Movable type comes to D&Dland

[Grek]

A 1st level wizard has very few ways of making money that don't involve some sort of crime. But very few isn't the same as none:

Amanuensis - Remember how I said that there are spells to let someone quickly copy writing from book to book? This is one of those spells. As a first level wizard, it copies 2500 words per casting for a total of 10000 words a day.

Appraising Touch - A first level spell which gives you +10 to Appraise checks on up to 30 appraisals per casting as a first level wizard. Assuming you want to max out your appraisal skill and play Antique Roadshow Wizard, a Raven familiar gives you another +3 and an appropriate tool (magnifying glass or scales) gives you another +2, putting you five points above the highest listed DC for the Appraise skill, even if you have no Int bonus at all.

Comprehend Languages - A first level spell that allows you to understand speech and writing in other languages. Translates up to 2500 words per casting as a first level wizard. That's not a lot of words per day in an absolute sense, but there's a workaround. See Scholar's Touch. Particularly, archeologists would be willing to shell out for a definitive answer to what all of the hieroglyphics really mean.

Create Trap - Surprisingly, there is actually a legitimate use for this. First, the targeting on "where the trap goes" and "where the trigger goes" is separate. This means, among other things, that you can have the person triggering it be safe from the trap itself. Second, the Scything Blade option automatically resets itself and does 1d8 damage to anything it hits. The answer is obvious: use it to chop wood.

Detect Magic - If you're going to have a police force that can deal with wizards, you need a police force that can identify when and what magic is being cast. That makes a market for people who can reliably cast Detect Magic and successfully interpret the results.

Lesser Spider Form - A 1st level spell which lets you turn yourself into a fiendish, human-sized spider. In theory you're supposed to use this to be moderately creepy and drowish, but in practice you're going to use it to weave giant spider webs and sell the silk. As a 1st level wizard, you can produce a 30' cord (strong enough to support two medium sized creatures) or 12 pounds of fiendish spider silk in the form of a web around some sort of creature. That's probably not quite 27gp per casting all by itself (2.77 square yards of silk) as there's processing involved, but the rest is just weaving that you have all day to do.

Mage Hand - This cantrip can effectively be used as a sewing machine. Congratulations.

Mending - Repair one object of one pound or less. Allows for perfect "invisible" welds, broken wood and ceramics to be "invisibly rejoined to be as strong as new", both of which are reasonably marketable options all by themselves. But the most marketable application is actually in leather production. "A hole in a leather sack or a wineskin is completely healed over by mending." Yes, really. Get as big a sheet of leather as fits under the weight limit. Use scissors to cut a single huge hole out of the middle of it. Sell the leather you cut away or use it for crafting. Cast Mending on the original leather sheet, creating more leather for you to work with out of thin air. If you can get a hold of a dragon's hide, you are set for life.

Scholar's Touch - A first level spell which lets you touch a book in order to read through it. Gives you all the understanding you'd get from "a solid reading but not deep study". The trick here is to be a specialist diviner and to cast Comprehend Languages followed by Scholar's Touch. This lets you read a solid reading of book in any language, then spend the remaining 98 rounds left on your Comprehend Languages rereading the nine most tricky or complicated pages for greater understanding. Congratulations, you are now employable as a translator!

Silent Image - You are now first class special effects. Go work in a theatre.

Suspend Disease - A 1st level spell that prevents a disease from getting better or getting worse for 24 hours. You can probably find a way to market this to a hospital.

Unseen Servant - 1st level spell which gives you one hour of menial labour. There's probably better uses for your time and effort, but it at least has the benefit of being obvious in its application.

[Reynard]

nockermensch:
> That being said, seeing how much people in D&Dland are expected to pay for a casting of dancing lights or cure light wounds is a decent start at figuring how is life there.
So? How is life there?

Really good, because there are lots of customers for expensive spells being sold every day?

Or really bad, because spellcasters are forced to raise prices through the roof to pay for those weeks they sit on their asses without a single customer?

I'm genuinely curious what conclusion you came to.

[Kaelik]

nockermensch:
> That being said, seeing how much people in D&Dland are expected to pay for a casting of dancing lights or cure light wounds is a decent start at figuring how is life there.
So? How is life there?

Really good, because there are lots of customers for expensive spells being sold every day?

Or really bad, because spellcasters are forced to raise prices through the roof to pay for those weeks they sit on their asses without a single customer?

I'm genuinely curious what conclusion you came to.

You are confused, mostly because you are being a combative idiot.

