[Thaumatology] Setting magic item prices to make economic sense

[scc]

Originally Posted by cvannrederode

I would just like to point out that there's a section in Magic 4E about just this topic. It's titled Economics and Enchantment, and it starts at page 21.

It goes into all the gory details of how the $1 per point for magic items up to 60 points, and then $33 per point after that was figured out.

It also refuses to account for Enchanters deciding buy extra FP or use Powerstones to increase the amount of energy they have at hand. Since Magic even more sources of energy have become aviable that break the assumptions made about Enchanting even more.

Now I use a variant rule for Quick and Dirty Enchanting because I mis-remembered the actual rules and my rate of Enchantment is 10 energy per hour per Mage. I also have some story irons in the fire that use the GURPS rules as the behind the scenes mechanics, so all workings below are real world USD, NOT GURPS dollars.

The survivors of a DF-like world are forced to flee to our world circa 2019. After a week of snooping around the members of the Mages Guild get together and elect a new Guild Master and set a new price per point of Energy used in casting spells at $15 per point. Why? Because in their snooping around they found out that's where the minimum wage per hour and Enchanting normally use the Raise Cone of Power spell and you need to hire people for that, preferably dancers.

Note that the Guild has no interest in keeping prices low as demand for magic items always outstrips supply and that this also sets the pricing of regular spell casting.

Note too that the Mages also expect to be paid no top of the calculated energy cost, and for a rank beginner with only Recover Energy-15 who gets 6 energy an hour they expect $90 an hour, whilst those with Recover Energy-25 plus an ER who recover 60 an hour expect $900 an hour, Witches and Wizardress who can recover 3 and 4 times as much (variant schemas to explain striperic costumes) expect 3 and 4 times as much and then some have unusual abilities, access to power boosting artifacts, or simply aburdly high skill (like Enchanting-50) that cost even more to hire, meaning they can expect wages of like $5,000 an hour and they might be no more then 20 years old and have a life expectancy measured in millennia.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by hal

400 non-stop days rules as written: 400-365 is 35. 35/7 = 5.

There are 52 weeks in a year, nearest time then, in weeks for 400 days are 52+5 or 57 weeks. 57 x 5 days per work week or 57 x 6 days per work week depends on whether you as GM want the enchanter to be able take off 2 days per week or 1 day per week as a CHANGE to the rule that says you may not take any time off from enchanting without penalty.

This permits the enchanter to work a more normal work schedule as compared with non magical jobs.

Yes, it changes the required "mandays" of slow and sure, and it no longer imposes a penalty against "resuming" an enchantment after either one day of break, or if the worlds building GM prefers, 2 days of a break. The GM can impose the rule for breaks in the enchanting process to apply for breaks of 2 days (assuming the GM wants their world to permit no more than a 24 hour beak, or for breaks of 3 days (assuming the GM as a world builder, wants to permit up to 48 hours of permitted breaks without penalty).

Either way as suggested above, the final enchantment time is still 57 weeks. The suggested new way still takes as long as far as slow and sure will as the original rules. It WILL impact on the quick and dirty enchantment time, but that too will reduce the overall cost of the enchanment.

How many people in real life work 7 days a week nonstop who aren't farmers tending livestock? Again, my suggestion was a variant of the rules as written, nothing more, nothing less.

WRONG
The Slow and Sure Enchanting rules, as currently written, DO NOT give you weekends off. The effect on team morale of taking weekends off would be insane, given that times already stretch into the years.

Now I have a spreadsheet at hand for size 60 teams doing S&S and modifying them for size 6 teams +1/+2/+3 Swords would take the following time, in days: 42/167/834, subtract 4 and you get the number of WEEKS it would take to make them at your proposed rate. And +6 Swords are a thing, expect at the rate you want they'd take over 1,200 years to make.

Basically if Enchanters can't get weekends off because if they did S&S Enchanting wouldn't be practicle

[hal]

Originally Posted by scc

It also refuses to account for Enchanters deciding buy extra FP or use Powerstones to increase the amount of energy they have at hand. Since Magic even more sources of energy have become aviable that break the assumptions made about Enchanting even more.

Now I use a variant rule for Quick and Dirty Enchanting because I mis-remembered the actual rules and my rate of Enchantment is 10 energy per hour per Mage. I also have some story irons in the fire that use the GURPS rules as the behind the scenes mechanics, so all workings below are real world USD, NOT GURPS dollars.

The survivors of a DF-like world are forced to flee to our world circa 2019. After a week of snooping around the members of the Mages Guild get together and elect a new Guild Master and set a new price per point of Energy used in casting spells at $15 per point. Why? Because in their snooping around they found out that's where the minimum wage per hour and Enchanting normally use the Raise Cone of Power spell and you need to hire people for that, preferably dancers.

