[Thaumatology] Setting magic item prices to make economic sense

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by ehrbar

So, what's the market-clearing price? Frankly, it's usually going to be about $0, since that's the likely place where the demand (nobody wants one) and supply (nobody has ever made one) curves actually cross.

No, it's not $0; while not super-useful, make it cheap enough and someone would buy it. If there's zero trade in a particular product (because at a cost equal to its production cost demand is zero) I'm not sure it has a defined cost.

In any case, that's a different class of problem. There's two general types of problems with enchantment in GURPS:

• RAW pricing doesn't actually make a lot of sense -- powerstones and other sources of transient power would absolutely be used for quick and dirty enchantment (combinations of powerstones and paut beat S&S up to around 1,000 energy, at which point the fact that everyone involved is working a ten hour day becomes problematic) -- and $33 per mage-day is nonsense. Related to that, RAW pricing creates a weird gap in pricing, as it's impossible to have an item that costs between $100 and $3333.
• Energy costs seem to have been pretty much made up by throwing darts at a board rather pricing on either balance or some systematic method.

At the moment, I suspect the easiest option is to use meta-tech as your enchantment system.