Fabricate and other spells are where the real money is. And now and then with Wall of Stone and the like you make some free housing so all the peasants love you. Naturally some of the wealth is turned into providing magically produced food for the people as well.
The problem being that spellcasting is also economically unfeasible (see the prices for spellcasting services).
Create food and water costs, at a minimum, 150 gp to create "highly nourishing, but rather bland" food for 15 people for one day. For the same price you can get a catered banquet, 20 good meals, or 33 common meals for those same 15 people.
Wall of stone for "free housing" costs 400-500 gp, depending on who casts it, and at that price will get you a 5Lx5Wx10H stone phone booth. Sure, multiple castings will get you larger structures, but you have to pay for every casting.
All of which means that unless you *are* the caster, using magic to do stuff that mundane cooks and builders can achieve only gets it done faster, not cheaper. Paying mid-to-high level spellcasters to do this kind of thing for you is like hiring an M.D. to fix a headache when you could have just taken an aspirin, or paying a lawyer to advise you that the big red octagon means that you must stop your vehicle before proceeding. Spellcasters get paid a lot to do what they do.
The problem being that spellcasting is also economically unfeasible (see the prices for spellcasting services).
Create food and water costs, at a minimum, 150 gp to create "highly nourishing, but rather bland" food for 15 people for one day. For the same price you can get a catered banquet, 20 good meals, or 33 common meals for those same 15 people.
Wall of stone for "free housing" costs 400-500 gp, depending on who casts it, and at that price will get you a 5Lx5Wx10H stone phone booth. Sure, multiple castings will get you larger structures, but you have to pay for every casting.
All of which means that unless you *are* the caster, using magic to do stuff that mundane cooks and builders can achieve only gets it done faster, not cheaper. Paying mid-to-high level spellcasters to do this kind of thing for you is like hiring an M.D. to fix a headache when you could have just taken an aspirin, or paying a lawyer to advise you that the big red octagon means that you must stop your vehicle before proceeding. Spellcasters get paid a lot to do what they do.
The whole stance was from assuming you were the caster. So your concerns are not relevant.
You don't have to pay yourself. You don't have to pay your simulacra. You don't have to pay any magical devices you make to help.
If you are making so much money that you are turning the economy upside down, you can definitely afford to spend some of it personally casting spells, making simulacra, and making magical devices to help lessen the negative impacts of social upheavals.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Odraude wrote:
Actually, just because you can make all the rope doesn't mean you automatically sell it all. To sell stuff, you'd essentially make weekly Profession (Rope Maker) or Craft (Rope) checks to see how muck gold you make that week (half your check). So even if you can make 48,000 gold worth of rope doesn't mean you can sell it all.
The rules disagree. Rope sells for half the listed price. Simple as that.
Actually, just because you can make all the rope doesn't mean you automatically sell it all. To sell stuff, you'd essentially make weekly Profession (Rope Maker) or Craft (Rope) checks to see how muck gold you make that week (half your check). So even if you can make 48,000 gold worth of rope doesn't mean you can sell it all.
The rules disagree. Rope sells for half the listed price. Simple as that.
Anything else is a house rule.
Well, the rules do say "generally" and the section on magical items does say you couldn't just sell +1 longswords constantly.
What the heck that precisely means with regards 10+ miles of rope is up to the DM. Howver, I'd point ships use a TON of rope. There have been ships that used miles of rope in their rigging. So I think it is reasonable you could sell the rope in a large port city.
That said, it is bizarre that money is used to balance thing in the game when there are so many ways to just flat-out make money left and right that doesn't involve adventuring.
It's stuff like this and Fabricate that bother me. How's the DM supposed to rule on that short of banning it, radically altering it, or having agreement with players about abuse -- and what then constitutes "abuse"? Making ANY money off it? Too much? How much is too much? It's not like most of these things even get in the way of adventuring. Fabricate is literally a matter of rounds or less.
So on day 3, I decide to craft a Page of Spell Knowledge for a first-level spell. Market price is 1,000 gp, crafting cost is 500 gp. Lo and behold, I have 5 points of Magic capital. I pay the crafting costs with that. The Spellcraft DC of the crafting is trivially easy; I can take 10 and...
