How much was the starting gp in 3.5?

@SimonGill Does that include preparation?

Preparation of the food? No, I just used the price of a meal from the phb. Forgetting the cooks mark-up, of course.

If everyone's eating apples and bananas, that's one thing. But wheat gets ground into flour even if it's then sold directly to the consumer.

Throw in transport, storage, purify spells as needed.

Although there are a number of amusing gate ring exploits that can reduce transit issues.

Which increases the number of people that farmers can feed.

I still think your base numbers are suspect.

Taking 10 on Profession doesn't produce X gold worth of product, it earns you X gold.

Or am I forgetting something?

If it's profit like I think, then we run into questions about whether that's gross or net.

@BESW Correct.

Which means that if the price is lower than we think, there must be more product available.

So is 7g the amount the farmer earns by selling his produce, after expenses?

'cause that's not a measure of quantity, that's a measure of markup.

Maybe food prices are just that damn high.

Is he selling bulk to distributors, or at the local market? There are just too many generalizations in the source material to make even the most broad of educated guesses.

If he's selling at the market, how much of his week's work is spent selling rather than producing?

If he changes his method and sells bulk to a large distributor, does that somehow change how much gold taking ten earns him?

Bah, my numbers are totally wrong because I mixed up my silver -> gold conversion.

Coppers are pennies, silvers are dollars, golds are Benjamins.

7gp per week is 70sp per week, which he can't even feed himself with on a Good diet.

... I think.

Maybe silver are dimes and golds are dollars. It's been a while since I've cared.

silvers are 10c and golds are dollars

Gotcha.

So... food. Where does it come from?

Answer: secret aboleth yeast farms, vast underground installations of burbling vats that get processed into Quon and Tofurky.

All of the civilized D&D world is unwittingly vegetarian.

@BESW Only sensible way forward.

Occasionally the Underdark rumbles with battle horns: the aeons-old Yeast Wars between the aboleths and the mind flayers have begun once more!

Each desperate to use their massive slave armies to tend and process the stiff-smelling slop into the semblance of foodstuffs, laced with their own secret blend of hormones and mind control drugs.

I don't know if it's as simple as that. The way a farmer feeds himself is to grow the food, sell it to the chefs who sells it to the shops from which the farmer purchases?

Well, I think I've gotten that urge to work from first principles out of my system.

...you realize this makes more sense than the way the books say it works.

@BESW Much more sense.

Dear Wizards: Reality isn't your bag. Please stop trying.

Hehe. I'll stick to the setting that includes heroin-peeing dinosaurs.

@SimonGill ?

@BESW Exalted - the Creation-spanning commerce organisation has found some old First Age biogenesis creations that can synthesise drugs in their urinary tracts.

[blink]

I assume all the jokes about the developers drinking this stuff themselves have been made already?

It is White Wolf...

My exposure to White Wolf is pretty limited.

I know to smile and nod at Malkavians, then flee at the first opportunity.

(Possibly show them something shiny as a distraction.)

@BESW Haha - you haven't seen Marauders then have you?

No.

Mages that can overwrite reality around them to represent their own madness.

Cool.

and then, after they've gone, people remember what happened as if it happened in their own reality.

Heh.

The guy I learned most about WW from was an Old World storyteller who specialized in Vampire, Mage, and Werewolf.

He told me a little about Exalted too.

Did he go into the purported link between Exalted and OWoD?

I can't recall.

I tuned out a lot of it after the first hour or two.

@BESW heh, that can happen. There was a lot of metaplot.

He also dwelled a lot on his own plots.

...Without a lot of differentiation.

ah, a "Let me tell you about my character" kind of discussion.

Eheh.

This was the Storyteller who told you about your character.

I guessed :P

but yes, there are a lot of really weird and over the top setting details in Exalted.

Heh.

I have an allergy to pre-made setting detail.

@BESW There are still plenty of gaps to fit your game in.

I think it's more to do with the feeling that it's possible to get the setting "wrong" than not having room for the game.

@BESW mmmmm, yeah, you have to have a group of people who are really enthused about the whole setting for it to be fun.

I once ran into a player who believed my homebrew generic D&D setting should mesh with her encyclopedic knowledge of Faerun, of all settings.

She also found it hard to internalize Making Tough Decisions and wound up with a lot of "That's the only way my character could possibly act" moments.

@BESW Yeah, the most tightly locked down of all D&D settings.... that'll never fit well with a homebrew setting.

Even though she wasn't part of it, my next campaign was deliberately outlandish and defied all expectations--partly in response to that experience, partly because all my players were memorizing the books and anticipating everything I did.

haha, good on you.

So... I reskinned everything in a New World Across the Sea setting analogous to Europe discovering America.

Drow were vermin-worshipping savages that lived in the treetops of a tropical version of Mirkwood, and fought bitterly clan-to-clan over whose vermin totem was more powerful.

@BESW Excellent!

The dominant religion was a cult that believed permanent magic items were the cause of the Europe analogue losing all its magic. They had an Arctic base and polar bear mounts/companions.

