Here's the situation: the crafter in my party made a magical item that casts Stone Wall and Stone Shape spells once per day each.
The question is, how to integrate that into the Downtime system? The initial use, namely using it to build the stone walls of my stronghold, is fairly straight forward, in this case, it can build 35' worth of the standard "Natural Stone" wall per day. (that's 5' thick, 10' tall)
But what about using it for building rooms? Stone Wall, particularly when used in conjunction with Stone Shape for finer details, should be very effective at building *all* the walls. But how does one determine the costs as a result? There's no real guideline as to how much of the cost of a room is the structural walls, and how much is the stuff inside it.
Consulting with the Stronghold Builder's Handbook doesn't really help much here, either. It lists a series of bonuses, namely reducing the cost of walls per a certain number of castings. But the DT system doesn't calculate wall costs separately, so that's not much of a help.
1) I suspect that the easiest way to do it would probably to simply assign a flat bonus. Something along the lines of "reduces the cost of the room by 25%, and requires 1 casting per room." Doesn't really adjust to appropriateness of the situation, but it is simple and fast. And let's face it, the Downtime system (as opposed to the Stronghold Builder's Handbook) really simplified things a bit in order to speed things up.
2) Alternatively, a better way might be to figure out how much material it produces, then work from there. Taking the volume of stone produced by the spell, and converting that volume into stone blocks (by volume, anyway, enough to make 60' of wall), then I could use my conversions of the SBH to figure out how much capital that is the equivalent of.
(Just FYI, I made a numerical conversion of most of the SBH rooms and walls into the downtime system, which included figuring out costs for each wall type by the 5' section. In this particular case, I had determined that it took 10 goods and 9 labour to build a 5' section of Stone Block wall, whose standard thickness is 3'. I'm using the values for Stone Blocks, as the prices for Natural Stone walls state that they are the cost of shaping a naturally occurring stone formation into a wall, not creating the stone itself)
So, long story short, a stone wall spell that can create a 35' natural stone wall is essentially equivalent to 120 Goods and 108 labour.
Having figured this out, one could work the spell into large construction projects by stating that the spell provides that much Goods and Labour towards the construction, and spend as one sees fit. Given how large those values are, however, this spell would essentially pay for the entire thing, which doesn't make sense.
3) Find a very simple stone room, one that is simple enough that one can assume that the majority of its cost is the structure itself and not the contents. Let's take a basic Cell, that seems pretty close. It costs 5 Goods and 4 Labour, and can range in size from 1 to 9. Let's take 4, as a value in the middle. 4x5' squares, so that makes a 10x10 room, or a perimeter of 40'. Dividing the total cost by the circumference, and we get 0.125 Goods and 0.1 labour per 5' section of wall.
At that point, we could broadly assume that the cost of each room includes 0.125 goods and 0.1 labour per 5' section of wall. So after figuring out the circumference of the room and the cost of that particular wall, one could rule that the Stone Wall spell could cover that portion of the cost.
Which is looking to be an incredibly math intensive method of calculating its impact.
4) As a slight variation on this, one could use this value, then extrapolate it out to the cost of each room, and figure out what the average percentage is, and simply use that value as a flat percentage reduction of cost as per point 1.
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So, at the moment, I those are all the options I can see for using this spell. Kind of amusing that the somewhat math involved SBH actually appears to be the simplest and least problematic, despite not fitting terribly well with DT.
For the purposes of integration with the DT system, I think a flat 20% cost reduction for rooms with stone walls is probably the best solution. It is simple, straightforward, and close enough to be acceptable. Of course, with the stipulation that 1 casting can only apply to one room.
So, what do you all think? Does any of this make sense? Or am I missing some fairly obvious solution?
Isn't using your class abilities already covered in earning downtime capital to build things? Surely this would be covered by that, if described a little differently.
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I might be inclined to let that item substitute for 1 point of magic when used to construct a room - the buildings lacking magic as part of construction being poorly suited to be crafted by magic.
