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This thread is meant to brain storm abuses that adventuring PCs might attempt when they are not adventuring, either for the wary GM on the lookout, for the corrective game designer looking to close loop holes with errata, or for the aspiring player not long for this world.
I'll start:
If you end up with a substantial amount of downtime in between adventures and are not the party crafter, don't waste time making Profession checks to earn piddly pocket change. No, buy a house. Spend, say 100gp/month, to get a wealthy lifestyle. Then search your home for non-magical items of 5gp or less for your entire downtime.
So if you have a month off (30 days), and spend 8 hours a day searching your home for goodies to sell (which takes 1d10 minutes, or an average of 5.5 minutes), then you could end the month with a little over 6,545gp in garage sale profits.
Salt(1 pound) = 5GP.
I thought that was simply once per month or some such limit...
Hmm... Not really a lot of options with this that I know of...
What I do know is this might change when Ultimate Campaign comes out.
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Not Pathfinder, but in one of my old Rifts games a player took some relevant skills and used his giant mecha to build log cabins that he would then sell to refugees.
Mecha lumberjack builder. Cool.
Years ago I played in a high level campaign that included a lot of plane hoping including a lot of alternate prime material planes. The GM always liked to change things around just to be different. He had different worlds where the coin metals were of different value. One of them had gold being more valuable than platinum.
My character was able to freely travel to the two planes so I ended up with unlimited wealth. The exchange rate was around 10 platinum to 1 gold at least at the start. I loaded up with gold and bought platinum at a rate of 50 platinum to 1 gold. When I got back I sold the platinum for more gold and just kept repeating the process. He charged a 50% transaction fee on so the rate of return was only 2.5. I started with 100 gold and made one trip per day. I calculated it would take me about a month to acquire about 173 trillion gold this way.
Casters have a ton of ways to create things of genuine value... as well as temporarily create or simulate things of real value that last long enough to pawn off on someone for a "bargain" price and still have time to change disguises and leave town. :)
How about a rather simple, classic money maker? Cast Wall of Iron. You now have a giant slab of iron to sell off. Or use it and some follower blacksmiths to outfit your army on the cheap.
Years ago I played in a high level campaign that included a lot of plane hoping including a lot of alternate prime material planes. The GM always liked to change things around just to be different. He had different worlds where the coin metals were of different value. One of them had gold being more valuable than platinum.
My character was able to freely travel to the two planes so I ended up with unlimited wealth. The exchange rate was around 10 platinum to 1 gold at least at the start. I loaded up with gold and bought platinum at a rate of 50 platinum to 1 gold. When I got back I sold the platinum for more gold and just kept repeating the process. He charged a 50% transaction fee on so the rate of return was only 2.5. I started with 100 gold and made one trip per day. I calculated it would take me about a month to acquire about 173 trillion gold this way.
That's funny. That's 3,460,000,000,000 lbs of gold per month. That's somewhere in the ballpark of the weight of 4,130 fleet carriers worth of gold per month. Considering this article which claims that "...if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man has ever mined into one place, you could only build about one-third of the Washington Monument." that is quite impressive. I think the setting would actually run out of gold first.
My PCs never seem to take downtime. We've been playing basically once every two weeks (is that bi-weekly?) since the end of September, and every session has been the following day in the campaign. I tried to encourage them to take some downtime. (They're not in an immediate life-threatening situation.)
I'll never forget that in D&D 3rd, a 10' ladder cost 5cp, while a 10' pole cost 2 sp.
Since a 10' ladder consists of two 10' poles joined by hand holds, buy a ladder for 5cp, pull it apart, and sell the two 10' poles for 1 sp each.
Given enough time, you can quadruple your money (more if you can sell the bars for scrap or use them to craft more ladders).
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That's funny. That's 3,460,000,000,000 lbs of gold per month. That's somewhere in the ballpark of the weight of 4,130 fleet carriers worth of gold per month. Considering this article which claims that "...if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man has ever mined into one place, you could only build about one-third of the Washington Monument." that is quite impressive. I think the setting would actually run out of gold first.Years ago I played in a high level campaign that included a lot of plane hoping including a lot of alternate prime material planes. The GM always liked to change things around just to be different. He had different worlds where the coin metals were of different value. One of them had gold being more valuable than platinum.
My character was able to freely travel to the two planes so I ended up with unlimited wealth. The exchange rate was around 10 platinum to 1 gold at least at the start. I loaded up with gold and bought platinum at a rate of 50 platinum to 1 gold. When I got back I sold the platinum for more gold and just kept repeating the process. He charged a 50% transaction fee on so the rate of return was only 2.5. I started with 100 gold and made one trip per day. I calculated it would take me about a month to acquire about 173 trillion gold this way.