He is saying that you can measure how good life is for the other goddam people by how much they have to pay. So for example, Joe the Crap Covered Farmer can afford across 40 goddam years of hard work, maybe a single casting of Cure Disease, so when his precious daughter gets sick, he probably blows all his savings and takes some loans from the wrong kind of people and ends up losing the farm and becoming a beggar to save her life.

[Reynard]

erik:
So, it boils down to: an army of first-level Wizards still has to get a real job and their abilities are mostly useless?


Basically, being Wizard 1 is like being in rock band. It may look cool and will give you skills you can impress people with, but most rock bands members do not go on to become filthy rich and have to make a living doing something else.

[erik]

No... an army works as soldiers. I have no idea why you tried to shift gears with that wording. An army of first level wizards will roflstomp mundane opposition.

Being a level 1 anything is mostly useless. At least a wizard can spend some of their time being superhuman on top of all that. I don't even know what the fuck you are going on about anymore. You are literally arguing that it's not better to be able to do everything someone else can do and also magic.

'Combative idiot' is way generous.

[Previn]

erik:
So, it boils down to: an army of first-level Wizards still has to get a real job and their abilities are mostly useless?


Basically, being Wizard 1 is like being in rock band. It may look cool and will give you skills you can impress people with, but most rock bands members do not go on to become filthy rich and have to make a living doing something else.

First off, a rock band member isn't a specific level. There is very clearly a difference between the 15 year olds playing in their parent's garage and Aerosmith. You know how we measure that in D&D? It's called experience and levels.

Now, converting D&D gold pieces to the CURRENT gold price is stupid. The price of gold fluctuates a lot. It is currently about 400$ to the GP, in 2002 is was about 100$ to the GP. But beyond that D&D prices are nonsensical, especially when compared to actual historical prices. The fact that you are trying to base anything off the D&D economy, which has been known to be massively stupid for at least a decade? Really?

Next off, you're missing the point that this is magic. Yes, our first level wizard with an int of less than 12 can only get a horse for 2 hours at a time, but it can do any work of a normal horse, and even better, it won't get sick, need care, food or shelter, which is a HUGE cost savings. Heck, do you know how the pony express worked?

Imagine you could magic up a car for 2 hours at a time. It never needed gas, or oil changes, or wiper fluid, and you didn't have to pay for parking, or garage space. Your insurance would go down because if you do wreak it? Who cares unless there was other damage/injuries because you can magic up a new one.

Employing a wizard as any sort of negotiations with charm person, an hour is more than enough time to save a hostage, secure a business venture, talk a suicidal person off a ledge, or a number of other things, all legal and very lucrative.

A floating disk can move liquids that would normally be difficult, cost prohibitive or impossible to move, such as acids, liquid nitrogen or molten steel. It also doesn't require any of the support that creating a mundane method of moving said things would including material, mechanical and chemical engineering.

Using Unseen Servants to deal with radioactive materials would be a huge boon. Oh noes! The unseen servant is glowing from all the radiation! *dismisses* But I mean, no one is going to pay a lot money for that, right?

Burning hand isn't a super useful thing to have for camping, or wilderness folks, like park rangers, search and rescue or people living in climates with cold enough weather that exposure is deadly. I can't see anyone wanting the ability to create fire instantly 100% reliably for any reason than burning people/animals and taking their stuff.

This will my first and last post to you, just so you know. I'm putting you on ignore.

[OgreBattle]

Does a country that can readily train 1st level wizards have a military advantage over one that doesn't? Considering that in the real world and D&D land alike many disputes are solved by violence, the fact that many 1st level spells are "only useful for crime" isn't all that bad.

[erik]

Does a country that can readily train 1st level wizards have a military advantage over one that doesn't? Considering that in the real world and D&D land alike many disputes are solved by violence, the fact that many 1st level spells are "only useful for crime" isn't all that bad.

"the fact that"

To answer your question. Yes.

[K]

Hiring a coach cab costs 3 cp a mile, so any pony express Wiz1 is basically saving the company somewhat less than 32 cp per casting of Mount (a horse can go 4 miles an hour according to the PHB) or half again as much if we assume they Hustle, and that's assuming retail rates.

This means that your average pony express Wiz1 might be saving the company up to a gold a day if we didn't have to assume that you still have to pay the rider. Since a messenger is paid 2 cp a mile, the amount of savings our pony express company is saving is somewhere in several coppers a day only if we assume the Wiz1 is not getting paid. Pay him, and suddenly the Wizard pony express is not making any more money than the regular pony express and probably less.

