[Magic] Enchanter Wages

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem with enchantment rules in GURPS is that the vast majority of magic items are not worth the trouble to enchant. A fireball wand is a mage-only item that takes 800 mage-days to create.

This has always been a big problem for me as well. There is definitely value to magic items in most settings, but the sheer time involved means that the costs cannot be realistically as low as they are, simply because of the astonishing amount of time it takes.

4 mages working for 200 days can make your fireball wand in about 6 1/2 months of nonstop labor, assuming no absences. If they are working 6 days a week then it takes 40 weeks (since after the first week, you lose a "penalty day" making up for that day off), and if they are working a modern 5 days a week then it takes about 50 weeks - a whole year!

And all that assumes that no one quits, or gets hired away, or dies, or is subjected to any kind of inconvenience, injury, or illness that takes them out for any real amount of time! Heck, I would expect that a significant part of international and industrial espionage in these worlds would consist of sabotaging enchantment circles!

And it gets worse for the bigger items - creating a weapon that ignores all DR (Penetrating Weapon) requires 25,000 mage-days of labor! That is 25 trained enchanters working for 3 years without ANY interruption or break! And it sells for a mere $825,000?!

Plus, the slow nature of enchanting items means that commissioning any but the smallest items is a task of strategic nature - if you realize that you need a particular item to complete a particular task you almost certainly cannot wait around the months or years or decades it will take to get it made.

There needs to be an optional and faster system for enchanting, something that perhaps requires an additional resource but speeds things up. Perhaps there are certain magical tools (forges, or looms, or whatever) that speed up the process. Perhaps the number of points contributed per mage per day under Slow and Sure is dependent on the skill of the mages in question - perhaps that level 21 enchanter can make an item 8x as fast as a level 15 enchanter, or some such. Perhaps "copying" an existing design is much faster than pioneering a new one - if you want 8 fireball wands, it only takes 2x as long as a single wand!

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

There needs to be an optional and faster system for enchanting, something that perhaps requires an additional resource but speeds things up. Perhaps there are certain magical tools (forges, or looms, or whatever) that speed up the process. Perhaps the number of points contributed per mage per day under Slow and Sure is dependent on the skill of the mages in question - perhaps that level 21 enchanter can make an item 8x as fast as a level 15 enchanter, or some such.

There are such systems in Thaumatology.

In my Forgotten Realms fantasy campaign, I allow higher skill and higher power casters to construct magical items faster and I also allow the use of various magical components to reduce the labour requirements. Enchanters are definitely Filthy Rich or higher in my campaign, but the cost of magical items is still fairly affordable for the rich and powerful, at $50/energy point.

[Anthony]

Personally, I would set a money cost for magic items, and rule that creating them is a special case of crafting, with details that are game world specific.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

There needs to be an optional and faster system for enchanting, something that perhaps requires an additional resource but speeds things up. Perhaps there are certain magical tools (forges, or looms, or whatever) that speed up the process. Perhaps the number of points contributed per mage per day under Slow and Sure is dependent on the skill of the mages in question - perhaps that level 21 enchanter can make an item 8x as fast as a level 15 enchanter, or some such.

GURPS Thaumatology has a good deal of ideas regarding magical energy, starting on pg 50.

EDIT: Ninja'd!

[Kalzazz]

My current idea of a fix (if I ever try a new setting, or maybe Ill just retcon it into my current attempted settings) is 'TDM applies to enchanting also! Your generic ordinary enchanting project has at least a +4 on it, so your generic assistant enchanter need only Muster 11 in the skill', plus I tend to assume that the Enchanter style has the mandatory style perk 'ignores prereqs for Enchant spell', so they need only put points in Enchant and the spell to be Enchanted, not 10 other spells to

Being able to muster gaggles of skill 11 guys is thus surely much easier than mustering gaggles of skill 15 guys, and if there is enough for +5 TDM, then a skill 15 guy instead of being a mook assistant is actually a guy suitable for leading a Q&D operation, and a skill 20 Real Master TM can handle a much bigger gaggle (I'd also say that the skill 20 Real Master TM has a nicely stocked enchanting lab and has potentially found an area blessed by Trivia, Goddess of Magicky Thingies to set up his shop and so forth), so Bob the Real Master Enchanter can lead a team of 15 lackeys (and maybe he has sweet lackeys who can donate pretty decent sums of energy) and has powerstones, so if you really want a semi powerful magic item yesterday thats where you go

Admittedly, this is wild and whacky house ruling that deviates wildly from baseline assumptions, but we were discussing the potential for instance of making slow and sure faster based on mage power level and such, so it seems valid to bring up

(my prior explanations when someone brought it up involved mumbling about trained enchanting monkeys or such, since if people can use horses to help plowing, why not monkeys with Magery to help enchanting?)

[Anthony]

It is a bit of an issue that competent mages require a 15+ in multiple hard skills, while other jobs require 12+ in a single average skill. If you want enchanter wages to actually be modest, I'd probably change Enchant to Hard, No Prerequisites, and remove the minimum skill requirement for enchantments and ceremonies, if you really want to cast at skill 9 go for it.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Icelander

While I don't necesarily think fireball wands are the best use of the enchanter's time, I think that a lot of magic items are worth making because there might be a number of Magery 0 people that aren't really able to master a lot of spells at useful levels, but who can use magical items.

What about for bypassing the escalating penalties of repeated Healing castings?

It's -3 per casting after the 1st, per day, but a casting by a mage might count as being different from a casting by an item held by the mage, so that the penalties are accounted for separately. With two such items, a healer mage can cast the healing spell three times per target per day, at no penalty. And a further 3 times per target per day at a -3 penalty.

FP costs might also well be a problem for Special Ops mages, e.g. members of dungeon infiltration squads. So having the most useful items castable from Powerstone-fitted items could be really handy, in intense situations where you don't have time to sit down and rest.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

This has always been a big problem for me as well. There is definitely value to magic items in most settings, but the sheer time involved means that the costs cannot be realistically as low as they are, simply because of the astonishing amount of time it takes.

The reason Enchantment requires so much time is that it enables the GM to control the players. It ensures that Enchanting will be an NPC-only activity. There's a bizarre, but sadly very common point of view, from which that's considered a good thing.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Personally, I would set a money cost for magic items, and rule that creating them is a special case of crafting, with details that are game world specific.

And what's the world impact of that?

[Kalzazz]

Well, I personally would like a setting where 'sitting here in my house building stuff' is not the best way for PCs to get more powerful compared to going out and going on adventures

Left to their own devices players will want to make oodles of money and power by doing boring mundane things that make me want to tear my hair out, such as building stuff and selling it, or doing speculative trading, or whatever

Admittedly, my solution to that problem is the metagame one of 'if you do that the game is over and I go play Pokemon or whatever'