I ended up taking over both planes. As I stated it was a long time ago under 1st edition rules. It was an over the top extremely high level campaign. When you have characters that are around 30th level with multiple artifacts things get a little out of hand. I used the wealth to found schools of magic and temples to train spell casters as follower. Setting up permanent gates between the two planes made it a little easier to control them both and took care of the transportation issues.
Would I allow something like this in a campaign I was running? Hell no way to much abuse of power. It was pretty much at the end of the campaign anyways and my character ended up becoming a deity. The climax of the campaign was an all out assault on a demon lords plane. We ended up permanently killing him and cleaning out a layer of the abyss of demons.
Wouldn't your devaluation of the currency lead to massive scale war and sabotage against your faction by everyone else?
Or the rest of the world abandons gold as acceptable currency, there is too much of it, and the markets stabilise leaving you in your castles of gold worth the Zimbabwean dollar.
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I'll never forget that in D&D 3rd, a 10' ladder cost 5cp, while a 10' pole cost 2 sp.
Since a 10' ladder consists of two 10' poles joined by hand holds, buy a ladder for 5cp, pull it apart, and sell the two 10' poles for 1 sp each.
Given enough time, you can quadruple your money (more if you can sell the bars for scrap or use them to craft more ladders).
I had a player who tried that on me as a GM.
The exchange with the NPC merchant went something like this:
Player: "My good man, I have here two ten foot poles I'd like to sell you, what is your asking price for a ten foot pole?"
Merchant: "Why, I would be willing to pay 1 silver for each solid ten foot pole."
Player: "Well, here are my two poles."
Merchant: "What are you trying to pull? Both of these 'poles' have holes all along one side! This isn't a solid pole, it's part of a ladder. You can't use this as a pole, it would break the first time you tried to use it for anything but one side of a ladder! What are you trying to pull?"
Player: "What? It's two poles!"
Merchant: "Get out of here before I call the guards."
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I detail my downtime in long 3 to 4 page descriptions of everything my character did, all of which of end with the lyrics to the theme song from the fresh prince of bel air
My GMs just spend most of that time quietly weeping
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Money making schemes are a dime a dozen. Anyone got anything more creative?
...by using the blood money spell to make an army of simulacrums. (Suck up the ability damage, get a Sim for free, heal up, rinse and repeat.)
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Wouldn't your devaluation of the currency lead to massive scale war and sabotage against your faction by everyone else?
Or the rest of the world abandons gold as acceptable currency, there is too much of it, and the markets stabilise leaving you in your castles of gold worth the Zimbabwean dollar.
I was not just hoarding the wealth but also investing it. I was already the ruler of a kingdom by this time and used the money to finance many improvements in both planes. Eventually the value of the different metals became the same. By that time I already had purchased large amounts of land and goods. Part of the investment was also in schools and temples. The other players were playing wizards and clerics so they were running the schools. I was a Paladin Cavalier and founded orders of knighthood and recruited armies. We even had a Halfling thief who setup a spy network.
After there was a demonic invasion of the other plane and my party pretty much single handedly defeated them the other kingdoms accepted my offer to become vassals. Like I said a extremely high level campaign. Some of the battles were so big we ended up using war gaming rules rather than D&D.
The fact that I was a business major and the GM an art major meant I understood economics a lot better than he did. I was building an economy before the GM realized what I was doing. When I started building roads and patrolling to keep the bandits down he did not think it was such a big deal. Same with the schools and temples.
It depends on the campaign. The current one, we have a player who basically won't let us have "Down Time". I was trying to Work on my Mithril Breastplate, and every day I tried to go, he'd find something that needed to be done, and screw up the little progress I was making ;-p
Prior campaign we were Pirates/Explorers, so we had lots of downtime on a boat to get various tasks done. The Smithy in the group wasn't happy, but the Map Maker was.
This thread is meant to brain storm abuses that adventuring PCs might attempt when they are not adventuring, either for the wary GM on the lookout, for the corrective game designer looking to close loop holes with errata, or for the aspiring player not long for this world.
I'll start:
If you end up with a substantial amount of downtime in between adventures and are not the party crafter, don't waste time making Profession checks to earn piddly pocket change. No, buy a house. Spend, say 100gp/month, to get a wealthy lifestyle. Then search your home for non-magical items of 5gp or less for your entire downtime.
So if you have a month off (30 days), and spend 8 hours a day searching your home for goodies to sell (which takes 1d10 minutes, or an average of 5.5 minutes), then you could end the month with a little over 6,545gp in garage sale profits.
wait.....
What?
