3 - A Reading Rainbow
Discord leered at the larger of the two alicorns before him. "And who is this intriguing slice of chaos?"
Luminace bristled at the calling. "I am no servitor of chaos, Unspoken." She tilted her head a bit, realization coming to her. "Are you mocking me, or is this another echo?"
Twilight cleared her throat softly. "This is Discord. Discord, Princess Luminace, a guest."
Discord rolled a hand as he bowed low. "Oh, of course. Hello, Princess. Now, what was that about unspoken things and mocking?"
Luminace's curiosity grew stronger than her worry and she approached Discord to circle him. "Fascinating. Are you a god?"
Discord seemed surprised by the question, but quickly tried to smooth it over. "Of a sort, yes. I am the high master of chaos!" He brought up his mismatched hands and lightning arced between them with the scent of chocolate and a light spattering of pebbles, sugar, and confetti spraying free. "And you, I presume, are another alicorn princess?"
Luminace raised a brow. "Are there a lot of those in this world?"
Discord began counting on a hand, another finger sprouting as he got to six. "Six, if we include you."
Luminace shook her head. "You should not. If dear Twilight is the barometer of such a thing, I am above that. I may be of unified blood, but my power does not stem from it, rather the opposite. In my power, I claimed unification. Do you understand?"
Discord cocked a brow. "Are you gonna take that, Twilie?"
Twilight bristled instantly. "You will not call me that!" She gestured at Luminace widely. "She's a goddess, a for real goddess."
Discord's eyes traveled up and down Luminace. "I don't see the big deal."
Luminace nodded. "As you please. I have little reason to demonstrate myself for you. You do not feel like one that would take interest."
Discord hiked a brow. "Says who?"
"I have." Luminace turned to Twilight. "As we were speaking of--"
"Well, I don't need to stay here to be insulted!" Discord scowled a moment before he threw open a door that wasn't there a moment before angrily, stepped through, and slammed it shut.
Twilight let out a little sigh. "Sorry, he can be like that."
"He is not the Unspoken," agreed Luminace. "We are old friends. He has... an underappreciated task, and one he bears, forcing a smile and laced with a touch of madness. I do not envy him, but I respect him deeply." She leaned in towards Twilight. "Without the Unspoken, there may be no ponies on Everglow."
Twilight blinked at the mental image. "But... how?"
Luminace held up a hoof. "We could dive deep into Everglow history, but I would rather hear about your world. Tell me, do you study alone? Do you have friends who join you in the pleasure of learning?"
Before Twilight could answer, the sound of a window being opened came from above.
"Hey, Twi!" Rainbow Dash flew in from above with a big grin. "You finish the newest book yet?!" She saw Luminace and came to a halt, hovering in the air. "Oh, uh, sorry... Princess?"
Luminace smiled gently. "It would seem unified blood is a mark of royalty in this world."
"This world?" Rainbow hiked a brow, then pieced together the different proportions of their guest and clopped her fore hooves. "You're from Everglow! Sweet! I didn't think we'd get any visitors from there that weren't angry things."
Twilight gestured up at her friend. "This is Rainbow Dash, a good friend."
Luminace looked happy to see Rainbow. "And she is a partner in your studies, how lovely. Come forward, Miss Dash. Speak to me of the studies you share with Miss Sparkle."
Rainbow did flutter in closer, but looked a bit confused. "Studies? Oh! Yeah, they aren't studies, per se." She wobbled a hoof, then looked around a quick moment. She spied the abandoned Daring Do book and rushed for it. "Here!"
Even as Twilight colored, Luminace approached the book. Her horn glowed gently as she hefted it up and flipped through it as if looking for pictures. "A fascinating tale of adventure. Worthy of a more relaxed reading perhaps. It does not contain academic secrets. I feel there are falsehoods hidden among truths. Deciphering the two would take time."
Twilight tilted her head at the goddess. "Did you just read that?"
"Yes."
Twilight and Rainbow both shook their heads. Rainbow lifted her shoulders. "That's pretty crazy, but since you did read it, how did you like the part where--"
Twilight bopped her friend on the head lightly. "I haven't finished it!"
Luminace seemed amused at the two. "For some, the revealing of knowledge before they have earned it is quite a discomfort. We will have to speak another time on this book. It is a pleasure to meet any pony that would call Twilight a friend, even more so a fellow in study."
Still laced with a bit of red, Twilight shrank a bit. "But we're not... studying, exactly. That book is for fun."
Luminace glanced at the book held in her magic, then back at Twilight. "Do you read avidly?"
The two nodded.
"Do you not consider the actions the protagonists take?"
Rainbow looked to Twilight for help. She sighed. "The protagonist is the star."
