Ritual Path Magic (RPM) Charm Pricing / Magic-Industrial Revolution

[KeplerMine]

I run a company using the magic system from RPM. I have a fairly high-magic setting, meaning that mages have gone through their version of the industrial revolution and many things in general are in fact made on the magic conveyor belt.

And that's where the problem with cost comes across. On the one hand, magic should be generally expensive enough - enough that it would make sense to use technological things (I have classic Arcanum conflict but in present day). On the other hand it should be realistic enough considering the scale of production of some things (for example, magic stoves, we have discussed this with acquaintances).

The prices from the base book are too high. I tried to deduce the price from the calculation of the average salary and time to create a ritual + price for materials, but it turns out too low (even with a markup).

Maybe someone has some ideas about this, or better understands pricing can explain it to me.
As an example: An average worker gets 2100 (7 TL), has 12 skill-level, has a +3 grimoire (cost 1050) and his employer bought him a +1 lathe (cost 10500). The ritual costs... Let's say 40 energy.
How to estimate its value, if such an item, for example, should stand in 80% of homes (such as a stove for cooking)?

[mlangsdorf]

I don't know what base book you're referring to. Neither MH: Champions nor Thaumatology: RPM give any prices for rituals, and the Basic sets rules on enchantments do not apply to RPM.

I'm assuming the caster is working a fully consecrated space (Champions p 36) but isn't a full ritual adept.

Skill 12 with +4 in bonuses lets him accumulate energy with an effective skill of 16. 3 rolls versus a 16 gets an average of 18 energy, followed by 3 rolls versus a 15 for 15 energy, followed by 2 rolls against a 14 for 8 energy hit 41 energy. There's a cumulative chance of a critical failure of around 10%, which is mostly likely going to happen when most of the energy is accumulated. Assuming no critical failure, the spell goes off successfully and takes 40 minutes to gather the energy.

So our caster can create 10-11 rituals per day. His wage per day is about $100. The daily cost of his equipment (including a loan and 5-year depreciation) is around $20. It's hard to estimate the cost of a critical failure, but it could be a lot, so let's say $5,000. So the business is spending $5,120 per day to create 10 rituals, or $512 per ritual.

Business overhead such as the HR department and marketing and sales is at least 50% of production costs, so another $250. So each ritual costs the manufacturing company about $750. Their wholesaler buys them for that price and sells to the retail outfits for $1,500 and the retailers probably sell them for around $2,400.

Using ritual adepts instead of non-adepts reduces the ritual time to 40 seconds without reducing the critical failure rate, so 600 rituals/day but also 60 critical failures. Daily costs are $300,120 and each ritual costs $500... so you're not really saving much money.

Costs are determined almost solely by the cost of the critical failures. If failures are cheaper, the ritual is cheaper; if the failures are more expensive, the rituals are more expensive. Because of that, a competitor with a better grimoire can almost certainly undercut the operation: a +6 grimoire is more than 10 times as expensive and increases daily costs to less than $200, but reduces the critical failure rate to around 1 in 30 and the casting time to 30 minutes. Daily costs drop to $2,700 while production increases to 15/day for a ritual cost of $180, or $270 with overhead, for a retail price of $1,000 or less.

This is an original analysis, just going by the rules as I understand them. I tried to show my work if anyone wants to argue for or against.

[KeplerMine]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

but reduces the critical failure rate to around 1 in 30 and the casting time to 30 minutes.

Thanks for the answer, it really helped me to better understand how to calculate it all, but I don't understand a bit how you calculated the chance of critical failure, because according to my calculations critical failure on 8 (9 including the last one) throws will be about 4% (considering that 17 would not be a critical failure at 16 effective skill).

To clear up misunderstandings, do you think there will be a critical failure every day? Just otherwise, wouldn't the cost of a critical failure only partially count towards the cost?

[mlangsdorf]

the chance of critically failing repeated tests is 1 - the product of not failing the individual tests.

3 rolls against a 16 each have a .995 chance of not critically failing.
5 rolls against a 15 or 14 each have a .98 chance of not critically failing.

1 - .995^3 * .98^5 = .89, or about a 10% chance of critically failing when using the +3 grimoire.

for the +6 grimoire, it's 3 rolls against a 19 and 2 rolls against an 18, so

1 - .995^5 = .975 or a 2.5% chance of critically failing. Which I somehow rounded up to 3.3%.

A critical failure happens every X castings, on average, and so you can amortize the cost of the failure across X castings. Which is what I should have done. But as it works out, with the +3 grimoire, there's a daily critical failure and with the +6 grimoire, there's one every other day (well, every 2.5 days, oops).

So redoing the math a bit:
Fixed costs for a +3 grimoire and lathe: $20/day
Variable wage costs: $100/day
Critical fail cleanup: $5000/11 castings or $450 per casting.
11 useful castings per day, so fixed and variable costs are $11 + $450 for the crit fail. then throw in overhead, wholesaler, retail and you're looking at around $2,000.

Fixed costs for a +3 grimoire and lathe: $100/day
Variable wage costs: $100/day
Critical fail cleanup: $5000/40 castings or $125 per casting.
16 useful castings per day, so fixed and variable costs are $13 + $125 for the crit fail. then throw in overhead, wholesaler, retail and you're looking at around $750.


Obviously, you can adjust the numbers a lot. A 30 point both for Path of Energy is a 4d burning explosion, and a 40 point ritual will usually botch for 50-70 points. You could easily be spending a lot more on resolving critical failures. And the cost of the critical failures is driving production cost, much more than the daily wage or fixed costs for the grimoire. It's almost certainly worthwhile to have an enchanted item with some kind of Path of Luck affect for either Destiny Points (don't blow up the lab!) or Magic Aspected Luck, but that could just be rolled into the cost of critical failures.