Rules + Physics = Questions

[Oli Ironbar]

I thought I would start a thread for whichever questions might come up later, but right now I am wondering if anyone has knowledge ranks to answer this:

Ruina Montium was a gold mining technique of digging chambers inside a mountain side then flooding them to cause the whole side of the mountain to crumble and fall, which I now desperately want to do in game with Polymorph Any Object, but it occurs to me that water isn’t the only option here.

What if the spell instantly filled large chambers inside the side of a mountain with mercury? Would it cover a larger area? Could it break thicker sections of stone?

Also, rules related, can dispel turn it back into stone or a different casting turn the mercury to water? Flooding a valley with thousands of cubic ft of toxic metal seems bad all around.

[Waterhammer]

Polymorph Any Object can’t be used to create mercury. Actually, mercury is listed as a material component of the spell.

[Oli Ironbar]

Let’s make pretend for the sake of your username and the intertia behind that much liquid?

[Azothath]

okay... this is really a practical medieval mining question translated to a Game AND metagaming technology into PF1....

A lot depends on the local rock composition that the mine goes through. Windmills, waterwheels, etc are mainly used to remove water from the mine, as water runs downhill and you are digging a deep hole. Second problem is air. People need to breathe and mostly hydrocarbons (methane etc) is going to come out of the rock. Third is support as all those rocks are under tremendous pressure and want to slip into the nice hole you dug.

In a basalt shaft water ain't gonna do much. Mercury neither, but it will kill off your workers even after you remove it. You are referencing mercury extraction which is done on selected/refined ore to dissolve the noble metals. You then vaporize the mercury to recover the gold mix.
I'd say the water didn't break the walls, rather water was the penetrating lubricant that allowed friction to be lessened and the rocks slip (or fly) using natural cracks/fissures into the low pressure opening filled with water. You have a really good shot of collapsing your tunnel in hopes of creating a stable larger natural cavern.

The real In Game problem is you need the Technologist Feat to escape alchemy and try your PCs rank in unknown and untested chemistry... I use AD 1650 as the general transition point in technological history. Architects/engineers used to build detailed wooden models of their project(church) and then proportionally scale it up then act surprised if/when it fell down as clearly it was a flawed model problem rather than strength of materials or accumulating pressure from weight.

Using 'rediscovered' Roman engineering is a bit of a cheat as that was lost during the Dark Ages.

As a Game is about Adventuring, once you dig your deep deep hole, pump out the water and pump in air, then stabilize it with trusses, the drow or derro are going to show up and demand tribute as you've encroached on their domain.

[Taja the Barbarian]

General Warning: Trying to mix actual physics or economics with game rules never works well.

[Pizza Lord]

For polymorph any object, I am also not sure if you can turn something to mercury. I don't know that liquids are viable targets or for turning things into. I could see turning something into a liquid creature like a water elemental, but not something that inherently flows or discorporates itself in a way it would probably die if restored (this is not the same mud or wax or something).

That aside, let's say you turn an interior space of rock (1,500 cubic ft.) into mercury, it might or might not work. Mercury is denser than most rock, and it would depend on the structural integrity of the rock around it.

You can dispel the polymorph, otherwise it should wear off itself in a week. Or you could turn something else into the mass of mercury, like plant or animal matter, and it will revert much fast, likely a day or so.

But really, if you're using 8th-level spells, you have access to much better mining techniques. Earth elemental summoning (or polymorphing someone into one), metal and gem detection, you have soften earth and stone, transmute rock to mud, decanters of endless water to fill hollows, dig spells, passwall, etc. animate some dead to mine (they're not great at appraising). Lots of ways to crack a rock face.

[Azothath]

here's the spell Poly Any Obj:T[poly]8
the salient text is This spell cannot create material of great intrinsic value, such as copper, silver, gems, silk, gold, platinum, mithral, or adamantine. It also cannot reproduce the special properties of cold iron in order to overcome the damage reduction of certain creatures. so it could create some amount of mercury but there should be a gp limit as that's the obvious intent of the limitation.

