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Pathfinder magic item economics
Feb. 4th, 2018 01:23 amStarted thinking about the worldchanger spells. Endless food is definitely up there.
If I've understood the rules and exchange rates right
Sustaining Spoon, cost to buy 5400 gp, price to make 2700 gp
Craft Wondrous Item, create food and water
feeds up to four humans a day on highly nourishing complete nutrition gruel that tastes like warm wet cardboard.
crafting a wondrous item requires 1 day for each 1000 gp of the base price.
So it takes 3 days and 2700 gp of materials to feed four humans forever.
But 1 gp is one goat
a whole goat
a pound of wheat is only one copper
So it would take a while for turning 2700 goats worth into admittedly endless gruel to make economic sense.
Rations per day are 5 sp, or 1 gp per two days. That's 5400/4= 1350 days rations to get endless rations. Like three years eight months and change.
But then the spoons continue to exist.
So there's these things just lying around, making endless food.
Pathfinder material component requirements do make it more likely the average village priest isn't making stuff like this.
To make the same thing in GURPS needs Create Food from nothing, 400 per meal per day, a meal is a pound of normal food or half a pound of travellers rations, and a human needs three meals per day. 3*400*4= 4800 energy to create. Each is one mage day. So a mage could do the work solo and spend thirteen years making a bowl
that a pathfinder dude could make in 3 days
if you dont factor in the wildly varying times it takes to get all those gp of components.
and there we have the wildly varying assumptions about magic items in GURPS and Pathfinder.
I feel like Pathfinder is more likely to make big gifts to spellcasters to get a food bowl out of it, and GURPS is likely to go make something else.
Also while GURPS says feel free to ignore rules about starvation it does make it very expensive to eat magic if you're doing the maths. Pathfinder makes the infinite food item kind of cheapish in comparison.
I'm always interested how magic would change the world and anything that could change the food supply is a biggie. But plant spells that increase yield or speed growth would be way more useful than miracle food here, in either system.
If I've understood the rules and exchange rates right
Sustaining Spoon, cost to buy 5400 gp, price to make 2700 gp
Craft Wondrous Item, create food and water
feeds up to four humans a day on highly nourishing complete nutrition gruel that tastes like warm wet cardboard.
crafting a wondrous item requires 1 day for each 1000 gp of the base price.
So it takes 3 days and 2700 gp of materials to feed four humans forever.
But 1 gp is one goat
a whole goat
a pound of wheat is only one copper
So it would take a while for turning 2700 goats worth into admittedly endless gruel to make economic sense.
Rations per day are 5 sp, or 1 gp per two days. That's 5400/4= 1350 days rations to get endless rations. Like three years eight months and change.
But then the spoons continue to exist.
So there's these things just lying around, making endless food.
Pathfinder material component requirements do make it more likely the average village priest isn't making stuff like this.
To make the same thing in GURPS needs Create Food from nothing, 400 per meal per day, a meal is a pound of normal food or half a pound of travellers rations, and a human needs three meals per day. 3*400*4= 4800 energy to create. Each is one mage day. So a mage could do the work solo and spend thirteen years making a bowl
that a pathfinder dude could make in 3 days
if you dont factor in the wildly varying times it takes to get all those gp of components.
and there we have the wildly varying assumptions about magic items in GURPS and Pathfinder.
I feel like Pathfinder is more likely to make big gifts to spellcasters to get a food bowl out of it, and GURPS is likely to go make something else.
Also while GURPS says feel free to ignore rules about starvation it does make it very expensive to eat magic if you're doing the maths. Pathfinder makes the infinite food item kind of cheapish in comparison.
I'm always interested how magic would change the world and anything that could change the food supply is a biggie. But plant spells that increase yield or speed growth would be way more useful than miracle food here, in either system.