How to Finance Slow and Sure Enchanting

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rupert

I concluded it would be lower, because of the difficulty of getting powerstones of that level that weren't so badly quirked that they'd be unusable.

Well, that's what the spreadsheet is about; rather than using intuition, it works out actual rates, with some options for adjusting the basic assumptions. Yes, 90 point powerstones are hard to get, but slow and sure is so insanely expensive that it can still be worth the trouble.

[Refplace]

Just in case anyone forgot about it the article "Thoroughly Modern Magic in Pyramid #3/66 can also help here. Also I like its wages better.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Monastic and military enchanters tend to go against theme though. Anyway, for the same point cost, nearly every other form of magic is more profitable than enchanting. For example, with the same point cost, you can make a very competent agrarian mage who should make much more money than an enchanter through using the five spells mentioned in Agrarian Magic in Fantasy.

I'm not sure how monastic enchanters go against theme. Wizards and hermits are extremely thematically connected, and monks are often just hermits that have gathered together. Wizards also have a scholastic theme, and the universities have an ancient historical connection with monasteries. Both wizards and monks study other-worldly power, tend to be literate in otherwise illiterate societies, are more likely than others to wear robes, and often chant in Latin. If anything, wizards as craftsmen or merchants is off-theme. But I think in this thread off-theme is a positive thing, as it often means that we are looking at new options.


I agree about the money. There is a reason the opening post said to assume that slow and sure enchanting was economically viable.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

With access to powerstones on cheap materials, the break point for S&S over Q&D is generally upwards of 600 energy. I pulled together a nasty spreadsheet a few years back here.

Was that using your "infamous" Single College Powerstones? I wouldn't allow those.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Was that using your "infamous" Single College Powerstones? I wouldn't allow those.

It becomes somewhat more expensive if you don't, maybe cutting the breakpoint down to 500 energy. You can modify the assumptions somewhat, one of the preset values on the config sheet is the presumed price for a single powerstone enchantment (or I created a new page). However, even if 'one college: enchantment' is not valid, 'one college: whatever that particular magic item is' should be valid, and in most cases you aren't going to be using the same stone for different circles anyway.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It becomes somewhat more expensive if you don't, maybe cutting the breakpoint down to 500 energy. You can modify the assumptions somewhat, one of the preset values on the config sheet is the presumed price for a single powerstone enchantment (or I created a new page). However, even if 'one college: enchantment' is not valid, 'one college: whatever that particular magic item is' should be valid, and in most cases you aren't going to be using the same stone for different circles anyway.

500 energy is what I got for 'non-gemstone' powerstones too. I just think that the difficulty of getting stones that big (73-74 points) that aren't quirked to hell and back will raise the price of useable stones more than linearly, bringing the threshold down. Being able to charge a premium for fast service will also raise the price (but not cost, obviously) of large Q&D jobs as well. Thus the break-point will be lower than the basic assumptions suggest. However, that doesn't mean those larger jobs won't be done using Q&D enchantments, just that they'll cost more than S&S jobs.

Either way, Q&D enchanting is actually cheaper than S&S into the 'hundreds of energy' range, despite what 4e's Magic claims, and the major culprit is being able to enchant lumps of rock as powerstones for 80 energy a shot.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Rupert

500 energy is what I got for 'non-gemstone' powerstones too. I just think that the difficulty of getting stones that big (73-74 points) that aren't quirked to hell and back will raise the price of useable stones more than linearly.

For a 74 point powerstone, assuming you discard any stones with 3 or more quirks, the expected result is about 3% of attempts will give you an unquirked stone, and you'll have another 6-7% each of stones with one and two quirks. Because you might stop early, you only average 37 castings per try (229 per success); at $80 per casting, that makes the stone cost a bit over $26k. The actual cost of using it will depend on how you amortize the cost; if you expect 10% per year and use it 4x/year (meaning you're wasting 67 days per year) it costs $650 per use, and since you have a circle of 6, $3,900 per enchantment. Add the cost of paying a circle for a full day (it takes 5 hours to cast, so that seems appropriate) and your final cost is $4,100 if a mage-day is $33. By comparison, slow and sure would cost $16,500. You're going to have some extra costs, but still, it's not even very close.

[AlexanderHowl]

Statistically speaking, an enchanter possesses around a 2% chance of critically failing every time that they cast Powerstone, meaning that only 22% of capacity 80 powerstone attempts will succeed. Unproblematic powerstones will be even rarer, since only 1.7% of attempts will create an 80 point powerstone without quirks. That means that a flawed 80 point rock will effectively require ~29,000 points of energy to create, since only 1/5 attempts will succeed while unproblematic rocks will effectively require ~390,000 energy, since only 1/60 attempts will result in such a powerstone. Since it takes 80 days for such rocks to completely recharge, an enchanter would need around 640 such rocks to be able to use them every hour of every day, meaning an effective expense of ~18,600,000 energy (for a group of quirky 'stones) to ~248,000,000 energy (for a group of flawless 'stones). The economics of enchantment actually does not seem to favor large stones.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Statistically speaking, an enchanter possesses around a 2% chance of critically failing every time that they cast Powerstone, meaning that only 22% of capacity 80 powerstone attempts will succeed. Unproblematic powerstones will be even rarer, since only 1.7% of attempts will create an 80 point powerstone without quirks. That means that a flawed 80 point rock will effectively require ~29,000 points of energy to create

Already accounted for above, and your math is wrong because you stop trying when you fail excessively.

[Gnaskar]

Since it takes 80 days for such rocks to completely recharge, an enchanter would need around 640 such rocks to be able to use them every hour of every day, meaning an effective expense of ~18,600,000 energy (for a group of quirky 'stones) to ~248,000,000 energy (for a group of flawless 'stones). The economics of enchantment actually does not seem to favor large stones.

Except now you have a single enchanter pumping out 640 energy in enchantments per day. Technically, we aught to multiply that by 95.47% to account for failures, so call it 612.5 energy per day. That's 223,715 energy per year.

And if we assume that we stop improving a stone once it's gotten a flaw, the average energy cost for 640 flawless 80 energy stone drops down to ~45,000,000 energy. Still about 200 years for our poor enchanter, but not completely ludicrous. Especially since he could theoretically find buyers for his flawed stones, so the investment isn't completely wasted. Even if that market is probably completely flooded.

But, yes, having a 6 person circle with a mix of 13 and 14 energy stones (416 of the former and 224 of the later to be precise) is a much more efficient way to get the same energy output, requiring only ~484,000 energy.

This circle will have spent about 4 years bootstrapping their way to this capacity based on some rough spreadsheet work and assuming they had enough FP to make Q&D powerstones from the start. They are producing twice as much now as when they started, so it will take them another 4 years to make up the lost time, assuming they specialize in producing power-stones for other casters.