Um...correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the DC for this equal to 5 + CL(17) + 5 (for not knowing the spell) = 27? That's a DC27 Spellcraft check and you're optimized for K: Arcana, not Spellcraft. Ideally you can take 10 and get 10+7Ranks+3Class+4INT = 24, which is a few points shy. Easily fixed with another Skill Focus I suppose.
Besides which, a system is not broken if you have to have EVERY possible advantage to create a situation where infinite power/money is possible. If it takes one combo of alternate feats, traits, archetypes, locations and magic items culled from umpteen books to make it happen, you are a corner case.
It's like saying the economy is broken because you're Tiger Woods and can make 80 million bucks a year in prizes and endorsements. If you build a character to make money doing money-making things (rather than adventuring), how is it a bad thing when that character makes money? It's not even that much money in the grand scheme of things. You're making 250gold in 3 days. That's 30,400gp a year, assuming you can work like that every day of the year.
So on day 3, I decide to craft a Page of Spell Knowledge for a first-level spell. Market price is 1,000 gp, crafting cost is 500 gp. Lo and behold, I have 5 points of Magic capital. I pay the crafting costs with that. The Spellcraft DC of the crafting is trivially easy; I can take 10 and...
Um...correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the DC for this equal to 5 + CL(17) + 5 (for not knowing the spell) = 27? That's a DC27 Spellcraft check and you're optimized for K: Arcana, not Spellcraft. Ideally you can take 10 and get 10+7Ranks+3Class+4INT = 24, which is a few points shy. Easily fixed with another Skill Focus I suppose.
Besides which, a system is not broken if you have to have EVERY possible advantage to create a situation where infinite power/money is possible. If it takes one combo of alternate feats, traits, archetypes, locations and magic items culled from umpteen books to make it happen, you are a corner case.
It's like saying the economy is broken because you're Tiger Woods and can make 80 million bucks a year in prizes and endorsements. If you build a character to make money doing money-making things (rather than adventuring), how is it a bad thing when that character makes money? It's not even that much money in the grand scheme of things. You're making 250gold in 3 days. That's 30,400gp a year, assuming you can work like that every day of the year.
It allows players to break the WBL guidelines pretty easily and craft things for 1/4 the cost instead of 1/2. Seems pretty significant to me. Sure there are other ways around money issues, but this is a notable one.
And the need for skill focus and other boosts can be avoid with just a few levels or any number of other ways (potentially having a caster there to help or buying a scroll, but if the former isn't a party member, then that doesn't help). The guy just posted one.
The money looks like it can grow quite a bit if you make organizations, which that guy didn't even get into.
Seems like it would add up if characters took something like a month off from adventuring (which isn't that uncommon in games in my experience).
It allows players to break the WBL guidelines pretty easily and craft things for 1/4 the cost instead of 1/2. Seems pretty significant to me. Sure there are other ways around money issues, but this is a notable one.
I'm not sure WBL can be broken this way, given that a GM can just not hand out treasure to compensate.
I guess my point is that, provided you want to play a simulation of a world rather than just a bunch of dungeon crawls, letting people make money off working hard is not a bad thing. A 7th level Wizard can do some pretty awesome stuff; generating roughly 83gp per day of profits seems like peanuts.
Remember, you CAN dispose of magic items at full value if you decide to live like a merchant. This wizard is pulling in 30,400gp per year doing the whole 'quick sell' thing, though I bet he could make a lot more spending the time to set up shop and sell items he makes at full value (rather than repeatedly spending time to generate magical capital, spend that time hawking the finished product). In either case, he's not adventuring. A 7th level character can make a LOT more money in that year spending his time adventuring (as well as gaining levels).
Looking at the downtime system, there ARE ways to have it make money for you - even lots of money. This is only a bad thing if you're supposed to assume that all a character's money comes from adventuring, and that WBL is totally outside of the GM's control (high WBL just means you throw tougher challenges). From a simulation standpoint, non-adventurers have to make a living somehow, and if you just used Profession checks, everybody would be lower middle class except for the folks with no Profession/Craft skills. That rich merchant that hires PCs for lots of gold? He has a big organization making him money. Lots of it. If the PCs want to become merchants and do the same, they can make lots of money too. And if that's fun for the group, great.