(Preaching anti-magic-item propaganda is a lot easier to do when you've got a polar bear backing you up against the city guard.)

The dominant race in the New World were catfolk, divided between an Iroquois Nation type alliance and a set of wild 'evil' clans. That was a fun society to build.

@BESW Indeed it is. I'll take a polar bear overa longsword +1 any day.

Aboriginal dreamtime + reincarnation + strong Catholic-type Original Sin racial guilt.

@SimonGill A priest would come into town wearing the signature white robes with blue arcane trim, riding a polar bear. First, he'd go get all the permits he'd need for his demonstration. Then he'd go to the market and buy all the permanent magic items he could afford (and he'd have a lot of money).

While he's going around, he tells everyone to come to the square at noon, where he'll be holding his demonstration.

Which consists of giving a lively speech about the importance of forsaking permanent magic items, and the grand utopia where everyone has a little magic they can do, if only these magic item makers and users weren't hoarding it for themselves... while the polar bear sits behind him and systematically breaks, snaps, crunches, and mangles the magic items he bought that morning.

Very popular among the lay crowd. Less so among those in power who actually have the resources to own these items.

and what did your adventurers who were tooled up with golf bags of the things think?

It's also said --though totally unproven-- that any powerful magic items which were withheld from the priest ("Oh, no, this isn't for sale") would be stolen within the next three months.

@SimonGill They were dubious, but something was draining the magic from the Old World.

[grin] It was part of my overarching plot, and tied in directly to the catfolk.

You're an Evil GM :P

Long, long ago, a coven of Rakshasa came to the New World and found a mineral called bubureau. It had the property of absorbing ambient magic, which could be channeled to make spells even more powerful (free metamagic feat application, without needing the feats). They set up a vast evil empire based on the might of bubureau.

But slowly they came to discover that every time they used this mineral, it sapped some of their own magical energy (XP drain). By the time it was confirmed, the rakshasa were utterly addicted to the use of bubureau and had already lost most of their magic, slowly turning into catfolk.

The Queen of the Rakshasa, a witch named Mombi, had used the green rock so much she dropped out of epic levels. Leaving her followers to wither and change, she built a great tomb in the middle of her kingdom, made of solid bubureau and designed to channel the magical energies it absorbed into the heart of the ziggurat.

Funky

There she placed herself, under a time-dilation spell which ensured she would age so slowly that the magic absorption effects would not be lethal even at such high concentrations. It would take a long time--thousands of years--at that slow buildup for her magic to return to its former glory... but return she would.

hmmmmm, when was her rebirth going to happen?

Over the next three thousand years she slowly gained power, but for the rest of the world her ziggurat acted like a bathtub drain for magic, leaching it slowly but steadily toward the tomb of the Witch-Queen. The most distant lands dried up first, while the lands closest to her tomb became increasingly rich in magic as it piled up around the Tomb.

@SimonGill Oh, about six months after the campaign started. [grin]

@BESW Of course.

The rakshasa she left behind turned into catfolk, and those who repented of their evil ways were shown mercy by the gods of the land. They believe that they are all descended from two evil catfolk who repented when all the rest of them were burned out and destroyed by the gods.

They believe in a timeless, placeless afterlife which those two catfolks' souls are barred from until they have atoned for all the evil their race did. To this end, every catfolk in the world is the reincarnation of one of those two souls. When a catfolk dies, his soul departs for the afterlife, is denied, and then returns to another time and place where he is re-ensouled into a new body for another chance at redemption.

Those catfolk who choose to do evil are thus the greatest traitors of all their kind, as they're prolonging everyone's entry to the great afterlife.

@BESW How did the metaphysics handle the increasing numbers of catfolk if they all share one of two souls?

@SimonGill Time and place are meaningless to the afterlife, so the souls can return however many times they need, out of continuity.

@BESW They aren't meaningless in this life though - the same souls are present many times at once. But if it's actually timey-wimey like that, then that's still cool.

The catfolk actually believe that time and place are mental constructs that we build to explain something we don't understand. Dreams are a way of glimpsing the afterlife: they make sense while we're in them because that's the way things actually are, but when we wake up and try to understand them, they stop making sense.

@BESW That ties it all together then :)

heheh.

They have a complicated society based on the worship of the sky and earth gods that saved them from their evil ways.

They refuse to wear shoes or go indoors because cutting yourself off from the earth and sky is disrespectful to the gods that saved them.

It does all come down to perspective after all. In 2d, a cube is one thing, but in 3 it looks entirely different.

@BESW I bet that caused some issues when the Fauxropeans turned up.

....yes.

A major part of the group's experience was learning the catfolk culture, gaining their trust, and becoming liaisons.

That was a group that really just reveled in exploring my worlds, meeting my NPCs, and putting things together.

I consider that campaign to be one of my greatest ever.

Not least because the tarrasque showed up and got hooked on bubureau. The overload of magical energies made it mutate.

@BESW twitch wha?

By the end, it had three heads, eight legs, breath weapons, dragonfly wings....

