This is something that I scratched the surface of when trying to design a menu with gil-prices for a bar. I went around and about to find out what various npcs charged for various things, and what I found (according to my notes, this was back around november ish) that npc prices only rarely go above 50 gil for an item. I then went on to try and caulculate how much it would cost me in gil to make a meal with stuff bought from a vendor, with the idea that if you know what the value of a meal is, and you say people have to eat at least 3 x a day plus they also need to drink something, then you could say a person has to spend xxx amount of gil per day to keep themselves alive. Problem just is that I'm not that good at maths, and it got a bit overwhelming as it were.Â
When I then designed the menu, I also tried to keep in mind that a bar has to turn a profit (That being said, most people probably don't eat at a bar every night) and so the prices would have to be higher than the raw NPC value.
So all of that lead to the price of a main course being around 120 gil, and probably in total a three course meal would be around 300.Â
Some of the problems I encountered with the drinks area specifically, is the fact that the NPC's sometimes sells an entire bottle of something for very very little, because it's used in the start of a craft and as such has to be dirt cheap, and vice versa some things seemed needlessly expensive (in comparison) seemingly because these are used in the higher end of a craft.Â
Another thing that you could count in (which I did not at the time) is the rewards for leves, but again levels play a factor here. But it could do for a vague "what might you get for risking your life a little bit" (in a world where risking your life as an adventurer is pretty normal?)Â
I would love to be more thorough with this, to see how much you can pull out of the data we have and the lore and everything else. But it's a lot of effort and requires someone who is a bit more maths savvy than I am, I feel.Â
However, based on all of the above, I would say that if your regular adventuring person eats at a bar once a night and has one or two glasses of alcohol, he'd need about 500 gil per day at least (and this would be eating at a cheap place and not at the bismarck) to get it to run around.Â
And then based on that 2000 gil might not be a whole lot of money for a courtesan to have unless it's made in a day.Â
If you look more towards mercenary hireings, especially of the someone probably needs to die caliber, a larger payment of maybe 5000 would probably be standard.Â
Keeping it in those levels also means that being a gillionaire is actually still pretty darn sorted.Â
HOWEVER, from experience as well, some RP'ers we had in the aforementioned bar tended to think of 50 gil for a glass of wine as being a bit much, whilst that wasn't our intention, I think there is a factor with what kind of currency the player OOCly is used to - they may think of 50 gil as being 50 dollars, and then it's really would be a very expensive glass of wine. Where as in my country, we're used to seeing a bit higher numbers with not as much value.Â
Another thing I found is that in order to be able to show the changes in quality and type of alcohol you need a pretty high maximum, otherwise there's not enough space to show it off on. This all turned into a really long ramble, I hope some of it made sense and for all that is holy please don't take this for fact, but rather an observation. I would encourage you to find a point where you feel it sounds reasonable, and also use the emote "/em hands over a (small/medium/large) bag of gil" and "/em slides some gil over the bar to the bartender" because they're nice and vague but precise enough to get the message across.
When I then designed the menu, I also tried to keep in mind that a bar has to turn a profit (That being said, most people probably don't eat at a bar every night) and so the prices would have to be higher than the raw NPC value.
So all of that lead to the price of a main course being around 120 gil, and probably in total a three course meal would be around 300.Â
Some of the problems I encountered with the drinks area specifically, is the fact that the NPC's sometimes sells an entire bottle of something for very very little, because it's used in the start of a craft and as such has to be dirt cheap, and vice versa some things seemed needlessly expensive (in comparison) seemingly because these are used in the higher end of a craft.Â
Another thing that you could count in (which I did not at the time) is the rewards for leves, but again levels play a factor here. But it could do for a vague "what might you get for risking your life a little bit" (in a world where risking your life as an adventurer is pretty normal?)Â
I would love to be more thorough with this, to see how much you can pull out of the data we have and the lore and everything else. But it's a lot of effort and requires someone who is a bit more maths savvy than I am, I feel.Â
However, based on all of the above, I would say that if your regular adventuring person eats at a bar once a night and has one or two glasses of alcohol, he'd need about 500 gil per day at least (and this would be eating at a cheap place and not at the bismarck) to get it to run around.Â
And then based on that 2000 gil might not be a whole lot of money for a courtesan to have unless it's made in a day.Â
If you look more towards mercenary hireings, especially of the someone probably needs to die caliber, a larger payment of maybe 5000 would probably be standard.Â
Keeping it in those levels also means that being a gillionaire is actually still pretty darn sorted.Â
HOWEVER, from experience as well, some RP'ers we had in the aforementioned bar tended to think of 50 gil for a glass of wine as being a bit much, whilst that wasn't our intention, I think there is a factor with what kind of currency the player OOCly is used to - they may think of 50 gil as being 50 dollars, and then it's really would be a very expensive glass of wine. Where as in my country, we're used to seeing a bit higher numbers with not as much value.Â
Another thing I found is that in order to be able to show the changes in quality and type of alcohol you need a pretty high maximum, otherwise there's not enough space to show it off on. This all turned into a really long ramble, I hope some of it made sense and for all that is holy please don't take this for fact, but rather an observation. I would encourage you to find a point where you feel it sounds reasonable, and also use the emote "/em hands over a (small/medium/large) bag of gil" and "/em slides some gil over the bar to the bartender" because they're nice and vague but precise enough to get the message across.