Actually, just because you can make all the rope doesn't mean you automatically sell it all. To sell stuff, you'd essentially make weekly Profession (Rope Maker) or Craft (Rope) checks to see how muck gold you make that week (half your check). So even if you can make 48,000 gold worth of rope doesn't mean you can sell it all.
The rules disagree. Rope sells for half the listed price. Simple as that.
Anything else is a house rule.
Actually, the rules pretty much agree that when practicing your trade and making a living, you roll Craft or Profession to do that. Even Ultimate Campaign goes into this more about selling magic items, where you can't just sell a +1 longsword every single day. So no, it's not a house rule. You'd have to use Craft (Rope) or whatever Profession skill. Now, thanks to the Downtime events rules and DM fiat, you could theoretically sell much more rope per week. Nothing wrong with that. And actually hands-on running your business gives you a +10 to your roll, in addition to the other bonuses you get from the building and the organizations you have. So don't worry, the player isn't going to be screwed over by the GM because he can't sell miles of rope in a week and become a millionaire. GM's just keeping a rein over unrealistic expectations of selling a ton of items.
Personally, I don't mind PCs wanting to make some money. But, in my games, you'll get way more money and jewelry from adventuring than shopkeeping.
It allows players to break the WBL guidelines pretty easily and craft things for 1/4 the cost instead of 1/2. Seems pretty significant to me. Sure there are other ways around money issues, but this is a notable one.
I'm not sure WBL can be broken this way, given that a GM can just not hand out treasure to compensate.
Money that comes purely from downtime and how long downtime lasts has almost no bearing on level. Over time with downtime breaks you can acquire more wealth than is suitable for your level, far more. So even if the DM gives NO treasure for adventuring you'll still be over the WBL guidelines.
I'm not saying there aren't other ways to break WBL, by the way. Just that this is yet another way to do it.
To me what's worse is that this is a huge mess of rules that seems to pretend to give the appearance of some sort of balance (certainly it isn't really simulationist). It's not balanced though. So why even bother having such a long, tedious, and boring bit of rules? Seems like something shorter and and more succinct would have done the job in a lot less space.
Actually, just because you can make all the rope doesn't mean you automatically sell it all. To sell stuff, you'd essentially make weekly Profession (Rope Maker) or Craft (Rope) checks to see how muck gold you make that week (half your check). So even if you can make 48,000 gold worth of rope doesn't mean you can sell it all.
The rules disagree. Rope sells for half the listed price. Simple as that.
Anything else is a house rule.
Actually, the rules pretty much agree that when practicing your trade and making a living, you roll Craft or Profession to do that. Even Ultimate Campaign goes into this more about selling magic items, where you can't just sell a +1 longsword every single day. So no, it's not a house rule. You'd have to use Craft (Rope) or whatever Profession skill. Now, thanks to the Downtime events rules and DM fiat, you could theoretically sell much more rope per week. Nothing wrong with that. And actually hands-on running your business gives you a +10 to your roll, in addition to the other bonuses you get from the building and the organizations you have. So don't worry, the player isn't going to be screwed over by the GM because he can't sell miles of rope in a week and become a millionaire. GM's just keeping a rein over unrealistic expectations of selling a ton of items.
Personally, I don't mind PCs wanting to make some money. But, in my games, you'll get way more money and jewelry from adventuring than shopkeeping.
Craft/Profession based checks are for when you are practicing a profession. When you use a magic item that makes rope, you are not practicing a profession. Selling that rope follows the normal rules for selling stuff. You sell it for half of what it is worth because you just want to get rid of it for quick money.
I'll grant the DM can rule there's not a big enough market. I'd also point out that in a large port city there will be a big market for miles of rope.
Actually, just because you can make all the rope doesn't mean you automatically sell it all. To sell stuff, you'd essentially make weekly Profession (Rope Maker) or Craft (Rope) checks to see how muck gold you make that week (half your check). So even if you can make 48,000 gold worth of rope doesn't mean you can sell it all.
The rules disagree. Rope sells for half the listed price. Simple as that.
Anything else is a house rule.
