Eberron-onomics

[Q. Flestrin]

Question, Playgrounders: What's up with the spellcasting prices in Eberron?

The spellcasting prices in the Player's Handbook presume a society in which spellcasters are rare (and possibly loath to share their powers). But Eberron doesn't conform to this understanding; Khorvaire very clearly is in the process of industrializing magic - magewrights, the dragonmarked, etc.
Sure, there's a little allowance for this, like how Jorasco healing is on 20% markdown from PH standard (Eberron Campaign Setting, p. 124). But since the "typical Jorasco healer" on page 233 is a 3rd-level adept in a society where a professional spellcaster is a "working-class caster" making "a relatively mundane living" (p. 89), not a full-on wonderworker, I'm really confused why the markdown isn't far more drastic. A cure light wounds costs 8 gp at a Jorasco enclave, so that typical Jorasco healer makes a gross profit of 24 gp/day - 32 with a least dragonmark (which I acknowledge not everyone has). Granted, a lot of that goes into the house coffers, but since the average worker still makes 1-4 sp/day, I'm not sure how your "typical healer" is so much more highly priced, especially when they can also supplement their income by giving mundane care. Am I severely underestimating the place of spellcasters in society/the difficulty of learning magic, or has an attempt to maintain game balance given Khorvaire a severely messed-up economic system?

I understand that the dragonmarked houses, for the most part, are monopolistic, but how did they achieve that monopoly if their prices are still so high? Say some independent competitor shows up - they may not have the Jorasco Seal of Approval, but they offer cure light wounds for just 1 gp. That's two weeks' wages, not four months', the sort of thing you could pull out of your savings when Uncle Rufus falls off the wagon - Jorasco would be flat out of luck.
High-level spells are another matter, since it's hard to advance if you're not out adventuring, so a serious price reduction would probably only go as far as 1st- & 2nd-level spells and maybe 3rd, but for low-level spells, especially from the adept, dragonmarked, and magewright lists? I really don't think they'd be nearly as high-priced as they are by RAW.

Thoughts?

[Dragolord]

To use your example, what makes you think that everyone buys spells? It's been explicitly stated when most people go to Jorasco, it's for mundane healing, not a magical panacea. A broken leg is the sort of thing that a few weeks' worth of healing checks at a clinic for a much lower price will cure. That typical healer is the sort of skilled fellow who only deals with rich and important clients, who need quick and dirty magic, not careful tending - i.e., PCs.

In the more general sense, the Houses don't just sell magic. It helps, but the vast majority of their businesses use non-magical methods. Lyrandar still runs non-elemental sailing ships, after all, and Cannith's fortune is based on mass-production. Dragonmarks give the Houses advantages, and let them use Dragonshard focus items, but the typical House or Guild member is just a skilled workman. Magic is still rare, even if it is much more industrialised than the norm for D&D.

[Flickerdart]

Imagine you are a 1st level commoner, like most people. You have 2 hit points.

One day, a rock falls on your head and you take 1 damage - but 8 hours of bed rest will heal you. The next day, two rocks fall on your head, and you take 2 damage. You can still take a move action every round without falling into the negatives, so you can make it home and take a full day of bed rest (or hire a medic to treat you for 8 hours). For these injuries, you don't need a magical healer.

The day after that, a whole bunch of rocks fall on your head. Now you're in the negatives and bleeding out! You will either become stable or die within 45 seconds, so the likelihood that a magical healer can save you is very low. So let's say you stabilized (or were stabilized with a Heal check) at -9. Three days of bed rest with medical attention brings you back up to full. You still don't need a healer. The medic who works on-site might be a spellcaster, but he doesn't need to be, and probably isn't paid much more for being one, since the spellcasting part of what he does rarely comes into play.

Let's say you are a healer. You have to have an office, to accept clients. That costs money. You have to advertise, or clients will go to someone else. That costs money. You can work for someone else, but then you still don't get paid the entire fee, because the employer needs to cover management salaries plus the costs above, plus pay insurance, and so on.

If you expect there's enough demand in a city full of healers for every healer to use every spell slot every day, and receive the full fee from that with no expenses, you will be disappointed.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Even in Eberron (hell, especially in Eberron), there's the Gold Economy with adventurers, nobles, and successful businessmen, and the Silver Economy with everyone else. People in the latter typically don't need magical healing, and therefore magical healers don't price themselves down to the point where they can afford it - they just put 4-6 skill points and maybe a Skill Focus in Heal and call it a day. People who do need magical healing (pretty much just adventurers and people who have otherwise worked themselves to decent levels in PC classes) can afford to pay out the nose for healing, even if it's relatively commonplace and available.

