Lesser Wish: $74

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Note that by ITL p.143 the wizard has to fail by 10 points on two six die rolls in order to be dusted. Hence it's nowhere near as dangerous as being an Uber driver.

GMs who don't want huge amounts of Lesser Wishes getting circulated might decide the first death check may not be dusted but is still "dead dead", not "not dead yet dead", so would require support from someone with Revival and apprentices, and would still drop the IQ 18 wizard by 5 attribute points.

[Steve Jackson]

Agreeing with the Wyzard here. But looking at it.

The wiz's death is no longer automatic - you can hire guards. But hiring guards because they MIGHT have to fight a demon is going to be expensive, if you want guards that won't just run and leave you to be strangled with your own intestines.

[hcobb]

Note that ITL page 143 "Pentagrams will not protect the wizard in this battle of
wills – though a good pentagram would prevent the demon from smashing anything else after he finished off the wizard!"

Hence you need to hire two wizards, one for each spell.

That raises the price for the lesser wish to $7 + $20 for the demon and $7 + $5 +$17 (waiting out the demon) for the Pentagram.

Then double for dangerous work to $92, no?

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by The Wyzard

Most RPG rules that are sufficiently complex will eventually run into edge cases like this. I think it's fair to have a table rule called "don't demand nonsense."

Wizards are going to demand a whole lot to cast a spell that might get them killed on a couple bad rolls, or may always demand more than money.

At least, that's my view of it. Maybe I'm wrong.

Yes, this is what I was describing in detail in my earlier post.

EDIT: Do you get to fight the demon if you lose the battle of wills? Like does the game actually go into combat mode? Because I had thought from skimming it that if you blew those rolls, it killed you with some kind of mental backlash. Having a team of guys with pikes and whatnot wouldn't help.

No, you're correct, a failed battle of wills happens psychically and you just drop dead if you fail.

But if you fail the DX roll to summon, the demon arrives hostile. And if the pentagram(s) you summoned him into (you did do that, hopefully) don't fail, then you do have a combat situation.


The devil is in the details, but as written the GM may need to think about those details harder than the players invent ways to make those details super safe, e.g.:

Originally Posted by hcobb

Note that by ITL p.143 the wizard has to fail by 10 points on two six die rolls in order to be dusted. Hence it's nowhere near as dangerous as being an Uber driver.

If we're lucky, SJ will verify, but GMs who don't want huge amounts of Lesser Wishes getting circulated might decide the first death check may not be dusted but is still "dead dead", not "not dead yet dead", so would require support from someone with Revival and apprentices, and would still drop the IQ 18 wizard by 5 attribute points.


On the question of summoned demons actually attacking physically so you ought to hire guards too, that's a good point, though it gets down to how pentagrams (or demons) work, and what can be done with them. For example, can you set up multiple concentric pentagrams to make the risk of anything breaking all of them so low that we could sell the guild meteor insurance?

A clever GM may rule that although there can be concentric pentagrams, a demon can only be summoned inside a single pentagram - i.e. if you summon a demon inside more than one pentagram, it doesn't appear - but that's a house rule.

Even a single pentagram though will require two auto fails in a row (1 in 466) to result in a rampaging demon (one for hostility, one to break the pentagram), assuming the team is careful enough to Aid up the summoner's DX to 15 (Pentagrams are broken on a failed 3/IQ roll, but Pentagram is an IQ 15 spell and auto-fail is 16+ so even if Aid would apply, it wouldn't help).

Other clever GM rulings / house rules could include:

* To Aid up the summoner's DX, you need to cast 5 Aid spells to cover all 10 turns of the summoning. The lowest summoner DX during those 10 turns is used to determine whether the demon is hostile or not.

* Lesser Wishes got from demons (not from XP) can't be used to re-roll either of these rolls.

I think though that even more effective would be to say that in a demon contest of IQ to gain a wish, that if the wizard auto-fails and the demon doesn't, or if the demon auto-succeeds and the wizard doesn't, that that counts as the wizard losing that contest. And that the first failure is "dead dead" so even revival loses 5 attributes. That would tend to keep the risks more real and significant, and discourage risking powerful wizards to churn out wishes unless it was really worth the risk for some significant need.

[RobW]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Then double for dangerous work to $92, no?

LOL

Any economists on here that can work out what the going rate for an IQ 18 wizard should really be?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by RobW

LOL

Any economists on here that can work out what the going rate for an IQ 18 wizard should really be?

The problem isn't really the wages. The problem is the flat doubling for dangerous work. A more realistic figure is something like 1,000 weeks (~20 years) wages, multiplied by multiplied by the odds of death or permanent injury. I'm not sure of the exact odds, but it will probably push the cost into the tens of thousands.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by RobW

LOL

Any economists on here that can work out what the going rate for an IQ 18 wizard should really be?

As I wrote originally, roleplay the IQ 18 wizard. Hmm, do I want to risk death and/or a demon rampaging in the guild hall so that someone else can get a lesser wish? What IS the actual risk? How much would make it worth it to me, if anything? What else could I do to earn that much? Would I rather be doing something else?

[Chris Goodwin]

The Revival potion is $65,000. The wizard can expect to be killed one time in 50, approximately, which means that besides already having that Revival potion bought, they charge a minimum of $1300 extra for each demon summoning.

The loss of 5 attribute points... let's assume they're already at 40 total, uhh...

Question: does that loss of 5 attribute points "reset" a 40 point character to a 35 point character? If we assume that it does, then it's 12,400 experience points to regain that. The exchange rate of XP to GP is 1 to 1, so that's 12,400 gp, and at 1 gp to 10 silver (i.e. $10) that's $124,000 to cover that. $2480 additional per summoning to cover the potential for attribute loss, added to the $1300 from above, is $3780, or 378 gold pieces.

If we don't assume that the loss of 5 attribute points resets the character point total, that's 396,800 gold pieces, or $3,968,000. Divided by 50 is $79,360 plus $1300, comes to $80,660 per summoning.

Arbitrarily double that to cover the possibility of non-revivable death -- wizardry is a dangerous profession, and wizards are notoriously unable to get life insurance...

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Chris Goodwin

The exchange rate of XP to GP is 1 to 1, so that's 12,400 gp, and at 1 gp to 10 silver (i.e. $10) that's $124,000 to cover that. $2480 additional per summoning to cover the potential for attribute loss, added to the $1300 from above, is $3780, or 378 gold pieces.

Er, if the GM allows XP to be cashed in for gold, it's a meta mechanic for PCs not something that accountants use. Also it does not work in reverse, letting you get XP by spending money.

[Chris Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Er, if the GM allows XP to be cashed in for gold, it's a meta mechanic for PCs not something that accountants use. Also it does not work in reverse, letting you get XP by spending money.

No, I'm aware of that, but call it the amount it would take to compensate the wizard for the loss of attribute points.