Note that the Guild has no interest in keeping prices low as demand for magic items always outstrips supply and that this also sets the pricing of regular spell casting.

Note too that the Mages also expect to be paid no top of the calculated energy cost, and for a rank beginner with only Recover Energy-15 who gets 6 energy an hour they expect $90 an hour, whilst those with Recover Energy-25 plus an ER who recover 60 an hour expect $900 an hour, Witches and Wizardress who can recover 3 and 4 times as much (variant schemas to explain striperic costumes) expect 3 and 4 times as much and then some have unusual abilities, access to power boosting artifacts, or simply aburdly high skill (like Enchanting-50) that cost even more to hire, meaning they can expect wages of like $5,000 an hour and they might be no more then 20 years old and have a life expectancy measured in millennia.

EDIT:



WRONG
The Slow and Sure Enchanting rules, as currently written, DO NOT give you weekends off. The effect on team morale of taking weekends off would be insane, given that times already stretch into the years.

Now I have a spreadsheet at hand for size 60 teams doing S&S and modifying them for size 6 teams +1/+2/+3 Swords would take the following time, in days: 42/167/834, subtract 4 and you get the number of WEEKS it would take to make them at your proposed rate. And +6 Swords are a thing, expect at the rate you want they'd take over 1,200 years to make.

Basically if Enchanters can't get weekends off because if they did S&S Enchanting wouldn't be practicle

I will try to explain one more time and then drop it.

My SUGGESTION is to allow up to 1 day off without it affecting enchanting, or up to two days off without it affecting enchanting as a HOUSERULE.

The IDEA here is to give the enchanter the ability to have a more normal life overall. In a Christian Medieval society, having to avoid work on Sundays was the rule. In a non-Christian Society, that likely doesn't matter. When I suggested calculating how many weeks it takes to create a magic item per the NORMAL rules, and then adjusting the process for where it takes the same number of weeks to make the magic item with the house rule as it took with the original rules - it has the added benefit of LOWERING the energy required for quick and dirty. By allowing the enchanter to leave off enchanting for 1 day without it affecting things, or 2 days without it affecting things - is strictly a HOUSERULE.

So really, CAPITALIZED shouting of WRONG?

Bear in mind the following:

In my campaign universes, magery is not permitted to improve. It is VERY difficult to find sufficient numbers of Magery 2 or 3 mageborn to engage in enchanting. If you were to search in the General Role Playing forum area, you will find a section "Mageborn are like coins". Once the mageborn studies a spell, the time spent learning that spell is expended. Once you try to get a given type of mage, chances are good, that you've got that mage doing engineering stuff with shape earth, earth to stone, etc.

I also took the time to create random attributes via a program written in VB net to generate both the Magery levels of a mageborn as well as their attributes as adults - along with expected duration of their life, and how old they currently are.

The idea here was to use the HARN MANOR rules for running a Fief/Village and then letting people work freely with each other or just in isolation to see just what their mageborn were capable of.

The program I devised for generating magery levels had two components - the more traditional Magery 1 through 3, and the Magery 0 through 3. I even set the program up to allow me to play with higher levels of magery. Each level of Magery was such that for every 1 Magery 3 mageborn, you will have 10 magery 2 mageborn, 100 magery 1 mageborn, and 1000 Magery 0 mageborn.

As with ALL world building - what the GM desires to emulate depends upon their vision. If 2% of the population are mageborn, then 2% are mageborn. If 20% are mageborn, then that's what it will be.

In any event - the rules for magic item prices are such that it would be HARD for any one given mage to actively earn a living.

Why?

To earn money, they have to exchange their labor for coin or their product for coin. Can a struggling income individual afford to purchase a magic item? No. Can a normal wealth level individual buy a magic item with their discretionary income (aka - Income per month less cost of living = discretionary income). No - they can not - not unless the magic item in question is a relatively low energy item. The only likely prospective customers for mageborn's crafts will be those who have comfortable wealth or higher. In other words, the upper 2% of the wealthy people can afford to purchase the magic items in question.

Now, some people may say "they can afford to buy things if they take a loan" but such "credit" tends to be non-existant in early society. The point to take away from all of this is a simple one...

Figure out who can afford to buy any alchemical potion or any magic item with discretionary spending and that will be the pool of customers.

On that note, I'll disengage form this thread - largely because I didn't expect something like this:

WRONG

That's just uncouth.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by scc

WRONG

<Moderator>
A lot more politely please!
</Moderator>

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

). Maybe the item existing at all save as a unique creation of a mad elf makes no sense because 'who would want to pay for that?!' (id est it's just not worth it in comparison to other things that k?

Ina setting like Yrth, eccentric elves are probably a major source of magic items, because they have long enough lifespans that spending a few years making a cool gizmo is a relatively small time investment. Why is there a magic item that lets you talk to hedgehogs? Some elf wanted to ask them a lot of questions. What if you want a magic item that does something specific? Try to get some elf interested in your project.