Actually, the rules pretty much agree that when practicing your trade and making a living, you roll Craft or Profession to do that. Even Ultimate Campaign goes into this more about selling magic items, where you can't just sell a +1 longsword every single day. So no, it's not a house rule. You'd have to use Craft (Rope) or whatever Profession skill. Now, thanks to the Downtime events rules and DM fiat, you could theoretically sell much more rope per week. Nothing wrong with that. And actually hands-on running your business gives you a +10 to your roll, in addition to the other bonuses you get from the building and the organizations you have. So don't worry, the player isn't going to be screwed over by the GM because he can't sell miles of rope in a week and become a millionaire. GM's just keeping a rein over unrealistic expectations of selling a ton of items.
Personally, I don't mind PCs wanting to make some money. But, in my games, you'll get way more money and jewelry from adventuring than shopkeeping.
Craft/Profession based checks are for when you are practicing a profession. When you use a magic item that makes rope, you are not practicing a profession. Selling that rope follows the normal rules for selling stuff. You sell it for half of what it is worth because you just want to get rid of it for quick money.
I'll grant the DM can rule there's not a big enough market. I'd also point out that in a large port city there will be a big market for miles of rope.
Selling rope as an adventurer and making a business out of selling rope are two different things, just like selling magic items as an adventurer is different from selling magic items as a business. If the player was just selling rope to get rid of it, then I wouldn't mind it and they could sell it under the normal selling rules of items. But the key point is that the player wanted to sell rope as a business, to make a living, and apparently "break" the downtime system. So, for businesses, you'd make the appropriate Craft or Profession roll to make the money. Without those rolls, how would you decide on how much rope they sell per day without DM fiat? The only thing I could really think of is the purchasing limit each city has for buying items, but I don't even remember if that is per day.
Honestly, though, I like the Ultimate Campaign section about selling magic items as a business and I would apply that advice to this situation.
Um...correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the DC for this equal to 5 + CL(17) + 5 (for not knowing the spell) = 27? That's a DC27 Spellcraft check and you're optimized for K: Arcana, not Spellcraft.
In short, the CL listed for the pearl is for a 9th-level pearl. A 1st-level pearl would have a minimum caster level of 1. A 2nd-level pearl would require CL 3. And so on. The exact same logic applies to the Page of Spell Knowledge -- the minimum caster level required to craft the item would be the same as the minimum required to cast the spell.
The crafting DC for a first-level Page of Spell Knowledge would therefore be 5 + CL 1 + 5 for not knowing the spell = 11. In my example, the sorcerer had an INT of 18. 1 rank + 3 trained + 4 INT + take 10 = 18 -- more than enough. And as a full-time casting class, it'd be pretty common to keep Spellcraft maxed.
EDIT: Oh, and I don't actually think this is game-breaking. It might screw with the WBL guidelines a bit IF the GM gives you a whole bunch of downtime to work with. Kingmaker games might run into problems, since there's often a year assumed to happen between books.
If it's an area of concern, the GM can simply overrule UC and say "When crafting magic items you can spend Magic capital at it's earned cost, not its purchased cost." That'd take care of it right there.
Although you can’t sell capital, you can use it for its listed Purchased Cost as payment toward any applicable downtime activity that requires you to spend gp. For example, if you are brewing a potion, you can spend 1 point of Magic toward the cost of the materials needed to make the potion as if that point were equal to 100 gp.
So on day 3, I decide to craft a Page of Spell Knowledge for a first-level spell. Market price is 1,000 gp, crafting cost is 500 gp. Lo and behold, I have 5 points of Magic capital. I pay the crafting costs with that.
I wonder if you're misreading this. It seems more likely the intent is that you can spend 1 Magic to essentially reduce the price by 100gp before you determine the cost to manufacture. So you essentially spend the Magic resources (which cost you 50gp) to buy 50gp worth of magic items components.
But the phrasing is poor and could be better.