I consider this GM chat - it's a Game and your players don't know what the rules of Nature are and you should not tell them (the Universe doesn't reveal it's secrets easily). PCs have to experiment in game and try stuff out before declaring how things are. A GM's job is to set a DC and have the players roll to see what they know in the context of the Game.
I'm not overly pedantic or into RAI, so just read it and take what you think the simple interpretation is. In a Game Balance way it's reasonable for as 8th level spell to convert 600gp of pewter & sulfur into 600gp of mercury and some alkaline water. {600gp is half the NPC casting cost}
Getting the value of mercury per ounce (1/16th pound) is the tricky part. Quicksilver barometer is 400gp, say 50 for glass and 150 for mercury, and will have about 1200-2400g of mercury (depending on the diameter of the glass tube) in my experience, or about 3-4gp/oz for bulk purchases. This somewhat agrees with quicksilver from alchemy manual at 1gp per 'dose' wt:-- (say 2 drams as it has a high density... lol).

remember that in PF1 mercury is a combination of the (4-7)elements, represents Mercury(fastest planet), one of the seven metals, speed and change. It's not conceived of as an atom or element in modern chemistry.

I think this is an aside and not the main point of this thread.

[Waterhammer]

I’m pretty sure that the metal, mercury must be considered as having great intrinsic value. It’s far more rare than copper, for instance.
So, at my table you wouldn’t be creating mercury with Polymorph Any Object.

Now, if you change rock into water. Yeah. That’s going to be pretty destructive. The water would revert back to rock pretty quickly I would imagine. The new rock formations might be quite strange.

[Azothath]

as a sanity check,
Au gp 50gp/lb means 1gp =0.32oz =5.12drams =9.07g, that's 0.195gp/dram.
Hg at 1gp/2drams or 0.5gp/dram is a bit more than gold. So 1gp/(6 to 8) drams would bring it in line. I'd assume alchemical purchases are at 10* bulk prices.
It's just scary to think what 2g of mercury would do to a person if ingested as symptoms show up at 0.05g. Those medieval folks playin with fire.

[Belafon]

The better method ("physics"-wise) would be to create water a whole bunch, then magic it into ice. The expansion of water to ice could fracture the rock.

Like Pizza Lord mentioned, transmute rock to mud does the job more directly than bothering with the whole fracturing process.

As for mercury (or similar metals) you could temporarily make it with major creation. If you picked mercury in particular because of it's use in gold mining (binding to gold in a slurry, then sinking while the non-gold rock and earth are sluiced off) then doing that process with major creation is quite clever. When the spell ends the mercury disappears leaving you with pure gold; no need to bother with heating the amalgam to remove the mercury. Plus it would be better for the environment if the mercury just magically disappears :)

[Claxon]

If you were my player and I your GM, I would tell you that your exact methods don't matter. I would come up with some framework for how much gold value you could extract over some time frame that wouldn't break the game and that would be that.

Otherwise, smart wizards across the world would already be doing whatever you can come up with and extracted all the gold available....so there's some in game world reason why it doesn't work or doesn't work well.

[Belafon]

Claxon wrote:

Otherwise, smart wizards across the world would already be doing whatever you can come up with and extracted all the gold available....so there's some in game world reason why it doesn't work or doesn't work well.

Capital Costs and Opportunity Costs

Capital:
-You need to purchase/lease/control gold-rich land. Sure, there's the "take it by force" option but then you need to spend a lot of effort defending it.
-You need a workforce. This kind of mining requires moving a LOT of earth and rubble from place to place. Move earth could do the gross work (though it takes a while) but the sorting and cleaning need finer control. Undead are an option but have an onyx cost to create.

Opportunity Cost
-Take one feat and you can instead spend your days crafting magic items and making 500 gp a day (1000 gp if you can handle the +5 DC speedup). In a nice, comfortable shop with all the amenities of civilization around you.

