Powerstones and Intrinsic Value

[William]

Personally, I prefer artificial Powerstones, with the value of the underlying material being a measure not of rarity but of labor involved in making them: a common stone intricately carved with a complex labyrinth, a minutely detailed porcelain egg, the original of a unique poem commissioned from a master poet, handwritten and laminated.

[Whitewings]

Perhaps the simplest solution would be to replace "intrinsic value" with "list price at time of purchase." I say "list price" because many game settings include haggling, and penalizing mages for being good bargainers, or rewarding them for being bad ones, irritates me. "At time of purchase" also covers the question of depreciation and appreciation (antiques, for example).

[fifiste]

^
I think list price before purchase/haggling/looting/robbery would be more precise, if you mean what I think you mean. (In which case I do agree with you)You know indicating that the fact that you haggled off 50% or did a "five finger discount" doesn't meant that now the power-stone will be 50% less potent or totally useless.

For the intrinsic value to have any meaning then it must mean what the playbook/GM says that this item has. You could maybe better visualize it like this - the intrinsic value should not be a dollar value per se, it is just a numerical designation to show how much power you can store into this given gem.
Fore example gemstone type P can store 50 PP, according to formula 10^2*P+$40*P =V, it's intrinsic value is 27,000, but you can of course buy it for higher price, haggle it down or even find/steal/rob one for no cash at all. Take it more like it has power metric V of 27,000 units :D, that in the game world a very common price for such stone is 27,000 is just really convenient :D.

Otherwise things get funny. I remember a good Order of The Stick comic where an apprentice brags that he haggled material components down from 1000$ to 750$, and his master gets angry and says they need exactly 1000$ worth of material components and he should go back to shop. :D

It also made me think on the following business -
"What you took it from the dragons hoard, so it's worthless.
Now give it to me and I can sell it to you for let's say 5000$ that's a pretty good power stone material then.
You know actually I can sell you some pebbles at pretty much any price you want :P"

[ericthered]

I think what is really being said is that the materials should be setting adjusted to cost that much. If gems the size of your fist are common, well, they shouldn't make good powerstones. If metal is extremely rare, why not use it? At some point we should remember that G:magic is supposed to be generic.

[fifiste]

Well or only some of those huge gems are capable of holding large amounts of power.
These thaumatologically exceptional gems are pricy because powers tones are such a great tool.
The current demand and supply works out somehow in a way that you can determine a gemstone value by its thaumatological potency 10^2*P+40*P = V where P is the amount of power a gem can hold and V is its value in $.

There might be gems and items that are quite valuable for other people for other reasons but the main price driver for gemstones suitable for power stones is well ... their suitability for power stones.

It would make a bit more (economical )sense compared to the situation where whatever is valued in this society suddenly gets suitable for power-stone.

The latter makes a certain deal of magical sense, and kind of meshes with the views of economics and value with lot of older cultures and their magic.

But it could lead quite a lot of confusion soon as it makes economy really "magical" :D. What about all the weirdness what happens when the society does not deem gems or colorful feathers really cool anymore*, will they still hold power?
What if you travel and the neighboring tribe don't give two **** about your fancy feathers? Or is it just important that you do find them precious, but then can the groups munchkin just deem random pebbles and pine-cones to be horribly important to him at a whim? And so on and on.

It looks much more sensible to me that the power capable items are precious because they are power capable, not vice versa. And much easier to adjudicate.

*Makes me think off all clap your hands if you believe type of magic stories. Like killing Hogfather by zapping childrens belief in him etc. so it can lead to some cool stories but heh just too messy for a regular game where you wouldn't put it as a highlight or major story arc in itself etc.

[Whitewings]

Originally Posted by fifiste

But it could lead quite a lot of confusion soon as it makes economy really "magical" :D. What about all the weirdness what happens when the society does not deem gems or colorful feathers really cool anymore*, will they still hold power?

Certainly. It just means that you can no longer create new powerstones from such things. That's why I specified "at time of purchase," though I should have said "time of acquisition," since a magician with appropriate skills could find or make valuable things himself. Heck, a *really* smart magician might simply go out and buy a pile of diamond dust, diamond chips, and small, low quality diamonds, then use Shape Earth to weld the dust into a single large high-quality diamond. I'd allow it, though the Shape Earth roll would be a penalty since it's not really the best for fine manipulation.

[wellspring]

Maybe instead of looking at this as an exercise in economics, treat it as an exercise in psychology. Gaining power requires sacrifice, in the form of acquiring an object that is costly in time, effort, risk, or money, and dedicating it to the magical enchantment process. So value as perceived (or experienced) by the acquirer is what matters. A player who pops over to Transhuman and gets a shipping container filled with perfect 40ct rubies for a hundred bucks, then goes to Merlin to get them enchanted might find that the rubies are still "worth" a hundred bucks in some cosmic magical sense. Even if the players get someone else to enchant it, magic's fickle ways mean that from a karmic perspective, they're still treated as cheap. The material itself isn't important, it's the effort to acquire that is. That gives the GM license to over-rule any attempts to game the system.

So to evaluate the effectiveness of a sacrifice, a GM could determine it situationally based on relative difficulty for that character. A rich wizard sacrificing a chest of gold might get less of an effect than an impoverished wizard giving up his last copper coin. That has its own unfortunate implications-- most notably that players don't want to gain money or political power because in magical terms the "cost" to cast inflates away your temporal gains. Maybe not so unfortunate, in some settings...

(Prevailing value in the setting as measured by sourcebook price lists is perfectly valid, especially in "consensual reality" settings. Value in that case is determined by a grand consensus of the society's prevailing beliefs. Convenient, easy to run, and can justify all kinds of settings... but with some major moral and philosophical problems if your players over-think it.)

[Anaraxes]

This is making the question too complicated; the rule isn't that subtle.

The original meaning of "intrinsic" was just the value of the item as an ordinary item, not considering its magical properties. And the reason was simply to justify the common fictional notion that magical items are commonly intrinsically valuable bits of jewelry, or items with superior craftsmanship, carving, runes, etc, made from rare materials like ivory and phoenix feathers, rather than random rocks and twigs.

If that doesn't suit your setting, just do away with the requirement.

If you want to assign items power capacities on some other basis, that will work, too. And it's a reasonable conclusion that high-capacity items will become valued in a magical economy. That might be _why_ phoenix feathers are valuable, along with simple scarcity and/or beauty. But in this case you wouldn't simply make capacity equal to value, due to the circularity. In this case, you'll want to assign higher capacities to the materials you want magic items to usually be made from.

And that brings us right back to point one.

[Kromm]

The rule isn't subtle and has nothing to do with economics. It's saying that to be enchanted as a Powerstone of a given size, an article has to have a minimum value locked in by the GM on the meta-game level. If a would-be Powerstone-enchanting PC hasn't paid for such an item or taken other risks attendant to acquiring a thing of value, then the player cannot use the rules for enchanting it. It's really that simple. If the meta-game aspects of this bother you, then consider that magic is essentially a way for wizards to have very limited access to meta-game information and a modicum of influence over meta-game events . . . go re-read the Bless or Link spell. Apparently, magic knows the GM's intent (which isn't surprising, given that all facts revealed by Divination come directly from the GM, too).