[Magic] Enchanter Wages

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Lend Energy requires Magery 1 or Empathy.

Luckily, a lend energy item does not require magery. And only costs 100 energy. And lets you cast the spell at the power of the item, rather than your personal skill. And can be handed around between multiple people.

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Luckily, a lend energy item does not require magery. And only costs 100 energy. And lets you cast the spell at the power of the item, rather than your personal skill. And can be handed around between multiple people.

True. But then there is no point to teaching the kids Lend Energy, is there? You have a(n) (potentially expensive) item to do it for them.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

True. But then there is no point to teaching the kids Lend Energy, is there? You have a(n) (potentially expensive) item to do it for them.

Expensive if you believe the silly theory that powerstones aren't used in enchanting. Otherwise, well, a 10 point one-college (enchantment) powerstone made with cheap materials costs $630 (multiplied by assumptions about mage wages, by Very Wealthy it becomes more economical to use expensive materials), lets you create a skill-16 item with a circle of 5 and a master, and will pay for itself in 63 castings (less than two years).

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem with enchantment rules in GURPS is that the vast majority of magic items are not worth the trouble to enchant. A fireball wand is a mage-only item that takes 800 mage-days to create. If a mage instead spends 100 days in study, he can just cast fireball (plus its prerequisites. And he might get power cost reduction from high skill). Why would anyone ever make that?

Something of my thought. For my own part, the way I solved the OP's issue, as well as yours, was to liberalize the amount of mage-days it took for Slow and Sure Enchantments by a factor of four, as well as have some other elements which served to speed things up.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Do you really believe that a blacksmith who has mastered a single IQ/Average skill well enough to make non-magical swords ought to have the same income as a Magery 2 enchanter who has learned at least ten IQ/Hard skills well enough to be able to assist in making magical ones?

(shrugs) Society decides, early and often, that certain skills earn you a great deal more money than others, and that this expertise doesn't necessarily reflect the difficulty of learning the skill. A fourth-line scrub in the National Hockey League will make more this year than I'd make in twenty years. A good friend of mine, plugging through college to be a medical technician, realized that she could make twice as much money a few blocks down the street doing nothing more cerebral than gyrating around a pole without clothing, and cheerfully went ahead and did so.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

(shrugs) Society decides, early and often, that certain skills earn you a great deal more money than others, and that this expertise doesn't necessarily reflect the difficulty of learning the skill. A fourth-line scrub in the National Hockey League will make more this year than I'd make in twenty years. A good friend of mine, plugging through college to be a medical technician, realized that she could make twice as much money a few blocks down the street doing nothing more cerebral than gyrating around a pole without clothing, and cheerfully went ahead and did so.

Society doesn't 'decide' this randomly. Skills that are in demand tend to yield high rewards and those that are difficult to learn, but no one is prepared to pay much to see or enjoy as services will not.

Under the rules and assumptions in GURPS Magic, enchanters can make items that outperform mundane substitutes, sometimes to such a great extent that the logical consequence would be a paradigm shift in a certain industry and greatly increased profits. The only way to imagine a setting where these things are not sought after and command high prices is if they are already plentiful, in which case the setting will be a post-scarcity high TL magitech world. And enchantment would still be more valuable on that world than smithing, for one thing because smiths would have been replaced by golems long ago.

[Jerander]

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but would the addition of the 10% reduction in learning time per level of Magery significantly affect any of these calculations?

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by Jerander

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, but would the addition of the 10% reduction in learning time per level of Magery significantly affect any of these calculations?

I do not believe so, no.

It would affect the cost of turning a generic magery-2 person into an enchanter, but not the amount of necessary income to warrant the job having a certain wealth-level descriptor (which is what my stuff in the original post was based on).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by DCB

Sure, but if mages with Halt Aging are that easy to find, there's every reason to expect the Wealthy merchant to be able to purchase it. .

They might not be that easy to find but joiining in projects with other mages increases your odds far more than wandering the streets crying "20 Gold Ducats! I have 20 gold ducats for any moge who will cast Halt Aging on me!".

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

They might not be that easy to find but joiining in projects with other mages increases your odds far more than wandering the streets crying "20 Gold Ducats! I have 20 gold ducats for any moge who will cast Halt Aging on me!".

Wealth level is, among other things, a measure of the connections a character has in his reference society. If assistant enchanters are Comfortable, the Wealthy merchant who sells the magical items they make is going to have a much better chance of having Halt Aging cast on him.

This is because having a professional perform a service for you is, in GURPS terms, simply Income in kind. Much like farmers receive at low TLs.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Icelander

This is because having a professional perform a service for you is, in GURPS terms, simply Income in kind. Much like farmers receive at low TLs.

Sir, I understand what you are saying but I am quite sure that you are wrong. It is my position that social networking and trading of favors is part or personal interaction and not dragooned into financial transactions.

However, I do realize that I will never convince you of my position. Please understand that you will not convince me of yours. I suggest we drop this sub-thread. It is not productive at all.