0 1 50 L
1st 2 140 L
2nd 5 450 L
3rd 8 1,400 L
4th 11 3,700 L
5th 14 10,600 L
6th 17 36,650 L
is there some formula or pattern to that spell pricing? If they were going to pull random numbers out of the air, why not more even ones?
I would wager it's set to be some specific fraction of suggested Wealth By Level, which also doesn't scale up evenly. I'm not exactly sure (or sure that I care) what the precise reasons for the Wealth By Level maths are.
I've been banging my head against it for about 20 minutes and I can't see the pattern, but I'm no Rachel Riley. I think Ceejay is probably right and it has something to do with WBL rather than item level or caster level, but even that doesn't look like a real pattern.
0th-1=5%
1st-2=7%
2nd-5=5%
3rd-8=4.2%
4th-11=3.7%
5th-14=3.18%
6th-17=3.26%
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I fear it may all be entirely arbitrary.
I'm pretty sure the devs prioritized flavor text and art over mechanical consistency and game balance. Considering paizo's penchant for historical revisionism, I imagine that various mechanics (including prices) will vary from one printing to the next.
The economics of Starfinder are especially irksome, since I am pretty sure that I recall Paizo staff claiming (unofficially) that one of the reasons for using Item Levels, and purchase restrictions based upon them, was so that Starfinder wouldn't have to suffer from the ridiculously arbitrary scaling of item prices Pathfinder used to keep higher level equipment out of the hands of lower level characters. I believe the described advantage was that such a system would prevent games from being broken as a result of a players getting their hands on more wealth than they should for their level (such as from selling a captured starship for example).
If you assume a base cost of 50 for the gem then the cost for the first few is 90*spell level*caster level at which a full, 9-level caster would get it (1, 1, 3, 5). Then it breaks at level 4 spells, where it looks more like 100 for the gem and 90*spell level 4*caster level 10. And breaks further with level 5 and 6 gems.
I'd guess there was a system then someone fudged the later gems prices up.
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At any rate I have to give the OP credit for some funny title-fu with "Dial Cthulhu." That was good. :)
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I just called Cthulhu to discuss this topic and he said ffhddcfgjjugeewsstuklogfshjjifdsedrwwwhguihoofrsssgghhvgjodeuj
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"Put your body on the pyre that I may feast upon your mind."
At least, that's what my universal translator gave me...
Then it started flashing weird colors. I don't think it's working properly anymore. I feel like it is watching me as I sleep.
My dreams have begun to feature horrors in the dark. My wife worries for my soul. I must find the source of this constant dread. The library calls to me.
The blood...
The blood...
....
Why can't it simply be "these are the values we settled on via play testing, other values were either too cheap or too expensive in practice"?
I believe we're meant to assume that Paizo never thinks to playtest anything and just does stuff randomly to mess with its customer base. ;)
The 3.5 WBL chart actually does have a formula.
It's based on the number of monsters of even CR (13, I think) you have to fight in a 4 person party to level to the next level and the average of those monsters loot drops (based on treasure tables), minus 25% spent on consumables that they assume get spent to defeat those monsters.
It goes out of whack very quickly partly because no one in 3.5 spends 25% of their loot on consumables. You really really don't have to, to win the fights, and so it's mostly a waste except in particular circumstances. On top of that, DM's often throw in 'party rewards' that happen outside of fighting monsters that compound the problem. Like when the duke throws you 500gp for taking care of the goblins in the sewer, or whatever. Savvy players compound that by abusing the craft rules, or sell rules, or magic item crafting rules and by being effecient buyers of gear.
So if you actually play from 1st-10th, you end up WAY over what the WBL chart says you should have at 10.
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Meh, in Pathfinder I just ran adventure paths. In all honesty no one was ever at their WBL in those games. And apart from kingmaker, having enough down time to actually craft anything of use just never came up. The ones we played through were all time sensitive for most part.
I used to get around it by just allowing a gear respec at level 8 and again at level 13. Literally sell whatever you didn’t want and then gear up to WBL. You couldn’t have any one item worth more than 1/4 of your total wealth.
It was a bit unrealistic but for the most part my group in those days were happy with it as it just let them do the thing they wanted most with their characters.
I think there was one one or two times where it turned out a charcater had gear above expected wealth at the point we did the respec.
I’d have more trouble running it like that with the groups I run with now though. They like the games to run more immersive than that.
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The closest simple formula I could come up with is 50*3^(spell level), where ^ is exponentiation, not bitwise and.
The formula isn't useful for much, unless you're planning to make spells higher than 6th level.
Edit: My formula is the same as the "multiply by 3 to get to the next level" formula mentioned above. But I did linear regression to get the answer, so mine is better. :-)
OK, so R did the linear regression. If you want to use 49.30374*(2.97725)^x, go right ahead. And the model A*B^(x^n) for n slightly bigger than 1 is probably even better (I haven't figured out what n should be yet, just that 2 is much too large).