Hello,
I am working in a regular campaign, we have just been informed that our sleepy little town may need to suddenly become a fortress.
I have some problems with the description and need a little RAW assistance.
With a Lyre of Building do I need to make a perform stringed instrument check to activate its building protection powers?
With a Lyre of Building do I need to make a perform stringed instrument check to activate the first hour of its construction power?
With its construction power is there a limit to how much work can be completed per week. Assuming ring of sustenance and decent con, and high perform is there any reason I couldn't play the instrument for 10 hours straight? or even longer.
I assume I have to pay for the raw materials? How do we cost that out?
It says 100 humans working for three days. Do we assume unskilled laborers? Do they have some skill? Some understanding of the construction skill?
Item description below for ease of reference:
** spoiler omitted **...
Um best as I can figure the Lyre makes about 426GP/ Hour of playing it.
That's assuming a DC of 20 for what you want done. And assuming that the Lyre's powers are a craft check of 5.
It really depends on your GM's DC of the completed fortification, and his view of how much the Fortification cost!
To be honest the Fortifications materials could come from local wood, dirt from ditches etc. But the game system just does not work that way.
Your Need to Know the Following:
DC For the Completed Project
Cost of the Completed Object (you must get 1/3 of this number for material cost)
Craft Skill for the Lyre of Building
From that point forward just use the Craft rules.
Just my guess
The King Maker AP may have an acceptable ruling that your GM may like:
At the GM’s whim, using construction magic (such as
a lyre of building or spells like fabricate or wall of stone)
can reduce the cost of a building’s BP by 2 (minimum
of 0 BP). This is a one-time reduction, regardless of the
amount of magic used.
City Wall (8 BP): City walls do not occupy a city block—
rather, purchasing a city wall fortifies one of a district’s
four outer borders. A city wall cannot be built on a water
border.
Using this system it would take about 24 Months to Build city walls with the Lyre, 32 months without.
The Ultimate combat has lots of information about bringing down fortifications but very little about cost of creating them..lol
Hello,
With a Lyre of Building do I need to make a perform stringed instrument check to activate its building protection powers?
No. You are using a magic item, no perform check is needed here.
With a Lyre of Building do I need to make a perform stringed instrument check to activate the first hour of its construction power?
No. The first hour does not require a perform check. The perform check (DC 18) is only needed after the first hour to see how long you can continue.
With its construction power is there a limit to how much work can be completed per week. Assuming ring of sustenance and decent con, and high perform is there any reason I couldn't play the instrument for 10 hours straight? or even longer.
You can play for as many hours as you can continually make perform checks at a DC of 18. Playing for ten hours straight would require 9 consecutive perform checks, each at DC 18.
Unless you enter into a prohibitive condition that stops you from playing you can continue making the DC if you roll well.
I assume I have to pay for the raw materials? How do we cost that out?
I have no idea. I wish I could find some Pathfinder answers to this question also. 3.5 listed the cost of castles and such, but that has not carried over with Pathfinder apparently . . . unless your GM wishes to use those rules. If so then I guess you could consider using the Craft rules.
Kingmaker has some rules for the purposes of building, but I'm not sure they would suffice for your situation. Someone else can probably speak more intelligently on that than I can.
It says 100 humans working for three days. Do we assume unskilled laborers? Do they have some skill? Some understanding of the construction skill?
Laborers are considered to be untrained hirelings. Trained hirelings are considered to be folks like Masons, Scribes, Mercenaries, etc.
In other words, untrained laborers are the ones that would be building the structure anyway, even without the lyre of building. It should not unduly impact your progress here.
My comments are above, in bold.
If an average crew of 100 workers can build the defensive walls you need in - as an example only - 100 days (or whatever time frame your GM rules appropriate) then the lyre of building can build the same structure in about 17 hours of play. That 17 hours of playing the lute can be continuous with a lot of good perform checks, or it can be broken into multiple weeks.
17 (hours) * 6 (days of work per hour of play) = 102 days worth of work.
A lyre of building provides you with labor, not skilled craftsmen. Its a great tool for building truly amazing things but it is not a replacement for skill. A lyre of building can dig a job site, load carts at a quarry, clean up trash etc. but asking it to carve and mortar stone is outside of its description.