[Claxon]

Belafon wrote:

Claxon wrote:

Otherwise, smart wizards across the world would already be doing whatever you can come up with and extracted all the gold available....so there's some in game world reason why it doesn't work or doesn't work well.

Capital Costs and Opportunity Costs

Capital:
-You need to purchase/lease/control gold-rich land. Sure, there's the "take it by force" option but then you need to spend a lot of effort defending it.
-You need a workforce. This kind of mining requires moving a LOT of earth and rubble from place to place. Move earth could do the gross work (though it takes a while) but the sorting and cleaning need finer control. Undead are an option but have an onyx cost to create.

Opportunity Cost
-Take one feat and you can instead spend your days crafting magic items and making 500 gp a day (1000 gp if you can handle the +5 DC speedup). In a nice, comfortable shop with all the amenities of civilization around you.

I know you're coming up with reasons why it could work (but also the hurdles in doing so), but what I'm saying is that as a GM I'm not going to come up with lots of reasons to shut it down, I'm just going to tell you no because at the end of the day, wealth is an important concern for game balance and I'm not going to let any sort of clever scheme override that.

[Belafon]

Claxon wrote:

I know you're coming up with reasons why it could work (but also the hurdles in doing so), but what I'm saying is that as a GM I'm not going to come up with lots of reasons to shut it down, I'm just going to tell you no because at the end of the day, wealth is an important concern for game balance and I'm not going to let any sort of clever scheme override that.

Oh no, I'm coming up with reasons why it wouldn't make sense to do it.

Amazingly, this is one of the cases where magic doesn't actually improve the outcome very much. Any such operation is going to rely in a large part on gravity and water flow, which together would be much more volume than what magic can manage.

"Craft magic items" was to point out that a wizard can make 500 gp a day just doing that. Which, let's not forget, is 10 pounds of gold. For a good open-pit mine or a marginal quality underground mine, that works out to around 20 MILLION pounds of ore that need to be processed. That's a lot of magic.

Make your money crafting items, then set up a company, buy land, and hire commoners to mine gold for you the mundane way.

[Mysterious Stranger]

Since gold is a metal not stone why not simply use rock to mud to turn the stone containing the gold ore to mud. Then all you need to do is to filter out the gold ore. Get a decanter of endless water and use it for a sluice box. Rock to mud is only a 5th level spell, so it would be much easier to do.

Transmute Rock to mud has an Area of two 10-foot cubes/level. That means at 10th level you would be able to affect 20,000 cubic feet; at 16th level it would affect 32,000 cubic feet. That is twenty times the volume of polymorph and object

You are using a higher-level spell, and more effort with less return on your investment.

Another thing to consider is doing large scale destruction to the environment could anger a lot of people and creatures. This type of destruction would probably start a war with the local druids and may draw the attention of nature-based deities and entities. That could be the in-game reason that Claxon was talking about.

[Azothath]

Belafon wrote:

Claxon wrote:

I know you're coming up with reasons why it could work (but also the hurdles in doing so), but what I'm saying is that as a GM I'm not going to come up with lots of reasons to shut it down, I'm just going to tell you no because at the end of the day, wealth is an important concern for game balance and I'm not going to let any sort of clever scheme override that.

Oh no, I'm coming up with reasons why it wouldn't make sense to do it.

Amazingly, this is one of the cases where magic doesn't actually improve the outcome very much. Any such operation is going to rely in a large part on gravity and water flow, which together would be much more volume than what magic can manage.

"Craft magic items" was to point out that a wizard can make 500 gp a day just doing that. Which, let's not forget, is 10 pounds of gold. For a good open-pit mine or a marginal quality underground mine, that works out to around 20 MILLION pounds of ore that need to be processed. That's a lot of magic.