Even if rules as your interpret it allows you break WbL at a rate of 250gp every three days in a very specific town. Ignoring the town bonus, we can probably reduce that to 250gp every three to five days, generating somewhere between 50 and 80 extra gp. Maybe 1500 a month if you work 5 days a week. That's cool, but you can get the same money in a single 5th level encounter. It's broken at low levels but at mid levels a few extra thousand gp aren't game breaking.
and thankfully a dm can stop this easily (va: downtime ? you mean dragon time) but thank you for showing me this weakness
I don't see a sensible way for the DM to stop it short of not using the downtime system.
well this example it would be fairly clear that breaking the downtime system at which point is a red flag to talk to that player. if the player still fights that you can use some economics 101 and role play of surplus of what what he/she is trying to sale in such great volume. npc dont buy magic items like crazy if they don't need them. so the problem is pretty manageable
I wonder if you're misreading this. It seems more likely the intent is that you can spend 1 Magic to essentially reduce the price by 100gp before you determine the cost to manufacture. So you essentially spend the Magic resources (which cost you 50gp) to buy 50gp worth of magic items components.
Well, there's also the bit on page 84 under "Craft Magic Items" where it straight up says "You may spend Magic toward the crafting cost." Not reducing the market price prior to calculating the crafting cost, but applied directly to the cost. I just picked the passage from p. 79 because it specifies that 1 point of Magic = 100 gp of crafting cost.
Jester David wrote:
[In less than ideal conditions you can get] Maybe 1500 a month if you work 5 days a week. That's cool, but you can get the same money in a single 5th level encounter.
True! But the income from a CR 5 encounter is unlikely to be cash, or at least not all of it. A fair bit of the loot will be items, which you can sell for 50% of their listed price. And of course the loot will get split up between party members.
There's also the fact that I can set up a business to earn the magic for me. If I've done the math right, a magic library consisting of two magic repositories, 1 common room, 1 office, and 1 storage would cost 2,000 gp at market rates, or 1,000 gp if I earned the capital and invested the time to set it up. Hire a librarian at, say, 3 gp per day to manage it while I'm away. It would then have a +24 Magic check (from the two magic repositories).
It continues to make downtime checks every day, even when I'm off adventuring. Suppose I'm away for 30 days, that I took measures to ensure that my librarian manager would be paid regularly in my absence, and that I left behind sufficient funds to pay for the Magic my library generates.
The library gets 30 capital checks to generate Magic, with a +24 bonus, taking 10 for a +34 check. It yields 3 points of magic per day. Capital attrition takes away a little bit of that -- since I have a manager, it's 1 for each 14 days I was away, which I still have to pay for because it was earned.
90 points of Magic earned
-2 points of Magic (capital attrition)
88 points of Magic in a month
4500 gp cost for Magic
90 gp cost for librarian
So in a month I've earned enough magic to craft something with a crafting cost of 8,800, which is to say a magic item with a market price of up to 17,600. A +4 stat booster item is 16,000.
And I wasn't even there. I was out adventuring and accumulating wealth from THAT, too.
If I wanted to be cheesy I'd actually build two separate libraries with one magic repository each, so I could take 10 on two checks. That would come out to a capital check of +22 each, thereby getting 4 points of magic per day. But for the sake of simplicity of discussion, I'll limit it to single building.
I still have to pay for the magic it generates of course, but that essentially lets me convert loot I don't want to loot I do at a 1-for-1 ratio. Maybe I find a masterwork longsword in a troll's lair (market price 315 gp). I don't need one of those, so I sell it for 157 gp and 5 silver. I then use the 150 gp to pay for 3 points of Magic, which I can in turn using for 300 gp of crafting costs for something I actually want -- meaning essentially I sold that longsword at full value, or pretty close.
There's a little overhead in all this. My librarian needs her pay. If I did this in an actual game, I'd probably add a few rooms to let the library do a GP check sufficient to earn her pay each day and then quit worrying about it. 3 gp/day is easily achievable.
Of course, I also need to have enough gold to pay for the Magic I earn with the library -- if I can't keep up, any Magic I might have earned evaporates. But hey, that's not so bad. There's more where that came from. The entire enterprise MORE than justifies its existence with the fact that I can convert loot I don't need to magic items of my own devising later.
Jester David wrote:
It's broken at low levels but at mid levels a few extra thousand gp aren't game breaking.
I agree. On the whole I think it's quite a well balanced system. The magic-item-crafting-at-a-discount thing is really the only loophole that I can see.