If the Wiz is the rider too, the savings go back up to several extra CP a day since fodder for a horse is 5 cp a day, so a Wiz rider is making the company 5 cp a day more than a kid off the street riding a company pony, plus the cost of replacing a 30 gp pony every few years.... so call it an even silver a day of extra profit for a Wiz1 pony express rider if we ignore that many horses have a working life of over a decade (if we did, it gets grim).

Overall, Mount-based pony express is looking pretty crap for several years of hard training considering that scribing that spell into your spellbook is an opportunity cost of 50 GP.

I could do this kind of breakdown for other spells, but I hope my point is obvious: bullshit spells equals bullshit money.

[Shady314]

bullshit spells equals bullshit money.

Your point is that the DnD "economy" (this is what we call the bullshit prices the designers randomly put next to items/services in books) is bullshit. Everyone knows that.

[K]

bullshit spells equals bullshit money.

Your point is that the DnD "economy" (this is what we call the bullshit prices the designers randomly put next to items/services in books) is bullshit. Everyone knows that.

Set the prices wherever you like because being as good as 2-3 peasants or one horse is always going to earn you as much as 2-3 peasants or one horse.

[Omegonthesane]

bullshit spells equals bullshit money.

Your point is that the DnD "economy" (this is what we call the bullshit prices the designers randomly put next to items/services in books) is bullshit. Everyone knows that.

Set the prices wherever you like because being as good as 2-3 peasants or one horse is always going to earn you as much as 2-3 peasants or one horse.

I'd have thought having a steed that never gets tired and never needs either the stables mucking out would be worth a significant premium.

Also, Wizard Pony Express can deliver to places that don't even fucking have stables, so there's that.

Not sure what you mean by "hustle", I'm guessing that's something along the lines of running until you no longer autopass the Con check, then one move action a round for 6 rounds, repeat until you catch fire. I will grant I'm surprised there are no mechanically reflected drawbacks to exhaustion which are suffered by real ponies and lacked by wizard ponies.

[tussock]

Some stuff I did a couple years back for 3e seems appropriate here.

Based on common inflation data for wages and prices in England (officially running back to 1300, I use late 14th century, post plague), with price lists around the place to check the numbers.

gp and sp and cp are measures of account, not coins. Actual coins vary in size and metal content and face value and name quite dramatically over time, but the ratio of silver to goods changed very little. Debased coins are debased, silver pennies from 1350 eventually become nearly identical silver groats in 1650, and bought you the exact same goods.

I've done an overhaul of my house rules on currency and prices. Here's some of the more useful results.

In modern terms 1gp is ~$50. People get paid very little and most things cost about the same.

The physical coins in-game in C14 D&D should be tiny miscellaneous copper coins (1cp), or small silver Pennies (~8cp) and gold Florins (~3.2gp). Copper coins are metropolitan and only used locally, silver is minted and used everywhere but doesn't travel well, while gold is mostly a large-scale trade coin. There are 1000cp to the pound, 200sp, and 400gp.

They're worth 10/20/400gp per pound to lug out of the dungeon.

Unskilled labour should be paid 2sp/day, master craftsmen should profit 3sp/day, and skilled merchants earn up to 5sp/day, so Craft and Profession skills profit about d20+mods in sp/week, and unskilled fits as a default. Grinding poverty for all.

Cut room and meal prices by a factor of 3 or 4 at the low end, unless it's festival time or you're renting a room at the hell-mouth like the PCs always are. Most weapons and armour are just slightly overpriced, about 150% of average (assuming high quality weapons, militia arms are 10 times less), so feel free to discount a little as appropriate. A few things like posh frocks are vastly too cheap. Chickens are half price.

Certain items are anachronistic, and priced to suit. Full plate and a few weapons are about 10x the price they settle to when common, along with some other gear. As a campaign note, very few people use the expensive stuff, because it doesn't really exist yet.

Traps and poisons are just as stupidly priced as you'd expect. Divide by 1000 or so.

Spellcasters make far too much money casting spells, there's only a handful of them can replace more than one or two days of unskilled labour, spell level x caster level in sp at the most, not 100x that. The gigantic price only makes sense if they almost never sell spells.

A king's ransom is about 300,000gp, or 750 pounds of gold.

Everything else was basically spot on, I guess those are the bits they didn't adjust for "game balance", AKA fucking over the Fighters. Under 10% inflation since I did that (2011), so close enough.

[Reynard]

erik:
> No... an army works as soldiers. I have no idea why you tried to shift gears with that wording. An army of first level wizards will roflstomp mundane opposition.
When did an "army of beggars" begun to imply military strength of impoverished?

Horde/millions/throngs of first level Wizards, if you prefer. The idea is that first level Wizard can earn lots of money IRL only if he is rare (very rare). Not "public education" rare.


