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You really aren't meant to think too hard about material components. They are a gold tax meant to balance some spells and to provide some flavor to the act of spellcasting.
Some DM's point out that it is also a way to prevent spallcasting by forcing people to keep detailed lists of what components they have, but the developers of 3.5 obviously felt that wasn't a great consideration, due to the rules surrounding the Spell Component Pouch.
Here's a few things to consider with regards to material components. How big is a 100 gp pearl? In a desert? Near the sea?
Some spells require diamond dust. Some require actual diamonds. Are these diamonds cut? Can a wizard acquire raw diamonds cheaply and use Craft -Gemcutter- to increase their value? You see where this is going.
Pathfinder cannot support any kind of real economy the way it is written, gp values are arbitrary, and only serve as a resource for player characters.
Take trade goods, gems, and jewelry. In a world where everything is sold for half value, these items are basically money and can be sold at cost. I once received a platinum plated and jeweled masterwork long sword in a treasure horde that I was told was an art object by the GM.
I considered with much amusement the strange paradox that a regular masterwork sword could only be sold at half price, but this one sold for full price.
Or how about Magic Item Crafting? If I make a +1 weapon for ~1000 gp, I can sell it for ~2000 gp. But if I find a +1 weapon, I can only sell it for ~1000 gp. What stops me from saying "Oh I totally enchanted this", lol?
We just have to accept that all gp costs are arbitrary concepts and move on, even if it strains our suspension of disbelief.
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Why are prices absolute and fixed, once and forever ? Shouldn't they fluctuate depending on whether there's a mine down the road or if the only one is on the other side of the world ? Can't I grab the cheapest diamond around and sell it to my bud for 1000gp, thus making it what he needs for his spellcasting ?
Because it's convenient and easy to handle.
That's it.
That's very much a game balancing thing, not a realism one - which is true for pretty much everything money end economy realted, if we're honest.
With how old of a world Golarion is, there otherwise would be pretty much no diamond left.
Besides, are diamonds really that rare in a world of magic ?
Because I'd absolutely expect an ambitious spellcaster to try and set up a mining operation in the Demiplane of Infinite Precious Gemstones.
That said if you're running a grittier/low magic game and want to restrict access to certain spells without removing them entirely, that's a pretty good way to do it.
Hint at it early on, then have your players realize that not only are these things getting pricey, they're also becoming simply much harder to find in the first place, making every spell cast a real choice. Fun times.
That's really not for everyone though, so if you're not running it that way, with all your players explicitely on board with the idea... Suspend your disbelief, ignore the economic nonsense, and buy your standardized, fixed price ration of diamond dust. There's worse things to worry about.
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Looking for an in-game explanation (rather than jumping to “because it is a fantasy gaming experience and not an economics simulator”):
The materials aren’t “a diamond of X carats” but rather are a “a diamond worth Y gp.” Maybe 100 years ago the diamond you were using for the spell WAS bigger. The point of the material in the spell isn’t to represent a specific quantity of diamonds but rather the sacrifice you are giving up.
Or here’s another possibility. Golarion happens to be a world where prices are in a sort of homeostasis. A 25,000 gp diamond has been the same size for millennia. Why? Because new sources are found regularly. Creating a portal to a plane where you can find diamonds is an expensive and dangerous undertaking, but if prices start to rise then it becomes worth the risk. There may be brief, minor fluctuations in price but not enough to be worth worrying about.
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Games don't have to be realistic, they only have to be consistent. See this article among others. Beyond the basic message, it has a funny example how the quest for more realism can turn out horribly wrong:
When Realism Creates Unrealistic Behavior
In the early days of Everquest, it was not uncommon to stumble upon another player in the wild who was throwing himself off a short cliff over and over again while spewing gibberish indecipherable to passers-by. Use-based advancement was to blame: While most of Everquest's advancement model was centered around a classic level-based advancement system, the non-combat skills like "Language" and "Safe Fall" advanced as the character performed in-game actions. Thus, our mysterious cliff diving tonguespeaker was someone whose character was, ostensibly, learning new trades.
The ironic thing, of course, is that these use-based systems are designed to be realistic -- practice making perfect, and all. Some players and designers are bothered by the idea that you can learn how to speak Orcish by killing kobolds until you gain a level. A learning-by-doing system makes perfect sense to them.
If Pathfinder would have gotten a more elaborate economy, it wouldn't necessarily result in such oddities. But I don't think many players would be happy to deal with the additional complexity, since it distracts from more interesting things like slaughtering monsters and taking their stuff.
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Re: diamonds
Note that the real world price of diamonds is artificially inflated. They are a lot more common than many other precious gems.
From a game-economy perspective, their use as spell components may actually help explain why they are so expensive without a fantasy equivalent of De Beers and others controlling global supply and distribution.
