4e PC Upkeep Costs
Adapted from: Making money matter (forked from Abstracting Wealth) - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine
I use info from pre-4e D&D, especially 3e, which seems to fit ok with 4e norms. So basic peasant subsistence is 1 sp/day; that's what you pay an unskilled labourer if there is plenty of surplus labour, it's enough to keep an active human male from starvation, it's also the cost of a maidservant in your castle - you're not really paying her, maybe an occasional sp at holiday time, but feeding her & keeping her supplied with clean linens etc adds up. A mercenary infantryman in barracks costs 2 sp/day, 6gp/month; that covers his equipment, good eating (equivalent to that Inn meal every day), booze money etc.
For PCs:
Wealthy: 200gp/month.
A wealthy, luxurious lifestyle (eg successful mercenary Captain) is 50gp/week, 200-250gp/month. That kind of cash establishes you as having higher social status than the 6gp/month riff-raff, lets you develop useful contacts, and other in-game benefit.
Middle-Class: 40gp/month
At the "we're successful!" level; a middle-class lifestyle (eg mercenary junior officer) is 10gp/week, 40-45gp/month.
Upper Working Class: 10gp/month.
For the unsuccessful or novice adventurer, they sleep 5 to a room (1 sp) and eat 1 meal/day (2sp), the 3sp/day is 2gp/week or 8gp/month for long-term stay. Call it 10gp/month including equipment, clothes, booze & sundries. A little less than what a mercenary sergeant or elite soldier makes IMCs. Also covers journeyman artisans and similar.
Lower Class: 3gp/month.
If they can't afford that, then the life of the 1sp/day, 3gp/month peasant labourer awaits - sleep in a ragged blanket on a dry(ish) stone/reed floor with 30 other men for 1cp/day, get your food from the market with plenty of hot broth and porridge and you can eat for ca 5 cp/day, if there's regular work you still have 4 cp/day for patching your rags and drinking plenty of weak beer at ca 2 cp/gallon... Not such a bad life by historical standards. But if there's no regular work, you better hope you saved some cps, or it's a choice (at best) between starvation and beggary.
BTW IMCs costs roughly equate to 1 cp = $1, 1gp = $100. This means that the 1 sp/day labourer is bringing in around $10/day, even at Purchasing Power Parity he’s better off than a substantial portion of Earth’s population in 2011. The intention is to create something vaguely pseudo-medieval, resembling neither modern US/UK nor the grinding poverty that has been the lot of most people since the invention of agriculture brought us the Malthusian Trap.
I use info from pre-4e D&D, especially 3e, which seems to fit ok with 4e norms. So basic peasant subsistence is 1 sp/day; that's what you pay an unskilled labourer if there is plenty of surplus labour, it's enough to keep an active human male from starvation, it's also the cost of a maidservant in your castle - you're not really paying her, maybe an occasional sp at holiday time, but feeding her & keeping her supplied with clean linens etc adds up. A mercenary infantryman in barracks costs 2 sp/day, 6gp/month; that covers his equipment, good eating (equivalent to that Inn meal every day), booze money etc.
For PCs:
Wealthy: 200gp/month.
A wealthy, luxurious lifestyle (eg successful mercenary Captain) is 50gp/week, 200-250gp/month. That kind of cash establishes you as having higher social status than the 6gp/month riff-raff, lets you develop useful contacts, and other in-game benefit.
Middle-Class: 40gp/month
At the "we're successful!" level; a middle-class lifestyle (eg mercenary junior officer) is 10gp/week, 40-45gp/month.
Upper Working Class: 10gp/month.
For the unsuccessful or novice adventurer, they sleep 5 to a room (1 sp) and eat 1 meal/day (2sp), the 3sp/day is 2gp/week or 8gp/month for long-term stay. Call it 10gp/month including equipment, clothes, booze & sundries. A little less than what a mercenary sergeant or elite soldier makes IMCs. Also covers journeyman artisans and similar.
Lower Class: 3gp/month.
If they can't afford that, then the life of the 1sp/day, 3gp/month peasant labourer awaits - sleep in a ragged blanket on a dry(ish) stone/reed floor with 30 other men for 1cp/day, get your food from the market with plenty of hot broth and porridge and you can eat for ca 5 cp/day, if there's regular work you still have 4 cp/day for patching your rags and drinking plenty of weak beer at ca 2 cp/gallon... Not such a bad life by historical standards. But if there's no regular work, you better hope you saved some cps, or it's a choice (at best) between starvation and beggary.
BTW IMCs costs roughly equate to 1 cp = $1, 1gp = $100. This means that the 1 sp/day labourer is bringing in around $10/day, even at Purchasing Power Parity he’s better off than a substantial portion of Earth’s population in 2011. The intention is to create something vaguely pseudo-medieval, resembling neither modern US/UK nor the grinding poverty that has been the lot of most people since the invention of agriculture brought us the Malthusian Trap.
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