval items are an artificial invention of modern people in the first place when you get right down to it. And where there were standards in perceived value - common knowledge prices for things, often, they weren't written down, as EVERYONE but the village idiot knew that!

Ah well. No one is forcing you to use that price list. But I will make a suggestion to you.

Import that price list into a spreadsheet. Then, do an item by item check of those items such that you have a column that lists the Harn World price for that item, and the GURPS analog price for that item. Care to make a wager? That there will be less GURPS prices for that list than there are Harn prices? Care to bet it would be at least 50% to 25% less? I don't know as I stopped counting a long LONG time ago and ditched the GURPS units of cost for anything except perhaps my THE ARCANUM based campaigns, and even then, I still used the Silver based system from C&S to a large extent...

In any event - your dislike of the price list is acceptable and perhaps even with merit. But until the day arrives where someone puts together a PDF document for sale at E23, containing a list not unlike that found at the link I provided, GURPS will generally suffer from the perception that it stinks when it comes to providing equipment lists, wages, etc.

Mind you, I've been using GURPS since it first came out as MAN-TO-MAN (used Man-To-Man coupled with THE ARCANUM magic system no less), and have stuck with it through all the years. If GURPS can't satisfy a die hard GURPS user such as me, then I submit, it really has some issues that need to be addressed.

Now for the best part...

It only has issues from my perspective if I'm in the minority. If 90% of the people are happy with the Cost of living rules, and happy with the wealth rules, and happy with the equipment list provided by various GURPS books, who am I to complain? I've a few book sellers who made money off me as I spent time researching what I could of history. Finding out that it takes roughly 12 lbs of wood to produce 1 lbs of iron was a real eye opener for me. Finding out that various grades of iron were worth more because of their point of origin intrigued me enough to find out that like much of anything dug out of the earth, metal ore contains impurities that can render iron relatively useless compared against more purer types of iron smelted elsewhere. In the end - digging into history that GURPS is supposedly good at simulating, is a happy adjunct to my other hobby - wargaming ;)

So, enjoy what ever it is you enjoy, and above all, have fun. Don't be surprised (as I'm not) that HARNWORLD is not for everyone. But I'll tell you this much - if you PAID me $100 to use either of GURPS prices lists only, or D&D price lists only, or some other obscure game system's price lists (and wage lists by the way), I'd not take the money.

[KevinJ]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_Black There was even a couple movies about (one version of) them.

You have broken the unspeakable code. Crap, I did too! Thanks a lot.

[KevinJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Now, if it's not milking season, there's no cream to be had; the price of cream is infinite. But there still may be butter to be had. But as the butter gets used up, its price is going to rise; it will come to cost more than fresh made butter, because of scarcity. Or if you require uniform prices year round, the price of butter will be higher year round.

I don't know what kind of cows (or pigs, sheep, goats, mares, or camels) they have where you live, but in the real world there is no 'milking season' and never has been. A lactating female mammal will not stop giving milk once a specific time of the year has passed since they will continue to lactate until you stop milking them or they die.

[KevinJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you look at the terrestrial elemental abundances, Fe is more than 100x as abundant as Pt. And that seems to allow for an intense preconcentration already; it looks as if the ratio is closer to 1,000,000x in the solar system as a whole. You're going to need a pretty impressive elemental assortment process to reverse that final 100:1 ratio.

Bill Stoddard

And you know this because you have been to every planet in the universe? What we 'know' about chemistry and physics is based solely on what we can observe on OUR planet and has no bearing on anything else in existence. Your argument is specious at best.

[Fred Brackin]

[QUOTE=KevinJ; What we 'know' about chemistry and physics is based solely on what we can observe on OUR planet .[/QUOTE]

The above statement is false.

We recieve photons and particles from the rest of the universe and they are studied quite intensely by astronomers and physicists. What we know about the universe is based on these observations and it forms a coherent whole.

Even if you don't want to beleive in cosmically distant observations we have sent probes to obsever from close approach every major planet in our Solar System and landed on the Moon, Mars, Venus and a couple of asteroids and comets.

Chemical knowledge 150 yhears ago may have been based only on what had been observed on our planet but that chnaged at least as early as the discovery of Helium in the Sun by spectroscopy in 1869.

Modern theories of chemistry and physics are throughly based on non-Earthly observations and the possibility of every planet having a different periodic table or even radically different (much less random) distribution of elements is not taken seriously.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by KevinJ

And you know this because you have been to every planet in the universe? What we 'know' about chemistry and physics is based solely on what we can observe on OUR planet and has no bearing on anything else in existence. Your argument is specious at best.

No, not really. We have good models of the processes by which nuclei are synthesised in stars and supernovas, consistent both with experimental data from Earth and with astronomical observation. If fundamentally different things were going on in the wider universe and just happening to exactly resemble what we expect by assuming that the laws of nature are the same here and there, that would be a fantastic coincidence.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by hal

ou, and I, and many others, are so used to a cash society, that we forget just how much commercial transactions took place in the form of barter.

I forget less economics than you think I do.