Why is iron so cheap?
taltamir
Member Posts: 288
Everyone tells me how scarce iron is, and how bandits are passing on the gold to steal the iron weapons and tools.
Yet for some odd reason all the iron and steel weapons and shields I come across are practically worthless to merchants. Seems rather an odd discrepancy.
Yet for some odd reason all the iron and steel weapons and shields I come across are practically worthless to merchants. Seems rather an odd discrepancy.
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(Said bandits know when the Iron crisis is going to end, and they're stock-piling untainted weapons to make a financial killing once the time is right).
You know what a sword cost in 1500 AD in medieval Europe ?
Roughly 50 euro- a crossbow around 60.
A horse 1000+ depending on what breed/age.
Some people have this idea that only knights could and wielded swords. With that said, any farmer mostly worked on owned land, and only got the food as the income. So, yes, many farmers never had real "money", EVER.
Cheap is relative.
Even 1 gold piece is A LOT of money for a non-adventurer, noble, or merchant. (Millers and blacksmiths generally being one of the few exceptions to that, due to providing essential services that couldn't be easily replaced).
Most Man at Arms used short swords or light maces (mean hell, the only real difference between a man at arms and miltia is being wealthy enough to buy your own gear. Career soldiers are man at arms, but not all man at arms are career soldiers), due to be much cheaper then arming or long swords or cheaper construction, while nobles or elites of a nobles army would be fitted with higher quality gear. Axes were also very common, due to basically being a club with a edge, and were fairly necessary for life, so most families would have at least 1 axe for wood chopping.
The vast majority of armies were made up of miltias fitted with spears or light crossbows, due to their cheapness to make or lack of skill required to use them effectively (light crossbows were EXTREMELY cheap make...due to having a very simple design with no real moving parts....heavy crossbows though had to use a mechanism for loading and were much more expensive and relegated mostly to defensive engagements.
Why do people talk about how bandits pass over gold to loot people's iron?
and hey... while I am asking questions:
Why does nobody notice that older weapons don't break?
Why aren't alternatives like ironwood used?
Why doesn't the price on alternative weapons, like all wood bows, skyrocket? 1GP is a night at the crummiest of inn rooms, peasant class, with rats and bed bugs.
Higher tiers are 2, 4, and 8GP.
1GP is a single mug of beer
4GP is a single mug of mead.
The odd thing is that prices of weapons were pretty much the same in icewind dale games, even though there was no iron crisis that i know of. I think they ought to have been even more expensive, considering the climate there and the dangerous habitat.
A mug of common beer is 2 coppers.
A mug of mead is 6 coppers.
A typical faerunian laborer makes 1 silver a day. So 1 g per week (assuming they don't take then 10th off....some do, some don't) (faerunian weeks are 10 days), not counting living expenses, which tend to eat up most, if not all, of their income.
So...yeah...adventurers are getting the crap scammed out of them in BG. (on the other hand though....raise dead should cost a minimum of 5000 gold for it's required casting component + cost of a donation for the priest's services (though people of the same god can usually get off without having to make a donation, or only 1/4....allied faiths or same alignment are usually 1/2 donation, neutral faiths or alignments are normal price, and opposed alignments are extra or even outright refused service case depending).
@Sheikh
The 10 towns are a haven for crafters, and due to it's remote location they try to be as self-sufficient as possible, only importing luxury items or things that simply cannot be produced up there. Hence there's actually a surplus of crafted goods. It IS a hostile area, and as such everyone needs protection.
Sometimes a DM comes up with a plot he thinks is cool and the only work a player must do is to play along even if it doesn't make 100% sense.
Wow, they really do stick it to adventurers
Yea, ToEE was a good game, shame atari forced them to release an early alpha (it was impossible to finish without your save becoming hopelessly corrupt 2/3th of the way through the game; and it didn't happen all at once but step by step)
Then they forbade spending the money on finishing the game via patches. The community finished it and bug fixed it (including some amazing work with a decompiler done on the engine's dll's) though and the game is now playable.
Anyways, ridiculous gold rounding aside, BG1 is simply not consistent in terms of prices.
Why does every single one of the guards tell you they see kobold tracks or actually fought kobolds yet everyone outside the mine is talking about "rumors about demons/curses" which most of them claim to not believe.
That being said, that shouldn't remove the existing good iron from the cities since they are only robbing trade caravans and not assaulting cities and clearing out their weapon and tool supplies.
However, mechanically merely carrying tainted ore increases the chance of your weapons breaking and there are allusions to it infecting good iron... so maybe it magically transfers from one piece of iron to the next like a disease? (only, it turns out its an alchemical toxin rather than a magical disease/curse). Honestly it would have made a lot more sense to find a giant glowing sphere radiating "iron weakening" magic that you break to stop the "iron plague". Or an actual magical disease that is magical enchanted bacteria that eats iron. (like microscopic rust monsters!)