Adepts and Magewrights are going to make their bread and butter with skill checks, same as most people, and use their spellcasting on making that more efficient, and occasionally making some serious extra bank when someone with pockets full of gold and more than 10 maximum HP (or a mining company with a need for a Wand of Continual Flame, or a noble who needs a magebred horse, or whatever) comes by their office, the same way real world doctors make a whole lot more for surgery than they do for clinic visits.

[nedz]

In the real world prices are governed by supply and demand.

In D&D prices are governed by the cost of manufacture - or a fixed price list.

So of course it doesn't make sense.

[Fizban]

The reason Eberron can maybe claim to work is because of the Dragonmarks, feats which any character can take, meaning they're as widespread as the DM wants. The actual number of Adepts isn't any larger than normal, meaning it's vanishingly small (some 1% or so). I remember reading somewhere that 1/4 of the population had dragonmarks but I have absolutely no source-even then you have to divide by the number of houses and end up with maybe 3% Jorasco marks.

As for the "typical Jorasco healer," the Eberron books typically like to just throw out whatever stat blocks they want with no rhyme or reason. I personally find it most amusing how there was a big deal about it being a low-level world where 12th level is serious business, and then every dragon has that many class levels for breakfast and half the NPCs listed for a city are higher than that.

Grumbling aside, Flickerdart and Nerd-o-rama have the other half. Peasants simply don't need spellcaster healing even if they could afford it since they're not mechanically capable of surviving the damage it would be needed for, and the people who are work on a whole different scale. Not that paying a "healer" to cure hp damage ever makes much sense. You go to the healer to remove status effects: disease, curse, petrify, etc, and even then only when it's something you can't handle in-party. Needing hp recovery right now means you just got out of a fight and expect to be in one again before tomorrow, highly suspicious.

[Q. Flestrin]

Alright, gotcha. I think Nerd-o-rama's surgeon metaphor makes the most sense to me - magical healing is specialized treatment, and most injuries don't need that kind of treatment, and thus for other specialties as well. I keep forgetting that your standard commoner doesn't need magical effects that often, and that the dragonmarked houses can focus on infrastructure and occasional magical services.

D&D economics is still weird, but at least it's internally consistent.

(I think this may really just be residual resentment about how much the lightning rail costs, which is also something that your standard commoner wouldn't use that much.)

[Nerd-o-rama]

The lightning rail and airships definitely strike me as the Houses showing off their industrial might rather than sensible business ventures. I mean they clearly have an incredible number of uses, but there's no way either product turns a profit for their manufacturers and operators...in peace time. The lightning rail, at least, was probably a lot more profitable when the Five Nation governments were paying to use it as a supply line, and if war ever breaks out again, I expect the demand for airships to literally skyrocket.

[Âmesang]

Let's say you are a healer. You have to have an office, to accept clients. That costs money. You have to advertise, or clients will go to someone else. That costs money. You can work for someone else, but then you still don't get paid the entire fee, because the employer needs to cover management salaries plus the costs above, plus pay insurance, and so on.
This makes me wonder… are there billboards in Khorvaire? Will you see some wizard advertising himself on the side of a carriage?

[Gildedragon]

This makes me wonder… are there billboards in Khorvaire? Will you see some wizard advertising himself on the side of a carriage?

hadn't thought of it... But now that is in my canon; along with a 10-20% reduction to non-first-class rail prices.

I now need to come up with 20 or so advertisements for non-house-controlled Ventures...

[Fizban]

The thing that bugs me about lightning rails and elemental airships isn't the cost they charge for passengers, that doesn't even matter (it's the regular hauling of goods at high speed that changes the setting and the opportunities it creates are where you make the money). No, it's the fact that they cost huge amounts of money to build and are supposedly created by teams of people, even though magic items can't be sped up or reduced in cost by cooperation.

In the end it's probably easier to have one high level guy chain-craft magic items than it is to set up the infrastructure needed to build a real train or airship (those still take time to build even then), but Eberron pretends that it works the other way around and teams of casters somehow create items they flat out cannot meet the prerequisites to make. For a setting that claims to take magic's effect on the world seriously, this is laughable. Dragonmarks do their job correctly by expanding the pool of casters, but elemental binding doesn't change the item creation mechanics at all.

