What's the GP value of an orphan's smile?

[Mulletmanalive]

I came up with a not entirely silly game format that i'd like to run sooner or later based on the PCs being agents who work to collect components for Magic Item Creation.

The basic idea is that the GP cost of an item's components actually indicates the cost of hiring mercenaries like the PCs to go out and gather the various components that are needed to create the item. This includes the factor that multiple teams are dispatched at once and various other things.

The components themselves aren't intrinsically valuable other than their rarity most of the time but i've come up with the basic plan of assigning roughly equal treasure's worth of critters to the component so that the component is basically the treasure from all the encounters [i never did understand the idea of a bear having gold coins but i can imagine him making a lair over laughter fungus or something].

The first item is a Cloak of Charisma +2 [2000gp components], commissioned by a local noble. The components are:

• The Smile of an Orphan as she finds Love
• The thatch of an honest innkeeper
• 3 yards of Palamanian Silk [about 40gp]
• The gold upon the sunset

Of course, the game is mostly figuring out how to capture this stuff and avoiding rival collection gangs...

I can't really assign the prices without being arbitrary about it: I presume that the Smile will be the most difficult to find [i've introduced expensive single use alchemical camera/mirror things for part of this] but i'm not sure how much should be opposing it. Any help?

[The Glyphstone]

Orphan = 1 GP
Sealed, comfortable room = 5 SP/day
Puppy/Kitten = 10 SP
Item of Programmed Amnesia 1/day = 61,200 GP

Unlimited supply of smiles from an orphan finding true love = Priceless.

you'll make back your investment eventually, and if it doesn't work, get replacement orphans until you find one who really,really loves kittens/puppies.

[Project_Mayhem]

Or, you know, Mindrape

[The Glyphstone]

I was trying to make it look at least vaguely Neutral on the surface. Mindrape doesn't cut the cost any, it just makes the whole operation officially [Evil].

[Mulletmanalive]

Yeah, i'm working on the assumption that the players will, y'know, actually play the game that i worked to create...

I was mostly just wondering how much opposition to have the PCs twart....

[The Glyphstone]

Since when do players ever do what you want them to?


More serious then - i'd suggest a simple 40%/30%/20%/10% split for cost on any particular item, assuming it's got 4 ingredients. In your example, the most expensive part would be the orphan smile, which would cost 40% of the item's total, or 800GP*. Your rare silks might be the cheapest component and only cost 10% of the cloak's value, 200GP. Decide which of the other two is more valuable (sunset gold vs. thatch), and price it as listed, then fill in the remaining value with your last ingredient.

So, if the Sunset Gold is decided to be worth 600GP, being the 30% option, than whatever monster happens to be hording it would have to be high-enough CR to warrant a treasure stash of at least 600GP. Away from books, otherwise I'd give a more detailed example of CR-range.


(straight from Totally Not Evil Bob's Discount Orphan Smile Farm! Buy Today!)

[Project_Mayhem]

Its a sorry day when mentally forcing someone to love a kitten is [evil]

[The Glyphstone]

That's not the [Evil] part. The [Evil] part is making them forget each day that they ever had a kitten, so they can 'discover true love' again tomorrow and get you another smile.

[AgentPaper]

(straight from Totally Not Evil Bob's Discount Orphan Smile Farm! Buy Today!)

I want to sig this. May I?

[Mulletmanalive]

Since when do players ever do what you want them to?

Since the first group of players realised that if they make an effort to break my games or metafarm, they'll end up running and find me using my worrying knowledge of rules loopholes to mess with them? [I actually have this reputation locally, I refuse to not gain the fruits of my efforts]

Thanks for the advice on the costs: it was far simpler when I was just looking at say, rare wildflowers, because i could class those as Object d'Art and price them accourdingly. Ephemeral things are tricky to price

[Project_Mayhem]

But surely we're gifting them with the joy of loving kitty for the first time every day? Thats gotta be worth some good points. I mean, the kids an orphan in a medieval setting anyway, his quality of life isn't spectacular

[Mulletmanalive]

The smile farm bit is kind of academic anyway; the plot as is includes a wedding, a Romeo and Juliet thing going on in the background and someone trying to break up the preceedings.

Finally, Augury works in my favour!

[Tyndmyr]

Bonus points for the Smile Farm. Bottled Happiness(I think that's the spell) from BoED. You can use it as a spell component, or to replace crafting xp.

You just gotta have a person experiencing true joy to get it. Long as we're harvesting the smiles, may as well harvest the happiness afterward.

On a plus side, its a [Good] spell, so it counterbalances the MindRape.

[The Glyphstone]

I want to sig this. May I?

All yours.

@Bottled Happiness: If it's an Arcane spell, sure...otherwise it makes the Smile Farm into a 2-person operation.

