How much wealth would be reasonable for a Fabricate spell to create?

[Privateer]

I like this spell and the concept of magically creating value to society besides blasting monsters as a high-level wizard. There seems to be two interpretations of it, though. One camp I've seen lay out examples of using something very valuable (like gold) as a material component, which leads to absurd profits. The other camp is DMs that get terribly defensive when magically created wealth is brought up and place such conditions and restrictions on this spell that it becomes practically useless.

There must be a more reasonable view, though. Surely, a single casting of this spell would not make you richer than a king, but equally surely the power of a 9+ level wizard could produce boons worth quite a bit outside of combatting creatures.

The question is, what would that reasonable amount of profit per casting be?

[Worira]

Uh... Fabricate doesn't get you more stuff. Using gold as a material component lets you fabricate, say, gold jewelery, but it doesn't get you more gold.

[faceroll]

Fabricate would turn a 50gp wall of iron into tens of thousands of gp worth of full plate.

It's a cool spell, but it should cost 1/25 of the worth of the items being created in xp and 1/2 the gp, so basically the cost of crafting magic items.

[Zaq]

Keep it at the fluff (or at least not-immediate-GP-gain) level, and I'd allow pretty much anything as a GM.

For example, taking the Wall of Iron to full plate example, if you wanted to outfit a small army (or an entire militia or whatever) with full plate, I'd be happy to allow it. If you wanted to turn the Wall of Iron into full plate and then sell the full plate in town for tons of profit, then we'd have to talk, and it probably wouldn't make either of us too happy.

Creating value is one thing. Fortify your base, outfit your army, make a shortcut, whatever. Creating GP (which is not the same thing as value) is another matter. The problem with magically created wealth is that there's no good cutoff point. If you allow one Wall of Iron to be turned into plate mail and sold at an enormous profit, what's wrong with allowing two, or three, or ten? Why is doing it x times good but doing it y times is bad? That way lies madness. I find that it's easier to cut it off ahead of time.

[Havelock]

Rule that nobody wants to buy those full plates, so he just sits there with a large stack of them.

Or claim that the iron in a wall of iron is too poor quality to be made into armor.

[Privateer]

Uh... Fabricate doesn't get you more stuff. Using gold as a material component lets you fabricate, say, gold jewelery, but it doesn't get you more gold.

The thing is, though, that gold jewelry is worth more than gold and can be sold for profit. And while profit on a single gold pendant is not that big, the amount of material you can target with fabricate, by RAW, is absurd.

Take gold for example. It's a mineral, so you get to impact 1cu.ft/lvl. Say 10 cu.ft, 9 being lowest you can cast the spell at. So you can target 12060lb of gold, worth 630,000gp with a single casting.

Crafting rules(which fabricate emulates) say that components cost 1/3 of the finished good price. This means our produced jewelry would cost 1,890,000gp. Sold at half price and minus the cost of materials we get 945,000-630,000=315,000gp profit from casting a single 5-lvl spell.

This is clearly absurd.

But completely disallowing the spell to produce profit, as many people advocate, is also absurd. That's what the spell does, what it's for. It takes cheaper materials and turns it into something more expensive. You should be able to pocket something off this process, it just shouldn't be too much.

That's why I'm suggesting a second limit to the spell in addition to volume impacted: maximum total value added. It should be less than 315,000gp, obviously, but still not trivial.

[thubby]

unless they become traveling merchants, they'll flood the market with any 1 thing.
made a bajillion full plate? great, the town gaurd bought a dozen, now for the other 88?

[hewhosaysfish]

unless they become traveling merchants, they'll flood the market with any 1 thing.
made a bajillion full plate? great, the town gaurd bought a dozen, now for the other 88?

But if a single travelling-wizard-merchant of 9th level or above (Fabricate and Wall of Iron are 5th level, right?) can - at next to no cost to himself, just 2 spell slots on one day - flood the market of every town he passes through with full-plate (i.e. sells full-plate to everyone who both wants it and has more spare cash than it cost the wizard to make it) and still have suits spare to flood the market again in the next 7 towns...

...then surely everyone will have full-plate.
Unless the PC wizard is the first one to every reach a high enough level to cast those spells. Or all the other wizards in the word have a massve aversion to money.