"Oh! Yeah, totally."
Luminace smiled. "Then you are learning. It may not be the deepest of truths in every tome, but you are learning. Rainbow, please continue at Twilight's side. You two make an adorable reading pair."
Rainbow leaned in on Twilight. "Is she calling us marefriends or something?"
Twilight let out a loud anxious laugh. "Ha ha! No... She..."
Luminace glanced between them. "My apologies if I implied too heavily. Friendship is a facet of the universe I celebrate deeply. I would be quite happy if you remained friends forever. Romance... that I have less experience with. If it comes, I hope it does so gently and enhances that friendship. If it does not, no harm is done."
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No kidding Rainbow isn't Twilight's marefriend; she's Applejack's marefriend, as per how the previous story ended.
One has to wonder if she's going to think to ask Luminace for help with how AJ is still so...Lawful Neutral, after her contact with Severance. But then, Luminace's hooves might be tied, since that would constitute taking direct action against the workings of another god.
7711172 That's a subtle thing. AJ doesn't have her alignment as a badge on her chest.
she approaced - she approached
Of a sorts - Of a sort -or- Of a sorts
*****
It's intriguing to see Discord put off his game so quickly, I hope Twilight was paying attention. That could be a useful tactic in the future.
Let me guess, the next chapter title is called I Can Go Anywhere?
7711186 Two typos fixed, and they were having a buy two, get one free! Also fixed.
Luminace tests the limits.
Destroy the typos!
I think the door was not there a moment before but that could just be me.
And.... We need Discord to go to Everglow, wonder how that world would take him?
Shipping alert
I dont need to stay here and be insulted. Im going down the computer shop for some decent insults.
7711172 shame, I'm more of a TwiDasher. RaryDasher too. AppleDash as a third option. Also, spoilers! I haven't read that one yet!
Wait are the rest of the chapters going to reference Reading Rainbow also? Now I have the theme for Reading Rainbow in my head. Hopefully you can reveal what happened to Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon in this story as Silver Spoon was claimed by Luminace.
7711385 I disagree. I think that it's better to leave DT and SS's fate uncertain, at least until they can be the subject of their own tale. Other than the teaser we got in Roots of Stone, it's best to let them be, I think.
7711265 Fix'd!
7711398
Nope they where in the canceled story, Tarnished Silver and Clouded Diamonds. It unfortunately was not that popular and it got cancelled.
7711461 That's what I was referring to when I said "leaving their fate uncertain." I meant "their own tale" as in "another story, besides that one, to reveal what happened to them." And yes, Roots of Stone does give a small hint in that regard:
Something happened and Fast Shadow abandoned them.
EDIT: Also, if I recall correctly, David didn't abandon that fic because of reader perception, but because Crusaders of the Lost Mark came out, with its changes to Diamond Tiara's character.
[youtube=ywfnDJfXsLA]
(we really need an emoticon for Shipping Princess)
7716077 Look at it another way. You're playing an adventurer. Do they care about a spell that bakes a perfect cake?
I'm saying the magic is probably there, just unsung in the lives of people struggling to explore ancient tombs or save the world.
7716118 I don't disagree with the underlying logic, it's just that this then follows the law of unintended consequences. The more we presume that the presence of so much combat magic means that there must be a similar amount of magic with non-combat applications, the more everyday life changes. That's because all of the background assumptions that go along with everyday life are then not going to follow the quasi-medieval (or perhaps early Renaissance) lifestyle that's already been established, since now the myriad defaults that we held to be true are no longer so.
Saying that Everglow has household magic that's been developed anywhere near as much as combat magic would likely change a lot of how the setting looks.
7716160 Nobody claimed equal, simply present.
Besides, wizards are rare. How many are willing to spend that much time honing their arts just to make perfect cakes?
How does Princess Luminace know that there are falsehoods in a Daring Do book? We know that Daring Do is real after all and that those books describe her adventures in stopping Ahuizotl in becoming powerfull enough to take over the world or to destroy it.
7716203 There are truths, but some facts are distorted, even if just to excite the reader more.
7716177 To be fair, I said "similar" rather than "equal," but I think that's a reasonable presumption. The vast majority of the population in almost any society isn't going to be that of an adventurer, or anything with a similar martial bent. For most people, regardless of character class, their main focus is going to be on their day-to-day lives and the various social and economic factors therein, particularly with regard to their jobs. As such, they're going to have a strong set of incentives to encourage them to push their craft to its most profitable end, presuming that it doesn't cost them too much to do so.
Whoa, whoa, what is this now? Even if we leave aside that Pathfinder doesn't have community generation charts the way that 3.5 did (and that's something I personally think was a bad decision, but there it is), the issue isn't one of wizards per se but any and all classes with spellcasting ability. And that's the majority of the classes that are out there.