In the event that the system gets abused, a talk with the player will take care of it most of the time. For other cases, the GM can just house rule that when Magic is spent on magic item crafting costs, it only nets you 50 gp rather than 100. That eliminates the crafting loophole right there, while still allowing you the full value of the Magic points when spent on other things (such as making buildings, etc).
EDIT: You know, it occurs to me that I was assuming the library was open seven days a week. My poor overworked librarian! Lets give her weekends off and assume only 20 effective days in a month for generating capital. That'd change the totals to 20 * 3 = 60 points of Magic raised, costing 3000 gp. Still -2 points for capital attrition, so total yield to 58 points of Magic, for 5,800 crafting costs (= a 11,600 gp item). Not quite a +4 stat booster item in a month then, but close.
and thankfully a dm can stop this easily (va: downtime ? you mean dragon time) but thank you for showing me this weakness
I don't see a sensible way for the DM to stop it short of not using the downtime system.
well this example it would be fairly clear that breaking the downtime system at which point is a red flag to talk to that player. if the player still fights that you can use some economics 101 and role play of surplus of what what he/she is trying to sale in such great volume. npc dont buy magic items like crazy if they don't need them. so the problem is pretty manageable
If the example given is "breaking the system" then that means the most obvious and straightforward uses is breaking it. That means the system is BROKEN.
I mean, what are you going to tell the player? "Sorry, you can't spend more than one day actually doing magic-related work during downtime." Or "you can't actually build any organizations that are magic-based"?
That's why these rules seem problematic, because the most natural use of them seems like it would lead to problems unless you are adventuring all the time.
Thing I'm confused with is, isn't there a limit to how much Magic capital you can spend? From the table in the section, it looks like it's only for Goods, Labor, and Influence. I'd swear there was a section for Magic capital.
I have to say that I love this downtime system. A crafter mage is going to be the best bang for you buck on money but others can make a fair bit of change as well. Thing is this will make the characters want to finish the adventure fast so they can get home (good thing), give a DM all kinds of things to threaten (good thing), and discourage murder hobos (great thing). It is also really nice to know what happens if the PCs do a jpb for tavern owner and he pays the A-team way. I see many games where the PCs go all gangster and now the DM knows how much the bartender can pay in protection.
and thankfully a dm can stop this easily (va: downtime ? you mean dragon time) but thank you for showing me this weakness
I don't see a sensible way for the DM to stop it short of not using the downtime system.
well this example it would be fairly clear that breaking the downtime system at which point is a red flag to talk to that player. if the player still fights that you can use some economics 101 and role play of surplus of what what he/she is trying to sale in such great volume. npc dont buy magic items like crazy if they don't need them. so the problem is pretty manageable
If the example given is "breaking the system" then that means the most obvious and straightforward uses is breaking it. That means the system is BROKEN.
I mean, what are you going to tell the player? "Sorry, you can't spend more than one day actually doing magic-related work during downtime." Or "you can't actually build any organizations that are magic-based"?
That's why these rules seem problematic, because the most natural use of them seems like it would lead to problems unless you are adventuring all the time.
there is a vast differences between using the DTS(down time system) to make a few thing for the betterment of the party and trying to gather mass wealth via Henry Ford-ing "Pages of Spell Knowledge" and the system has some weaknesses but over all its not game killing, it needs a good DM but so dose the magic item system in general. you cant just give the players all the magic items they want nor can you take them all a way(depending on your setting) I know my players and they wont be breaking the game with this system because I can manage the the problem that could happen knowing its weakness(hell give free rain over the DTS they would build some sort of boat that goes to the under-dark and kill drow with a harpoon) any way if you find that DTS breaks your game i honestly fill that says less about the players and more about the DM in that game.
I think it's a good system. It adds a lot of value to the game, for people who want to build stuff. It just needs a reasonable GM to moderate it, and preferably a group which isn't out to deliberately break the system.
there is a vast differences between using the DTS(down time system) to make a few thing for the betterment of the party and trying to gather mass wealth via Henry Ford-ing "Pages of Spell Knowledge" and the system has some weaknesses but over all its not game killing, it needs a good DM but so dose the magic item system in general. you cant just give the players all the magic items they want nor can you take them all a way(depending on your setting) I know my players and they wont be breaking the game with this system because I can manage the the problem that could happen knowing its weakness(hell give free rain over the DTS they would build some sort of boat that goes to the...
