EPT Kaitar Conversions

[aldarron]

EPT has some interesting economics. I was thinking about the possibility of using D&D adventures with EPT and vice versa, but looking at the various prices in Kaitars and the weight in Kaitars etc. I could see there was clearly no 1 to 1 relation of Kaitars to D&D Gold Pieces. Maybe 2K = 1 GP is a decent average but I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or ideas about that.

How many Kaitars are there to a D&D gp?

[greentongue]

It may help if you confirm that you mean Original D&D and not some newer version.
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[aldarron]

Yep OD&D gold piece. Although the GP remains fairly stable in value in all the TSR D&D versions - prices and wages are often unchanged. AD&D is a different story though.

I see in EPT fer instance that 1 square mile will yield about 10 Kaitars per month in production value. So that makes Kaitars seem like they ought to be worth a lot of GP

On the other hand I see that Kaitars are really small - 150 to a pound - or 1/15th a gp, which might mean they are worth less than a GP

I dunno.

[rleduc]

Purchasing power ought to be more important than weight. Also, Tekumel is a metal-poor world, so I would understand if a kaitar represented more production per unit weight. Things being what they are, I'm sure you'll find plenty of inconsistencies.

[snorri]

at a first look, most prioces are the same in OD&D and EPT, even if EPT tend to be little more expensive. for axemaple, a plate mail cost is the same (50 gp = 50 K), but leather armor is more exepnsive in EPT (30 isnted of 15). I guess one gp = one K would fit.

[aldarron]

Oct 31, 2011 20:32:55 GMT -6 rleduc said:

Purchasing power ought to be more important than weight. Also, Tekumel is a metal-poor world, so I would understand if a kaitar represented more production per unit weight. Things being what they are, I'm sure you'll find plenty of inconsistencies.

Point well taken. The size of the coin presumably relects the scarcity of the metal on Tekumel and doesn't tell us anything about its value on other worlds.

Nov 1, 2011 5:57:22 GMT -6 snorri said:

at a first look, most prioces are the same in OD&D and EPT, even if EPT tend to be little more expensive. for axemaple, a plate mail cost is the same (50 gp = 50 K), but leather armor is more exepnsive in EPT (30 isnted of 15). I guess one gp = one K would fit.

Yeah, noticead that. most prices are in the same ballpark - like maybe Barker was just making minor adjustments to things he thought should cost more or less.

He also gives the price of constructing a borderlands "small castle" as 250,000 Kaitars, which is a price one could easily come to using the D&D castle construction rules.

So maybe Barker did have a 1 to 1 ratio in mind when he wrote EPT. Usually I look at craftsmens wages to get a grip on the value of coin, but the EPT wages are randomized and can vary extremly

That 10 Kaitar per square mile per month figure seems way low. In ACKS the peasant family is assumed to generate about 12 gp a month, and these figures are fairly consistent with D&D economics. A fairly typical medieval pop density might be 50 - 100, which would yield 600 - 1200 gp per square mile per month! Even the FFC, whose productivity figures are 1/4 that of Acks, would still yield 150 to 300 GP per square mile for an average sq mi of common farmland.

[greentongue]

While that may be true for European style population distribution, I believe that EPT follows the Asia style with a much denser population. High population in a agricultural setting means everyone is very poor but things besides money are important. It helps explain why honor is worth more than life for example.
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[rleduc]

Yes - honor; and clan!

[ckutalik]

This would be a good one for Victor/Badger to weigh in on. We were talking a couple months back about my idea of porting the equipment lists and prices from Swords & Glory and he mentioned that the prices/wages et al in EPT were all "D&Dized" for the TSR rollout. The prices, which include a very thorough range of goods including domain costs, in S&G in other words are much closer to what Barker intended.

[aldarron]

Nov 1, 2011 18:16:20 GMT -6 greentongue said:

While that may be true for European style population distribution, I believe that EPT follows the Asia style with a much denser population. High population in a agricultural setting means everyone is very poor but things besides money are important. It helps explain why honor is worth more than life for example.
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I dunno what the pop densities of Tekumel nation states and territories are. High population densities however will increase the production value of land for the ruler. It's not an efficient increase in that you don't get a one for one, but more hands means more labor means more output means more money in the tax coffer, typically.

Also I wouldn't put too much stock in "just so" stories that explain culture in terms of economics or settlement pattern (somewhat of a cart before the horse issue). The death before dishonor value was just as much a part of germanic/viking age culture and populations there were not even remotely crowded.

[rleduc]

There are several looooong threads in the Tekumel yahoo group mailing list going into population densities in detail that is beyond excruciating for those that want to know. It seems to come up about annually there.

Obviously a lot of factors would go into yield per person per acre, which would mostly be setting-dependent (e.g. climate, soil type, ag knowledge, tools at hand). As these things are setting-dependent, you can't really expect the rules sets to necessarily agree on yields.

Not to spoil anyone's fun, but we are in grave danger of truly over-thinking this.

From a rule mechanics point of view, it seems EPT prices were jiggered so that 1k = 1 gp in OD&D.

[aldarron]

Looks like the consensus is 1 to 1