Meanwhile the conductor stones the rail has to ride on don't have a price, because if they actually had a magic item price there would be no justifying how they could lay hundreds of miles of track with them. The airship price I'm pretty sure is just a 40k boat+Wings of Flying (the Soarwood sailing ship is 40k, though I mixed it up with the PHB's 30k galley in previous threads) which is quite clever, and you can use various gymnastics and old rules to reach 20mph (3.0 ships double moved, soarwood doubles speed, 6x4=24mph, though fiat air elemental into double moving or just fiat 20mph seems more likely). Admittedly I don't have such convenient answers for the elemental galleon or lightning rail: the galleon is about 70% of the airship cost but the rail just seems arbitrary.

It's not until Explorer's Handbook that everything goes nuts with aircraft carrier sized lighter than air ships that cost less than a normal ship would and have cargo/crew capacities a fraction of what they should (indicating someone ignored the Sailing Ship references and decided an airship should actually be based on the largest possible ship, except twice as big just because?). Really it's just the airship entry that's the problem, all the other ships are perfectly reasonable but whoever did the airship was nuts.

[Gildedragon]

The thing that bugs me about lightning rails and elemental airships isn't the cost they charge for passengers, that doesn't even matter (it's the regular hauling of goods at high speed that changes the setting and the opportunities it creates are where you make the money). No, it's the fact that they cost huge amounts of money to build and are supposedly created by teams of people, even though magic items can't be sped up or reduced in cost by cooperation.

In the end it's probably easier to have one high level guy chain-craft magic items than it is to set up the infrastructure needed to build a real train or airship (those still take time to build even then), but Eberron pretends that it works the other way around and teams of casters somehow create items they flat out cannot meet the prerequisites to make. For a setting that claims to take magic's effect on the world seriously, this is laughable. Dragonmarks do their job correctly by expanding the pool of casters, but elemental binding doesn't change the item creation mechanics at all.

Meanwhile the conductor stones the rail has to ride on don't have a price, because if they actually had a magic item price there would be no justifying how they could lay hundreds of miles of track with them. The airship price I'm pretty sure is just a 40k boat+Wings of Flying (the Soarwood sailing ship is 40k, though I mixed it up with the PHB's 30k galley in previous threads) which is quite clever, and you can use various gymnastics and old rules to reach 20mph (3.0 ships double moved, soarwood doubles speed, 6x4=24mph, though fiat air elemental into double moving or just fiat 20mph seems more likely). Admittedly I don't have such convenient answers for the elemental galleon or lightning rail: the galleon is about 70% of the airship cost but the rail just seems arbitrary.

It's not until Explorer's Handbook that everything goes nuts with aircraft carrier sized lighter than air ships that cost less than a normal ship would and have cargo/crew capacities a fraction of what they should (indicating someone ignored the Sailing Ship references and decided an airship should actually be based on the largest possible ship, except twice as big just because?). Really it's just the airship entry that's the problem, all the other ships are perfectly reasonable but whoever did the airship was nuts.

Wow that's a lot I didn't notice about ships and the like.
but regarding creation sans prerequisites: I believe this is the power of the (standard to greater) schemas (which were never statted out, or much described beyond the minor ones, and an artifact-level one)

[Nerd-o-rama]

Yeah I am not a huge fan of the Explorer's Handbook vehicle stats, having tried to use them once. Once.

Guigarci is right, though - schemas and other setting/plot conceits are what allows for mass production of relatively high-level magic items, and they aren't statted out much because while mass production is necessary to a pseudo-industrial setting, you do not ever want it in the hands of player characters. Trust me on this. Trust every gaming story on the internet about this. Players should not have access to magical factories except as a narrowly-defined plot contrivance. Plus, the low-level Magewrights and Experts are there to mass-produce the mundane goods, including the large vessels that are then "powered" by a single major magic item, which is my understanding of how Elementally-bound vehicles are supposed to work.

And in general, Eberron is not meant to emulate "realistic" effects of D&D rules. It does not take the magic item creation rules as the laws of physics. It is not the Tippyverse. It is a setting where magic is used for mundane, but society-shaping effects every day. It may or may not line up exactly with the rule books, and that's the premise you have to buy into, in the same way that to play in Forgotten Realms you have to buy into the idea that 50% of the world has between 5 and 25 PC class levels.

[Zombimode]

Dragonmarks do their job correctly by expanding the pool of casters, but elemental binding doesn't change the item creation mechanics at all.

I tend to agree. We know of two ways of creating magic items: elemental binding on the one hand and dragonshard stuff on the other (sometimes uses in conjunction). But neither has any impact on the rules of creation or availability of magic items at all. There is also a huge number of magic items that have no connection to either of those methods whatsoever. It raises the question why even bothering with binding and dragonshards?