Well, when the Fauxropeans discovered bubureau, they weaponized it. The tarrasque woke up under one of their weapons depots.

@BESW Hashitte. Gojira da!

After that first taste, the empire that had built itself on bubureau fell in a matter of weeks: the tarrasque systematically ate all their bubureau... which happened to also mean it systematically destroyed their entire military.

It rampaged across half the world before it got to the Witch-Queens Tomb of solid bubureau, just in time to munch its way into the battle between the party and the Queen.

By the time the party had defeated her, the tarrasque had eaten her tomb, the last bubureau in the world. It got mighty indigestion and exploded, releasing all the magic the bubureau had absorbed for three thousand + years in a single catastrophic event the party barely survived by quick plane-jumping.

Magic levels in the world quickly normalized, and the much-smaller tarrasque, dazed and confused, burrowed down for an unusually long nap/sulk.

@BESW That is one way forward :)

One of the big themes in that campaign was that natural and social forces move to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another, but only the players could act to see that the people involved had happy endings.

By the end they'd talked the pirate king out of running a slave trade, smoothed over relations between the natives and the settlers, provided their favorite traveling salesman with a lucrative position negotiating trade between the pirate king and some very picky desert janni, and several other happy-ending type deals, including setting up one of the PCs as the leader of the polar bear cult, which he was going to repurpose for more productive goals.

There was also a traditional catfolk wedding for one of the PCs. I used Whitman for the ceremony.

Anyway. Bed now.

G'night!

@BESW Awesome

Night :)

g'night

squee Mike Shea knows we exist!

Mike Shea?

Name sounds familiar but I canb't place it.

@SimonGill sly flourish

heh, not really been exposed to his stuff - but it's cool that a big name blogger can pass out the word.

@SimonGill definitely

Yarp

Afternoon @Rob

How's the build today?

Afternoon @SimonGill the time o' work escape draws nigh!

@SimonGill Not too bad today, got several bits working, almost encouraging!

@Rob Excellent! Can people see more than HTML1 in your browser yet?

@SimonGill Text only :) Now trying to drive content via a uPnP server

How's your day?

Then you can have all the more fun tomorrow! ;)

haha, I probably still won't have all that much to do tomorrow either :P

What you working on?

The stuff that's putting a small amount of money in my bank account is tech support for business coaches. Mostly wordpress and web service configuration.

The stuff that should turn into something is a url referral service with some extra statistics options.

That latter is real world tester-bound at the moment.

A multi talent webmonkey then?

Pretty much - my real talent is finding solutions quickly, but that seems to be best salable in those areas.

Adios!

@BESW Oh - talking of drugs... the people who made a character called Schrodinger who was a Nazi vampire cat-boy were definitely on drugs. Quite copious amounts as far as I can tell.

@SimonGill That sounds like the result of falling asleep in the back of anime club studying for your 101 exams.

So here's a thought. I love OneNote and use it to keep track of my roleplaying sessions.

Maybe I could get it to generate or select from a premade set of random encounters.

noooooooooo! I mean we all knew it was coming.... giantitp.com/comics/oots0870.html

but still

It's a pretty icky ending. :P

@William'MindWorX'Mariager just the way he would have wanted it. (then again it's not like death is ever final in D&D)

@William'MindWorX'Mariager I have no idea if that's a thing the program can do, but it sounds pretty cool. I'm not one for actually random encounters, but there are times when I could've done with a random selection of non-random encounters.

@waxeagle His death inspiring someone to warm, fuzzy thoughts of their loved ones? I really didn't see him wanting to go that way.

@BESW I'm more of a random selected non-random encounter type too. It does seem to support VBA which is similar to VisualBasic which is pretty straight forward to use.

Coupled with WebOffice and Skydrive and I have some nice tools in my arsenal.

@BESW more like bloody with daggers in hand...but you're right it's not quite what he wanted (and I'm thinking he doesn't mean children in the traditional sense...more like zombie companions :P)

@waxeagle Isn't that the Victorian definition of children already?

@BESW only in creepy vampire romance :P and buffy

@William'MindWorX'Mariager Sometimes I wish I were a little savvier in those areas.

It took me a month to develop a working excel spreadsheet for 3.5 PCs, and I was still tweaking it a year later.

(Everything I know about Excel? That's why and how.)

Excel is a great way to learn VBA though. Record a macro, and then check out the code it generates.

Though regular in-cell expressions work great too.

My spreadsheet had nary a single macro.

A lot of the stuff I now know macros could've probably handled, I just did manually because 3.5 classes have so many custom variables.

@BESW macro all the things?

Most years the closest I come to macros is Photoshop batch actions.

@BESW fun

Another reason I like FATE is that the most numerically complicated bit of character building is the fact you can't have more skills at any given level than you have at the level below.

(It replaces point buy or class/nonclass costs as a way of balancing skill point expenditure.)

@BESW yup

I'm kinda tired of needing calculators and spreadsheets and sticky notes to be sure I've got the numbers right on a character.