[Gnoman]

I limit this by ruling that the X in the Wall of X spells vanishes if ever removed from the wall.

[thubby]

But if a single travelling-wizard-merchant of 9th level or above (Fabricate and Wall of Iron are 5th level, right?) can - at next to no cost to himself, just 2 spell slots on one day - flood the market of every town he passes through with full-plate (i.e. sells full-plate to everyone who both wants it and has more spare cash than it cost the wizard to make it) and still have suits spare to flood the market again in the next 7 towns...

...then surely everyone will have full-plate.
Unless the PC wizard is the first one to every reach a high enough level to cast those spells. Or all the other wizards in the word have a massve aversion to money.

and then you enter the tippy-verse

[LordBlades]

The best answer with this, as with all the debatable effect spells is talk to your DM and see what he'd be comfortable with allowing you to do.

[gbprime]

Well remember, you have to have the appropriate craft skill to make quality things. So yes, you could turn twigs and scrap lumber into fine rocking chairs if you had decent ranks in Craft (woodworking) or the aforementioned Wall of Iron into full plate with Craft (armorsmith).

But selling them is another matter. The community you're in can only buy so many so fast. You may have made 200 suits of full plate armor, but you're not going to sell them all in one day. My general rule is to look at how long the item would have taken to make without Fabricate and say it takes 1/3 or 1/4 that much time to find a buyer.

That way it's not insta-gold, but still gives a bonus over making it the old fashioned way. And it does give you a LOT of free time for other things!


Also recall that you can't use a fabricated item as a spell component, so it stands to reason that even if you make a masterwork item, you can't enchant it. You might want to put a sign out so that doesn't come as an unpleasant surprise to whomever is buying all this armor you whipped up...

[Tyndmyr]

I limit this by ruling that the X in the Wall of X spells vanishes if ever removed from the wall.

That merely lowers profits by a percentage, as raw materials are still invariably cheaper than manufactured products.

And reducing the profit percentage of what is essentially an infinite resource doesn't really change anything.

[Eldan]

Well remember, you have to have the appropriate craft skill to make quality things. So yes, you could turn twigs and scrap lumber into fine rocking chairs if you had decent ranks in Craft (woodworking) or the aforementioned Wall of Iron into full plate with Craft (armorsmith).


Three problems with that:
a) Craft is dependent on intelligence. So, at mid-levels, the wizard already has a modifier of around +5 without ever spending any points.

b) Thanks to his high intelligence, the wizard can probably spare a handful of skill points, except if he really has to take Knowledge: Renaissance Painting.

c) Skill checks are easy, really easy, to boost. There's spells that give a good bonus, there's bardic music, there's the generic bonus on the next skill check...

Really, the wizard could easily get something like +15 in all craft checks.

[Noble Savant]

Should I note that armor isn't one size fits all? Or even close to that? Especially Full-Plate?

[Eldan]

Full-plate, IIRC, is even mentioned in the book as being custom-made. So there's at least that. Still, making long-swords is probably just as good. Perhaps even better, looking at the weight/cost ratio.

[gbprime]

Plus, Full Plate always strained the limits of the crafting system anyway. If you have a +15 and you're taking 10 then by the book it takes 33 weeks to crank out one set of full plate by hand. A +18 and taking ten allows you to work faster, resulting in ONLY 19 weeks.

So yeah Fabricate is a great deal there! But still, you make 100 suits of Full Plate, I as a DM will only let you sell one every 5-6 weeks or so.

[Eldan]

That's nothing. Try making the same plate out of Adamantine. It'll take years.

[gbprime]

That's nothing. Try making the same plate out of Adamantine. It'll take years.

True. 11 times as long. So armed with a +18 to your roll and working "fast", a normal artisan could churn out Adamantine Full Plate armor in... 209 weeks.

But it's Mithril Full Plate everyone wants. That's only 133 weeks! Bargain!

Place the order when you're 2nd level... come back and pick it up when you're 18th. :smallamused:

[Eldan]

And that's why its mostly dwarves with heavy (adamantine) armor. No one else has the patience.

