GURPS Magic - Creating gemstones

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by ehrbar

Sure, when Powerstones had to be gemstones and were limited in capacity by their number of carats, not their price, stopping mages from waving a hand to make incredibly huge gemstones would limit Powerstones some (the 2-energy-cost casting of Earth to Stone in 3e was for an object up to 20 lbs, or a bit over 45,000 carats; the 5 energy cost version was for an object up to a hex in size, which, at the density of diamond, is over 23 million carats).

.

It didn't even matter much back then. The main limiter of Powerstone size was (and really in 4e still is) the cumulative chance of the stone-shattering crit fail (and of course the 1 hour per pt investment of time in Q&D Enchantment rituals).

The old "Complete Powerstone" article figured that you'd go through 2 and 1/2 stones getting to 50 and 6 and 1/2 getting to 100. That breaks down to 6 days and 2 hours for the 50 pt stone and 12 days and 4 hours for the 100 pt one.

This of course assumes that all energy spent on Enchanting was regained from cheap Powerstones and with even just 1 pt stones you need 160 of them (which you store 6 feet apart) to fuel the daily Powerstone Enchantment.

Perhaps you consider 50 pt stones game-breaking but you'd still need 50 of those so you could have one to use every day (and of course 400 to fuel 50 pt Q&D rituals 8 times per day).

Even in the old days Powerstone abuse was limited by more than stone cost and 4e changed that less than may have been thought.