Quote from: jhkim on March 07, 2024, 01:18:30 PM
The assumption in D&D is that player characters always pay for goods and services in coin. Thus, they are vagabonds, though usually ones with a lot of coin in their pockets. There is no presumption that they can rely on their family, or even who their family are. Unlike games like Chivalry & Sorcery or HarnMaster, a PC's birth and family aren't generated.

That's a huge difference for me between the D&D genre and medieval games like HarnMaster or Ars Magica. In medieval games, social class is omnipresent. Even if the PCs ignore social class among each other, it's clearly present in how PCs are received and between NPCs.

Apparently early D&D the assumption was the PCs were from middle class noble families. Hence why they had so much coin on hand at the start. Far more than any commoner would have.

Quote from: Insane Nerd Ramblings on March 07, 2024, 10:28:20 AM

Quote from: Exploderwizard on March 07, 2024, 08:15:19 AMWhat part of murderhobos are you not getting?

Murderhobos are the kind of players who sack Hommlet and put everyone to the sword after sacking The Moathouse. Or sack The Keep after sacking The Caves of Chaos. Most adventurers aren't actually Murderhobos.

I always thought Village of Homlett would be great in reverse for an evil party. I mean GG goes to great length to list out all of the coinage every villager has squirreled away. Put all those words in the text to use!

Quote from: Willmark on March 09, 2024, 11:38:37 PM
I always thought Village of Homlett would be great in reverse for an evil party. I mean GG goes to great length to list out all of the coinage every villager has squirreled away. Put all those words in the text to use!

I ran a TOEE game that started in Hommlet, the PCs decided to just take over the town. They dumped a ton of money and started building a new church and housing. Basically converted the entire populace to their cause. Not evil at all, but certainly at odds with the "good" guys.

Quote from: RPGPundit on March 08, 2024, 04:55:27 AM

Quote from: jhkim on March 07, 2024, 08:31:10 PM
I just double-checked my DMG, and I think you're misreading that. Notably, the Secondary Skills table (p12) has entries for "farmer/gardener", "fisher", "miner", and "trapper/furrier". Those aren't skills of gentle birth. There is a statement like what you say on page 88, but it's phrased as an example society, and it generally says to leave it up to the DM and the specific campaign world.

Unearthed Arcana did what? Just plugged in a set of birth tables of course!

Oh, hey. I forgot that was in there. It seems to me that in practice, most people ignored the Comeliness and birth table rules from UA, and just used it for the new races, classes, and spells. None of the sample characters from modules had Comeliness or social class that I recall.

Quote from: Omega on March 09, 2024, 04:19:42 PM

Quote from: jhkim on March 07, 2024, 01:18:30 PM
The assumption in D&D is that player characters always pay for goods and services in coin. Thus, they are vagabonds, though usually ones with a lot of coin in their pockets. There is no presumption that they can rely on their family, or even who their family are. Unlike games like Chivalry & Sorcery or HarnMaster, a PC's birth and family aren't generated.

That's a huge difference for me between the D&D genre and medieval games like HarnMaster or Ars Magica. In medieval games, social class is omnipresent. Even if the PCs ignore social class among each other, it's clearly present in how PCs are received and between NPCs.

Apparently early D&D the assumption was the PCs were from middle class noble families. Hence why they had so much coin on hand at the start. Far more than any commoner would have.

Do you have a text reference for this? I quoted the AD&D DMG section earlier. In real history, commoners like mercenaries, merchants, or thieves could still potentially have a lot of coin. In most of Europe, there were still big social differences between a noble with money and a commoner with money, even if they had the same amounts of coin. There is a trope in stories of impoverished noble families having to make deals with commoners to pay for upkeep of their land.