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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jerichothebard" data-source="post: 1494517" data-attributes="member: 4705">Why wouldn't a portal to the elemental plane, used as a gold mine, throw off the economy?Yield.According to the USGS, the United States has averaged 330+ metric tonnes of pure gold mined, per year, for the last 7 years (the years for which data was available).  This is almost entirely from Alaska.  Other regions in the world - Australia, I believe, and some others - produce as much or more.  I believe the total for the whole world is on the order of thousands of tonnes/year.That's a lot of brand-new gold hitting the market every year.  And yet, it still sells for $300+ per ounce!  The discovery of a new high-yield mine typically causes only a little fluctuation in that price.Flooding the market with gold would require a mind-bogglingly huge amount of gold, hitting the market all at once (as in the Aztec example mentioned earlier).  Even if the market weren't flooded, driving down prices, making a profit off of it is even more difficult. Why?Although our mining technology is certainly advanced beyond what the average dnd campaign can manage, they have some advantages we don't - dwarves, for one, and the availability of magic.  So it's probably fair to assume that our technology and their magic actually wash out; our mines probably don't yield more than would a dwarven mine, with spellcaster support.Further, assume, for a second, that the elemental plane of earth has roughly the same composition and mineral distribution as the crust of the Prime Material plane (an assumption which may be faulty in a number of ways, but which is good enough for this comparison).  If this is true, then a mining operation on the EP of Earth would be, by definition, very similar to a mining operation on the PM.It would still require the same amount of labor, the same R&D costs (or higher, due to the foreign terrain), and the same amount of refining and processing and minting and casting into gold bars.It also involves higher costs for security - pissed-off xorns and Elder earth elementals are much more difficult to defend against than your average human brigands, particularly on their home turf - and the cost for setting up and maintaining a portal to another plane can't be small.Which means your yield will be similar, and your costs higher.Therefore, while the gold is in fact available, a cost/benefit analysis would probably show that it isn't profitable.  This isn't unlikely; it happens in our mines all the time.  There is a mine in the California foothills that has been shut down for many years, because, although the vein wasn't tapped out, and they know there is another vein nearby, the profit margin for mining that gold would be unacceptably small.  Instead, they have made it into a state park celebrating California's mining heritage.  One of the guides there said that the price of gold would have to jump to $1000/oz for them to restart the mine - and that is in today's economy, not as a result of inflation which would also drive their costs up.jtb</blockquote>

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