Where money schemes go, I prefer the Wonderful Gem Trick With Rod of Wonder.
Basically buying a rod of wonder, using it every round, every day, casting pointless spell into the air, but once in a while creating gems. Use these gems to buy a new rod of wonder as soon as possible, and put it to work (using hirelings off cause). Repeating these steps, it only takes a few weeks before you make millions of gold per day.
Money making schemes are a dime a dozen. Anyone got anything more creative?
** spoiler omitted **
Even if you don't have a lot of downtime, crafting wands of Lesser Restoration with the aid of a paladin could potentially make this viable even if it would still have a minor cost.
The only real limiting factors would be number of spell slots and how quickly you could make the sculptures.
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Even if you don't have a lot of downtime, crafting wands of Lesser Restoration with the aid of a paladin could potentially make this viable even if it would still have a minor cost.
The only real limiting factors would be number of spell slots and how quickly you could make the sculptures.
I think wands and scrolls require the creator to have the desired spell.
I think wands and scrolls require the creator to have the desired spell.Even if you don't have a lot of downtime, crafting wands of Lesser Restoration with the aid of a paladin could potentially make this viable even if it would still have a minor cost.
The only real limiting factors would be number of spell slots and how quickly you could make the sculptures.
So hire a paladin with Craft Wands to make it for you. Problem solved. :P
Though I was under the impression you could just hire someone to cast the spell while you craft it, which is what I was basing my thought on. I know you can't do the "Add +5 to craft DC" thing.
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Build your network of allies through diplomacy and volunteerism.
(not really abuse)
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Casters have a ton of ways to create things of genuine value... as well as temporarily create or simulate things of real value that last long enough to pawn off on someone for a "bargain" price and still have time to change disguises and leave town. :)
How about a rather simple, classic money maker? Cast Wall of Iron. You now have a giant slab of iron to sell off. Or use it and some follower blacksmiths to outfit your army on the cheap.
Iron created by this spell is not suitable for use in the creation of other objects and cannot be sold.
Probably it is full of impurities.
Money making schemes are a dime a dozen. Anyone got anything more creative?
Something like raising an army of absolutely loyal disposable soldiers by using the blood money spell to make an army of simulacrums. (Suck up the ability damage, get a Sim for free, heal up, rinse and repeat.)
The components created by blood money last 1 round, simulacrum has a casting time of 12 hours.
It depends on the campaign. The current one, we have a player who basically won't let us have "Down Time". I was trying to Work on my Mithril Breastplate, and every day I tried to go, he'd find something that needed to be done, and screw up the little progress I was making ;-p
I've seen this before both in players who want to be the center of attention all the time and in a GM that didn't want spellcasters preparing spells, hence nerfing them. (I left that game fast)
You need to get the GM on your side. he/she is enabling this behaviour.
However, try to buy the brestplate. It'll take months to build that way.
While the campaign isn't a "low magic" campaign, my character had more Mithril that the city we're based in had to sell.
After awhile, he ended up "handwaving" the creation process and I got the Armor made by an offscreen NPC who was passing through town and completed everything in the Smithy that was being made, including my armor.
The components created by blood money last 1 round, simulacrum has a casting time of 12 hours.
So? There is no rule you need the material components the entire time the spell is cast (which wouldn't make much sense if it did, since they are annihilated in the process). The rules only seem to check that you have them when you begin casting.
EDIT: And it seems some of the game designers agree.
When you cast blood money, you do so with a swift action. You create the needed components, and must then IMMEDIATELY (in the same round) cast the spell you want to use those components with. You don't need to finish casting the spell in the same round, though; once you start casting the spell, the components (and the prepared spell itself) are committed and used.
However can you cast a another spell in the middle of casting another spell?
(12 hours casting man that's rough these wizards have some great dedication and concentration. Then again these are the guys that spend an hour studying their magic each day every day and about all there free time crafting magic items)
The components created by blood money last 1 round, simulacrum has a casting time of 12 hours.
So? There is no rule you need the material components the entire time the spell is cast (which wouldn't make much sense if it did, since they are annihilated in the process). The rules only seem to check that you have them when you begin casting.
EDIT: And it seems some of the game designers agree.
When you cast blood money, you do so with a swift action. You create the needed components, and must then IMMEDIATELY (in the same round) cast the spell you want to use those components with. You don't need to finish casting the spell in the same round, though; once you start casting the spell, the components (and the prepared spell itself) are committed and used.[relevant post]
I have to wonder how it would play with Fabricate.
