[MH] Creating gold with RPM

[Kalzazz]

Well, in a secret magic world, I would expect that most of the mundanes are pretty well clueless on magic

So going to a random pawnshop I would perfectly accept you could sell off 'grandma's gold bracelet' etc no problem (but would of course have all the mundane record keeping and gold test measures that a pawn shop would have on any gold sale)

You could use the Bewitched Basketry spell from Ghostdancer's Pyramid Article, create oodles of real wicker baskets, and sell them as handcrafted awesome craft baskets (and use a buffing spell to add to your marketing so you do killer item writeups) on Ebay etc

The guard whose mother is sick? You could say use a healing spell on her directly

Now, in my (predating MH by several years) hidden magic setting, there is a 'Supernatural Gains Tax', which is a tax based on 'how much did the supernatural add to this?', with the default assumption that 'everything beyond minimum wage' is attributed to things like 'I conjure gold from thin air'

Noone feels motivated to conjure gold at 7.25 / hr

Things like 'I conjure some gold to grease the doorman in an adventure' the tax guys are fairly well not going to notice or ignore for the most part. You buy an old junker car and use a big repair spell to get it fixed up so you can drive it? They will probably be okay with that, I mean, people do fix up old cars to be serviceable, its not going to really motivate them to notice. You buy 100 junkers, fix them like new, and go into a used car business? Then the tax man cometh

Also while conjured gold might scam mundanes, mundanes don't sell the cool magic trinkets and other groovy toys you really want. And if you start dumping lots of gold into the market, mundane authorities and such may grow curious, and even in a hidden magic setting, usually the vampire elders or the council of wyrms or the orders of magic, or the faerie courts etc all have their spies and plants, so eventually somebody who isn't mundane will get involved

One amusing story involved I remember the fae could no longer help people out by giving them a bag of silver . . . so instead they entered racing, and used lightning fast elven steeds to win races, then donated winnings to charities, and charities helped people

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

Well, in a secret magic world, I would expect that most of the mundanes are pretty well clueless on magic

So going to a random pawnshop I would perfectly accept you could sell off 'grandma's gold bracelet' etc no problem (but would of course have all the mundane record keeping and gold test measures that a pawn shop would have on any gold sale)

You could use the Bewitched Basketry spell from Ghostdancer's Pyramid Article, create oodles of real wicker baskets, and sell them as handcrafted awesome craft baskets (and use a buffing spell to add to your marketing so you do killer item writeups) on Ebay etc

The guard whose mother is sick? You could say use a healing spell on her directly

Now, in my (predating MH by several years) hidden magic setting, there is a 'Supernatural Gains Tax', which is a tax based on 'how much did the supernatural add to this?', with the default assumption that 'everything beyond minimum wage' is attributed to things like 'I conjure gold from thin air'

Noone feels motivated to conjure gold at 7.25 / hr

Things like 'I conjure some gold to grease the doorman in an adventure' the tax guys are fairly well not going to notice or ignore for the most part. You buy an old junker car and use a big repair spell to get it fixed up so you can drive it? They will probably be okay with that, I mean, people do fix up old cars to be serviceable, its not going to really motivate them to notice. You buy 100 junkers, fix them like new, and go into a used car business? Then the tax man cometh

Also while conjured gold might scam mundanes, mundanes don't sell the cool magic trinkets and other groovy toys you really want. And if you start dumping lots of gold into the market, mundane authorities and such may grow curious, and even in a hidden magic setting, usually the vampire elders or the council of wyrms or the orders of magic, or the faerie courts etc all have their spies and plants, so eventually somebody who isn't mundane will get involved

One amusing story involved I remember the fae could no longer help people out by giving them a bag of silver . . . so instead they entered racing, and used lightning fast elven steeds to win races, then donated winnings to charities, and charities helped people

Your stc and the supernatural gains tax is almost exactly the sort if scenario I envisioning. User Nate to get wealth fire one problem, not an issue, considerably increase your overall net worth hello stc and the supernatural gains tax. Figure out a way to not have everything claimed by there tax, pay for your new multiplayer advantage (or play a PC with enemy; US government, which does know about supernatural powers and will send cleaners to 'fix the problem').

Actually, it might be good if you describe the stc and the supernatural gains tax in detail, as well as how you have employed it. I think it is an excellent representation of the 'you are NOT the only one' effect.

[starslayer]

That's basically what Kal instituted with his STC.

The setting is basically a monster hunters sort of setting, set in modern day, with a strong conspiracy to keep the supernatural under wraps.

The concept is that; as the world evolved with the supernatural the government is well aware of its existanc, and in order to combat supernatural threats (at least as much as government can be bothered to deal with supernatural threats), as well as to keep the conspiracy an organization called the Supernatural Tracking Centre (STC) was created. The STC has a huge budget that they use to quickly whitewash supernatural events, often resorting to 'a movie is being shot on <street where kaiji just rampaged>'.

They have access to a lot of cool MiB type devices, and the bankroll to provide all of this is the Supernatural Gains Tax. Basically the supernatural gains tax does a quick evaluation of how difficult it is for someone to do something, and then taxes the difference between that, and the money they actually did.

So if your RPM mage can pretty effortlessly create gold, then the maximum amount that gold can be worth is minimum wage; everything else vanishes into the tax coffers of the STC. Further with their own wizards, oracles, and psis on the payroll that taxation happens almost immediately- your bank account nearly vanishes with a massive deduction to 'STG'. Mundane vendors won't sell you anything unless at radically increased prices, and they aren't even are of it, because there being mind controlled. Supernatural creatures are generally exempt, but they also will be the least likely to accept magically created wealth (because they know THEY won't be able to use it either).