If we presume that not every spellcaster is going to be interested with maximizing their personal power or uncovering eldritch mysteries - and that's an entirely reasonable presumption, I believe, given that d20 magic is so prolific (via the sheer number of spellcasting classes), has comparatively easy requirements (e.g. have a spellcasting ability modifier of 10 + spell level in order to cast spells of that level), and has no real drawbacks to cast (some other magic systems require skill rolls with penalties for failure, etc. But not d20 magic), which I think can credibly be said to allow for people who treat spellcasting as just another job...hence the reason why "spellcasting" is on the equipment list with standardized prices for spells cast, to say nothing of magic items being sold in shops - then there are going to be some who treat their craft as just another way to make money.
In fact, this doesn't even need to be limited to spellcasters per se, if we take the Master Craftsman feat into account in terms of magic item creation. That raises the character level required in order to make magic items, but only to about level 7 or so.
Take, for example, the 0-level spell create water. Water is a basic necessity for living, and so you can't really have a town or settlement without a source of it. It's one of the first things that needs to be taken into account when a siege is conducted (something Iliana would know quite well, I suspect). If you have control of the local water supply, then you have a steady income guaranteed. By contrast, if there's a threat to your control over the local water supply, then your livelihood is going to be seriously threatened.
As a 0-level spell, any cleric (or druid or oracle or inquisitor or shaman) can cast it at will, and even paladins and adepts can cast it with some regularity. According to the equipment tables, a casting of it only costs 5 gp (caster level 1 x spell level 1/2 x 10 gp). And yet creating a continual-use/use-activated magic item that does nothing but cast create water at caster level 1 is going to have a market price only 1,000 gp (caster level 1 x spell level 1/2 x 2,000 gp) - none of those notes about altering the cost based on the spell's duration apply to a spell with a duration of "instantaneous," you'll notice - which means that it costs only 500 gp to create. So leaving aside the base price of whatever material item you link the spell to, that's only going to require a day to make. There's virtually no chance of failure either, since the skill check involved will be (DC 5 + caster level (1)), and if we make the entirely reasonable presumption that you have the maximum ranks in the skills involved (either Spellcraft or the relevant Craft skill) and that they're class skills, then it's pretty well impossible to fail those, since you need to be at least 3rd level to take Craft Wondrous Items. That's true even if you have to get their via Master Craftsman and raise the DC by 5 for not knowing the spell in question (since you'd need 5 ranks to take Master Craftsman, it grants a +2 skill bonus, and you have +3 due to them probably being class skills).
So you can make an item that creates water continually, which will pay for itself after the first one hundred uses (since at that point the 500 gp to create will be less expensive than 101+ actual castings of the spell), which means that even if people only need water created once per day it will become cost-effective in just over three months...far less than that, since most communities will want more than just a single casting.
So why doesn't every community then have something like a fountain of endless water? All it does is make 2 gallons of water per round, but that's still a huge amount (10 rounds per minute x 1,440 minutes per day = 28,800 gallons per day). It won't flood anything either, since unconsumed water disappears after one day. This would be central to life in arid communities, to the point where a lot of laws about access are going to surround them. That's not even taking into account water being central to irrigation efforts for the local crops (since only "unconsumed" water disappears after a day, and plants drink water also).
So if we presume that Murrage, the purrsian city, has one or more of these fountains, then their cupidity will make sure that a lot of laws deal with them. Whoever owns/controls the fountain will have it guarded at all times, and likely charge a toll for drinking from it...which is what we saw in The Apple Falls Far From the Tree, though it didn't say that the fountain was magical. But it won't stop there, because anyone else who can cast create water - especially if they're above 1st level - is going to be a threat to their business. And it's a profitable business, since it needs no maintenance and will never run out or go bad, so you can just sit back and collect the tolls.
Now you need to have enforcement going around and making sure that there aren't people trying to break your monopoly on water. Since it's impossible to stop people from having access to those spells, you then need to regulate who uses them. So the water that's taken from your fountain must now be in special containers to mark that it's your water; you'll need to have teams of law enforcement groups (or rather, thugs) who go around checking to see if anyone else is carrying water in unapproved containers, which will be contraband to be confiscated and make the violators pay a fine.
Foreigners will need to be taxed for bringing outside water into the city. An entire "black water market" will spring up with people trying to sell illegal water, since there's going to be plenty of people who can cast that spell and will be trying to make a some quick money for doing so for people who can't afford your water toll. You'll want to make sure that trade routes aren't too close to oases, since then you'll have thirsty customers arriving, and cautious travelers making sure to stock up on water before leaving the city. Magic item creators will need to be monitored, since it takes only a day to make a new fountain, and the last thing you want is some competitor springing up literally overnight, especially if they have their own thugs to defend against your attempts to put a stop to them. Now there's a "water war" going on, with the entire town getting caught up in the fight since everyone gets thirsty on a regular basis.