[Asheram]

True. 11 times as long. So armed with a +18 to your roll and working "fast", a normal artisan could churn out Adamantine Full Plate armor in... 209 weeks.


I do enjoy that after cost deductions of the 1/3 material that's needed to craft said armor, a bard with +20 (added +2 for the sum of 5500gp since he doesn't have to pay for materials) to his modifier in perform will make an average of 3gp more per day.

Is there a fix to the crafting system somewhere? This makes me sad.

[hydraa]

There are Craft points in Unearthed Arcana

[Gavinfoxx]

How creative is the caster getting?

Are they using wall of iron & shape metal & metal melt & fabricate all together to make absolutely everything under the sun, that can be made out of metal, out of it?

Are they doing this with the financial backing of a guild or group that wishes to bankrupt the metalworking industry of a region with a flood of cheap goods?

Are they doing the same with Wall of Stone & Greater Stone Shape & Greater Stone Metamorphosis & Fabricate?

Have they gotten a way to get unlimited 'real' True Creation of plant based goods, say with a Simulacrum of a Djinn? And then doing Wood Shape and Fabricate with that? And also selling lots of plant based trade goods?

If they are doing the Simulacrum thing, are they making wealth with the unlimited wishes?

What skill improving spells are they using for the crafting and the selling and the making of these deals?

[bokodasu]

I think some people have gotten to the heart of the problem here - if it were possible to make more money using fabricate, the market would flood to the point where it wasn't. And exactly because the spell is so versatile, it wouldn't matter what market you entered, someone would already be there. You might get some little bit of arbitrage in there here and there, but overall your wizard day-traders would probably have it all covered. (And with all their scrying and divination, I'm not sure playing the market would help you much.)

Obviously this changes if you're in an extremely low-magic setting, but I think overall you'd just have to assume the market prices already take wizard-meddling into account, and price it per the normal crafting rules. (Yes, you can *craft* it in one day, but it still takes you the same # of days to *sell* it as it would a dedicated craftsman to make it in the first place.)

[CigarPete]

Also recall that you can't use a fabricated item as a spell component, so it stands to reason that even if you make a masterwork item, you can't enchant it. You might want to put a sign out so that doesn't come as an unpleasant surprise to whomever is buying all this armor you whipped up...

Where are you getting this from? I don't remember that being in the spell description.

Fabricate Transmutation
Level: Artifice 5, Sor/Wiz 5
Components: V, S, M
Casting time: See text
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: Up to 10 cu. ft./level; see text
Duration: Instantaneous
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No


You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.

You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.

Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet (or 1 cubic foot) of material to be affected by the spell.

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

To take the full plate example, the way I play it is that Fabricate can only create one complex item at a time, and my current DM has ruled that I still need to spend a few hours at the forge to finish the armor/weapon. Are you seriously going to tell me that you think you can concentrate enough on the magic to make more than one suit of armor?

[Doug Lampert]

...Crafting rules(which fabricate emulates) say that components cost 1/3 of the finished good price. This means our produced jewelry would cost 1,890,000gp. Sold at half price and minus the cost of materials we get 945,000-630,000=315,000gp profit from casting a single 5-lvl spell.

This is clearly absurd.

But completely disallowing the spell to produce profit, as many people advocate, is also absurd. That's what the spell does, what it's for. It takes cheaper materials and turns it into something more expensive. You should be able to pocket something off this process, it just shouldn't be too much.

That's why I'm suggesting a second limit to the spell in addition to volume impacted: maximum total value added. It should be less than 315,000gp, obviously, but still not trivial.

The standard rule for purchasing a spell from an NPC is 10 GP * Spell Level * Caster Level. Typically PC wizards aren't able to sell spells to NPCs for massive amounts of money, but that does give a reasonable baseline for value added.

If Fabricate could ROUTINELY exceed 50 GP * caster level value added then no one would sell fifth level casting for that little. Hence in a sensible setting (as opposed to RAW) it can't.

Just let Fabricate add that much value assuming you can hit a 20 DC on a take 10 craft check (fairly trivial for a wizard).


and then you enter the tippy-verse

Happens far earlier than 9th level if you pay attention to the actual RAW. Magical traps as written are actually worse than fabricate, because they break the game at level 3-5, while fabricate waits till level 9.

