GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Earlier hominids appear to have used wedges and levers.

And I'm an idiot. Sees 'human', thinks 'hominid'. Most embarassing.

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Yes, of pure gear, like Low-Tech is. There are no PDFs focusing on life and technology of TLs 5-8, as opposed to the adventuring gear for those times, like these three PDFs for TLs 0-4 do.

Ah you are right.

A book about life and technology of TLs 5-8 looks terribly more complex than about TLs 0-4, though... it would have to encompass the whole Modern Age, including industrial revolution, computers and everything.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

If it is talking per worker, then it assumes a human with 10 in every stat?

It doesn't assume anything, so far as stats are concerned. Those are, as best as I can reconstruct them (which admittedly is not particularly well), based on historically documented working times. So the stats in question are "whatever real people had." Scaling for unusual skill levels can be handled by clever application of the labor cost rules on p. 23. Scaling for populations with unusual attributes (relevant for construction, which requires lots of strong backs) is out of scope for this book and could be the subject of a section of another Fantasy Tech volume. I'd probably base the scaling on BL rather than directly on ST.

Originally Posted by Gudiomen

On composite weapon materials, it mentions that, for example, a spear is 3/4 wood... but on the materials it's not clear (to me) which size of wood should be used for hafts... 4" poles seem too thick, and planks seem simply inappropriate... any tips?

The tips are stone, bronze, or iron...oh, sorry. Pay attention to the size rather than the shape. Like the note says, "When buying wood, calculate price per pound by its thinnest dimension." The two-inch is probably about right.

[panton41]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

Under manufacturing, where it says Production (lbs/day) (p.22) it is talking about per worker, right?

If it is talking per worker, then it assumes a human with 10 in every stat?

Depends on the worker. I have the feeling the "average human worker" in a manual labor job has a higher than ST 10. I can say at my work where lifting and carrying more than 100 pounds is a routine task and where you're expected to lift up to that every 3 seconds for hours on end there are lots of people with ST11 and 12 and we use lots of machines to help with it.

[panton41]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

Picked it up yesterday and it seems great -- my congratulations to Matt and Bill. The Jobs listing is especially useful; the only thing that struck me as odd is that while there is a listing for 'judge' there is no corresponding entry for 'lawyer,' a specialization which grew out of 'orator' in classical times.

Could you imagine a template for the typical lawyer? Sadistic, Cold-Blooded, Bloodlust, Compulsive Lying, Hamfisted, Oblivious, Overconfidence, Paranoid, Megalomania, Compulsive Suing... Sounds like a good start for a Dungeon Fantasy villain.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

Could you imagine a template for the typical lawyer? Sadistic, Cold-Blooded, Bloodlust, Compulsive Lying, Hamfisted, Oblivious, Overconfidence, Paranoid, Megalomania, Compulsive Suing... Sounds like a good start for a Dungeon Fantasy villain.

I'd make that Stereotypical lawyer. There's a difference.

[Lupo]

LTC3, p. 22, "MATERIAL COSTS", says:

All prices on the table assume ready access to the natural resources from which the materials are processed. In practice, scarcity and transport costs can drive up prices. For example (...) in the Classical Mediterranean (...) tin was [nearly 30 times the generic cost of "soft metal" listed in the table]

So the table is meant to be very generic... what other raw materials had a significantly higher cost in, say, Middle Age or the Roman Empire?
Or, is the cost table meant to be representative of at least one particular time and place?

If the answer to those question is "varied wildly" and "no", respectively, it is quite hard to use the cost table in actual play...
(note that I would be fully satisfied by approximate and vague answers, such as "in Europe, porcelain costed at least 10 times as much")

[Bruno]

Specifics of what materials are scarce where and when really ARE the kinds of things for world books (for fictional settings) or the historical resource books (for... historical settings :P). Just like saying "Nobody in the Roman Empire uses straw or wooden armor" is a matter for a Roman sourcebook, not the generic GURPS Low Tech.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Lupo

If the answer to those question is "varied wildly" and "no",

Both the case, I'm afraid. Indeed, everything's that way. Just as it's left to the GM to set the values of gold and silver, we're leaving it up to the GM to determine local prices of lead, tin, and copper. And everything else, while we're at it. The prices here are a baseline based on the labor necessary to produce the material in question, from which the GM can come up with his own actual prices based on factors relevant to the specific campaign.

Having said that, most prices (save for wood and the softer metals) aren't wildly implausible for most places in history, and the classical prices for copper and tin presented as an example of price variability are, if you run the numbers, fairly close to Low Tech's suggestion that bronze have a +3 CF over iron (almost as if that example was chosen on purpose...).

[Tyneras]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

Depends on the worker. I have the feeling the "average human worker" in a manual labor job has a higher than ST 10. I can say at my work where lifting and carrying more than 100 pounds is a routine task and where you're expected to lift up to that every 3 seconds for hours on end there are lots of people with ST11 and 12 and we use lots of machines to help with it.

I generally assume that a professional of Race A with be proportional to the same type of professional of Race B, so if a human blacksmith has ST 12 (44% above an ST 10 average), then an ogre blacksmith will have an ST of 24 (44% above a ST 20 average). That way I don't have to think about how strong each profession is, just racial averages. So if humans are base 1, ogres would be 4, and just multiply all ST related stuff by 4 for what equivalent ogres can do.

I agree, more ST seems to only help some of the manufacturing processes. Lumberjacking and smelting look like they might be helped by having stronger workers, while glassblowing and pottery, not so much. Those might require more exotic advantages than more ST.

P.S.: Outside combat, I consider ST and Basic Lift to be pretty interchangeable.