...that's from a single 0-level spell.
So yeah, I do think that there's going to be quite the issue with how the plentiful amounts of magic will impact a society.
7716244 You kind of wrote a lot there. o_o
You make a lot of dangerous assumptions. Wizards require a lot of money, effort, and time to do.
A peasant can learn to bake with no rich resources.
A wizard needs to have top grades to get good magic.
A peasant can become proficient at making cakes and just keep at it. He'll never hit a 'ceiling' due to his innate talent.
To even get in a wizard school of any sort requires you qualify in some way, usually paying fees in addition.
To learn how to bake a cake can often start with asking your parents. Failing that, neighbors are a good enough starting point.
Comparing the two, even just from an economic standing, feels absurd.
So, alright, how about other classes? Great, welcome to sorcerery. Were you born with magic blood? Good job! No? Too bad, no sorcery for you. By nature, sorcerers are not common. They tend to stink at innovation, learning what they do intuitively. The next great breakthrough in magic is not coming from them.
Alchemist? Same as wizard, really.
Cleric, hope you're ready to bend knee to a god. The god is going to want things from you. Those things rarely have much to do with baking cakes. Making 'new' divine spells? Tricky... You know your spells because your god literally whispers them in your ear and reveals them with dutiful prayer.
Where's that damn cooking god?
That aside, many of the same restrictions apply, though joining the cleric pool is likely much more available, minus the talent barrier, than wizard colleges.
These things are not even close to the same. I don't need community charts to know you'll get far more non-magic users than magic-users.
7716264 I did kind of go overboard on what I wrote, but all of it stands to reason.
Beyond that, I feel that the assumptions being made are your own. Take a strict look at the game rules for spellcasting classes, and you'll see that there are no great resources there. The idea that "being a wizard requires schooling, which is expensive" is one that's a presumption that is not, strictly speaking, borne out by the text. The only thing that's required to be a wizard is that you have an Int of 10+. The only thing beyond that which has a material cost associated with it is a starting wizard's spellbook, which is technically given for free, despite that fact that the spellbook itself costs 15 gp and scribing each spell into it - a wizards gets "all" 0-level spells, twenty from the Core rules, and 3 + Int 1st-level spells - costs 130+ gp. But saying that it requires top grades? No, there's nothing there about that, nor are there any hard-and-fast time requirements. If you can take a new level between adventures, and that new level can be multiclassing as a 1st-level wizard, then there's no reason why it needs to take years for someone just starting out either.
The other classes require even less in the way of overcoming non-existent barriers to entry. Damn-near everyone has magic in their blood waiting to be activated - a byproduct of living in a world where dragons, fiends, celestials, gods, and more have all been fornicating with ponykind for a very long time (and that's not even taking into account "bloodlines" like Arcane or Destined, which aren't strictly meant to be representative of some sort of bestial ancestry) and spreading their genes out into the general population. So becoming a sorcerer is more a question of working to activate that latency than anything else, hence, again, why it can be done by anyone when leveling, rather than having stricter class entry requirements the way a prestige class does.
Gods want something from their clerics? Sure they do; they want them to proselytize. Being active in your community and winning more converts over isn't that difficult to attempt, and even then there's no real penalty for failure, since you'll keep getting clerical spells so long as you don't violate the tenets of your religion or your alignment. But of course, that's presuming that you worship a god at all; Pathfinder, like 3.X before it, decoupled divine spellcasting from divine worship. Ponyfinder has no particular requirements that you must worship an existing deity to gain divine spells, so there's no reason why you can't be a cleric who gets your divine spells from faith alone - or really anything you feel like - which frees you from any sort of nasty regulations from on high. You worship gods only because they tend to have more active social networks via churches, more than any particular boost in power.
Yes, you're going to have more non-magic-users than magic-users, but the total population of magic-users is going to be damn high overall. They're everywhere, and most of them won't care about adventuring. Moreover, they don't need to come up with any sort of magical "revolutions" or anything like that. They just need to be able to fulfill a particular economic niche and do so with more reliability and better prices than anyone else. A sorcerer has no innovation? Fair enough. But if he or she can cast detect poison with impunity then you can bet that the paranoid local ruler will be keeping them on retainer to check each and every meal they eat. Is there any reason why they can't take Create Wondrous Item at 3rd level and sell amulets of detect poison? Sure they cost 500 go to make, but they sell for 1,000 gp, and let the wearer use detect poison at will. Suddenly the entire concept of killing someone via poisoning has become much more difficult, if not impossible.