> I don't even know what the fuck you are going on about anymore. You are literally arguing that it's not better to be able to do everything someone else can do and also magic.
I distinctly remember someone addressing his post to the people "who compared wizardry to engineering and physics degrees". Moreover I remember someone claiming that becoming Wizard would be "the whole fucking reason people came to the school in the first place". That phrasing kinda suggested that it was Wizard vs Engineer, not Wizard-Engineer vs Egnineer.

It must've been some mistake, since, apparently, no one supports the former comparison, concentrating on the latter. It's not like you would start moving goalposts once you are on the other page of the thread and actually hope no one would notice, right?


Of course, there was this quote I literally copied and responded to:
> You are off your nut if you think "Oh, nobody would do that. It's no better than X college degree."

But this is an obvious optical illusion, because you are no longer comparing college degrees to first level wizardry or mentioning magic academies.


tl:dr So, no one doubts that making everyone (or even "substantial part of population"; let's be specific - 10%) first level Wizard IRL is worse than giving them good education instead?



OgreBattle:
> Does a country that can readily train 1st level wizards have a military advantage over one that doesn't?
Let's put it that way: if you are talking about equally trained and equally armed forces of equal size, but only one side are Wizards (as erik does) - then there is an advantage.

But if expenses for training one Wizard 1 are comparable to training and arming 3 more soldiers, Wizards don't get to research uber-spells as 1st level spells, the other side knows about Wizards and has a few of their own, and the level of conflict involves modern weapons - then it's a safe bet to say we will have someone arguing that I'm deliberately misrepresenting awesomeness of Wizards.



tussock:
> The physical coins in-game in C14 D&D
You can also use ceramic chips and bits of wood as tokens shopkeepers issue on their own to the people who they are trading with, and those tokens could be used in their shop as money. That was a thing in medieval times, and in New World. And today. US troops overseas are getting paid in cardboard money, for example.

NB: If PCs could get paid in broken pottery and stones, you'd better warn them beforehand. I learned that this is very important.

[violence in the media]

Just fucking up posting. Don't mind me.

[erik]

*sigh*

The initial wizard vs. engineer chastising was because two folks said that because not everyone is an engineer or physicist, people would not choose to learn magic... as if these were somehow equivalent. My very objection was that they were not equivalent.

I stated level 1 spells would be an awesome college course that almost everyone would want to take. Unlike engineering or quantum mechanics. That was my opener the context of that post.

If I could choose a school that was a regular school vs. one that was a regular school and offered wizardry, I'd choose the latter. And if I couldn't get in there then I'd spend some time at the wizard academy to take that course, just as I went to community college to grab a couple courses back in the day. Sorry I wasn't clear enough for an idiot to follow, but when I started with a course, I was ending with a course as well.

My supposition was that since wizards can learn other professions and crafts that casting spells clearly wasn't that much of a drain on their learning of other things. Hence, treat it as a course. I assumed this but didn't lay it out clearly enough I suppose.


I am surprised that you take issue with magic being assumed as an addition to other professions since you assumed it in your first post in this thread. Your assumed magic to be ubiquitous and police are trained in magic on top of their regular job. I guess I don't need to apologize for not spelling out that magic doesn't require your entire focus because you assumed it in your first fucking post. Don't blame me for moving goal posts when you set them there in the first fucking place. Dishonest twat.

Your first rejoinder was to argue that in the presence of massive amounts of existing wizards eventually it will become less special... and that you must use gold piece costs converted to dollars at 2015 conversion rates to calculate modern costs. I overlooked that you already assumed masses of people became wizards (a different argument that shifts goal posts from that people would sign up for something novel and amazing) in light of the overwhelming dishonesty of the dollar conversion which ensorcelled my attention.

If someone is spending their entire education on wizardry then ideally they are not just learning level 1 spells but going on to learn higher level spells. I didn't state this in the opener because I was talking about taking a wizard course. You are the one who latched onto that learning wizardry begins and promptly ends at level 1 spells, not I.

I stated that level 1 wizardry is a perfectly reasonable choice as compared to level 1 whatever both on equivalent merits at that level and eeeeeeespecially because it leads to level 2 and onward.

If your argument is "if everyone is a wizard then its relative value goes down... but it is still mandatory since people need magic to deal with other magic users", then what the fuck? Congratulations I guess and welcome to the fold?

tl;dr You are a dishonest twat who blames me for shifting a goal post that you offered in your first writing.