This is such an obvious disconnect that I doubt it is accidental. I think this just another effect of executive meddling. Of course WotC wants all magic items (especially those printed in subsequent books) to be available in Eberron. I think it is possible that Keith Backer had a different system for magic item creation in mind.

[Q. Flestrin]

Yeah. As a guy who once took item creation feats specifically to make use of the delicious Camembert that is eternal wands, I can attest that PCs will turn into robber barons at the slightest opportunity.

If my Eberron game works out, while I'll keep spellcasting services as written, I am going to slightly mark down magic item prices and heavily rework infrastructure usage costs (and come up with some magical adverts; thanks, Âmesang). Eberron has magic trains and telegraphs; I love magitech, and I don't think it should be hard for players to use it just because of gold. If they want to own or make infrastructure, though, I think it should be pretty easy to justify it in-game as House monopolies shutting down independents.

[ExLibrisMortis]

elemental binding doesn't change the item creation mechanics at all.
I'm sure you know a lot more about Eberron than I do, but this bit I happen to know isn't quite right: binding an elemental as part of regular item crafting somewhat reduces the cost of creating an item, by up to 20% (see Magic of Eberron).

Now, a little speculation on crafting airships... I don't know whether this is how it's supposed to work, fluff-wise, but it's mechanically sound.

You craft an airship as follows:
1) You need someone who has the Bind Elemental feat, and as many cost reduction feats as possible (e.g. Legendary/Extraordinary Artisan, house affiliations).
2) You need someone who can cast greater planar binding.
3) You need someone who has a caster level of 15.
4) You may need a team of mundane crafters. Technically, the raw materials used to build an airship are undefined, but I'd say that 92.000 gp is partially mundane crafting materials, requiring mundane Craft checks (or you just buy an unenchanted ship).

None of these abilities are granted by dragonmarks, so normally you would look for a level 15 full caster. However, since we're talking about using low-levelled crafters, let's try something else. Bind Elemental requires CL 9, so you probably need at least level 6 or so, plus a lot of CL boosters.

Let's start with a 6th-level artificer. This artificer needs a fairly permanent caster level of 9 at level 6, to be able to take Bind Elemental at that level. Once they have it, the CL for the airship follows automatically, by using the artificer +2 bonus and a bead of karma for +4, totalling 15. The bead is beyond WBL, but that's acceptable, as it's on loan from the house treasury. After that, this artificer emulates the greater planar binding requirement with a DC 35 UMD check, and that's your airship done (in 92 days).

DC 35 UMD is fairly easy - 9 ranks, +2 masterwork tool, +3 charisma modifier (12 base and eagle's splendour), a casting of skill enhancement (CL 9, for a +6 bonus), and then your favourite competence magic item - 2500 gp for +5. You need to make those checks fairly often, but skill enhancement is a first-level infusion, so you should have plenty.

The caster level increase requires a bit of DM input, due to the artificer's not-really-spellcasting ability, and because it's not 100% clear what 'caster level 9th' means in terms of prerequisites. However, you get six feats to get +3 CL: level 1 and 3, artificer bonus at 4, human bonus at 1, and two flaws. You can use Spell Thematics, Spellgifted (not even a feat, saves one), Primitive Caster, Reserves of Strength etc. to get the required caster level. Spend your unused feats on cost reducers.

If you want to do this at level 3 (the lowest viable level, I think, because you need Craft Wondrous Item for Bind Elemental), you'll really need to stack a ton of CL boosts in level 1-2, ruling Primitive Caster to add +3 CL, and so on.

At this point, the only reason you'd ever want multiple crafters is to share the XP cost, because no 6th-level NPC crafter is going to have 1725 XP (with Legendary Artisan) per 92 days available, and it's not viable to spend nine months recuperating after building one ship. I guess they work in teams of 5, contributing about 345 XP per 92 days each, or about 4 XP per day. That allows a team of five artificers to build about four ships per year, while keeping their XP total relatively stable.

[Fizban]

They added a thing to try and justify it yeah, but it wasn't in the initial book (maybe Explorer's?). It's an okay monster-hunting-for-cash mechanic, though that should be based on challenge rather than sizes of a range of possible creatures. You said the rest yourself: it doesn't change the time or person requirements, and the only reason you'd need multiple people is for xp donations. That part makes sense, but it's also the part most usually handwaved by DMs for NPC crafters.