You don't need to have very many spellcasters to change the local economy, the local society, or virtually any other part of the game world. You just need to have them realize that they can maintain a steady source of income from marketing their talents, and that doing so will make them rich without needing to put their lives in danger on a regular basis.
That cleric who made the fountain of create water before? Suppose that each gallon drawn from that fountain costs 1 gp - which is far cheaper than paying a 1st-level cleric to do it (5 gp to create two gallons) - with the cleric getting a 1% commission from that (or 1 cp). In a city like Murrage, with other 30,000 people - where everyone needs a half-gallon per day as a loose average - that's fifteen thousand gallons drawn, which is 15,000 cp...or 150 gp per day. In a month, that's 4,500 gp, enough to pay for an extravagant lifestyle three times over and still have some left. That cleric can reach that at 3rd level, when they take Create Wondrous Item, at a cost of 500 gp (plus the material of the fountain) to make. And that's only at a 1% profit from then on out, which is essentially paying them not to make that same fountain for anyone else ever again.
d20 magic is a resource that can be leveraged, especially when magic items can be manufactured, and they'll absolutely transform the societies around them in myriad ways. Throw in that there's no real barrier to being able to use magic in the first place - hell, adepts (who also don't need deities) are NPC classes - and there's no reason why that wouldn't be so.
7716443 Clerics are not there to prostelytize. Those are priests. Clerics can and often are priests. Priests may not be cleric, or may be. They were two seperate things.
A cleric is expected to be -doing- something. The most peaceful cleric in any of the actual Pathfinder material is one that serves as a healer, seer, and general magic source of their god. They cannot 'just' preach the good word. That's a priest.
Why do wizards for sure take a lot of time? Easy. Starting age. Multiclassing assumes a full life of excitement to get to the point that you get level 2+, something most peasants fail to do. However, even reaching level 1 in wizardry or cleric takes longer, due to training, than most other classes that are intuitive. It's right there, baked into the rules. A wizard is not self taught. The rules say they are trained. That money? The wizard either coughed it up themselves, proved worthy of a scholarship of sorts, or their parents did.
How do I know? You get a level of wizard after level 1? You don't get a free book.
Hell, how do I know PCs are better than most NPCs? Their starting stats are a good place. The NPC stat array is a very sad thing.
Let's tangent back a bit. You like magic items. Magic items are hideously expensive to make compared to what a person, without wild adventures, will have to spend. Hell, a wizard or alchemist will go broke just scribing their spells. This is part of what drives them to adventure when they'd rather bottle up in a tower and read all day. Twilight knows the feeling, though she is a damn Mary Sue with basically infinite money.
Let's talk basic economics. You research the perfect cake spell. It's marvelous! You cast it at the ingredients for a cake and it makes a masterwork cake every time, exactly to your specifications!
Oh man that was great!
Making a spell is a grey area in the rules, but let's say it costs, I dunno, 1,000 gp x spell level x minimum wizard level to cast it? Rough stab, but fine, roll with it.
So let's say this cake spell is level 1.
Our level 1 chef wizard has 1000 gp laying around, and gladly spends it because he wants mastercraft cakes on demand, damn it.
Ta da, he has it! He's out of money, but he has his spell, yeah!
No problem. With this spell, he opens up a bakery, specializing in cakes, of course, and gets to selling. He'll be back in the black in no time, he hopes. Cake mix is a silver for six biscuits worth. Let's say you can sell the resulting cake for a gold. Not a bad profit. You only need to sell 1000 cakes at 1 gp each.
That's the equivalent of two high-ticket meals. How many buyers are going to show up on any given day?
How long will it take for this wizard to ever see a profit, if ever, considering living expenses and such.
7716520 I'm going to switch to responding to certain quotes to keep things on track.
With regards to clerics, the core of your point seems to be that they're going to be called upon to do (non-specific) stuff that will keep them from engaging with their community to the same degree as other members of non-adventuring society. But I can't see anything that mandates that, especially with the possibility of clerics not even bothering to serve a deity at all. There's really no prohibition on clerics "just" be priests that spend their days at their local temple and tending to their adherents.
Moreover, this doesn't explain why there can't be very many of them, nor why they can't be active in their community selling spells and making magic items as a day-to-day job, with all of the alterations to society that that entails.
Most peasants do get to level 2+, however. Just look at Paizo's book of example NPCs; even your average pig farmer is level 2. So clearly that second level or above isn't out of reach.
You're right that certain classes do have greater starting ages than others...but that by itself doesn't necessitate that it takes longer to learn those classes in general, but rather that there's a steeper curve to get started (and even that is just an average). Given that every class now uses a unified XP table, it takes no more experience to learn to be a better wizard than it does to be a better fighter.
