I don't recall a single spell that creates an object that lasts forever with the exception of maybe wish, which isn't something everybody can access easily, and the only magical stuff that doesn't vanish are magic items which are regular items enchanted with magic. I don't see how there couldn't be an economy in a magical world with these circumstances.
Wall of Stone.
Imagine the Great Wall of Golarian.
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This has veered very far off topic, but remember that none of the economic elements of the game are codified in rules outside of how they work for the players. That is because the base line is "have it work however works to tell the best story at your table." So if your table wants a world economy "solved by magic," that is your prerogative, but it probably doesn't work that well for a setting in constant conflict, and hence you wont see much of that in pre-written adventures.
It is the same reason the setting and lore folks don't want to go around setting settlement stat blocks for places that might eventually be used in an adventure. Too much formal setting structure where it isn't serving a specific story only prevents future stories from being told.
Not really; I think economics is an essential part of world-building, especially since many conflicts in our world are motivated by economic reasons. For instance, there is a significant difference between being unable to sell a thousand daggers because of balance and being unable to sell them because, after the first thirty, they became devalued since everyone who needed one has already bought it. Additionally, if other mages have already entered the dagger-making market, the supply may exceed the demand.
If you simply tell people they can’t create food for cheap due to balance issues, it will feel gamy. However, if you explain that it is against the law because it would drive down food prices—an action banned due to pressure from farm owners—that could lead to a quest of its own. This is the kind of deep simulationist role-playing that I love.
I disagree. Economics is only important if it is a relevant part of the story. There are many stories and worlds built with no economic information or very little that are great. Middle Earth is one of the most well built worlds ever and it has little or no economic information. Information is only necessary if it is part of the story and necessary to the reader or participant.
I think economics is an essential part of world-building
Economics is an essential part of building a capitalistic world.
I don't see Golarion as a capitalistic world. There are a few organizations that may look capitalistic but overall I don't see countries fighting for economic dominance. Capitalism really grew quite late in our world, mostly when industrialization allowed the production of a crazy amount of goods at a single place. Before that, goods were produced case by case when someone needed it. Growing more food than you need means rotting food in your granaries.
And when you add the extreme randomness of Golarion (one day your country is rich, the next day you have an undead uprising on your hands), accumulating goods/wealth doesn't look like a useful goal in life.
I'm in the "handwave economy" team. It's really not an interesting subject to speak about in a medieval fantasy world.
In the right story I think you could make delving into the economics of a magical world interesting, I'm pretty sure there are some stories that do that even.
But within the context of what PF does it's probably not important. If anything trying to track the relative market value of the treasure you're selling based on supply and demand and geography is going to just bog down a game unless the players are really into that specific thing.
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This is also how I liked to play my wizards. This just isn't an option now. The wizard doesn't have a good selection of buffs or debuffs, and the debuffs it does get are to hard to land, to the point I just gave up. It would have made sense that curriculum spells, cast from curriculum slots, would be more powerful. That should have been built into the chassis. You should be better at those arcane theses spells, any wizard can cast charm, but yours is more difficult to resist, and if it doesn't land it should remain uncast. If your thesis is spell shaping, they should be a free action, because it's what you specialize in. We are almost level 5, and I have had a single battle where my wizard made a difference. I don't need to compete as a fighter, but it would be great to be as valuable as a fighter. To land my spells as often as the fighters sword hits (who doesn't run out of sword juice). Is the wizard weaker? Not everyone agrees, but I think so. It certainly isn't as valuable a core class anymore.
I've said before there is an apparent departure in design for the Wizard when it comes to encouraging behaviour.
Paizo have made it so that, in order to encourage casting curriculum spells, they locked a spell slot per level to those spells. A "stick" approach.
Contrast this with Sorcerers, for instance, who are encouraged to cast their bloodline spells by getting a reward in the form of Blood Magic for doing so. A "carrot" approach.
Feats and abilties that do interesting things with curriculum spells would certainly be a path to making the whole mechanic more appealing.
I used to think being a merchant was a perfectly valid way to play Pathfinder
By being a merchant, you mean that your GM determines the price and demand of all goods in the country you're playing in? Or that your Greatsword Fighter is Trained in Diplomacy and Mercantile Lore? Because I have never seen anyone doing the former, as for the latter it doesn't look like "economy" at all.
Things have changed, and TTRPGs as a whole seem to have solidified into a "right way to play" that mostly revolves around encounters.
I literally said I was in the "handwave economy team", which is pretty much the contrary of the "right way to play".
