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Post by Vile Traveller on Oct 26, 2013 9:23:27 GMT -6
I'm looking through the rules on men-at-arms, and I can't find any references as to whether the cost for horsemen includes their mounts. It seems likely, given the wage disparity between foot and horse, but I was wondering whether I was missing anything written somewhere in black and white.
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Post by cooper on Oct 26, 2013 12:19:26 GMT -6
If you look back at FFC, in Od&d and into Ad&d you see requirements for armorers armorer apprentices, wagon trains, and smiths based on how many men you have under arms. It is simple enough to say (and ad&d might be specific on this) that for every 10 horse or what have you requires a horse handler, or perhaps a master animal trainer + 1 apprentice for every additional 5 horses.
For example, B2 Keep of the borderlands has 244 men at arms, looking at the rules, this requires 1 smith, 1 armorer and 3 apprentices. I believe the smith also does horseshoe repair.
So, short answer, is that the cost is somewhat baked into or spread out between the wagon train as well as the smith and a hired animal handler if you want at perhaps 25gp/month. Additionally, men did tend to groom and feed their own mounts, as footmen do minor repairs on their own weapon so the difference in salary can help explain associated costs as well.
Also if you look at FFC vs. 0d&d in salary breakdown. 0d&d simply puts a heavy foot at 36gp/year (3 gp per month) in salary, whereas FFC puts the heavy foot man at 10gp per month + 24gp to outfit him in chain armor, +10gp for a sword, +2gp for a helmet. So it is conceivable to look at salary as an amalgam of keeping 1 man properly outfitted and prepared for combat.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Oct 27, 2013 22:11:18 GMT -6
Great in-depth post, cooper - thanks!
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Post by Red Baron on Jun 29, 2014 13:37:10 GMT -6
Horses could be fed for free during the summer, provided that they had many hours a day to graze. Fodder was only needed for armies on the move with little grazing time and during the winter months.
It gnaws me more that a heavy footman is paid 3 gold a month, when it costs 21.4 gold to simply feed a man over the same period of time.
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Post by oakesspalding on Jun 29, 2014 22:10:10 GMT -6
It gnaws me more that a heavy footman is paid 3 gold a month, when it costs 21.4 gold to simply feed a man over the same period of time. Oh, sure. But it's even worse than that. Consider that according to the rules on "Obtaining Specialists and Men-At-Arms" it costs anywhere from 1,500 to 18,000 TIMES more to ADVERTISE for, say, torchbearers or Light Foot troops than what you pay them per day once you find them. No doubt they're hiding from you because it's much more fun to loiter around the pub than work for your party, where IF they survive a month of walking in front of you with a ten-foot pole, they'll have enough money to buy, well, their very own ten-foot-pole (or a coil of rope or small sack, if they prefer). After a few months of service they may even be able to afford a bud of garlic to bring home to their long-suffering wives (who by now probably all wish they had married animal trainers). Now the high prices for adventuring gear may indeed be due to the "gold rush economy" that Gygax cited. But if so, surely the people living in such an economy would have inflated wages to match. Perhaps only some of them do. But if so, Instead of a career as a torchbearer or light soldier, why not just sell rope? Or even better, advertising? As a DM in 1979 I didn't use hirelings, partly because I figured that the wages were so low that they couldn't possibly be intended as people available for dungeon expeditions. Rather, those guys somehow materialized during the end-game, after you cleared your territory of Balrogs and then went into cheese farming. Now, it is true that medieval and pre-modern "wages" were often paid partly or even largely "in-kind". So one way of salvaging things would be to postulate that once you had a barony, your estate was, so to speak, automatically producing food, lodging and perhaps other goods of value for potential workers, and thus the listed wages were the EXTRA money you had to pay out. That's the way I went with my own game, cautioning that without a barony, listed wages paid would be per WEEK, or even per DAY if for a dangerous dungeon expedition. But now I think I might have been too tolerant with an obviously broken rule. I think this sort of economic disconnect also contributed in a small way to the annoying AD&D view that all player-character adventurers, even 1st levels, were automatically assumed to be sort of Nietzschean Supermen, standing high above and apart from the "0-level" rabble. After all, even starting adventurers shop at super high-end stores where a mere coil of rope costs the equivalent of a month's wage. Don't take my sarcasm too seriously. I'm trying to have a bit of fun while confirming a few points that many have referenced. As everyone here knows, I love this d**n game.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2014 22:21:11 GMT -6
Well, it gave me a chuckle!