I did a ctrl-f in the wizard description for "train" and "taught," and found neither of them there. Overall, there doesn't seem to be anything to support this, to say nothing of the idea that there are limits on time and gp that constrain how many members of this class there can be in a given population...let alone what they do insofar as turning a profit via selling spells and magic items to that population.
No, you don't, and this is a good point. But given that new, blank spellbooks cost 15 gp, and that acquiring spells (presumably the cost of paying someone to cast them) are only spell level x caster level x 10 gp, with the cost of writing in new 0-level spells being 5 gp and writing in new 1st-level spells being 10 gp, this is far from a huge barrier in terms of costs. Literally, 25 gp can get you a spellbook and at least one new 0-level spell. This is not a barrier that's meant to keep everyone away except a select few.
Heroic NPC stats are based on a 15-point buy, which is "standard fantasy" for PCs. But then, that doesn't matter very much, since we're talking about the impact that NPC spellcasters can have as much as their population. So long as they can manage to reach caster level 3rd or so, they can make a gigantic impact, particularly if they take any Crafting feats (particularly Craft Wondrous Items).
This gets into how high your average NPC is, and how much they typically earn, probably via Profession checks (or Craft or Perform). The aforementioned pig farmer has a Profession bonus of +5. On an average roll, that's a 15, for 7 gp and 5 sp per week. That's 390 gp per year, minus 120 gp for paying 10 gp per month for an "average" lifestyle. Obviously, 270 gp left over isn't very much...but it's enough to buy a 1st-level potion or two (50 gp each), or maybe even some very cheap wondrous items (e.g. elixir of love, unguent of timelessness, etc.). Obviously, none of those are very useful, but if he saves scrupulously for two years, then that's enough to hit the 500 gp required to make something like the aforementioned fountain of create water.
Of course, he's just a pig farmer, and can't make that. But he takes his meager 500 gp to the local 3rd-level cleric, who can cast that spell and has Craft Wondrous Item, and they go in on the project together. Maybe they get the local stonemason to join in to donate the masterwork fountain necessary, or maybe the remaining 40 gp (the pig farmer actually has 540 gp after two years) goes to that.
That's with the money earned from just a profession bonus of +5.
Scribing spells has a very fixed cost, and that's nothing compared to the NPC wealth by level table. Or even what they can earn from raising their skills that they earn income with.
This is where I disagree. Adventuring might be a good way to strike it big, but for FAR less risk you can still earn consistent income at home if you can get into the crafting business. Whether it's your Profession skill, or the cost of the spellcasting services listed in the Equipment chapter, or just leveraging sold magic items (they sell for double the cost to create), you can return a consistent income without having to go put your life on the line. Easily.
First, there's no need to invent a new spell for this. Just using prestidigitation can be marketable, if you can use it to instantly launder your clothes, or clean the dirt and grime from yourself without needing to bathe (as I believe Sunset Shimmer did in your fic where she and sci-Twi went to Everglow), or whatever else. Making that into a magic item - as outlined before - costs only 500 gp. It then sells for twice that much, which allows her to make two, which then sell for twice that much, etc. The only problem is starting capital, and that's not really a problem unless the wizard is level 1 or 2 (and even then a level 2 heroic NPC has more than 500 gp in gear value, as the table shows).
There's also no problem with finding who'll need to buy them, since even your average military officer has more than 1,000 gp even after all of their other gear. That's without getting into the adventuring population, who has money and is looking to spend.
Even if they are that low-level, that's nothing that can't be solved by gathering together some other people to donate the money (called "investors") in exchange for a share of the profits. Now you have your 500 gp to make. And when it's sold, they all earn double their money back. Now rinse and repeat. That's basic economics.
This ignores that what he'd do is start by selling at a loss to undercut his competition, and then when they've been driven out of business, raise his prices back to a reasonable standard. At that point he's the only game in town, so he's guaranteed himself an installed base of customers. Moreover, he can afford to sell at a loss for a while, and take a bigger cut of profit later, because he doesn't need to buy any ingredients to make new cake mix, since his magic item creates them from nothing. Just like that, the market is cornered, and he has a perpetual supply of gold coming in that will eventually (after not very long) surpass the costs he sank into it. Plus, he can keep up with other projects in the meantime, since he doesn't need to actually make the cakes himself, and so can perform other money-making tasks in the interim.
Once the initial startup costs are met, there's really no way that a continual-use magic item won't decimate the non-magical competition.
