The value of a wall of iron

[sullivan]

As for opportunists, have you looked at the DC adjustment for "through a stone wall" (and what thickness of stone is that +15 for? Six inches? Two feet? What about your "thin" 5-ft thick dungeon walls?), and the penalty for sleeping? Okay, the ones in the room right next door would likely hear, but around just one or two bends and you wouldn't hear much at all.

Around a corner is most definately not the same as through a wall. There isn't DC modifiers for corners, and the DM should adjust for that. But most dungeons are fairly enclosed areas with hard stone walls to reflect the sound around a corners with relatively little attenuation beyond that of the distance along the longest wall.

 

[darkelfo]

Why not set up a special forge/work shop to exploit this spell? You could have a conjuration space for the wall to appear in that provides easy access to for cutting the material. Such a workshop would only exist in large cities, of course, unless a high level wizard employed the peasants of a nearby village out in the wilds.

Then there is also that 4th lvl spell in Magic of Faerun. Name escapes me but it turns metal into liquid for one round without heat. You could create a "cold forge" to melt the wall down in chunks and pour it into iron bar molds.

My crafter character is going to set one of these forges up on a smaller scale so as to manipulate fine metals and for crafting weapons and constructs.

As for the economy and those other issues, a good GM can fit something like this into their game just as easily as they can make a dungeon believable. Crafty players should be rewarded for thoughtful approaches like the workshop or for using diplomacy to sell straight to the people who need the iron near where its needed. Less thoughtful players should be rewarded with their own foibles as they attempt to haul, handle and cut up a huge slab of metal.

As long as its fun, it's all good.

 

[hobgoblin]

heh, how about having a rust monster eat up the wall when the wizards isnt looking?
there have to be more uses for those monsters then getting the warriors to strip

 

[isoChron]

Lots of iron on the market -> price drops & miners get unemployed.

You don't make easy money more than 1 or 2 times in a region with that trick.
And as soon as the miners get a hint who is running them out of business ...

Perhaps the iron is really 100% iron. No carbon, no other metals that improve the durability. That means you have to alloy it and that may be more time consuming than buying "good" iron from the friendly neighborhood dwarves.

 

[Stalker0]

Lots of iron on the market -> price drops & miners get unemployed.

You don't make easy money more than 1 or 2 times in a region with that trick.
And as soon as the miners get a hint who is running them out of business ...

Perhaps the iron is really 100% iron. No carbon, no other metals that improve the durability. That means you have to alloy it and that may be more time consuming than buying "good" iron from the friendly neighborhood dwarves.

Then you teleport to a different area....or higher someone to do so, and do it again. And the miner's come to get me? Some level levels experts and commoners...psssh!!


If you allow wall of iron to make money in this way, your just giving the players a ton of cash. But a lot of stuff can do this....dnd econonmy is not realistic in the least. I think it might be a fun way to get teh party up to their recommended gold level if you don't give out a lot of treasure....then they have to go to the pains of buying their magic gear instead of finding it...which can be fun in itself.

 

[Stalker0]

btw, that idea of having a tree grow out of a ring of sustenance is an awesome idea...consider it snagged

 

[Nail]

...and no one has even mentioned the Fabricate spell yet!

Yep, magic is not taken into account when designing D&D worlds.

 

[Crothian]

...and no one has even mentioned the Fabricate spell yet!

Yep, magic is not taken into account when designing D&D worlds.

which is okay, because I don't think economies are either

 

[Hypersmurf]

You can make dungeons with vaugly workable ecologies:
Perhaps somebody left a few Sustaining Spoons in a tipped over jars somewhere, and vermin (mice, rats, et cetera) raid it regularly, and are in turn hunted down and eaten.

Hey, I did almost exactly that once!

The PCs found a corridor blocked off with what looked like a Wall of Ancient Porridge. They got quite worried - concerned it was some sort of non-standard Ooze, or something.

What it actually was was a broken Murlynd's Spoon in the next room, that had been pumping out mush once a day for a couple of centuries... and feeding the colony of monstrous centipedes further into the complex...

-Hyp.

 

[Jack Simth]

...and no one has even mentioned the Fabricate spell yet!

Yep, magic is not taken into account when designing D&D worlds.

Fabricate is just faster Crafting -

Material Component: The original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created.

Pay one-third of the item’s price for the cost of raw materials.

When PC's get a hold of it (level 9, for a Wizard) it doesn't do too terribly much good - sure, they can buy the raw materials instead of the full plate, and Craft it themselves, but a Masterwork Full Plate Mail (suitable for enchanting) is still going to cost 550 gp in materials, and require a DC 20 craft (armorsmithing) roll by the caster to boot (for the Masterwork component, of course) (granted, that won't be too difficult for a Wizard of that level who took a few levels in the skill - take 10, Int bonus of - just pulling a number out of a hat here) 5, needs 5 ranks, could have 12 ranks. Of course, it only produces mundane items, and won't be too terribly competitive with the merchants (assuming someone hires a Wiz to do it - 5*9*10 gp for the spell (450), 550 for the material components, 1000 gp for an item that would otherwise be 1650 - assuming, of course, that the price for the casting doesn't go up due to the requirement that the wizard has the appropriet Craft skill). Special materials widen the gap - an Adamantium Full Plate would cost 16,500 gp to buy, 5,500 gp for material, and 450 to hire the spell, for a price cut of 10,550 gp to have someone else do it, 11,000 to do it yourself; selling the armor would then get you half it's market value (8,250), for a profit margin of under 3 grand a casting, any way you slice it (until, of course, you get to epic levels and pick up Ignore Material Components (the starting materials are listed as material components, so you conjour Masterwork Adamantium Full Plate for ONE LEVEL 5 SPELL SLOT) at which point it's pure profit, but not really enough to be worth bothering with, for the most part)