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beccaelizabethIt's kind of frustrating trying to find out the prices of things in GURPS dollars. I keep finding people trying to convert back and forth to US dollars, because of the symbol, despite it saying clearly that this is not the case. The basic set says $1 equates roughly with the amount of local currency needed to buy a loaf of bread.
GURPS Fantasy says "In a realistic historical economy, a pound of silver is worth $1,000. A typical system of coinage uses silver pennies, smaller than an American dime and worth $4, and brass or copper farthings, worth $1. [...] Gold averages 20 times as valuable as silver, but most people never see gold coins."
GURPS Low Tech says silver costs $1,000 per pound and gold is $7,000 to $20,000, varying wildly over time. It does not actually say how much copper is per pound. Which would actually be handy. A real world British farthing weighed maybe 5g, 0.01 lb says google. That would make 1lb be worth $100, 100 coins to the lb. Tidy.
$100 = 1 lb copper
$1000 = 1 lb silver
$10000 = 1 lb gold at the cheap end, or maybe £20000.
So with coins of the same weight you could get 10 copper to the silver and 10 silver to the gold
or 1 loaf for 1 copper, 10 for 1 silver, 100 for 1 gold.
A gold coin would be about as much use as a £100 note. Which isn't much use, if everyone is paying in pound coins.
I'm not sure of my maths at all. I've been staring at numbers long enough they have ceased to make sense.
A lot of the rules say 'copper or bronze' as if they cost much of a muchness, like the rules for jewelry. But you can't go from a ring being £3 and weighing 0.1 lb to copper costing £30 per pound, because other jewelry costs different per weight. But I think all of them come out much cheaper than 1 lb being £100. Like, a copper circlet for your head costs $7 and weighs 0.5 lb, so that's only $14 per lb. But piercings come out super expensive, $2 for 0.01 lb, or $200 per lb. So whatever the cost of materials is, it's not much, and work is more significant to price differences.
Doesn't help me figure out what $1 in copper weighs though.
Probably a lot more than 1/1000 of a lb.
Add Magic and things get difficult. Because there's nothing logical about the rules saying you can't use Earth to Stone at double cost to make metals and use it to make gold; some versions do however suggest using GM fiat to make such use off limits. You can certainly use it to make copper, bronze, or iron though, they're in the spell description. Which, on a 1 yard cube, is a lot of copper.
Essential Earth can make metal into orichalcum. Orichalcum objects cost 30 times as much as standard metal objects of the same weight. Also they have lots of useful properties. But that means you can turn your farthing into £30, if and only if you can get someone to recognise the worth of it. It's also worth three times as much as silver. But still substantially less than gold, even at the cheapest.
Would an altar made of orichalcum be common in Earth temples?
The economics of gold in fantasy worlds... there's a section in Fantasy on Alchemy, which explains how labour and raw materials would change cost until it basically equalled as much gold as they could make in that time. As a new invention it would change economies, but as an old one, it would be... a bit DnD. "In some fantasy settings, precious metal seems much more common. Kings hand out purses filled with gold, and treasures contain vast amounts of it – a dragon may use his hoard as a bed. In such a world, the purchasing
power of gold and silver is much lower. The $ represents an ounce of silver, and a one-ounce gold piece is worth $20."
In that case, if the copper to silver ratio holds true, one ounce of orichalcum = $3. Or three loaves of bread.
Magic is only economically useful in this way if it is rare. If everyone is at it, then the value of rare metals just goes down.
Gemstones cannot be created by Earth to Stone. Can they be shaped by Shape Earth, or does it just mess them around until they're ordinary stone again? If gemstones can be magically created, then again, the value goes down. If they can't then you just have to make metal and use it to buy gemstones.
Earth to Stone
Turns an item of earth or clay into hard stone (but not gemstone), or turns an item of stone into a simple
metal like bronze or iron. For double energy cost, turns an item of earth or clay into metal.
Duration: Permanent.
Cost: 3 per cubic yard (minimum 3).
1 sec to cast.
That cost in cubic yards? That's what makes it spectacular in metal.
http://www.aqua-calc.com/page/density-table/substance/copper has many units of measurement
1 cubic yard is 15,085.72 lb , which in this estimate is $1,508,572.
Start with Essential Earth and you get orichalcum, which is worth 30 times as much, or roughly $45,257,160.
Even if you're using the abundant metals Fantasy version, that's still over $4 million.
Welcome to wealth.
If you can find anyone to trade it to.
A wizard using their magic to make money is just not going to have much difficulty doing so.
