Economy wrecking spells?

[hal]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

There's an easier way.

Create Food can transform organic matter into tasty food. It costs 2 FP per casting. It is a Regular spell, which means it can transform a SM 0 item (say a 150-pound mass of weeds tied together) into food. If the average person eats 2 pounds of food a day, then one mage can easily feed himself and 74 other persons every day year round. If he casts it more than once a day, each extra casting feeds another 75 people. With Powerstones and Recover Energy, one mage can feed a truly amazing number of people.

And your typical medieval culture is built around food production. Farming, harvesting, and protection of same - it all revolves around food.

If Create Food doesn't warp the economy and culture, nothing will!

Minor correction. Create Food is a regular spell, but it specifies that it costs 2 fatigue to convert something into food equivalent to 1 meal. Which is why I made a point of specifying 2 lbs worth of food production from the use of hay or something similiar. 3 fatigue will turn inorganic material (presumably mud for example) - again, enough for one meal. Four fatigue will produce food out of thin air - truly creating something from nothing but for the mana/fatigue involved. Agreed however, that the fatigue costs of doing this will provide upwards of a given amount of fatigue. The "usual" mage, assuming an average man with magery 0, IQ 10, would know the spell at a skill level of 8 if only 1 point is invested, or would require a total of 12 character points if one has magery 0 (the more common individual with magery in any Yrth society). So, a HT 10, ST 10, IQ 10, and DX 10 mage, with Magery 0, casting a spell he has at "professional" level (ie skill 12), will result in 3 successes for every four attempts. Every casting will produce only one meal's worth, for a total fatigue cost of 2. Take into account that four attempts will cost a total of 7 fatigue for 3 meals, or perhaps 9 fatigue for 4 meals, and we have a total expenditure of 9 fatigue per 4 meals. Taking 10 minutes per hour (Mage doesn't have recover ST with Magery 0) to recover a fatigue, results in 90 minutes to recover fatigue for every 4 meals created. 8 Hours divided by 1.5 results in generally speaking, roughly 5 castings. Lets call it 6, as there is no reason the mage can't be a bit tired on his way home. That's 24 meals per day for that mage. Not BAD when you get right down to it. With a population of say, 10,000 people living in the town, and all the "rural" mages tend to stay in the countryside, we'd have a total of .02 x 10,000 mageborn who can do this. 200 potential candidates who can manage this trick, less 1/3rd for the children who have yet to mature, and you get about 132 give or take. Then, multiply that by 24 meals per mageborn per day, and you have a total of 3168 meals per day (assuming all have a Skill on average, of 12). This of course does not account for any spell backfires or crit successes (where one can get double effect or even triple effect, or cast the spell at half energy cost etc). With 3168 spell successes, we're looking at roughly 18 crit failures and about 18 crit successes (remember, 1 in four spell attempts will fail in the above model, so with 3168 successes, there were 25% more that were failures).

18 crit failures where results range from no real effect, to caster taking damage, to caster creating something that is the reverse of the intended effect (gotta wonder what the reverse of create food is here - destroy food?).

In any event, casting the spell as if it were to be cast on a size 0 item, is not the original wording of the spell.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by hal

18 crit failures where results range from no real effect, to caster taking damage, to caster creating something that is the reverse of the intended effect (gotta wonder what the reverse of create food is here - destroy food?).

Critical failure is where the food eats the caster. [music]"Attaaack of the Killer To-may-toes!!"[/music]

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by hal

That's 24 meals per day for that mage.

Which means that the mage can feed himself and 7 other people. 3 of these will probably be his wife and 2 children. If he has more relatives than that who need support it only gets worse.

Not earthshaking. Not even if everyone is a mage.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Critical failure is where the food eats the caster. [music]"Attaaack of the Killer To-may-toes!!"[/music]

Bad MDL. No more cookies for youuuuuu.

Got any ketsup? ;)

On second thought, you can have some cookies. I hadn't thought about that scene in ages! <smirk>

[hal]

While not specifically an "economy" wrecking spell in the sense the original poster had intended, I suspect that the WINDSTORM spell can be a real problem for the poor peasants who depend on harvesting grains for their livelihoods. Imagine some night, where a mage sneaks in to the grain fields, and casts the Windstorm spell at a sufficiently high level to knock the ripening grains off their stalks, without neccessarily destroying the plants outright.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Prospecting is not so big a part of the medieval economy that making it obsolete will make things bizarre.

No, but metal is. Or rather, isn't.

The worry isn't that putting some miners out of work will cause a major change. The worry is that having vast supplies of metal brings you one giant step closer to an industrial age. This is particularly true if the same mages that have been making it also know how to shape it into plates, tubes, machine parts, and other useful objects.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Xplo

No, but metal is. Or rather, isn't.

The worry isn't that putting some miners out of work will cause a major change. .

Ahem. I was talking about Seek Earth.

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Which means that the mage can feed himself and 7 other people. 3 of these will probably be his wife and 2 children. If he has more relatives than that who need support it only gets worse.

Not earthshaking. Not even if everyone is a mage.

That's one wife, two children, and four other people who suddenly don't need to work in the fields all day.

Congratulations, you've just reinvented the green revolution.

Say, maybe that mage's kids can study engineering with all that free time. I'm sure that his suddenly-wealthy family can afford tutors and such. I hear there's this guy with thousands of tons of iron and he's looking for someone to help him build some machines...

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Ahem. I was talking about Seek Earth.

That's odd. How did I miss that?

Er, in any case, I think Eric had it right: if you know where the metal is, mining becomes much more efficient and metal becomes both cheaper and less scarce. Saying "but there are monsters that could eat the miners!" is a handwave and actually suggests retarding technology further, not keeping it at medieval levels.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Xplo

That's odd. How did I miss that?

Er, in any case, I think Eric had it right: if you know where the metal is, mining becomes much more efficient and metal becomes both cheaper and less scarce. .

Probably a bit. But that does not in itself change society to the point of unrecognisability. I've got no problem with my game featuring people who are somewhat more prosperous than the real middle ages.