[violence in the media]

Mending - Repair one object of one pound or less. Allows for perfect "invisible" welds, broken wood and ceramics to be "invisibly rejoined to be as strong as new", both of which are reasonably marketable options all by themselves. But the most marketable application is actually in leather production. "A hole in a leather sack or a wineskin is completely healed over by mending." Yes, really. Get as big a sheet of leather as fits under the weight limit. Use scissors to cut a single huge hole out of the middle of it. Sell the leather you cut away or use it for crafting. Cast Mending on the original leather sheet, creating more leather for you to work with out of thin air. If you can get a hold of a dragon's hide, you are set for life.

Would Mending fix a smartphone? What about an individual component of a larger device? Could you use it to repair a photomultiplier tube in PET machine? Could you use it to create defect-free wafers of various semiconductor material? Could I render any scintillator I wanted defect free? (I am relying on a fairly generous interpretation of "ceramic", at least with regards to it's probable intention in D&D.)

If so, those uses would be fantastically more valuable than anything involving a dead cow.

[erik]

Would Mending fix a smartphone? What about an individual component of a larger device? Could you use it to repair a photo-multiplier tube in PET machine? Could you use it to create defect-free wafers of various semiconductor material? (I am relying on a fairly generous interpretation of "ceramic", at least with regards to it's probable intention in D&D.)

If so, those uses would be fantastically more valuable than anything involving a dead cow.

Maybe? It only fixes one broken aspect, but often that's all that is wrong when machines break so long as a short doesn't melt other components or a broken part doesn't tear up the rest of an assembly.

I'd be happy to be able to mend things my kids break. Pop back dents in cars or cracks in windshields. Unfortunately mending cannot repair the magical nature of lucky boxers that get holes in them. =-(

[violence in the media]

Maybe? It only fixes one broken aspect, but often that's all that is wrong when machines break so long as a short doesn't melt other components or a broken part doesn't tear up the rest of an assembly.

I'd be happy to be able to mend things my kids break. Pop back dents in cars or cracks in windshields. Unfortunately mending cannot repair the magical nature of lucky boxers that get holes in them. =-(

There's nothing stopping you from laying multiple Mendings on an object to repair multiple breaks, right? I guess it all depends on whether, or how far, you have to disassemble something to get mending to work on it. The comment in the spell about welding an individual chain-link leads me to believe the spell is "smart" enough to distinguish individual parts separate from the whole (as there is no way most chains will fall under the 1 lb limit, taken as a whole).

So yeah, your 1st level wizard-(literally anything else they want to study in college) are going to have lucrative careers fixing high-tech devices and scribing scrolls of Mending in their downtimes.

[nockermensch]

Does a country that can readily train 1st level wizards have a military advantage over one that doesn't? Considering that in the real world and D&D land alike many disputes are solved by violence, the fact that many 1st level spells are "only useful for crime" isn't all that bad.

A company of level 1 wizards would probably be to an army more or less what a wizard is to a 1st level party: It can solve a problem per day, super-hard, and then needs to stand back and load their crossbows.

Enemy has an elite unity? (say, cavalry or ogres on full plate) Send the wizards in for a mass casting of Sleep, or mix them with your non-wizard companies with orders to cast Color Spray or Grease as the forces are about to clash and then retreat.

Heck, Magic Missile is a stupid spell, but 200d4+200 of unerring force damage will promptly implode anyone without Spell Resistance or a particular immunity to it.

[Reynard]

> Magic Missile
Fun fact: Welsh archers could rain sharp pointy sticks on enemies from 300-400 yards (900-1200 ft.).

[hyzmarca]

> Magic Missile
Fun fact: Welsh archers could rain sharp pointy sticks on enemies from 300-400 yards (900-1200 ft.).

While true, many of them miss, and also those arrows don't ignore armor.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Being a Wizard instead of a Warrior reduces your L1 HP by 4 of 8, but lets you cast Silent Image twice per day if you specialize in illusion.

So, you crouch down in your foxhole with three of your buddies under a Silent Image of plain ground in one 10ft cube, while the other 10ft cube covers a unit of archers with a tree or something.

Just keep concentrating.

EDIT: I made a thread for army tactics/strategy: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55880

[Orion]

Erik,

Where are you getting the idea that you could get level 1 spells from a college course? It takes 7 years, on average, to get to level 1 as a wizard. Level 1 spells are a Masters in spellcasting that comes after a BA in spell theory.

[virgil]

Where are you getting the idea that you could get level 1 spells from a college course? It takes 7 years, on average, to get to level 1 as a wizard. Level 1 spells are a Masters in spellcasting that comes after a BA in spell theory.

Or after you take your NEWTs, half-levels are probably after your OWLs