Of course a wizard doesn't have much need for wealth, since magic can take care of all their food, clothes and shelter needs; except when they need to buy spell components.
I previously counted the cost of gemstones required to make a 300 point powerstone, suitable for powering one single Resurrection spell. I thought it was implausible because each attempt would require $912,000 worth of materials.
Any object can potentially be used. Well if you make 1 cubic yard of metal, you have your raw powerstone.
It isn't portable, but it's going to take 300 days to recharge anyway, so why worry about portability? Also you only need to make it be six feet away from your previous attempt in order for it to charge at full speed. So I'm imagining columns of copper, with precisely six feet in a circle all around, measured from their outer edge, marked out in the stone beneath them (because you can make the stone twice as easily as metal so why not just make a pretty courtyard while you're at it), with the circles making patterns where the edges touch. Or the easy way, square pillars with a seven foot grid marked out, so the pillar can be up to a foot wide without intruding on the next pillar's space. A foot wide and three yards tall, two yards between them, over and over and over, making a temple precinct.
And on each pillar someone would get to work casting powerstone. So, some pillars would end up really quirky, and many (about 53) would stop before reaching full capacity, but they only need one pillar to get as high as 300 before they can use it to cast Resurrection. And with all these different pillars around...
A critical failure destroys the materials used for the powerstone. You would get a lot of those. Create Earth for another pillar, then Earth to Stone to make it copper, and then start again enchanting.
It would take a lot of enchanting. But you could still make several attempts a year. Especially since existing pillars could be used as power sources to make more pillars. Spells cast through a six foot wizard's staff have no distance penalties. You'd just lean on one pillar and casually poke the next.
And it would be very, very tedious, but that's why I keep saying temple, because a random wizard alone sitting around doing this would be one odd person, but a whole temple full of people would be a religion.
Also, you would gain skill in the Enchant spell just by doing them all day every day. It's a routine job, so you'd need 800 hours of 8 hour days, but that means you'd get 3 skill points a year, easy. You'd swiftly be a very skilled enchanter indeed.
Granted, getting any Enchanters at all in the first place involves them learning a wide variety of much more interesting spells, so I don't know why they'd ever sit around making their building into powerstones, but may as well ask why some people go and pray or meditate all day.
Also, having calculated all that, there's still another loophole: Any object may be used to produce a Powerstone. However, it is easier to enchant a Powerstone using an item with intrinsic value. The cost to cast
Powerstone is quadrupled if the item being enchanted has a value of less than $10*P2 + $40*P, where P is the target capacity of the Powerstone. This is one reason gemstones are popular; a valuable stone is compact and durable. That would mean each casting would require 80 energy; too much for a single mage, unless they've been in the habit of attempting to cast epic huge powerstones. They could then use the huge ones to enchant small, portable, relatively worthless raw materials. Which could be handy, especially if they want to make a dedicated powerstone for a magic item.
The Meta-spell Charge Powerstone could hurry up the recharge on that 300 point giant stone, but if you charge it for 3 points then it won't start recharging for 3 days, because it's like an advance on natural charge. So you could charge it by people casting that spell, like donating to a common pot of fatigue for one giant use later, but it's inefficient (3 points to cast 1 point of charge) and the powerstone wouldn't charge itself until it caught up. Which makes no sense except for game balance reasons.
Too much of this makes no sense. Why would earth to metal make the same size of item, rather than the same weight? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a spell that rearranges dirt to be compressed rock, or extracts particular elements to make metals? Magic doesn't work by chemistry rules though. And the limit on No Gemstones or what you want to argue a simple metal is, that's just because your characters can learn the one spell and then sit there making money forever, without paying the character points for the income. But you can assume that would be boring. But really, once you have magic, economics goes boom.
Spells are mostly for adventuring purposes though, so some of the simpler to cast spells would make the biggest changes in the world, but they aren't much interest if you're trying to stop monsters. Though I feel you'd get significantly less bandits etc if you could hand out a cornucopia each. Star Trek replicator economics, in robes.
Okay, bored now.
GURPS Fantasy says "In a realistic historical economy, a pound of silver is worth $1,000. A typical system of coinage uses silver pennies, smaller than an American dime and worth $4, and brass or copper farthings, worth $1. [...] Gold averages 20 times as valuable as silver, but most people never see gold coins."
GURPS Low Tech says silver costs $1,000 per pound and gold is $7,000 to $20,000, varying wildly over time. It does not actually say how much copper is per pound. Which would actually be handy. A real world British farthing weighed maybe 5g, 0.01 lb says google. That would make 1lb be worth $100, 100 coins to the lb. Tidy.