Here's my issue with things like that. It isn't like the player is metagaming or acting out of character if they have their caster research and work on ways to improve their casting. At least, with most characters that certainly makes sense. Alignment here isn't even an issue, as a good-aligned character has every reason to increase their prowess so they can do more good.
I dislike systems that require metagaming so that they don't lead to broken stuff. It's very immersion-breaking as a player. It's worse when a system's problems are so blatantly in-your-face about it.
I'm honestly not sure if all this stuff isn't handled far better just adhoc. I'm going to be playing a wizard and I know I'd rather just avoid this whole mess and do things outside of the system than have to deal with it on tiptoes the whole time.
That's what I REAALLY hate. When it is logical to do X, if not X then Y, if not Y then Z, but X, Y, and Z are all broken so I have to pretend they don't exist. With a number of theoretical Char Op stuff this is avoidable (as the rules are just so unrealistic that there's no way reality works that way*). This downtime system, at the very least for Magic, is one of these things. I haven't looked at the business side of it for generating wealth -- I imagine that might be similar.
I can accept limits on things for gamist reasons. Some things break the game. I can accept limits because they aren't realistic even in a setting where you are essentially mythic characters. It's when the rules are so badly crafted that they are reasonable simulationist-wise and dipping more than a toe into their waters messes up the game that they annoy me to no end. NO END! (Ok, well, maybe there is an end).
And again, it's not like we're talking about some bizarre combo of things. This is just straight-up using the most straightforward example of downtime points allowed.
*Planar Binding for Wishes would be an example. Though Fabricate and Wall of Iron is not. Really they should just make it so that it is stone as tough as Iron or something like that, imho. It's weird when it is Iron but somehow unusable no matter what. Just reeks of annoying arbitrariness. It would avoid the whole problem.
Looking at it carefully, you are spending three days to make something at a quarter of the cost, instead of just the one day at half the cost. That honestly doesn't seem too broken to me. Especially with the rules for Creating Items For Profit on page 173, which does help to curtail abuse.
Looking at it carefully, you are spending three days to make something at a quarter of the cost, instead of just the one day at half the cost. That honestly doesn't seem too broken to me.
I agree -- the extra time compensates for the decreased gold when you earn the capital yourself. When you have a business generate the capital for you while you're off adventuring, though, the crafting time drops to the same it would be if you just paid the full 50%.
Odraude wrote:
Especially with the rules for Creating Items For Profit on page 173, which does help to curtail abuse.
Those are very handy. I hadn't gotten to them. Thanks for pointing them out.
Mapleswitch wrote:
Libraries are open 7 days a week ...
For what it's worth, I'm a librarian. I work regular day hours -- 8-5 -- plus evening shifts on Tuesdays and occasional Sundays.
But we have a staff of about 40 people, and 10 of those are the reference librarians who keep the place open at night and on the weekends. A single librarian who had to do that -- as in the example -- would rapidly get burned out.
Having an organization raise Capital for you is indeed very attractive, but it does tie your character down to one area (yes Capital attrition can be compensated for, but you still have to visit to use the Capital in the first place). And there's a certain amount of time and money you have to invest in setting the whole thing up (and keeping it going).
Obviously, like everything else, the system needs GM overwatch. I don't care how many magical repositories you have, in a small town you won't generate that much magic Capital - any more than a palatial inn will generate large amounts of gold in the middle of nowhere.
JJ actually answered RavingDork asking the question on Blood Money and multi-round spells here, saying that it can't be used with spells that have a longer casting time. There's no more inconsistency, now that the inconsistency has been clarified.
JJ actually answered RavingDork asking the question on Blood Money and multi-round spells here, saying that it can't be used with spells that have a longer casting time. There's no more inconsistency, now that the inconsistency has been clarified.
He also said that using it with fabricate would cause the item to disappear as soon as blood money does, as that's what it's made from.
That's not what the description says though. It doesn't disappear if you use it.
The annoying thing about Pathfinder at times is how the people involved seem to avoid admitting mistakes and that things need errata. Instead they act like whatever house rules they have is what the text says.
