Looking for fantasy/medieval weapon & equipment lists

[Novembermike]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In an equilibrium situation, market forces will work to prevent such an outcome as you envision.

* If a normal cream buyer will pay 3d a pint, but a butter maker will pay 1/2d a pint, the dairyman would obviously much rather sell to the cream buyer. He might occasionally have cream left over that he has to sell cheap, but that won't be his goal, and a buttermaker won't want to rely on it for his raw material. If selling at 3d a pint means that one-third of the output goes unsold, routinely, then the average price is (2/3)3d + (1/3)1/2d = 2 1/6d; the dairyman can cut his price to 2 3/4d, 2 1/2d, or even 2 1/4d and come out ahead . . . so the market price of cream will be a bit lower and nearly all of it will sell.

* In saying "3d" we must assume that this process has already happened, and 3d is the price at which nearly all the cream sells.

* Alternatively, the dairyman can adjust his output of cream to avoid unsold cream. He can produce less cream and less skim milk (or, in the real world, less butter and less buttermilk) and more whole milk. Doing the labor of separating the cream is a waste if you don't make a profit from it.

* The quantity of cream that the locals can consume is also not fixed. If the price drops to 2 1/2 d, they can find more uses for it, having more cream in their diets.

* The greater the disparity between the price of cream-used-to-make-butter and cream-used-otherwise, the stronger these market forces are. If butter makers will pay 2 1/d for cream, then the dairyman has much less reason for reluctance to sell to them; he doesn't lose much, and may even find a guaranteed sale worth the slight cut in income. But this will also mean that butter must be a lot more expensive than cream by weight.

Bill Stoddard

I think you're going to find that a lot of your assumptions don't work. In a large free market system you'd be correct, but this is a feudal medieval market. If we assume that he can turn all of his excess cream into butter (or sell it to a butter manufacturer) then there's never a reason for him to lower production, and the market is going to hit saturation pretty quickly between the lower populations, the fact that it spoils and larger transportation costs in a medieval setting.

[MiB Agent 0102]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Sounds to me like you just want a free copy of Low-Tech. Personally I'm a little offended that you can't find $20 to help support a work that took several years to research, write, and playtest.

First of all Dan... I have just about every GURPS book from each edition...
Personally I am greatly offended by your accusation.

Secondly... to all others... what I was looking for was a compiling of the items in to one chart... so I am not juggling all of the books to looking up pricing or specs for some odd item that was listed in Low Tech, then another that may be in Basic, or Fanasty... or somewhere else.

I assumed by now, someone, like an approved fan (as with other utilites in the SJG website), would have put all the items/clothing/livestock/equipment from the various books into some master list, listing all of the TLs/prices/wt/st....


Thats is what I was looking for.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

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

I agree. It may strain probability, given our current understanding and examples, but it remains possible and it doesn't require the laws of physics to be changed which the point I was arguing against claimed. "Does not occur within any known example" and "Impossible to occur" are not the same thing. Artificial intelligence doesn't occur within any known example (we have no examples of human-scale intelligent software); we do not believe its occurrence is impossible.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Novembermike

I think you're going to find that a lot of your assumptions don't work. In a large free market system you'd be correct, but this is a feudal medieval market. If we assume that he can turn all of his excess cream into butter (or sell it to a butter manufacturer) then there's never a reason for him to lower production, and the market is going to hit saturation pretty quickly between the lower populations, the fact that it spoils and larger transportation costs in a medieval setting.

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. Perhaps in the "dark ages" you might not have had this happen on a larger scale than a single village, but certainly by the high middle ages, a lot of goods were traded between villages. 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.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

I agree. It may strain probability, given our current understanding and examples, but it remains possible and it doesn't require the laws of physics to be changed which the point I was arguing against claimed. "Does not occur within any known example" and "Impossible to occur" are not the same thing. Artificial intelligence doesn't occur within any known example (we have no examples of human-scale intelligent software); we do not believe its occurrence is impossible.

On the other hand, I think we can fairly safely say that artificial intelligence will not be attainable without human agency.

Bill Stoddard

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by whswhs

On the other hand, I think we can fairly safely say that artificial intelligence will not be attainable without human agency.

Probably.