$100 = 1 lb copper
$1000 = 1 lb silver
$10000 = 1 lb gold at the cheap end, or maybe £20000.
So with coins of the same weight you could get 10 copper to the silver and 10 silver to the gold
or 1 loaf for 1 copper, 10 for 1 silver, 100 for 1 gold.
A gold coin would be about as much use as a £100 note. Which isn't much use, if everyone is paying in pound coins.
I'm not sure of my maths at all. I've been staring at numbers long enough they have ceased to make sense.
A lot of the rules say 'copper or bronze' as if they cost much of a muchness, like the rules for jewelry. But you can't go from a ring being £3 and weighing 0.1 lb to copper costing £30 per pound, because other jewelry costs different per weight. But I think all of them come out much cheaper than 1 lb being £100. Like, a copper circlet for your head costs $7 and weighs 0.5 lb, so that's only $14 per lb. But piercings come out super expensive, $2 for 0.01 lb, or $200 per lb. So whatever the cost of materials is, it's not much, and work is more significant to price differences.
Doesn't help me figure out what $1 in copper weighs though.
Probably a lot more than 1/1000 of a lb.
Add Magic and things get difficult. Because there's nothing logical about the rules saying you can't use Earth to Stone at double cost to make metals and use it to make gold; some versions do however suggest using GM fiat to make such use off limits. You can certainly use it to make copper, bronze, or iron though, they're in the spell description. Which, on a 1 yard cube, is a lot of copper.
Essential Earth can make metal into orichalcum. Orichalcum objects cost 30 times as much as standard metal objects of the same weight. Also they have lots of useful properties. But that means you can turn your farthing into £30, if and only if you can get someone to recognise the worth of it. It's also worth three times as much as silver. But still substantially less than gold, even at the cheapest.
Would an altar made of orichalcum be common in Earth temples?
The economics of gold in fantasy worlds... there's a section in Fantasy on Alchemy, which explains how labour and raw materials would change cost until it basically equalled as much gold as they could make in that time. As a new invention it would change economies, but as an old one, it would be... a bit DnD. "In some fantasy settings, precious metal seems much more common. Kings hand out purses filled with gold, and treasures contain vast amounts of it – a dragon may use his hoard as a bed. In such a world, the purchasing
power of gold and silver is much lower. The $ represents an ounce of silver, and a one-ounce gold piece is worth $20."
In that case, if the copper to silver ratio holds true, one ounce of orichalcum = $3. Or three loaves of bread.
Magic is only economically useful in this way if it is rare. If everyone is at it, then the value of rare metals just goes down.
Gemstones cannot be created by Earth to Stone. Can they be shaped by Shape Earth, or does it just mess them around until they're ordinary stone again? If gemstones can be magically created, then again, the value goes down. If they can't then you just have to make metal and use it to buy gemstones.
Earth to Stone
Turns an item of earth or clay into hard stone (but not gemstone), or turns an item of stone into a simple
metal like bronze or iron. For double energy cost, turns an item of earth or clay into metal.
Duration: Permanent.
Cost: 3 per cubic yard (minimum 3).
1 sec to cast.
That cost in cubic yards? That's what makes it spectacular in metal.
http://www.aqua-calc.com/page/density-table/substance/copper has many units of measurement
1 cubic yard is 15,085.72 lb , which in this estimate is $1,508,572.
Start with Essential Earth and you get orichalcum, which is worth 30 times as much, or roughly $45,257,160.
Even if you're using the abundant metals Fantasy version, that's still over $4 million.
Welcome to wealth.
If you can find anyone to trade it to.
A wizard using their magic to make money is just not going to have much difficulty doing so.
Of course a wizard doesn't have much need for wealth, since magic can take care of all their food, clothes and shelter needs; except when they need to buy spell components.
I previously counted the cost of gemstones required to make a 300 point powerstone, suitable for powering one single Resurrection spell. I thought it was implausible because each attempt would require $912,000 worth of materials.
Any object can potentially be used. Well if you make 1 cubic yard of metal, you have your raw powerstone.
It isn't portable, but it's going to take 300 days to recharge anyway, so why worry about portability? Also you only need to make it be six feet away from your previous attempt in order for it to charge at full speed. So I'm imagining columns of copper, with precisely six feet in a circle all around, measured from their outer edge, marked out in the stone beneath them (because you can make the stone twice as easily as metal so why not just make a pretty courtyard while you're at it), with the circles making patterns where the edges touch. Or the easy way, square pillars with a seven foot grid marked out, so the pillar can be up to a foot wide without intruding on the next pillar's space. A foot wide and three yards tall, two yards between them, over and over and over, making a temple precinct.