7716635 I'm going to leave this here, as this debate has eclipsed the story it's a part in for length.
Your economics of selling magic items is wonky. You take an item with a value of 1000, make it for 500... and sell it for 500. It's wonky, but that's how the rules work. If we're ignoring those, then the entire debate becomes two people just debating what they 'think' it should be.
For the starting ages: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advancedRaceGuide/ageHeightWeight.html
Don't like that? This also works: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/alignment-description/description
That includes the fact that some classes, by core rules, take longer than others, even if the xp charts are the same. That cannot be ignored.
Lastly, the spell turns cake mix into cake. It does not conjure a cake. You still have to buy the cake mix, at least in the example I made. It's a very specialized fabricate spell. For note, fabricate is normally level -5-, but hey, this thing can literally only make cake, so I let it off at level 1. I think I was generous.
It has, and it's been a terrible time-sink, but I still had fun, and hope you did too.
Well, the d20 economics system comes "pre-broken," as I've heard it called. But the idea that you can sell something for more than it costs to make seems fairly intuitive to me; it's the standardizes, absolute nature of it that doesn't fit with the reality, and is only part of why the entire thing falls apart when you look at it too closely.
Of course it does. That was my entire point, and what sparked this debate. When you have magic that's easily-accessible, has no real cost to use, and can be utilized in a very quick and timely manner, then any society that includes such things on any measurable social scale will be impacted by the presence of that.
Yeah, I know where they were.
They take longer to start. That chart measures how long it takes to earn your first character level. Every level after that doesn't have tables measuring how long they take.
Then it is, with all due respect, a really terrible spell. Creating water out of nothing is level 0. Creating food and water that can feel multiple people is level 3. A spell that performs a single non-combat process, which can normally be done by one person with almost no effort and not much time, is level 0 at the absolute highest. Strictly speaking, conjuring a single, fully-made cake out of nothing is level 1 at the absolute most, and I'd think that there was a very, very good argument to be made that it should be level 0 instead. Comparisons to fabricate are way out of line, since that's a multi-purpose spell that can transmute any non-magical thing into another thing of the same material.
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7716665
You two are cute. Reminds me of when pure white and Alzrius argued over Lex.
7716860 Limited rebuttal. Create food and water specifically makes terrible food of blandness that no one wants to live on, and is level 3. This one takes cake ingredients and makes a masterwork cake of tastiness! I reaaaaaly don't think level 1 is absurd.
Name another spell that performs a 'mundane' action that would require skill (craft or profession baking, both of which are trained only) and an assured high roll in addition to an hour's effort to accomplish?
7716881 But create food and water has greater utility in that it not only makes food that can sustain people, but a fairly large number of them. That's far and away more versatile than making a single cake, which won't feed that many people and certainly won't nourish them to the same degree.
Insofar as being able to correctly bake a cake - and there's really no "masterwork" cakes, or at least not enough to be worth any mechanical distinction - that's fairly easily within reach of a DC 10 Craft skill check, presuming that you need to require a check at all. Hence, it can easily be done by an unseen servant, which can perform simple tasks that a DC 10 check in an untrained skill could do. If it can be told to "clean" an area without every detail of that being micro-managed (e.g. you don't need to tell it how to beat a rug, or wash windows so that it doesn't leave streaks, etc.), then it can handle a simple baking chore.
That spell, however, is multi-functional. An unseen servant can do myriad things, whereas your spell has far more limited capacity in that it can only do a single thing, but with all of the same restrictions, and so shouldn't be the same level. Hence level 0.
7716950 You are rejecting the core conceit, which was a spell that creates a masterwork cake. Saying 'that's impossible' is rejecting the entire debate. I can't argue that. Food comes in different qualities with different prices. There's no 'mechanical' reason one can't say 'This cake is masterwork!'.
7716956 I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that there's no difference between a cake and a purported "masterwork cake," at least in terms of game mechanics. I looked through the Core equipment list, and Ultimate Equipment, and I couldn't find any listing for foodstuffs that were listed as "masterwork," so that seemed like a reasonable conclusion to draw.
7716961 One is tastier, has better consistency, is decorated better with fancy writing on it, cuts perfectly. IT has all the properties one could desire from a cake. Cake perfection.
7716964 And that's fine insofar as flavor text goes (see what I did there?
), but in terms of game mechanics there's no difference, and so that doesn't matter insofar as determining price, cost to create, skill check DC, or what level of spell is needed to make them rather than a normal cake.
7716967 Look at the religious text. You can spend up to 100 gold for a really nice one with inlays and notations and all kinds of fancy.
It does nothing more than a perfectly plain one for 10 gp.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/goods-and-services/toys-games-puzzles#TOC-Holy-Text
The idea of a cake that is 'better', costs more, and properly would be more difficult is not beyond comprehension. It's also kind of the start point of this. :p This is poor debating.
