Urban Family Cost of Living & Market Class

Hi all! I'm trying to figure out some of ACKS' economic assumptions to build my own urbancrawling system using downtime activities.

In Axioms 3 there's a great breakdown of everything a peasant family consumes and produces. I haven't been able to find much mention about urban family consumption (even under the heading on page 3 of Axioms 3 it omits info about how much they consume). From another thread there's an interesting breakdown of a wealthy patrician's living expenses, and from there I'm understanding that food, rent, and entertainment come to roughly half the monthly cost of a standard of living.

How much do living expenses cost for urban families? Why is the monthly cost on the standard of living table a range instead of a single value? Does a settlement's market class raise the costs of living? How would a wealthy patrician's cost of living, or even an emperor's, affect the market? Would market impact apply here?

So, when you start looking at urban settlements of any size, you start getting into folks that either have levels or are a specialist of some sort. I can't find a thread, but I have a recollection that the "urban family" averages around 25gp in monthly income/costs (the generic "specialist" wage). That average includes all the "peasant class" manual laborers at the 3/6gp wage rate all the way up through sages/etc at 500gp, plus what the wages/earnings/whatever would be of leveled characters, mages, fighters, blah.

As far as what that all get *spent* on, not real sure. It might be interesting to take Alex's suggestions there and bin those things into various categories - rent, food, entertainment, staff, personal luxury, personal care, personal sporting, personal transportation.... - then take those ratios and multiply those up or down based on the wage of the person in question - if they don't make enough to have a healer on staff, let's say, then they don't get one, or maybe it goes up to affording a rank 3 healer, or a small staff of healers, at the high end. Should take care of itself, but for figuring out how to explain the extravagance at the upper ends.

 

1 Like