My player is breaking my world [long]

[Zappo]

Well, everything I wanted to say has been said while I was checking the spells' descriptions...

Manufacturing items while the material is reduced wouldn't work that well; any metal stress or other factors mentioned by Chimera would be multiplied the moment the spell is gone. You would end up with a very brittle material, which is unlikely to resist the pressure of a steam chamber for long. This has nothing to do with finesse in working the material, it's a physical thing which depends very little on the artisan's skill. I think modern steel melting techniques might work, as well as very high temperature ovens, but I doubt any of that is available to your elves. Even then, the material would still be far inferior to its mundanely-forged counterpart.

Additionally, you would need very skilled artisans, able to craft small items. This is a skill very different from the one your current metalworkers know, so you would need to train them all in miniature working, or fire them and hire others.

Loading a ship with lots of extra goods (or powder, shots or whatever) beyond its capacity means that an area-effect dispel magic will immediately sink it. That's a very nasty vulnerability and not one I'd want on my ships.

The tactic of dropping shrunk items from high can work but, again, it makes the wizard extremely vulnerable to a dispel magic spell. While the fly spell doesn't make you plummet if dispelled, you will plummet if you are suddenly carrying a load beyond the spell's limits.

If you really want to stop the thing before it even gets tried, you can rule that a reduced item is magical, thus preventing use of shrink item, or that shrink item will be dispelled as soon as enlarge ends because its target is no longer valid. Both are perfectly acceptable rulings.

Still... magic in D&D can do nasty things to a campaign world if it is applied with a 21st-century mindset. The coherence lies in the fact that usually, people in a medieval fantasy world just don't think like that, and in that wizards are rare and have many better and better paid things to do than working as carriers.

Anyway, take a look at the DMG where it states the prices for NPC spellcasting - most industrial applications of magic would become overcostly very quickly.

 

[Dave Blewer]

Hi,

Not really sure what the problem is to be honest - Shrink Item is a 3rd level spell, so only a (relatively) small number of mages would be able to cast it. Wizards all over the world would be using it for all sorts of things

Some thoughts:

- Why would Shrink Item and Reduce stack? other spells that have a similar effect do not. In fact it says just that in the description of Reduce

While it isn’t surprising that the shortsighted humans have neither exploited nor even realized the import of these common spells

- Huh? Wizards wiould use this all the time, you can be sure that every spell is used to its greatest effect by some mercantile organisation. Just because a PC hasn't thought of it doesn't mean an NPC has not...

Other simple spells are able to conceal the aura of magical enchantment which would be plain to other spellcasters.

- simple spells such as... ?

An additional benefit is that should these materials be stolen, the thief, unless also a wizard, would not travel very far as he would soon find the weight of such items unbearable.

- Where does he get this idea?

warships would be carrying 40 extra tons of powder, shot and/or coal,

Shrink Item only effects one item... Yes that could be onne barrel, but so what

- Building things in minature out of a single block of stuff is flawed in lots of ways... This seems a bit twinky to me... now if you permanently enlarged a working model of the item... Flaws in the Mold would be magnified by as many times as the mold had been shrunk... This would be a bit hit and miss I think..

- The flying boulder thing is a fine use of the spell and possibly one of the uses that was envisioned by the designer methinks...


Last thought: This letter has to be delivered doesn't it?....

 

[Dave Blewer]

Look at that the same post nearly ten times

One also wonders how many others are still in the compose stage...

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

A heavy horse (like a clydesdale) can carry 400 tons as a medium load, and can drag 3000 tons. An elephant can carry 1000 tons as a medium load.

I'm leaving all discussions of "fun" out of it, since that goes without saying. I'll just address the logic and games rules of it: Getting a caster to cast the Shrink item (5th level caster, BTW, not 7th) has issues.

Duration 1 day per level: So you can't go very far using this method.

400 tons worth of reduced material is rarely likely to be around. That's 800,000 pounds! Let's assume you are transporting that much copper. Assuming standard costs, you're casting the reduce spell 400 times to achieve 400 tons of reduced material. That's a lot of wizards. And you'll spend 60,000gp doing it. You could just buy and staff a couple cargo ships to do that, and then they'd still be around 6 days later.

It sounds like a cool idea, but it falls apart on close analysis.

 

[Zappo]

Kid Charlemagne made me notice another flaw: the wizard can transport so much material that the mines' ouput will become a bottleneck. The wizard can transport much more ore than what the mine can produce.

 

[Nail]

From a Materials Engineering point of view (simplified):
A metal's strength is stongly affected by crystal size. Smaller crystals ('grains") usually make for tougher metal objects. If the metal crystallizes during the Shrink item spell (in th' mold), the grain size will expand to "supersize" when the spell effect ends. Large grain size = mucho weak metal. Perspective: yer steel ship-hull is as easily punctured as lead. In fact, it will probably collapse under it's own weight.

Nice try, though!

FWIW

-Nail

 

[jollyninja]

yes, all of that plus, imagine what the lawful neutral order of wizards dedicated to the sole purpose of keeping everything exactly the same would think. i pity the poor player who chooses to take them on.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

yes, all of that plus, imagine what the lawful neutral order of wizards dedicated to the sole purpose of keeping everything exactly the same would think. i pity the poor player who chooses to take them on.

Oh, man. That's an awesome idea. A group of people dedicated to stomping out any and all progress! That could be an incredible nemesis to a group of PC's, but yet they're not evil, so they can't be just wiped out.... I just may use that!

 

[Pielorinho]

Before you use that idea, make sure you check out White Wolf's Mage Game. The stampers-out-of-progress in that game are the GOOD guys.

Well, sorta. It's definitely a game worth checking out, especially if you wanna play around with the implications of creativity and magic.

Daniel

 

[Kugar]

I like the mini production idea!

If a PC sent this letter to superiors in my game I'd love it. The elves are teh perfect people too. I'd say a 100 year feasability study/risk accesment would be called for. An elven craftsmen might sponsor more "risk intensive" research. The technology could be kept away from the general world while allowing the PC to see his ideas in action.

As for the technical side - (I'm a ChemE so take this with a grain of salt) - their are problems with the production, but I really see it speeding manufacturing time.

Metal could easily be re-worked/annealed in sections using burning hands/create water and similar magics.

Fixing flaws would probably be better than starting from scratch.

If it worked in small scale it will not nessecarily work in big scale. When we talk scale up, there is more involved than just geometry. This can lead to big problems. A 1/12 scale working steam engine might not work at full scale - pressures will be off and may even blow up the pressure vessel. At first, stick to non-moving no-energy type structures.

Spare parts: If the small scale does work then spare parts are still a pain. Before interchangeable parts and the factory, EVERYTHING was hand made to fit together. Sorry no insta gears or springs.

Here is an idea - what if you alloy shrunken steel with mithral? What would it look like expanded?

Oh and mining? How about shrinking the ore and then refining it?

Don't forget the oppisite side of the coin. Magically enlarging material and making accurate small scale items.

Shrunken production might take many many years to perfect this type of process, but the rewards would be phenominal. I am so stealing this idea. Remember you control the world and the player controls the character. Elders might not persue the idea and change the world, but one elf can.

ttfn (sorry for the rambling)
Kugar