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Post by waysoftheearth on Jun 29, 2014 22:48:06 GMT -6
It gnaws me more that a heavy footman is paid 3 gold a month, when it costs 21.4 gold to simply feed a man over the same period of time. I'm pretty sure that the listed wages are in addition to basic food and shelter. In the medieval period your hirelings would have lived in house with you and been a part of your "household". You had to put a roof over their heads, put food on the table, have tasks to keep them busy, and give them a few coins to play with in their minimal spare time.
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Post by Red Baron on Jun 30, 2014 16:31:02 GMT -6
The Medieval Price List agrees with you so far as household servants and even sometimes squires are concerned. ("Of course, a price list is a misleading guide to a feudal economy, because so many goods were either produced within a household, or supplied by a lord. Retainers could get money, but they would also get food, lodging, weapons (sometimes), and cloth.") Armies are to large to lodge and feed out of a born's castle for more than a few days, and roaming adventurers aren't going to be housing and feeding the men that they hire for a few days. Armies in enemy territory might live off the land, ie. rob local peasantry everything they're worth, for a while but the defenders can burn their villages and fields to prevent this. Using the Medieval Price List and a pay list for troops in the 100 years war and some rounding, here's the pay per day for soldiers: Man | Cost | Role | Levee | 2 | LF | Private Soldier | 4 | HF, LH, Missile | Professional Missile | 6 | Heavy Missile, Mounted Missile | Sergeant/Squire | 10 | AF, HH | Knight | 22 | Officer | Knight Bannerette | 44 | Officer | Noble | 50 | Officer |
Horse fodder as iron rations. For comparison, an unskilled laborer or serf might earn or produce the equivalent of 1 a day, a carpenter or roofer could earn twice that, and a master tradesman or armorer could earn 4.
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Post by waysoftheearth on Jun 30, 2014 17:30:07 GMT -6
Great post Red Baron, I like your wage figures I agree that a player wouldn't be expected to feed and house a hireling taken on casually for a day here or there--and therefore those hirelings would need to be paid more (perhaps the same number of SP per day as their GP rate per month?) Regarding itinerant adventurers "housing" their hirelings: even if they don't have a permanent household to keep, they would likely still have a camp, hideout, or at least some kind of mobile baggage train to call "home". When they start attracting semi-permanent hirelings (by the month) the players will be a significant troupe moving about the countryside. If they can't feed their followers, they should see them deserting in short order
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Post by cooper on Jun 30, 2014 18:31:29 GMT -6
The rule may be in 0d&d and definitely in ad&d that hirelings will not consider employment of less than one month and that dungeon crawls cost a months wages per delve (week) given the extreme risk. Some specialists like the alchemist require a year contract.
As I mentioned further above, arneson's FFC lists baggage trains, which would be required for keeps on borderlands without peasant populations or for those on the march.
Ultimately, the costs of everything in the rules is a short hand for game purposes and balanced by what the designers assumed a name level character could field (this is a castle roughly costs an amount of gold a character would accumulate by 9th level). Peasants make 10gp per peasant per year for a lord, but obviously the peasants aren't making "gold". So too, wages to hirelings could very well be in salt, but the means by which we track wealth in D&D is something called a "gold piece".
Matthew once very astutely pointed out that the monthly wages in 0d&d are derived from the point costs in CHAINMAIL. This is of course very handy when finding how much "worth" your deck of warriors has. And then looking at peasant populations around cleared hexes gives you a means of playing a war game that doesn't get bogged down into how many HF you can buy with 80 wagons of wheat! Rather, if I capture your village of 300 peasants, next round (year) I can now field an extra 100 light foot or a 3rd level hero-1. I'm not interested in doing the math on what an actual soldiers yearly salary is as long as the math in the game works.
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