Quote:
You cast blood money just before casting another spell. As part of this spell's casting, you must cut one of your hands, releasing a stream of blood that causes you to take 1d6 points of damage. When you cast another spell in that same round, your blood transforms into one material component of your choice required by that second spell. Even valuable components worth more than 1 gp can be created, but creating such material components requires an additional cost of 1 point of Strength damage, plus a further point of damage for every full 500 gp of the component's value (so a component worth 500–999 gp costs a total of 2 points, 1,000–1,500 costs 3, etc.). You cannot create magic items with blood money.
For example, a sorcerer with the spell stoneskin prepared could cast blood money to create the 250 gp worth of diamond dust required by that spell, taking 1d6 points of damage and 1 point of Strength damage in the process.
Material components created by blood money transform back into blood at the end of the round if they have not been used as a material component. Spellcasters who do not have blood cannot cast blood money, and those who are immune to Strength damage (such as undead spellcasters) cannot use blood money to create valuable material components.
And the icing on the cake is that the duration is Instantaneous, so there's no reason to think the effects aren't lasting with something like Fabricate.
I'm not saying it's not horribly broken with Fabricate, merely that the rules are pretty darn clear. And honestly, half the fault is fabricate with its "material component" silliness. It should have no material component, the stuff you use is just the TARGET.
Whenever I think of stuff like this, I think back to the Wish Based Economy from the Dungeonomicon.
I wrote something similar.:
One crisis is that all items are literally measured against the gold standard. The problem is, supply and demand of one material, compared to the supply and demand of gold, would be in flux for any given region, of any given world, on any given plane of existence. When an epic wizard could conceivably conjure a mountain of gold from the Elemental Plane of Earth, or capture an Efreeti once a week and wish up diamonds 50 times a year, it really tests one’s suspension of disbelief when such things make no impact on the region’s economy and relative worth. This problem infects questions such as “how much diamond dust is 5000gp?” which is of vital concern to spellcasters, especially when clerics want to have tea with their dead friends. Would the shift in the value of diamonds mean that now a cleric needs more diamond dust for the same spell as he did last week? If so, how does one keep up to speed on the commodities market without a laptop and the internet, or the equivalent - a daily divination item?
The most common way to mitigate this issue is to ignore it altogether, pretend that everything balances out somehow, and move on. But ignoring the issue also ignores what a powerful spellcaster can do with a year off (“how much can I sell a wall of iron for?”), thus ignoring one problem only to be faced with another issue: spellcasters would not only have all the power, but all the money too. If a market could be saturated by inflated supply of iron, causing value to drop, then this issue can work itself out. But now we’re right back at the problem of comparing worth... especially since the low, low value of iron would affect the price of swords and armor thanks to the rules around the craft skills.
To keep a GM from pulling out their hair or handing out ultimatums to players in the form of barred activities, there is a nice, easy solution that makes both problems go away: A table to convert listed cost of materials in the books, to mass, and set an arbitrary atomic value for wealth. Since the “gp” is the common listing, it’s a good value to use, and say that it now means “global product” or something similar (to make yourself sleep better at night, “sp” could be “subsidiary product”, “cp” could be “coarse product”, and “pp” could be “prime product”). Then the prices of gold, silver etc can change, but the "gp" is still a measuring stick. It’s especially warm and cozy because one copper piece is “0.01gp”... which is effectively a penny, which traditionally was made of copper.
So copper is 0.50gp per pound, Silver is 5.00gp per pound and Gold is 50.00gp per pound and platinum is 500.00gp per pound. We go into spells which require a costly component... Bless Water requires “25gp” of silver per casting, which we convert to 5 lbs. Done. No matter what happens to the economy of silver, it will always take 5 lbs of it to make a pint of holy water. Rejoice.
Similar things should also be said for other materials, such as diamonds, iron (for craft skills) and the like. All you need is a table converting “gp” book listing to mass, and then you can quickly convert the amounts required for practical use. From there, the commodities market can fluctuate and dance like it does in the real world. Spellcasters and high level characters can hatch quick moneymaking schemes and be cut short by functioning economic realities, without ruining anything but that little corner of the economy that they curb-stomped.
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