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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 245898" data-attributes="member: 5328">If there is some other place with a glut of spellcasters, yes.And then? One of the spellcasters would lower his price 5% and get all of the business. And the others would cut their prices to compete. And with the prices falling the number of spells sold would go up. And this would keep happening until the spellcasters could not sell any more spell effects. Then they'd stop cutting their prices. And that is the point where professional spellcasters would be selling virtually all of their daily slots.You're talking about economic equilibrium. Do you think that occurs at the point where somebody's plant grinds out 24 widgets a day at a trivial cost, and he only sells one a week becasue his price is too high to shift more? In a monopoly maybe. Under any sort of competition, not a hope.In a large town the highest-level cleric is typically 6th-7th level (DMG, p139). Say it's 6th. That suggests 1 6th, 1 5th, 1 4th, 2 3rd, 3 2nd, and 6 1st-level. They can cast a total of 53 orisons, 47 first-level spells, 17 2nd-level spells, and 7 3rd-level spells per day. That's 124 spells per day, or 868 spells per week between the fourteen of them.Let's just look at the market for 1st-level spells, say Cure Light Wounds. (And I sincerely hope that there are more useful spells for clerics who act as curates rather than combatants than are listed in the PHB!) Let's start out supposeing that each of the fourteen clerics gets to sell a casting of this spell once per week, or in other words that the spell is cast for pay on average twice a day.Under these assumptions the spell-casting income a a single 1st-level cleric is 10 gp per week. But if he cut his price for Cure Light Wounds to 9 gp instead of 10 everyone would come to him to save the considerable sum of 1 gp. He would cast the spell twice per day, and make 126 gp per week instead of 10 gp. Do you think he won't do it?So now one of his rivals cuts her price from 10 gp to 8gp, and raises her income from 0 to 112 gp per week. Soon the price is 5 gp. And now that healing is cheaper poorer people buy it, and the demand is (perhaps) 28 castings per week (I am assuming unitary own-price elasticity of demand, but the argument works just as well for any positive, non-zero elasticity). Each cleric now casts it twice per week, and earns 10 gp per week. Still there is the incentive to chisel the price: a 1st-level cleric can sweep up all the business by cutting his price to 4 gp and raising his income to 112 gp. The price keeps falling until the people buy 47 Cure Light Wounds spells per day. At that point no cleric can increase his sales by cutting his price because he is selling all the spells he can cast. Perhaps the price is 4 sp.But we are told that the price does not fall. Something keeps it at 100 sp instead of 4 sp. What could do that?1) A cartel could do that. But is a cartel likely to include all the rival churches? Wouldn't one chisel the price to earn money and public goodwill?2) Divine disapproval could do that. But what CG healing god is going to disapprove of cheap heaing for the masses? And the divine-disapproval argument doesn't cut the mustard in the market for arcane magic.3) The fact that the market actually clears, that nearly all 47 1st-level spells per day are sold and cast at the stated price could do that.So. You are free to ignore the problem. (I choose not to, because I am an economist and it bugs me, but if you aren't in the habit of analysing things economically it need not bug you). But if you do that, be aware that you will have problems finding a robust and settled answer to any question involving the incomes or wages of spellcasters, the commonness of magic, etc. That need not be serious, since you are free to ignore those problems too.Otherwise, you can suppose that there is a powerful wizards' cartel that regulates the price of arcane magic and that for some strange reason the own-price elasticity of demand for all such magic is below unity; AND that all the gods for some or various reasons wish to either keep up the price or keep down the quantity used of divine magic.Or you can suppose that the market actually clears at the stated price.The first approach means inconsistency. The second forces an assumption that special features exist in the world. The third is the simplest, but it suggests collosal incomes for spellcasters.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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