[Sliver]

@Bottled Happiness: If it's an Arcane spell, sure...otherwise it makes the Smile Farm into a 2-person operation.

And we don't like to share do we?

Not that you have to, you could just make your partner forget...

[Tyndmyr]

It's arcane...fairly low level too, and the resulting component has a street value of 200GP if I remember correctly.

Come to think of it, we could simply get more orphans. Or use the same one more than once a day if we want to cut down on food/kitten costs.

[The Glyphstone]

If you've got an actual 17th level caster on hand to supply the Mindrape, yeah. If you're a mundane shmuck, it gets prohibitively expensive...300K+ for a Mindrape at-will item.

and it is called Totally Not Evil Bob's Discount Orphan Smile Farm, after all. What sort of farm only has one animal to make product for it?

[Mulletmanalive]

If you wanted this to be a quicker and more efficient spellcasting project, you could achieve almost all of your aims using Forget, a suitably powerful Phantasmal programmed illusion and the spells in question.

Find two folks who are madly in love; they will have imprinted on each other. Then seperate them and put them through cycles of being alone and then being reunited with their loved one using the phantasm, preferably after having escaped on their own efforts. Bottle the joy/ecstasy, harvest the smile, Forget spell, repeat...

Nothing requiring more than a 6th level spell.

edit: oh, and while we're at it, we could bottle loss/pain by seperating them or killing one in the illusion before the reset...

[The Glyphstone]

But that lacks style - and it's harder to find matched pairs of orphans who fell in love with each other than any number of individual orphans who like cute cuddly animals...

[Mulletmanalive]

You make a good point...

Part of me is considering using the Spawn Demiplane spell to figure out a way of mass producing orphans in love and then selling smiles across the planes...woot for being able to choose the temporal axis of your own plane.

[The Glyphstone]

Excellent, this has turned from a complete thread hijack/derail back into something productive - your players aren't going to be farming orphan smiles, but one of your NPCs can, and this is how the players get a hold of one for their magic cloak!

He's got to be called 'Not Evil Sam' or something though. Even if he's a wealthy ex-adventurer philanthropist whose hobby is finding downtrodden orphans, giving them a kitten/puppy, then finding them a comfortable home while selling the happiness/smiles it produces as a side business, he's still gotta be called Not Evil something. It will drive your players absolutely banannas when they can't get him to detect as Evil or catch him doing anything Evil.

And if he is evil, and farming his product via Mindrape, still call him Not Evil, just for the mind games.

[UglyPanda]

Seeing as this is D&D with screwy Wealth-by-Level, it's much cheaper to just hire parents for the orphans than to use spells on them.

300 GP is more money than more peasants will ever make in a year, you'd be able to get enough happy orphans to compensate for the much lower harvest rate.

[The Glyphstone]

What definition of orphan are you using? 300GP is a lot for a year, but not worth much if you're both dead...

'Manufacturing' orphans is all well and goodevil, but you don't need to pay the impending ex-parents off beforehand, unless its out of sadistic humor.

[Mulletmanalive]

"Totally-Not-Evil-Sam-Crafter-Of-Items-Most-Magical-and-Incidental-Producer-of-Smiles-and-Righter-of-Wrongs"

Sounds like I have an employer for my PCs here...won't respond to anything but his full title...

[UglyPanda]

I meant hire caretakers and buy the orphans food.

In other words: Go to an orphanage, buy it, then give them decent funding.

Creating orphans is something I leave entirely to the wandering barbarian bands of Orcs that seem to be everywhere.

[Mulletmanalive]

I don't know what's more disturbing;

The fact we're discussing a multiversal underground Orphan Smiles trade or the idea of a guy in wizards robes and a jacket with the collar turned up stepping out of the shadows and saying, "hey, bub, you wanna buy some smiles?"

[mikeejimbo]

I could see my group trying to harvest an orphan's smile.

"It's smiling! Quick, cut off the face!"

[Telonius]

I could see my group trying to harvest an orphan's smile.

"It's smiling! Quick, cut off the face!"

Hey, it's what Richard would do.

Either that, or have one of the players kill their parents and find out that they really loved the feeling.

[Fluffles]

Well, according to Mr. Montgomery Burns, upwards of 1000gp. And that was just for the smile of a regular child.

[ericgrau]

I'd be more in favor of non-standard treasure items to replace gold and gems. Crazy rare stuff (note: not orphan smiles) that can be used as crafting components or sold for half.

Otherwise, forget the PCs. Logicallly you'd run into child abuse scams among the NPCs. Be it magical or mundane trickery or just plain spoiling kids rotten w/o regard for their upbringing. I mean hundreds of gp just for an orphan's smile? Thems big business among common folk. Like crack.