[gbprime]

Where are you getting this from? I don't remember that being in the spell description.


It's not in the spell description. It's opinion based off the wording in Minor Creation. It follows that you cannot use magically created things for other magical purposes unless expressly stated.

A DM can feel free to ignore it, no matter how ironclad or tenuous it is, really.

[CigarPete]

It's not in the spell description. It's opinion based off the wording in Minor Creation. It follows that you cannot use magically created things for other magical purposes unless expressly stated.

A DM can feel free to ignore it, no matter how ironclad or tenuous it is, really.

Ah, I see. Fabricate doesn't create anything though. It's transmutation. It takes raw materials and changes them into another form, which could be a finished product, like a suit of armor made from ore. Or it could be a raft made in seconds from a forest.

This would invalidate the wall of iron to full plate example, even if we ignore that full plate is made from steel, and not iron, so the wall would be insufficient regardless.

[Tyndmyr]

Are you seriously going to tell me that you think you can concentrate enough on the magic to make more than one suit of armor?

Well, no...I can't. I can't even magic up one suit of armor. Im not really sure what level of concentration is required to magic up a suit of armor. It is magic, after all.

[CigarPete]

Well, no...I can't. I can't even magic up one suit of armor. Im not really sure what level of concentration is required to magic up a suit of armor. It is magic, after all.

:smallyuk:

I meant the PC you, not the you you...

[Tyndmyr]

Dude, it's magic. There's no frame of reference. I have absolutely no idea how to quantify the amount of concentration required to make a set of armor with my mind.

I would argue that it is pretty much impossible to quantify in any way other than via an arbitrary rule, because it's pretty far outside human experience.

[Gnoman]

This would invalidate the wall of iron to full plate example, even if we ignore that full plate is made from steel, and not iron, so the wall would be insufficient regardless.

You can make armor out of iron. It works just as well, it's just heavier.

[Worira]

And softer and weaker.

[JaronK]

It's not in the spell description. It's opinion based off the wording in Minor Creation. It follows that you cannot use magically created things for other magical purposes unless expressly stated.

A DM can feel free to ignore it, no matter how ironclad or tenuous it is, really.

The Minor Creation spell only temporarily creates things, which is why they can't be components. True Creation makes things permanently... and explicitly can be used for components.

Honestly, considering the long time to create expensive armors, I'd suspect Fabricate is precisely how said armors are made. Most Wizards at that level gain a bit of wealth this way... but they can gain a lot more wealth much faster by just killing things and taking their stuff, so they quit after a while. After all, it takes time to set up a shop. Remember that the material goods should take up 1/3 of the cost of the item and you can sell gear for 1/2 the cost, so he's really not making THAT much money doing this, especially considering the general cost to sell the spell itself as laid out in the PHB.

Also, full plate was made from steel with padding and such in it, not pure iron. So you can't just use Wall of Iron alone (though that could reduce the cost).

Though I imagine magically created gear like this would always be top quality (Dwarvencraft Quality, to be precise). Any Wizard doing this would have Magecraft already and at least a +5 Int bonus before even trying, so it's not like it's all that difficult to get to the necessary DC. Might as well make the extra money.

JaronK

[Tyndmyr]

And softer and weaker.

Consider that in metals, hardness tends to result in brittleness, and is often not desired. Most modern armor is not that brittle. It's generally still steel, mind you, but the last thing you generally want is your armor shattering.

Steel is not innately that light compared to iron. Steel IS almost entirely iron. Figure 98% or more. The reason that iron armor is heavier is the greater quantity, if you wish to compensate for the lesser hardness.

Wrought iron armor is not that bad at all, really. It's been used for all kinds of things that require a fair degree of strength, like the Eiffel tower.

[Zaranthan]

I always ruled that the Wall of Iron (and similar spells that create real matter without real cost) was composed of the sort of slag that any reputable foundry would toss in the bin. It's big and heavy, so it does the job the spell describes, but it's absolute garbage if you want to make anything out of it. Once the wizard has to buy the raw materials like everybody else, the economy settles quite nicely.