Golorion is not the only world in the pathfinder universe. There are also other planes of existence including the elemental plane of earth. Considering it is supposed to be an infinite plane composed mostly or endless rock and earth that is criss-crossed with veins or precious metal and gemstones, it would be kind of strange to run out.
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Golorion is not the only world in the pathfinder universe. There are also other planes of existence including the elemental plane of earth. Considering it is supposed to be an infinite plane composed mostly or endless rock and earth that is criss-crossed with veins or precious metal and gemstones, it would be kind of strange to run out.
Now I'm imagining a cabal of earth elementals acting like the De Beers, ensuring artificial scarcity and fixing the prices of gemstones through the great beyond.
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One easy solution would be to assume the referenced GP value is the base price before in-game market forces are applied.
I wonder who was the guy who created the spell using gem's
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I always thought that aspiring new magicians practiced by magically crafting spell components... doesn't every magician have an apprentice in the background, just slaving away to provide said magician with everything they might need?
I mean, False Focus and Fabricate can produce diamonds worth 100gp, for free... then you could use Fabricate to make some of those 100gp diamonds into a single, more expensive diamond... assuming it has to be one diamond worth whatever the spell calls for, and not just the GP value in diamonds of various sizes.
False Priest Sorcerers get False Focus for "free", as well as the ability to use scrolls without consuming them... now you can just recycle that super rare divine scroll of Fabricate. Impossible Bloodline allows you to ignore certain crafting requirements, too.
Point is, just as diamonds and other components are consumed to make magic... magic can be used to make diamonds. So the supply of both/all stays relatively constant...
So I’m not talking about quickly renewable material components. I’m talking about things like precious gems and diamonds, that while there may eventually be more of them, it takes thousands of years to make new ones, yet spellcasters use them up at high speeds.
I mean, so many different spells use diamonds or diamond dust as a material component, thus permanently using it up. Shouldn’t that mean the cost of diamonds would be increasing as diamonds become more and more rare?
The same is true of other material components that aren’t quickly renewable, so yeah, why isn’t the gp cost of these things increasing as time passes?
Why is the price of something the same everywhere you go?
Because this is a game and not an economics simulator.
Also, it's common to have mining expeditions to the limitless Plane of Earth where there is a virtually limitless number of rare jewels, minerals, etc.
High level spell components are not cheap by any means. High level characters just have metric craptons of gold compared to anyone else. So although it "seems" cheap to you, it's because you're always playing characters that represent the top 1% of the wealthiest in the world.
Maybe the price does increase over time.
Once, it took an enormous 5000gp gem to power Raise Dead. When all these were used up, the price of smaller diamonds rose to 5000gp, since they were now the largest available. And because of this, they started working as material components for Raise Dead. You see, it's not the size of the diamonds that give them magical properties, it's the value they hold in people's minds.
So no matter how scarce or how common diamonds are, it will always cost 5000gp to cast Raise Dead.
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Why, and more importantly how, does magic care about the GP value of its components?
You would think that when the spell was invented/discovered that the components to do so were relatively set in stone.
The exact size/mass/weight of diamond necessary to produce that magical effect shouldn't be bound, in any way, to what people will pay for diamonds.
Why does magic cost money?
The components can cost money, sure.
But why would the spell, itself, care?
Maybe each diamond molecule contains this magical number of subatomic particles, that when added to the magical number of subatomic particles in whatever other component makes some magical subatomic formulae we call spells.
The gold price value of diamond on any market has absolutely no bearing on the properties of diamonds. And therefore, should not be part of the requirement for a diamond's use as a magical component...
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The gold price value of diamond on any market has absolutely no bearing on the properties of diamonds. And therefore, should not be part of the requirement for a diamond's use as a magical component...
You could go in the exact opposite direction too - perhaps the value of the diamond at purchase is the only thing that matters. Maybe the material components used for these spells are merely efficient mediums for capturing some desirable metaphysical quality, resulting from the transaction to purchase the component itself, in a useful form.
For example, lets say that every time you use a coin to purchase something the coin accrues a bit of psychic weight from the transaction - something representing the hardship necessary to earn the coin, or the avarice, desire, or hope of the participants in the transaction. Coins quickly accrue a maximum "charge", varying depending on the materials they're made out of, but this charge can be transferred in bulk by further transaction to a new medium where it can be stored. The intent behind the transaction matters a great deal though, so cheating the system is very difficult. These charges carried by these items can, in turn, be used to fuel particularly powerful spells.
So a diamond the size of a minivan would be useless for casting Wish if it had not been bought with honest intent for the right price, while one the size of a grain of sand might suffice if it were truly purchased for 25000 gold.
@Laegrim, I actually really like the concept of magic in the money...
The physical work, the aspirations/hope/dreams/ambitions, the scheming, the bloodshed... it all adds to the magic...
Interesting.
And completely opposite of subatomic mathematical formulae/algorithms stored within the components, themselves...