The STC happily pockets all the excess wealth created in this manner and slowly releases it into the market in a controlled way to prevent massive flux.

They are, however, a government body; and a semi-secret on at that; so they are all but crushed by the weight of their own bureaucracy. Its not impossible to slip things under the radar here and there, and as long as your careful about it you can make a good living with your supernatural abilities- but what you can't do is be super-obvious about it, or do anything that catches public attention.

The STC also helps to allow supernatual creatures to 'integrate into society'; encouraging demons and other monsters to prey on the homeless as opposed to people who will actually be missed, and cleaning up messes when a monster is either too stupid or too arrogant to play along.

In a true monster hunters setting they are neither part of 'the problem' or 'the solution'- they are just one more layer of complication; they know about vampires, mummies, werewolves, and other creatures, and are often staffed in part by them- as well as believing that, as long as they are good tax paying citizins that they have as much right to life as a tax paying corporation; as long as they don't see any massive conspiracies going on (or those conspiracies are properly registered and they are paying taxes on the 'true' strength of their association), they are perfectly happy to let monsters run little cults, cabals, or whatnaught. They will contract out work to monster hunters, but only to take out the 'low hanging fruit'; things that are too obvious, or won't play the game.

They have always been a very believable and 'natural' thorn in the side of PCs who like to buck the system, happily providing cover to PCs who don't do so.

[Refplace]

The STC actually sound like a pretty cool organization to have in a MH setting.

[GodBeastX]

My Rule 0 on RPM is that it might have an increased subject energy if it's something utterly valued or rare. Magic (In my opinion) follows rules that aren't Nihilistic. Meaning gold isn't just the molecules that make up the substance, but all the wonder and greed that surrounds it on the metaphysical level.

So creating a substance that causes all that greed and wonder is going to cost more than say, making a bucket of sand.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

My Rule 0 on RPM is that it might have an increased subject energy if it's something utterly valued or rare. Magic (In my opinion) follows rules that aren't Nihilistic. Meaning gold isn't just the molecules that make up the substance, but all the wonder and greed that surrounds it on the metaphysical level.

So creating a substance that causes all that greed and wonder is going to cost more than say, making a bucket of sand.

As I suggested earlier in the thread, requiring a skill roll to actually produce the gold instead of a crude approximation could work here, just as one needs to roll against Armoury (Melee Weapons) to conjure up a sword. As for making it more expensive, to reliably produce decent amounts of gold you might need to tack on Bestows a Bonus, which of course increases the price. I'd also go further to say that any material that requires a skill roll to produce is always a Greater Effect, even though raw materials are usually Lesser, which is going to triple energy cost.

(Of course, for my own interpretations I'm tempted to say actually creating something from nothing, be it sand or a gilded azalum sword, always requires a Greater Create effect. Using magic to turn raw materials into finished products - making a piece of glass from sand, or turning some gold dust and a wootz ingot into that sword - can be done temporarily via Lesser Create, permanently via Greater Create. Creating a completed item from nothing would require both a Greater Create and a Lesser Create effect.)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

My Rule 0 on RPM is that it might have an increased subject energy if it's something utterly valued or rare. Magic (In my opinion) follows rules that aren't Nihilistic. Meaning gold isn't just the molecules that make up the substance, but all the wonder and greed that surrounds it on the metaphysical level.

So creating a substance that causes all that greed and wonder is going to cost more than say, making a bucket of sand.

That is an interesting and quite magically valid way to reduce the monetary effects of direct magic.
But then one wonders how to equate intense greed by the few to low or moderate greed by the many.

There's also the alchemical issue that gold is the purest most highly vaulted form of matter. That should require major penalties or quick degredation leading back to lead or another base metal before the magic technically fades.

I'm not sure you're using the word nihilistic correctly. I'm not a big fan of philosophy in general, so I could be very wrong, of course.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Varyon

As I suggested earlier in the thread, requiring a skill roll to actually produce the gold instead of a crude approximation could work here, just as one needs to roll against Armoury (Melee Weapons) to conjure up a sword. ..

As an element, gold is far simpler than any mundane object. I want 79 protons and electrons with 118 neutrons for stable gold 197. If you need a skill roll for that, then normal objects would be impossibly complex.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But then one wonders how to equate intense greed by tYhe few to low or moderate greed by the many.

You can't. There's no such thing as moderate avarice; the definition of avarice is that it is inordinate. Simply desiring money or for that matter desiring pretty jewelry is not greed, it is desiring things.

As far as that goes in magic, gold has a lot of cultural symbols attached besides avarice.

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

As an element, gold is far simpler than any mundane object. I want 79 protons and electrons with 118 neutrons for stable gold 197. If you need a skill roll for that, then normal objects would be impossibly complex.

not necessarily- if you allow magic to 'fill in the blanks'.

'I want a sword' will happily generate you a sword shaped thing that has a luminescent glow, shows up as not being matter at all if submitted to a mass spectrometer, and generally behaves in a way that will serve adequately as a sword be be impossibly obvious as 'magical' under any scrutiny.

'I want a sword made of steel' is much harder to pull off, because now you need to actually correctly magically generate steel, in the shape of a sword.

If gold should be harder or earlier than steel comes down to your setting, but it is definitely one way to handle this problem (IE- magically created items are functionally those items, but not those items under analysis unless some VERY difficult skill rolls accompany the forgery).