However, I should note, that the hypothetical world with platinum as common as iron may also be an artificial world. Such details weren't defined and so are left to the imagination of the reader.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by MiB Agent 0102

Anyone have or know where (on line) I can find a good complete compiling of GURPS weapons and equipment lists?
Or other equipment lists that would be compatible for a standard high fantasy campaign.

I find the lists in the books lacking depth


-E-

Apologies if someone's already cited it, but I've got a thing called GURPS Marketplace, knocked out by a chap by the name of Mike Cubbin ... who is probably around here somewhere.
Find it here on his homepage, together with other first rate stuff.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

However, I should note, that the hypothetical world with platinum as common as iron may also be an artificial world. Such details weren't defined and so are left to the imagination of the reader.

Of course, in fantasy, "artificial" may have a broader applicability. Is a world shaped by Odin, or Ptah, or Jahweh "artificial"? If the gods choose to fill the world with platinum, do they count as artificers?

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Novembermike

This stuff is going to need a lot of assumptions I wouldn't feel comfortable making. In the butter vs cream example, if cream spoils more quickly than butter (I think it does because I think butter was traded while cream was local) then cream will have to be bought fresh from farms while the butter can be stored.

Which makes butter more valuable, neh? Also, the market price of butter has to be greater than the market price of the cream that it is made out of, otherwise the return to making butter will be negative. People will make less butter, demanding less cream, the price of cream will tend to fall and the price of butter to rise, to the point where you can actually cover the wages of the dairymaid and get a return of the churn.

Good modern cream is at most 35% butterfat, and butter is at least 65% butterfat. Which means that a gallon of cream will produce at most about 5.3 lb of butter (assuming US fluid gallons are meant). With cream at 6d. per gallon, a pound of butter costs over a penny for the cream alone, but sells for half a penny. Unless buttermilk is ridiculously valuable, making butter is a losing proposition.

Bacon and ham vs pork is probably a setting thing or the result of different books.

The issue is the same, though. You take pork, spend money, effort, and time salting, smoking, and curing it. Lose weight to drying as you do so, and sell the result for less than you paid for the main ingredient to make it.

It doesn't really matter much how the problem arose. However it came about, it shows that the list is okay to give definite prices that PCs can shop at without the GM paying attention, so long as nobody cares much about the economy. They will do if you don't care and just want to get on to the next adventure. But they can't possibly be right.

(Well, the ones I have noticed so far, since they involve production making a loss instead of a fountain of gold for PCs. In The Fantasy Trip before the erratum was corrected, empty one-pint wineskins cost $2 and one-pint wineskins full of cheap wine cost $1. We used to joke about PCs making a good living as the town drunk.)

The housing issue might still be fine depending on what those modifiers mean (what is a small manor, for example).

Possibly, but pretty unlikely. The manor house is explicitly stone construction, and the poor middle-class house would far most likely be mud-brick or half-timbered at most. Realistically stone construction is much dearer, and the manor would have to be much smaller than the house to be the same cost. Possibly the manor-house might be built from material quarried on the manor, with a large proportion of the work done by some sort of corvée, and the opportunity costs not properly imputed. If so, there ought to be a note. And finished manor houses would add more to the value of the manor (ie. sell for more) than they had "cost" to build.

This stuff is pretty bad, but it's not really all that important for something like this.

That's probably right as far as adventuring goes. The worse problem is the slap in the face to suspension of disbelief, and that can be minimised by pretending that you don't notice. Which is easier for some people than others.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Danukian

Right, no list can be consistent, between time and region - and most importantly: game world!

That's very true. You can't assemble a consistent list by plucking prices out of different regions, periods, and technologies. Some time ago I made a stab at adjusting various prices from the south of England and the north of France for the inflation of silver from about 1100 to about 1485. It was hopeless. Improving metallurgical industry made the real price of weapons and armour fall significantly. Assarting of land made the price of livestock and butcher's meat rise because less waste land and forest was left for grazing and masting. Trade with the Far East came and went with the politics of the Middle East. Aside from that, food beasts were a lot cheaper in Gloucestershire and Somerset than in London, and the factor varied according to how easy they are to drive: it is cheap to drive cattle, but slow and difficult to drive pigs, so pork was cheaper than beef in Somerset and the other way around in London. (This may be why pork is traditionally often preserved as ham and bacon, whereas beef is traditionally more often eaten fresh.)

Since my own fantasy setting has an economy based on irrigated rice paddies rather than open fields of wheat, barley, oats, and rye I gave up on the project.