A lyre of building provides you with labor, not skilled craftsmen. Its a great tool for building truly amazing things but it is not a replacement for skill. A lyre of building can dig a job site, load carts at a quarry, clean up trash etc. but asking it to carve and mortar stone is outside of its description.
"...magically construct buildings, mines, tunnels, ditches, etc."
The lyre of building constructs. That means that it builds or erects. Using it to load carts or clean up trash is outside of its description. Using it to construct something is not.
Guys, never in the description does it say labourers or craftsman. It says HUMANS. Humans could be labourers or craftsman.
I agree that given the price of the item it probably should be labourers, but it doesn't say that. Right?
In fact the item specifically says that it can make buildings, tunnels, ditches, mines, and walls. That sounds like at least some skill is involved. Making mines is extremely dangerous.
Fair enough, I suppose. Again, I don't think the skill level is relevant overall. The lyre simply constructs buildings and such. It happens, plain and simple.
Frankly, I'm not entirely convinced that you need materials during the construction process. It says that it magically constructs the building. For all I know that means a white light slowly grows leaving a fully formed building behind afterwards.
I went through this whole exercise myself; it's how I discovered there's not really any rules for fatigue in Pathfinder or 3.5e - you can play the thing for days on end, until thirst gets you, since the only rule even resembling exhaustion is for when you sleep in armor.
However, the really telling this is that the lyre is based on fabricate. That means it performs the work necessary to build something, given the materials, but that it does not supply the materials.
Now, if the lyre were based on major creation or something, then I could see a while light magically creating a building like a 3-D printer, but as it is, it's pretty clear that you need the raw materials to be present, and it does the work of 100 people in terms of turning the raw materials into a completed building.
My ruling was that the building itself was pretty basic; you'd need artisans to do any fine crafting, bas-reliefs, etc., but there's nothing in the RAW that says so; in theory you could have the thing construct the Cathedral at Notre Dame and there's nothing that would contradict that ruling :)
Like I said, I'm not convinced that it needs materials. I'm also not convinced that it doesn't.
But the RAW don't say that it needs materials, and it's important to note that while the fabricate spell is needed to craft the item -- the item is not actually casting the spell fabricate. In other words, a magic item is subject to the rules of the magic item itself, it is not subject to the rules governing the spell needed as a prerequisite to crafting it.
In regards to the materials needed, heck, there's no area of affect that the lyre works within. There's no area to say that the spell has to grab the materials needed. Building a stone wall? There's plenty of stone in the earth. Building a wooden house? There are plenty of trees right over there.
This insistence that the raw materials have to be piled up like you would see at a construction site, well, that seems a bit arbitrary and provincial to me. That's not to say that a GM shouldn't feel comfortable ruling it that way, but it is to say that that particular vision of the lyre isn't the sole interpretation of how the item works.
The lyre of building could, by the RAW, build a structure without raw materials, unless there's a quote somewhere else that I'm unaware of.
Without the costs of building materials (stone, wood, nails, etc.), it's hard to really do much with the lyre...
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I'd like to think that Jo Bird's understanding and James' fit together. You need to have materials on hand, but they don't need to be laid out as if they'd been purchased from a lumberyard.
If you initiate the lyre of building in farmlands near a forest, you'll be building walls out of wood and thatch and whatever stones might be found in the soil. If you use the same lyre in a mountain pass, you would end up with walls made from stones laid atop one another. In neither case would you make a fortification out of platinum. In ice-locked Irrisen, you might end up with snow-pack walls.
A lyre of building never mentions any skill level for these 100 humans, so assuming 100 humans with a +0 modifier. Craft can be done untrained but it requires a certain skill level.
For something a trained monkey can do assume 100 humans doing 5 gold pieces (profession) worth of labor or crafting 10 gold worth of materials at a time.
Now for anything skilled you can have your workers take 20, but that slows down production considerably to about 50 gold of skilled work done total.
Materials need to be provided, if you try to build a house in an empty plain you would probably end up with a sod or straw bale hut.
For anything an idiot can do, the lyre of building is a game changing tool, for skilled work I would rely on hired help.