Make your money crafting items, then set up a company, buy land, and hire commoners to mine gold for you the mundane way.

well - there is the plan to file a claim on the land, put up a sign and general store, and sell gear, food, mining equipment, and crafted rods of metal and mineral detection $10500 to treasure hunters at adventuring prices... Mr. NPC

[Claxon]

Azothath wrote:

well - there is the plan to file a claim on the land, put up a sign and general store, and sell gear, food, mining equipment, and crafted rods of metal and mineral detection $10500 to treasure hunters at adventuring prices... Mr. NPC

Congratulations, you're no longer an adventurer but an entrepreneur NPC.

What's your new character?

[Oli Ironbar]

Honestly, I’m suggesting to our group that we do a few sessions between AP’s to do just that. Start at lvl 8 aristocrat or expert with NPC gold and just build stuff. Adept wouldn’t even be bad, but I’ll have to look into it.

Depending where we place the sessions it could make for a great backdrop for the next AP.

Edit: this is not a sailor’s forum and I can’t use some of their lingo.

[Azothath]

just make sure they have the gold, a place, a couple of NPCs to help with the crafting (aka feat relief). You can insert creative challenges and accidents during the process as wrinkles (alchemical golem, jealous & greedy fey, etc) just keep it amusing and fun.
I think the engineering aspect is a bit too much for adventuring PCs. If they were dedicated and wanted to spend 5 years of game time then okay. The wiz could just use earthglide or make a deal with elementals to mine a location.

[Diego Rossi]

A pound of gold costs 50 gp (apparently, the GPs are made of pure gold ...). At today's price of 108.17 $ for each gram, a pound of gold is worth 49,065.91 $.
But the rules say that an average lifestyle is 10 gp/month. Approximately 10.000 $/month for a single person. A family of 6 (father, mother, and 4 daughters and sons) would be on the smallish side for a late Renaissance family, and would need something like 40 gp/month for an average lifestyle.
A reasonable RL paragon would be a family with an income of maybe 4,000 $/month, not 40,000 $.

The conclusion is that gold is way less valuable in Pathfinder than in RL.

In RL gold extraction is done when the extraction cost is lower than the selling price. In Pathfinder, probably, people are already using magical means to mine gold, and that explains the low value.

Essentially, you are reinventing methods that are already in use in our fantasy world. Your gold mine will produce the same kind of revenue that every other gold mine would produce.

[Oli Ironbar]

But it is ours and cooler because of it!

[Azothath]

Hey - it's totally cool to learn about engineering and science. YAY - Go For It! I hope you understand some trigonometry and calculus (math tools) as it will make you endeavor much easier but most engineers slip by with algebra and polynomials.

The trick is how is that going to apply in your gaming situation? What technology will be appropriate for your setting? Those are ago old questions for people trying to model and simulate RL in Gaming. THAT part of it isn't any fun. Remember you are Adding Content rather than Specifying Rules. Again, 1650 is my transition date from Alchemy towards modern science.
Yes, being a physicist and engineer is helpful (r60%aises hand). Root out a civil engineer if you can (lowers hand). CRC publishes some very handy books and you can get those door-stoppers at your library.

===
We all know the DnD3.5 & PF1 economics is totally borked and beyond repair as it's really two economies. Honestly (looking at my coinage alloy database) GP at 100gp/lb at 25%Au 25%Ag 42%Cu 5%Zn 2%Sn 1%Ni OR 35%Au 8%Ag 50%Cu 5%Zn 1%Sn 1%Ni would be quite practical. Pure gold is wayyy too soft and too hard to refine to that purity. 18kt Modern White Gold 75%Au 14.5%Ag 5.5%Cu 0.5%Zn 14.5%Ni(durability). Aurume Gold 60%Au 38%Cu 2%Zn. Gold Electrum 60%Au 15%Ag 15%Cu 10%Zn.

[Tom Sampson]

If you want game mechanics that can handle advanced physics simulation I think you're better off playing GURPS.