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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 7513606" data-attributes="member: 58197">It's only a problem if you read it ultra-literally. I read &quot;a diamond worth 500 gp&quot; as shorthand for &quot;a diamond of a size and quality that would typically sell for 500 gp in a typical D&amp;D economy.&quot; If you haggle the jeweler down to 400 gp, the diamond still works fine as a spell component. If someone corners the diamond market and prices go through the roof, the diamond in your pocket does not suddenly gain the ability to power dozens of spells.It kind of blows my mind that anyone seriously argues for the literal reading. (I'm not accusing you of doing this, but I have seen others do so on these forums.)As far as transmutation goes... yeah, it's a little harder to square that with the fiction of the game, if only because it's an enormous coincidence that the &quot;transmutation value&quot; of any given item just so happens to line up exactly with its price in the typical economy. But it's an effective and simple way to balance the power. Perhaps the reason those values line up so well is high-level transmuters arbitraging the difference! It could well be that gold used to be worth 20 times as much as silver, and transmuters saw how they could make a huge profit turning 125 cubic feet of silver into 12.5 cubic feet of gold and 112.5 cubic feet of candy corn. And so they did it, and kept doing it, driving up the price of silver and driving down the price of gold, until the ratio stabilized at 1:10.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 7513606, member: 58197"] It's only a problem if you read it ultra-literally. I read "a diamond worth 500 gp" as shorthand for "a diamond of a size and quality that would [I]typically[/I] sell for 500 gp [I]in a typical D&D economy.[/I]" If you haggle the jeweler down to 400 gp, the diamond still works fine as a spell component. If someone corners the diamond market and prices go through the roof, the diamond in your pocket does not suddenly gain the ability to power dozens of spells. It kind of blows my mind that anyone seriously argues for the literal reading. (I'm not accusing you of doing this, but I have seen others do so on these forums.) As far as transmutation goes... yeah, it's a little harder to square that with the fiction of the game, if only because it's an enormous coincidence that the "transmutation value" of any given item just so happens to line up exactly with its price in the typical economy. But it's an effective and simple way to balance the power. Perhaps the reason those values line up so well is high-level transmuters arbitraging the difference! It could well be that gold used to be worth 20 times as much as silver, and transmuters saw how they could make a huge profit turning 125 cubic feet of silver into 12.5 cubic feet of gold and 112.5 cubic feet of candy corn. And so they did it, and kept doing it, driving up the price of silver and driving down the price of gold, until the ratio stabilized at 1:10. [/QUOTE]

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