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I used to think being a merchant was a perfectly valid way to play Pathfinder, but I guess not. Things have changed, and TTRPGs as a whole seem to have solidified into a "right way to play" that mostly revolves around encounters.Interesting. Which class would this character have and how they would fit into normal Pathfinder adventure? Merchants typically buy and sell goods, carry on business negotiations, travel here and there maybe and live mundane lives in other things. They don't fight monsters and/or armies, they hire other people to do that (or run, or die). That's possible to play in some TTRPG, but I doubt it would be very interesting for a lot of people, and no Pathfinder edition was made for this sort of gameplay.
Merchant backgrounds certainly exist in PF2 though.
Not really a "normal adventure", but there's definitely campaigns where economics matter more. I ran one years ago where the PCs were all indebted to a local crime boss, who had them pay off their debt by delving a dungeon underneath the city that the criminal gang recently discovered (and that no one else knew about), and selling those goods in an Outfitter's Shop that the PCs ran.
Economics definitely mattered in that since they needed to make a certain amount of money every time period (I think it was monthly, but maybe weekly, its been a long time) towards repaying their debt lest their criminal patrons become displeased.
In that case they were incentivized to run the shop by the simple fact that anything they sold there could go at "full price" rather than the discount that other merchants would pay to buy things from adventurers. They also needed to hire staff to run the place when they were in the dungeon and they didn't really want to put 50 magic axes for sale at the same time since flooding the market would have implications on the price. Though I know in one case they made a deal with one of the local mercenary companies to sell a large stockpile of gear to them at a discount in order to move all of it at once, which both parties were pretty happy with. It was a pretty fun campaign IMO.
Economics does come up in some APs as well, though its usually less at the forefront. Extinction Curse definitely has a "harvests are getting worse year after year and that's having wide ranging impacts, including on the economy" theme going, though the goal of the adventure is to fix the underlying problem and not to be a travelling merchant.
Kingmaker COULD have had a heavier economics theme than it does, but the kingdom's economy is so heavily abstracted and isolated from the adventurer economy that it doesn't really take advantage of the opportunity.
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I've said before there is an apparent departure in design for the Wizard when it comes to encouraging behaviour.
Paizo have made it so that, in order to encourage casting curriculum spells, they locked a spell slot per level to those spells. A "stick" approach.
Contrast this with Sorcerers, for instance, who are encouraged to cast their bloodline spells by getting a reward in the form of Blood Magic for doing so. A "carrot" approach.
Feats and abilties that do interesting things with curriculum spells would certainly be a path to making the whole mechanic more appealing.
Very true. It also feels bad IMO because it got so much more restrictive in the remaster. The old spell schools were big, and it was pretty likely there was always SOMETHING new you'd want to get from them to use those school slots for (and if you didn't, universalist was an option).
The new schools feel significantly more restrictive, and I think that contributes a lot to Wizard just not feeling like it got better in the Remaster.
I disagree. Economics is only important if it is a relevant part of the story. There are many stories and worlds built with no economic information or very little that are great. Middle Earth is one of the most well built worlds ever and it has little or no economic information. Information is only necessary if it is part of the story and necessary to the...This has veered very far off topic, but remember that none of the economic elements of the game are codified in rules outside of how they work for the players. That is because the base line is "have it work however works to tell the best story at your table." So if your table wants a world economy "solved by magic," that is your prerogative, but it probably doesn't work that well for a setting in constant conflict, and hence you wont see much of that in pre-written adventures.
It is the same reason the setting and lore folks don't want to go around setting settlement stat blocks for places that might eventually be used in an adventure. Too much formal setting structure where it isn't serving a specific story only prevents future stories from being told.
Not really; I think economics is an essential part of world-building, especially since many conflicts in our world are motivated by economic reasons. For instance, there is a significant difference between being unable to sell a thousand daggers because of balance and being unable to sell them because, after the first thirty, they became devalued since everyone who needed one has already bought it. Additionally, if other mages have already entered the dagger-making market, the supply may exceed the demand.
If you simply tell people they can’t create food for cheap due to balance issues, it will feel gamy. However, if you explain that it is against the law because it would drive down food prices—an action banned due to pressure from farm owners—that could lead to a quest of its own. This is the kind of deep simulationist role-playing that I love.
For sure economics is only relevant to a story when you dig a bit deeper and only if you want. But the world building questions were asked.
Economics is just one of those fundamental principles which affects society whether we like it or not. Once you understand some of the basics it is very hard to ignore.
Yeah, but magic isn’t one of those things we (as players) can actually have perfect knowledge of, nor really the economic principles of supply and demand in a world where magic and gods are physically and metaphysically present in the word.
In fact, the idea of approaching social sciences as science in such a word would be nearly impossible/maybe never develop as a field because the “rules” would change with the will of the gods and powerful other casters who regularly take what is supposedly the limits of power and then break them.
I think that is one of the challenging bits of the wizard in Golarion. The rules of magic and its essence are incredibly not well suited to scientific study and declaring certain occurances as provable theories is nearly impossible.