The economics of Continual flame

Umbran · May 17, 2019

Dannyalcatraz said:
I would say if you could use Fabricate to make a ball of wood from sawdust, you could make a marble of ruby from ruby dust.

Note: "the quality of objects made by the spell is commensurate with the quality of the raw materials." Is sawdust high quality wood? No. That says to me that if you use sawdust, you're goign to end up... with the equivalent of modern compressed fiberboard, like used in lots of IKEA furniture.

Do that with ruby dust.. you get this cloudy ball of compressed bits, not a single flawless crystal.

Dannyalcatraz · May 17, 2019

Umbran said:
Note: "the quality of objects made by the spell is commensurate with the quality of the raw materials." Is sawdust high quality wood? No. That says to me that if you use sawdust, you're goign to end up... with the equivalent of modern compressed fiberboard, like used in lots of IKEA furniture.

Do that with ruby dust.. you get this cloudy ball of compressed bits, not a single flawless crystal.

Immaterial (no pun intended)- the CF spell just needs ruby dust, not ruby gems.

And ruby itself comes in many grades. Here’s a 35mm polished sphere made from low grade ruby:

Not that visually impressive, and possibly less expensive than spheres of similar size made from other minerals.

cbwjm · May 17, 2019

Why even create a ruby from ruby dust in the first place when you need the dust for the spell?

Dannyalcatraz · May 17, 2019

cbwjm said:
Why even create a ruby from ruby dust in the first place when you need the dust for the spell?

I actually noted that at the end of my first post here. The making the sphere thing was just me examining the limits of Fabricate. So I was saying you could make a product with just ruby dust, just like you could with wood. But what you could make from it would be limited, and you couldn’t change the dust from one mineral to another.

jayoungr · May 17, 2019

Greenstone.Walker said:
You don't need rubies for the spell. In a world where fabricate exists, any gemstone will do (as long as it is of reasonable quality).

Ah, okay. Still, if you (generic you) wanted the spell to be rarer in your homebrew world, you could restrict it more.

Umbran · May 17, 2019

Dannyalcatraz said:
Immaterial (no pun intended)- the CF spell just needs ruby dust, not ruby gems.

Yep. I'm just talking about the Fabricate spell, and what it could accomplish. Making perfect crystals from dust does not seem to be its purview.

And ruby itself comes in many grades.

Yes. Spell components, in general, speak to gold piece value, rather than weight or size. Effectively, the spell component needs *value attributed by people* to be used, which is interesting and appropriate for magic.

Aenorgreen · May 17, 2019

I think you are confusing quality with physical form. Sawdust is just very small pieces of wood. Fabricate changes the shape and size of the materials. So if that sawdust was all of teak or mahogany it would make fine quality furniture with a fabricate spell (assuming skill proficiency). If it is all knotty yellow pine it would not be as good.

I see no reason you couldn't take smaller gemstones and make a larger gemstone with it. There is nothing in the spell that suggests it would suddenly include a bunch of foreign material that was not there before.

Stalker0 · May 17, 2019

Aenorgreen said:
I think you are confusing quality with physical form. Sawdust is just very small pieces of wood. Fabricate changes the shape and size of the materials. So if that sawdust was all of teak or mahogany it would make fine quality furniture with a fabricate spell (assuming skill proficiency). If it is all knotty yellow pine it would not be as good.

I see no reason you couldn't take smaller gemstones and make a larger gemstone with it. There is nothing in the spell that suggests it would suddenly include a bunch of foreign material that was not there before.

I agree, there’s nothing in fabricate that limits its ability to merge materials, in fact many of the examples would be just that. Turning ruby dust into a ruby seems completely within its purview. Now it won’t be a pretty ruby unless you had gem cutting but a ruby nonetheless.

Staffan · May 17, 2019

Umbran said:
Yes. Spell components, in general, speak to gold piece value, rather than weight or size. Effectively, the spell component needs *value attributed by people* to be used, which is interesting and appropriate for magic.

I always figured that that was just a matter of convenience. That is, casting chromatic orb requires that you have a diamond of so-and-so many carats on-hand, and a diamond of so-and-so many carats happens to cost 50 gp. That's a lot more convenient than having the spell specify the quality/size of the stone and then having to look up how much that would cost in a different section of the rules.

Dannyalcatraz · May 18, 2019

Umbran said:
Yep. I'm just talking about the Fabricate spell, and what it could accomplish. Making perfect crystals from dust does not seem to be its purview.

Agreed.