And on each pillar someone would get to work casting powerstone. So, some pillars would end up really quirky, and many (about 53) would stop before reaching full capacity, but they only need one pillar to get as high as 300 before they can use it to cast Resurrection. And with all these different pillars around...
A critical failure destroys the materials used for the powerstone. You would get a lot of those. Create Earth for another pillar, then Earth to Stone to make it copper, and then start again enchanting.
It would take a lot of enchanting. But you could still make several attempts a year. Especially since existing pillars could be used as power sources to make more pillars. Spells cast through a six foot wizard's staff have no distance penalties. You'd just lean on one pillar and casually poke the next.
And it would be very, very tedious, but that's why I keep saying temple, because a random wizard alone sitting around doing this would be one odd person, but a whole temple full of people would be a religion.
Also, you would gain skill in the Enchant spell just by doing them all day every day. It's a routine job, so you'd need 800 hours of 8 hour days, but that means you'd get 3 skill points a year, easy. You'd swiftly be a very skilled enchanter indeed.
Granted, getting any Enchanters at all in the first place involves them learning a wide variety of much more interesting spells, so I don't know why they'd ever sit around making their building into powerstones, but may as well ask why some people go and pray or meditate all day.
Also, having calculated all that, there's still another loophole: Any object may be used to produce a Powerstone. However, it is easier to enchant a Powerstone using an item with intrinsic value. The cost to cast
Powerstone is quadrupled if the item being enchanted has a value of less than $10*P2 + $40*P, where P is the target capacity of the Powerstone. This is one reason gemstones are popular; a valuable stone is compact and durable. That would mean each casting would require 80 energy; too much for a single mage, unless they've been in the habit of attempting to cast epic huge powerstones. They could then use the huge ones to enchant small, portable, relatively worthless raw materials. Which could be handy, especially if they want to make a dedicated powerstone for a magic item.
The Meta-spell Charge Powerstone could hurry up the recharge on that 300 point giant stone, but if you charge it for 3 points then it won't start recharging for 3 days, because it's like an advance on natural charge. So you could charge it by people casting that spell, like donating to a common pot of fatigue for one giant use later, but it's inefficient (3 points to cast 1 point of charge) and the powerstone wouldn't charge itself until it caught up. Which makes no sense except for game balance reasons.
Too much of this makes no sense. Why would earth to metal make the same size of item, rather than the same weight? Wouldn't it make more sense to have a spell that rearranges dirt to be compressed rock, or extracts particular elements to make metals? Magic doesn't work by chemistry rules though. And the limit on No Gemstones or what you want to argue a simple metal is, that's just because your characters can learn the one spell and then sit there making money forever, without paying the character points for the income. But you can assume that would be boring. But really, once you have magic, economics goes boom.
Spells are mostly for adventuring purposes though, so some of the simpler to cast spells would make the biggest changes in the world, but they aren't much interest if you're trying to stop monsters. Though I feel you'd get significantly less bandits etc if you could hand out a cornucopia each. Star Trek replicator economics, in robes.
Okay, bored now.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-23 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-24 05:06 am (UTC)rules for jewelry
if I read them right
a plain copper ring costs $3 and weighs 0.1 pounds
making it gold depends on local gold price by weight
to get gold weight from copper
multiply jewelry weight by 2.1
I think.
$20K*0.21= $4200
$7K*0.21= $1470
Probably.
There's like two pages of rules.
That seems like it has a zero in a wrong place.
I mean 0.1lb is real heavy for a ring.
google says that's 45g and a wedding band in gold weighs... huh, 4g to 15g in the first three answers, that's a range.
a ring maker had a table
https://debebians.com/pages/ring-weight
and another had a calcultor
https://www.jewelrypoint.com/size-width-to-weight-conversion-for-wedding-bands/
as with most things GURPS their units are not my units so conversion happens.
But weight to gold price can happen from there.
and then to get GURPS price you add the gold materials price to the calculated item and decoration price from the last couple pages.
so like $3 unless heavy or decorated.
... and get a number very different from real world costs now, but, low tech. *big shrugs*
er, that is probably more number than you want in a reply but I thought I had that answer in a table and then all that.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-24 05:11 am (UTC)Thanks!!
no subject
Date: 2018-09-24 05:08 am (UTC)what kind of people the rules imply is my favourite bit.