Wooden Cottage mispriced?

Looking at the civilian structure costs, I’m having trouble seeing the pattern. I think the issue I’m having is that the wooden cottage has a price that’s a factor of 2 smaller than the other similar structures suggest it should have.

In stronghold structures, the stone building is double the cost of a wooden building. In civilian structures, it’s a factor of 4.

Comparing roundhouse and longhouse, the price of the structure is proportional to square footage. The wooden cottage, with double the footprint of the longhouse has the same cost.

Both of these suggest the wooden cottage should cost 600, no?

These structures almost follow a pattern based on square footage and roof height, but not quite.

A simple formula might be:
Wooden structure: 50 gp per 100 Sq foot, 1 story, making a “longhouse” 225, and add an extra factor of 1.33 for a second story, making a “cottage” 600.

Is the cottage deliberately cheaper? Is there more specific thinking behind the different civilian structures?

Why do you ask?! Who would want to buy a cottage, anyway?

<looks nervously at the PbP group>

Cottages are over rated. Stone is where it's at!

I've got a further question to tag on here, Alex.  I know that the original discussion has to do with building a wooden cottage on the road between Muntberg and Dwimmermount (pretty close to Dwimmermount, if I remember correctly).  How do you handle construction times with something like this? It doesn't make sense to use the 500 gp/day figure quoted on p. 40, given both the small size of Muntburg's labor pool (although, now that I think about it the text does explicitly state that you treat the availability of commissions as one category lower.  So, if Muntburg is, say Class V, you would treat it as Class IV for purposes of seeing if a crew was available to commision the cottage, with a 25% chance per week that it is available) *and* the fact that you're out in the wilderness, where most workers aren't going to want to hang out, especially not in the numbers required to reach the 500 gp/day.

 

For purposes of discussion, I tagged on a 50% hazard pay premium, and divided the speed by a factor of 10, so it would still be reasonably fast, but not “crazy fast”… this was just handwaving and acknowledging that castle building crews and civilian workforces aren’t on the same scale, though.

Domains at War, if you have it, gives a detailed breakdown of construction projects down to the capabilities of an individual labourer, so you can work out construction projects under all sorts of conditions. Like some idiot wanting to build a stone cottage outside a pissant town like Muntberg near the massive underground fortress of a dead God. Just sayin'.

This rabbit hole goes very deep, I know :slight_smile: (it suggests not being that cruel to your players, too)