Seeing as the quality of items made by fabricate is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication, I'd imagine it wouldn't work too well. :P
Nothing saying that the materials made with Blood Money are of poor quality. :)
This thread is meant to brain storm abuses that adventuring PCs might attempt when they are not adventuring, either for the wary GM on the lookout, for the corrective game designer looking to close loop holes with errata, or for the aspiring player not long for this world.
I'll start:
If you end up with a substantial amount of downtime in between adventures and are not the party crafter, don't waste time making Profession checks to earn piddly pocket change. No, buy a house. Spend, say 100gp/month, to get a wealthy lifestyle. Then search your home for non-magical items of 5gp or less for your entire downtime.
So if you have a month off (30 days), and spend 8 hours a day searching your home for goodies to sell (which takes 1d10 minutes, or an average of 5.5 minutes), then you could end the month with a little over 6,545gp in garage sale profits.
Storage Wars: Golaria
You never know, you might find the Head of Vecna(tm).
Imagine you have false focus every day you put a Symbol of Mirroring on yourself so if a monster comes near you can press them all at once for a panic button.
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The components created by blood money last 1 round, simulacrum has a casting time of 12 hours.
So? There is no rule you need the material components the entire time the spell is cast (which wouldn't make much sense if it did, since they are annihilated in the process). The rules only seem to check that you have them when you begin casting.
EDIT: And it seems some of the game designers agree.
When you cast blood money, you do so with a swift action. You create the needed components, and must then IMMEDIATELY (in the same round) cast the spell you want to use those components with. You don't need to finish casting the spell in the same round, though; once you start casting the spell, the components (and the prepared spell itself) are committed and used.[relevant post]
I find "interesting" to see that you use JJ replies when convenient, seeing that you are the guy that started the "Paizo, keep your house in order thread."
And to counter your citation:
Keep in mind that blood money only really works if you cast a spell that has a casting time of 1 round or less, since the components created vanish after that time. So you can't combine this spell with raise dead or resurrection, both of which have a casting time of 1 minute. Nor can you do so with greater restoration, which has a casting time of 3 rounds.
So who win, my n. 25595 post or your n. 26466 post?
Or they are combined so you can cast a 1 round spell but not longer spells?
The real reply is: "it depend on how exploitative is your use of the spell".
I had already asked JJ for clarification on the matter prior to your post, Diego, so don't think I'm not trying to get to the bottom of it.
Until such a time as he says otherwise, his most recent post (the one I linked to) should probably take precedence.
It wouldn't be the first time he changed his mind on an issue.
A caster could hire themself out as a one-person construction crew using a Knowledge (Engineering) and multiple Wall of Stone spells. A 10th level specialist Wizard with 20 Int can create 200 feet of standard thickness wall per day, or a narrow 100 foot bridge. With a month of downtime you can create full castles for the highest bidder, or a city wall, an aqueduct, bridge, pretty much anything. You could get a reputation as Golarion's Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Hadrian.
*Edit* Assuming a Wall of Stone is 10ft high (no height is given) you could also use it to create masonry stone with a value of 5CP/lb. A wall of granite 200ft long, 10ft high and 2in thick will weigh about 12000lb (unless I've gotten a decimal place wrong at some point, which is quite possible). Sadly this is only actually worth about 6gp. Damn my wasted effort.
I just realized that an item crafter could, via the run a business rules in Ultimate Campaign, craft magical items for 1/4 their value. It takes longer, but...75% savings!!!
First, you start a business that generates a decent amount of Magic Capital. You pay the earned cost for the Magic Capital that your business generates (50gp each). Then, you can invest that capital's PURCHASED COST towards downtime activities, such as magical item crafting. The real kicker is that the rules clearly state you apply it towards the COST OF MATERIALS.
So a headband of vast intellect would normally cost 18,000gp to make. So I need to earn 9,000gp of magic capital. Once I've done that, I can spend said capital to get the materials needed to craft it.
9,000gp for a 36,000gp item. It takes longer, but man, is that still awesome.
PCs can now actually turn a profit with their magic items shops. :D
It took you this long to figure it out? It was one of the first things I saw in the downtime system.
I looked into it shortly after UC came out, but I could have sworn that the magic capital went towards the market price, not the crafting cost, essentially evening it out.
Guess I misread it the first time around.
Played in an old Ad&D 2nd edition game. The thief (rogue) sold houses. Here is how he did it:
Since it hasn't come up yet and isn't "yet another money abuse" my favorite use of downtime is casting Explosive Runes. Loads of them. Countless Explosive Runes. Combined with a summon that has Greater Dispel at wall (and is guaranteed to fail to dispel the Explosive Runes) you have access to a virtually resource free nuke of insane power.
Also Shrink Item. I like having an assortment of objects that can be used as walls, bridges, impromptu damage spells...