[v3.5] Potential Route to Wealth - I have questions

[vampire2948]

Hey all,

In a campaign i'm running, as an arcane caster, myself and another player have hatched a scheme to create a great deal of wealth.

The plan is to rent shops in various high-wealth cities throughout the world, and hire NPC shopkeeper-types. Other security measures will be implemented at a later date - plans involve golems, contingent spells, wards, and me teleporting in to accost any thieves.

Now - the plan is to utilize an item from Complete Mage - The Quill of Scribing. This quill allows the Wizard, or other person with the Scribe Scroll feat to say 'Inscribe' in Draconic and then it will spend the day writing a scroll of the caster's choice - so long as they have the ability to do so normally.
The quill can activate once per day.

Quill Cost - 1,750 gp or 875 gp + XP


The Plan

The plan is to craft several of these quills, and then to put them inside a bag of holding with a few pads of paper. Then to activate them each day.

Over a period of a month, five of them would scribe 140 - 155 scrolls [depending on the month, and how long months are in the campaign world. Above figures are for real-world months of 28 - 31 days length]

Anyway. With the Extraordinary Artisan feat - -25% cost on crafted items. We stand to make quite a profit, assuming we are capable of selling ALL the scrolls for the usual market price we will make the following amounts of profit per month: (assuming 150 scrolls produced AND that they all sell for the regular market price) (All scrolls made at min. caster level)

0th level spells: 1171.88 gp
1st level spells: 2343.75 gp
2nd level spells: 14062.5 gp
3rd level spells: 35156.25 gp
4th level spells: 65625 gp
5th level spells: 105468.75 gp
6th level spells: 154575 gp
7th level spells: 106781.25 gp
8th level spells: 140625 gp
9th level spells: 179325 gp
[7th, 8th and 9th levels take two days to make, so the profit is less.]

All above prices assume I sell all the scrolls for maximum profit every month, and making them at minimum caster level.

Anyone see any flaws in this plan? Except for the following?:

Market Saturation
DM saying "No."
XP cost of scrolls (XP loss < XP gain whilst we're adventuring and such.)

Thanks,

Vampire2948,

[Pharaoh's Fist]

No flaws, though there are easier ways of making infinit wealth, such as by casting Wall of Iron over and over.

[vampire2948]

No flaws, though there are easier ways of making infinit wealth, such as by casting Wall of Iron over and over.

Yeah - But that's boring. And this way, we can easily transport the scrolls to different cities by single teleport spells.

Wall of Iron would not provide exponential profit. And it would require me to waste my 6th level slots each day.
This method requires no time greater than what it takes for me to say 'Inscribe' in draconic into a bag that I carry. And occasionally teleport somewhere and back holding the scrolls.

Also - Wall of Iron would require more space. Which, being on a caravel-class ship, we don't have.

Also - Can't cast Wall of Iron yet.

[kamikasei]

Anyone see any flaws in this plan? Except for the following?:

Market Saturation
DM saying "No."

I don't think you need any other flaws - the D&D economy doesn't work in the first place so start pushing at the seams and the DM will murder you in your sleep. Note that I don't say "murder your character", either.

a) If it did work, wouldn't it have worked already?
b) If it does work, what will you do with it?

If you just want a ton of money and don't care about realistic effects of dumping a huge amount of cash into the economy, just find and defeat a dragon. Tell your DM up front that you'd like one of those "giant bed of gold" Scrooge McDuck dragons. Do some basic volume calculations to realize how much gold that would actually be. There! The same ridiculous influx of wealth, no ongoing shenanigans.

[vampire2948]

I don't think you need any other flaws - the D&D economy doesn't work in the first place so start pushing at the seams and the DM will murder you in your sleep. Note that I don't say "murder your character", either.

a) If it did work, wouldn't it have worked already?
b) If it does work, what will you do with it?

If you just want a ton of money and don't care about realistic effects of dumping a huge amount of cash into the economy, just find and defeat a dragon. Tell your DM up front that you'd like one of those "giant bed of gold" Scrooge McDuck dragons. Do some basic volume calculations to realize how much gold that would actually be. There! The same ridiculous influx of wealth, no ongoing shenanigans.

We don't need a ton of money, just some form of income to finance a few constructs and such.

Flooding the economy will not happen, because we don't need it to.

We'll use the money to pimp out our pirate ship, and maybe create a few magic items. Aside from that, a steady income is useful.

Vampire2948,

[vampire2948]

We don't need a ton of money, just some form of income to finance a few constructs and such.

Flooding the economy will not happen, because we don't need it to.

We'll use the money to pimp out our pirate ship, and maybe create a few magic items. Aside from that, a steady income is useful.

Vampire2948,

EDIT - The DM lives in America, I live in the UK. I think i'm fairly safe from RL stabbings.
And my character does not sleep.

[tiercel]

Well, as has been noted, D&D economics is already pretty much broken. Generally DMs allow you to drag random garbage from the local dungeon back to some set of shopkeepers and convert them into coin, but if you are cranking out 150 scrolls a month, I seriously doubt there are any one or two or five shopkeepers who are going to buy up that many scrolls (or, at the very least, they are gonna want bulk discounts even if they think they can move some significant fraction of their new Scrolls'R'Us inventory).

Honestly, I would expect that successfully selling 150 scrolls per month would actually be easily a full time job (not just for one person), requiring of order at least a month to do; moreso when you are talking about higher level scrolls -- at the far extreme, how many 9th level scrolls get sold in the campaign world per month? --Even if you include free overnight FedEx teleport shipping with every sending order of a 9th level scroll, where is your market? And how do you market to them?

If you are talking about setting up ScrollMart or a FRP Amazon with employees taking care of sales and distribution, you're going to invest a good amount of money in your setup, security, marketing, business model, salaries, customer relations.... you're not making pure profit after cost-to-produce-product. You've got a lot of overhead, and furthermore, at some point your game is going to look more like Merchants & Moneylenders than Dungeons & Dragons.

The minimum DM response I might expect is that quills of scribing don't stack. Honestly, I'd just talk to your DM and ask how much XP-into-gold conversion you can reasonably accomplish simply by scribing scrolls and selling them yourself; he'll probably let you make some cash, but if you want a serious gold run (like what you'd need to actually build golems, have you seen their costs?) it's probably better for the adventure game if you just get out there and adventure.

[Indon]

You forget "Party attacked by cartel established by first party in campaign setting to employ that precise plan".

Where do you think all the scrolls out there come from?