Originally Posted by Anthony

I've seen plenty of settings where cheap magical items are plausible, they're just not rare magic settings, and they either aren't low tech (I mean, they might be TL 3+4 or something, but not TL 3) or the magic items have very limited functions.

There's tons of fantasy settings where magic items are plausibly way more common than on Yrth, which is the context in which the GURPS enchantment rules were created, and which are pretty harsh by the standards of settings where mortals can deliberately make magic items at all. In many settings, specialists can enchant items related to their specialty without having to be experts in ten other fields too, and often it's considerably faster and less punishing of intermittent work. Also some high-magic settings have more potential magic users than the Yrth default, sometimes a lot more, up to settings like Steven Brust's Dragaera where literally everyone in the Empire has Magery.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Ina setting like Yrth, eccentric elves are probably a major source of magic items, because they have long enough lifespans that spending a few years making a cool gizmo is a relatively small time investment. Why is there a magic item that lets you talk to hedgehogs? Some elf wanted to ask them a lot of questions. What if you want a magic item that does something specific? Try to get some elf interested in your project.

And make sure that your heirs will continue your work, because by the time the elf gets round to making the item it's probably one of your heirs that'll be using it.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

In many settings, specialists can enchant items related to their specialty without having to be experts in ten other fields too, and often it's considerably faster and less punishing of intermittent work. Also some high-magic settings have more potential magic users than the Yrth default, sometimes a lot more, up to settings like Steven Brust's Dragaera where literally everyone in the Empire has Magery.

I am reminded of Elder Scrolls, where the gameplay process of making magic items is killing a suitable creature, trapping the soul in a specially prepared gem and then using the soul to imbue an item with the desired effect. Lore wise there are several hints and references to the final step being more labour intensive than the gameplay insinuates, and even if most people have the magical potential to do it, it's not something everyone is skilled enough to do (or even have the opportunity to learn).

In Morrowind the NPC enchanters charge so much for their services that most people seem to prefer to either make do with what they already have or go without.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by scc

Basically if Enchanters can't get weekends off because if they did S&S Enchanting wouldn't be practicle

Enchanters are obviously not subject to union work rules and operate on very different assumptions about what constitutes a proper work-life balance. They operate on work schedules better suited to energy drink- and modafinil-driven Silicon Valley tech startup coders or medieval craftsmen.

If you accept that it takes x amount of energy delivered at a steady rate over exactly 56 hours per 7 days and ignore exact work schedules, it becomes possible for enchanters to have one or more days off each week without breaking the basic assumptions for enchantments. Mages have the choice of a ~8 hour x 7 day grind, a ~10 hour x 6 day 19th century-style workday, or a ~14 hour x 4 day "modern flex time + commute" or "medieval summer + holidays" workday.*

*TMI Regarding Historical Work Schedules

Spoiler:  

The concepts of "The Weekend," the "8-Hour Workday," and "Overtime Pay" are late 20th century notions, brought about by decades of labor union efforts. Before the 1930s, such notions would have been considered radical by most people, perhaps dangerously so.

For pre-modern people, who lived without clocks or decent artificial lighting, an honest day's work ran from sunrise to sundown, but with lots of breaks - often involving food and alcohol - to recover from sessions of heavy physical labor. For medieval workers, Sundays were a mandatory day of rest and the Church or the local craft guilds might also forbid work on certain holidays.

This meant that, during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, work hours were much shorter during European winters and much longer in the summer, but the workday was much more relaxed (not to say, downright soused) and the number of nominal work hours each year probably worked out to about ~3,500 (averaging 12-hour days, minus Sundays and 14 days of holidays).

The notion of a "commuting to work" was also alien to most medieval people. Farmers and other rural folk might walk for several hours to get to far distant fields, but crafters either lived over their workshops or within short walking distance, effectively allowing most tradesmen to "work from home." Wives and children might also perform errands or support duties for the business and its workers, meaning that family members saw each other throughout the day.

These notions persisted until the late 19th century, although the Reformation did away with the observance of all but the most major Christian holidays. Most workers still lived within easy walking distance of their workplace. Once factories dominated the economy, factory workers began to agitate first for 12-hour, and then 10-hour days, in addition to other demands. The notion of taking Saturdays and all but the highest Christian holidays off would have just too wild, except maybe for the most wild-eyed IWW anarchists. The 40-hour work week was a product of the Great Depression, adopted in part to create more jobs and to forestall more extreme labor demands.

The idea of spending hours traveling to work and living far distant from your place of work is also very modern, dating to the early 20th century when interurban railroads were common. It became commonplace after WW2 once everyone had cars and suburbs developed. Before the 20th century the idea of separating housing from all but the dirtiest industries, much less having entire communities with just housing, would have been considered ridiculous.