7716981 The holy text item isn't masterwork, it just has a varying cost, which does have an in-game effect, namely being heavier the more ornamental they are. Admittedly, it's odd to have something become more burdensome when it's more expensive (if we presume that greater weight is a bad thing, due to the encumbrance rules), but it's there.
Moreover, that's part of the item description, which makes it expressly obvious that that's a property of that thing. Under the doctrine of expressio unius est exclusio alterius ("the express mention of one thing excludes all others") the fact that that was written for holy texts and not cakes makes it clear that cakes don't have that same level of variability. Obviously you can have cakes that look and taste different, of course, but that won't affect their gp value.
7716997 Dude.
If aliens came to earth, what would you do?
Answer: There aren't any aliens.
This is a poor debate.
7717002 I think that's a poor analogy (since I'm saying that you can have a "masterwork cake," but it won't have any distinctions insofar as game mechanics go), though I agree that this is a poor debate.
I'll also remind you that you were the one who introduced this entire tangent about theoretical cakes. I was content to limit things to existing spells and applications thereof, rather than theorizes about new ones.
7717004 You asked why there aren't more mundane spells. I gave an example. You've spent... hours saying the example's core conceits are wrong. Not that the result is wrong, but that the basic assumption therein is just wrong.
Let's make it a spell that creates noble clothes from raw fabric. It still requires no 'major' skill, but you're doing days and days of work instantly.
Change nothing else. My argument remains.
7717042 I didn't ask why there weren't more non-combat spells, I pointed out that the prevalence of such spells fundamentally changes the society that they're a part of. I then demonstrated how this was the case by using the pre-existing spells (and magic item creation rules) so as to show that even without introducing new spells, the basics of a presumed pseudo-medieval society are seriously called into question.
Likewise, the core conceits of your example are wrong. They hang on having mechanical drawbacks to balance out a flavor text that has no particular advantage, and so doesn't need to be counterbalanced by those drawbacks to begin with. You posit that such a thing would never be economically viable, since the cost to create it would supposedly eclipse any benefits for what it reaped, despite the fact that low-level magic like that is entirely cost-effective for people to buy if they have any decent Profession/Craft skill bonuses, and that once made a reliable, fully-automated process will eventually pay for itself (while you work on something else, to boot).
Being able to create something faster or cheaper than anyone else, unless the start-up costs are truly astronomical, will always be a viable way to economic prosperity. Whether it's creating water from nothing or automating the stitching of clothes, low-level magic is cost-effective enough that there's no reason for any enterprising spellcaster not to do it.
7717083 i think that both of you have fair points, but conjuring something like water being such a low level spell is silly considering that a combat spell like a ice blast needs to be such higher to do any real damage, talking about cake, does cake really need to be highly decorated? its flower, sugar and egg. i have made cakes that tast very good without needing years of practice, granted your conjuring stuff like eggs wheat and water from nothing, which the eggs and wheat would take energy to conger out of no wear, and should take much more energy than a high level fire spell since with the fire spell, you could concentrate the air and use that for the fire while with the other, your using highly complicated organic materials from scratch while water is much less complicated, I like to believe that when they conjured this stuff, it simply took it from some were else.
Granted it could be made easier if you transformed water and dirt to create the cake rather than forming it from nothing. i mean, if you could create something from nothing, than as the population rises, the sea levels will rise as more water is created and the wast level will also rise. i feel like it would be better if the food only nourished you for a time but than the energy disappeared faster than normal food as the conjuration ended.
Or as i said, it does not need to be that complicated and eggs just disappeared from some poor guys farm with his entire wheat harvest.
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That is entirely true and any one that does not know finance would say otherwise, after all you need to pay 50 dollars a month to play r20 with david and his books cost 29 dollars when they cost 3 to 5 to make. everyone, after all in tarnished silver, the griffins got a monopoly on dye and made it have ludicrous prices. further more, you won't have a profit if you don't give it a higher price, Of coarse you would need good speech and haggling skills or the store clerk is just going to buy it for a very low price. they won't buy it unless its a very good invention that is hard to get.
7716443 I get the feeling you would have enjoyed the Eberron setting.
7853130 What do you mean "would have"? I've got several Eberron books on my shelves.
why discord feels insulted ? And seriously, he's gone just like that ? No prank, no joke, no showing off and no annoying curiosity toward somepony twillight qualify as a god ?
Maybe it is beacaus i was hyped to see him in this story.
By the way, where was he during the elemental surge crisis ? With twillight absent, i was expecting Celestia to ask him for help.
I guess it would have been to easy.
That being said , that she-devil who hurt fluttershy is Lucky he wasn't here :
https://youtu.be/reOj_z6aPws