You might also assume that the listed costs assume you'll use magical construction.
Wall of stone is a 5th lvl spell that would cost 450g to have cast by a 9th lvl npc spellcaster.
120 goods @10g per = 1200g
108 labor @15g per = 1620g
So you shouldn't value a spell that costs 450g to cast once at 2820g or that 2820g would be 450g in the first place.
Another way to handle it would be to think of those spells as forcing the creation of a point of magic per day (without having to pay the cost) - that could once every 3 days be converted into a point of goods or labor. If you let the PC's sell their spell-casting at half price to npcs on a regular basis I suppose its worth 2 points of magic a day just for the wall - which would still get you off at less than a 20% reduction.
If you wanted to go with a flat % reduction I think 20% is too high.
That's a good idea. I'll have to include it when talking with my DM.
Note: I just went over the spell description again, and realized that I'd misinterpreted my fellow PC's statement. When he said his spell could do 7 x 5' squares of stone wall, I was visualizing 7 5x5' squares of solid stone, whereas the spell description specifies 1" thickness per 4 caster levels, so in this case, he can actually create a 2" thick wall that covers 7x5' squares. To make it thicker, one halves the distance. So to get a 3' thick wall, I'd only be getting about a 2' section. Little more than a column.
So that throws all my calculations off by quite a bit. Doesn't change the utility of the spell for internal walls, but makes it substantially less useful for building actual defensive walls. Still valuable, but not nearly as much so.
After looking at the numbers some more, I agree that a flat 20% is too high.
Having taken a look at the SBH for some inspiration, I'm currently plotting out the effects of a variable benefit: Stone Shape and Wall of Stone both reduce the cost of constructing a room by x %, where x is the level of the caster. Regardless of volumes, requires one casting of the spell per room, and only benefits rooms that are structurally made of stone. (If it's not primarily made of stone, no effect. Although in that case there's a variety of wood related spells that would have the same effect)
Walls are the iffy part. If using the DT rules, then continue as if they were a room. If using SBH's wall calculations, then it requires a casting of the spell per 5' section.
Does that seem a bit more balanced?
Things like this are one of the times when a WIden Metamagic Rod shines.
Wall of Stone is used to make walls and temporary barriers. WHen used in construction, what you'd use it for instead is for 'molds'. It's a lot easier to build a thick wall when you have a thin wall already in place as a guideline to hold things in place.
Wall of Stone is NOT good at creating raw material. 5'x5' squares per level, at 1 inch per 4 levels, is not a lot of raw volume. But it's enough to make a level surface for building against. (if you work out the math, at CL 10 it's a 1' square block 50 inches high, or a little over 4 ft squared).
If you want raw volume of stone for cheap, you want to use Rock to Mud, and then Mud to Rock.
Check out the raw volumes on those two spells. Then Use a Widen MM Rod to multiply x 8.
The Mud can be poured and molded even more easily then wet concrete, and then the magic simply dispelled. Voila, instant massive amounts of stone. Very simple molds can make it into blocks, or you could simply pour it between walls of stone, or something similar.
In either event, there's going to be labor involved, and additional spells.
In FR, there was a spell that allowed you to make 'transport tubes' of water that could arc through the air and move water from place to place. Such would be ideal for moving large quantities of mud over short distances. And even better is that Rock to Mud can be used on normal earth...which means you Rock to Mud the area you want to make a moat, and then simply drain the mud out to build your walls.
==Aelryinth
I will note that if you have a 12th level Caster with a Widen Rod, you get walls 1 foot thick, in 10x10 sections, so you could instantly bring up a 10' tall wall, 1' thick, 120 feet long.
That same caster using Rock to Mud will turn 12 20'x 20 blocks to mud, or enough mud to create a wall 20' high, 240' feet long, and twenty feet thick. Probably poured between walls of stone if you've a decent pump. One dispel magic, and you're set.
==Aelryinth