Powerstone Program

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Umm you do know you can only use 1 stone mage right?

One stone per mage, sure. However, if you note the $60 pricetag, there are six mages in the circle.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

One stone per mage, sure. However, if you note the $60 pricetag, there are six mages in the circle.

Except that can only do that ever 2 Months! Which means you 'price per energy' is WAY way off. you usein a prace that assume they can work most days of a month to make their monthly income, rather than a practice the reflect that they can only work a couple days ever few months to make it.

so instead of that ($1400 + 5x$700) / 22 to get $223 daily wage, you have $9800 daily way for any day you use power stones!

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Except that can only do that ever 2 Months! Which means you 'price per energy' is WAY way off. you usein a prace that assume they can work most days of a month to make their monthly income, rather than a practice the reflect that they can only work a couple days ever few months to make it.

so instead of that ($1400 + 5x$700) / 22 to get $223 daily wage, you have $9800 daily way for any day you use power stones!

Why are you arguing with me, when I merely attempted to clarify something you appeared to misunderstand about the post you replied to?

You claimed that they could only use one stone. I pointed out that one stone per mage, with six mages, means they would be using six stones.

My solution to the "only every two months" thing? Buy/make more stones.

If you've enough people making large purchases on that caliber, with the market price of the stones included in the price tag, you will quickly build up a stock of stones that you just rotate so you can do one big enchant like that every day ... and can either drop the price (as they don't have to buy the stones anymore, just the energy) or can keep the difference as pure profit.

Market forces (as I doubt this idea is unique) would drive the price down. The consequence being that the nice powerful enchants just became dirt cheap. Heh.

[roguebfl]

Firstly 'just make more' eats up resources, and opportunity cost which also drives up the price. And this is also ignoring the ridicules idea that Journeyman enchanters is an Average wealth job, and an Master is only comfortable.

And What market forces diving it down? Finding 6 highly educated Magi in a TL3 location, and thats just the basics to enchant, now couple that with even higher education to know the spell they want to enchant and the magery to pull it off... you really think there is going to be ANYONE remotely nearby (again remember TL3) to be consider in competition, making the same thing? IF in the highly unlikely sextuplet near enough, there almost garrented to be making something else that the originals can't and via versa.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

And What market forces diving it down? Finding 6 highly educated Magi in a TL3 location, and thats just the basics to enchant, now couple that with even higher education to know the spell they want to enchant and the magery to pull it off... you really think there is going to be ANYONE remotely nearby (again remember TL3) to be consider in competition, making the same thing? IF in the highly unlikely sextuplet near enough, there almost garrented to be making something else that the originals can't and via versa.

The cheap spells for long-distance travel, communication, and divination allow considerable progress toward continentalization of the magical economy. The high talent and academic standards and fairly long project lengths for enchantment also ensure that most candidates are fairly easy to train with a relatively small investment in time and energy. There are also acquirable magical perks that can further enhance the process.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

The cheap spells for long-distance travel, communication, and divination allow considerable progress toward continentalization of the magical economy. The high talent and academic standards and fairly long project lengths for enchantment also ensure that most candidates are fairly easy to train with a relatively small investment in time and energy. There are also acquirable magical perks that can further enhance the process.

Umm those 'cheep travel' is for mages only... not for the people who would be buy the goods to 'continentalization of the magical economy' the people who have the cheep travel, don't NEED enchnaters

Even if you give TL3 Morern academic pool, you still can only pull form High magery pool! So you need a need a Doctor of Enchantment with 5 grade students who are all 'All star' athletes of the magical community, selling to the local market.

And before you start talking about magi who cant hack it as enchanters use those cheep travel... that cheep travel has next to no payload capacity! they not going to be halling goods to cause the expansing market pool

[munin]

Originally Posted by Anthony

...This is ignoring powerstones on cheap materials...

Starting with no powerstones, a six-mage circle with Restore Energy-15 can make six Enchantment-Only 4-point cheap powerstones (48 energy per casting) in 44 work-hours (casting and resting, including the chances of quirks/critical failures). They can then use those (over the course of six months for recharging between castings, or less if they want to take the time to make more sets) to make six general-purpose 7-point cheap powerstones (80 energy per casting) using only 88 work-hours. Total opportunity cost (the money they could have made making sellable items) is 132 hours × $33/day / 8 hours/day = $545. They can make that back and more by doing a single 100-energy enchantment in an hour and charging the regular $3,300 that it would cost going to another mage circle (why not? they might even charge more because they can do it as a "rush" job). They can only do this once per week (the time it takes 7-point powerstones to recharge), but it's still an advantage and well-worth the investment. If 100-energy enchantment prove to be popular, they might build up multiple sets to allow more frequent 100-energy quick and dirty enchantments.

Once all mage circles are doing this, prices will come down quickly. I'd guess that circles will specialize in different amounts of enchantments -- new firms will handle the under-60 energy enchantments at the regular $1/energy; circles that have been around a year or more will also handle the 61-100 energy range, at a slight markup (amortizing $545 over 20 uses seems reasonable, bringing prices up to about $1.30/energy for enchantments in this range); and older circles will have built up sets of larger-capacity powerstones to handle 150/200/250 energy enchantments at greater markups (though still at a huge discount compared to slow and sure enchantment).

[Sunrunners_Fire]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Firstly 'just make more' eats up resources, and opportunity cost which also drives up the price.

You need six mages (10 energy) and six 4-point stones in order to get the 80 Energy needed to cast Powerstone on whatever garden rock you happened to pick up for that day's enchantment. Throw in a High Mana spot to recharge the stones and they can do it every two days in between the normal 60 Energy quick-n-dirty enchants scheduled for that day. (High Mana spots are easily created, either by sacred architecture, ley line spells or whatnot. Presuming there aren't gobs of the things occurring naturally.)

So $1,920 for the gemstones to make the original six 4-point stones at the valuable material energy cost. Oh my, no one could possibly afford that ... Especially not mages who could be doing so many other things with their time to make more money ...

And What market forces diving it down? Finding 6 highly educated Magi in a TL3 location, and thats just the basics to enchant, now couple that with even higher education to know the spell they want to enchant and the magery to pull it off... you really think there is going to be ANYONE remotely nearby (again remember TL3) to be consider in competition, making the same thing? IF in the highly unlikely sextuplet near enough, there almost garrented to be making something else that the originals can't and via versa.

Highly educated? 12~17 skill points in a variety of spells is now considered highly educated? Really? A bit less than a year's worth of study ... even going by the 200 hours per Skill Point ratio? *dies laughing* Call me when it at least takes four years of study. We'll do lunch.

In a city population in the near to multiple millions? I expect a few tens of thousands just like them. If not more.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Except that can only do that ever 2 Months!

6 stones of 7 energy each. You can do it once per week. And your mages have free time to do other stuff. Btw, there's more complete analysis here (though I think I assumed that quirked powerstones were simply discarded, which isn't exactly correct. If you incorporate quirked powerstones, powerstones wind up being cheaper, but you also have additional labor cost for micromanaging quirked powerstones, which is somewhat difficult to accurately price).

[ClayDowling]

Originally Posted by Alden_Loveshade

And if that made you cry...when I ran a computer lab at an elementary school, we had no budget to hire someone to repair them. So I repaired one computer with masking tape and another with a paper clip. They were still working three years later. :-P

Now, if you'd been a pro, you'd have used duct tape instead of masking tape. I played that game for a while, but didn't particularly care for it.