Economancy: Using The Rules To Tell A Story

[AvatarVecna]

Let's make a wizard academy in an average metropolis.

Spoiler: Average Metropolis

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In a given metropolis, the set population is the adult population. On top of this, there are children within the city totaling to approximately 10-40% of the adult population. We'll average this to about 25%. These children will make up the "0th level" column in the following table. This represents less what they will definitely grow up to be, and more the path they are on, the dreams they have, the talents they possess. It doesn't represent true ability, but what they might be if they push themselves into rising above themselves.

This is not to say that nobody would become a commoner or expert or aristocrat on purpose: it's entirely possible that a given character will pursue pure academia, or will never dream of more than just working on the family farm, or is raised from birth to join the nobility, and so on. To calculate this, I will find the population that would be 1st lvl NPC classes as if they were calculated the way PC classes were and then triple that. The actual number of 1st lvl NPCs will be calculated normally, this is just for approximating child populations among the classes relative to each other. So for example, if this entire metropolis was just commoners and clerics, and the calculation indicates there are 100 clerics and there would be 700 commoners if the 1st lvl commoners were calc'd like PCs and then tripled, then 1/8 of the child population would be clerics and the rest would be commoners.

Metropolises are 25000+ adult population. It's unclear what an average one would look like normally. if we look at the Epic Level Handbook, we can see that a Planar Metropolis (a distinction that 3.5 does not have anymore) started at 100000, so I feel comfortable calling a 40000 metropolis average, maybe even a little on the meager side as far as metropolises go.

This table assumes (approximately) average rolls across the board, with the exception of wizards which I will maximize because I feel like it. Additionally, I'm aware that there is text in the community section that indicates rolls that would result in characters over 20th level just make 20th level versions instead, but you will take my epic commoners from me when you pry them from my cold dead hands.

Class	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
Adept	890	191	40	8	12	4		2	4	2					1	1	1	1
Aristocrat	709	191	32		16			4	4					1	1	1	1
Barbarian	349	64	32		16			4	4					1	1	1	1
Bard	439	80	40	8	12	4		2	4	2					1	1	1	1
Cleric	439	80	40	8	12	4		2	4	2					1	1	1	1
Commoner	1430	34605	64	32		4	12				2	2	4								1	1		1	1
Druid	439	80	40	8	12	4		2	4	2					1	1	1	1
Expert	1430	1140	64	32		12	4			2	4	2							1	1	1	1
Fighter	529	96	48	16	8	8		2	2	2	2				1		1	1		1
Monk	349	64	32		16			4	4					1	1	1	1
Paladin	349	64	32		16			6	2					1	2	1
Ranger	349	64	32		16			6	2					1	2	1
Rogue	529	96	48	16	8	8		2	2	2	2				1		1	1		1
Sorcerer	349	64	32		16			4	4					1	1	1	1
Warrior	1070	1901	48	16	8	8			4	2	2					1	1		1	1
Wizard	349	64	32		16				8								4

So, we have our wizard population. Now let's figure out the academy side of things.

Spoiler: The Staff

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We have 12 rather accomplished wizards in the city, presumably all members of the wizards guild proper - 4 at 16th level, and then 8 at 8th level. These will be our 12 staff members - the four founders, and eight hired specialists. Let's build some wizards. They're using elite array except 18 instead of 15. I think considering they're supposed to be the best wizards in the metropolis, this is justifiable. They will also be...optimized. With an eye towards being educators rather than being combatants, but it's still going to be a great deal more effort than NPC builds generally get outside of theorycrafting threads.

Spoiler: Archmages

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N Old Human Wizard 13/Archmage 3

Attributes: Str 7 (-2), Dex 9 (-1), Con 5 (-3), Int 24 (+7), Wis 15 (+2), Cha 16 (+3)

Flaws:

• Noncombatant
• Vulnerable

Traits:

• Absent-Minded
• Specialized (Knowledge/Arcana)

Feats:

• HD 1: Greyhawk Method
• Human 1: Academy Graduate (Diplomacy/Intimidate/Use Magic Device)
• Wizard 1: Scribe Scroll
• Flaw: Apprentice (Spellcaster)
• Flaw: Collegiate Wizard
• HD 3: Favored In Guild
• Wizard 5: Spell Focus {Abjuration/Conjuration/Enchantment/Evocation}
• HD 6: Mentor
• HD 9: Skill Focus (Spellcraft)
• Wizard 10: Spell Focus {Divination/Necromancy/Illusion/Transmutation}
• HD 12: Skill Focus (Knowledge/Arcana)
• HD 15: Greater Spell Focus {Divination/Conjuration/Enchantment/Evocation}

Skills:

• Concentration: 19 (+16)
• Diplomacy: 19 (+22)
• Intimidate: 8 (+11)
• Knowledge/Arcana: 19 (+35)
• Knowledge/Architecture & Engineering: 1 (+10)
• Knowledge/Dungeoneering: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/Geography: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/History: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/Local: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/Nature: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/Nobility & Royalty: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/Religion: 1 (+7)
• Knowledge/The Planes: 1 (+7)
• Profession/Teacher: 19 (+21)
• Spellcraft: 19 (+31)
• Use Magic Device: 19 (+22)

77000 gp

Spoiler: Specialists

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N Middle-Aged Human Wizard 3 (Focused Specialist)/Master Specialist 5

Attributes: Str 9 (-1), Dex 11 (+0), Con 7 (-2), Int 21 (+5), Wis 14 (+1), Cha 15 (+2)

Flaws:

• Noncombatant
• Vulnerable

Traits:

• Absent-Minded
• Specialized (Knowledge/Arcana)

Feats:

• HD 1: Collegiate Wizard
• Human 1: Academy Graduate (Diplomacy/Intimidate/Use Magic Device)
• Wizard 1: Scribe Scroll
• Flaw: Apprentice (Spellcaster)
• Flaw: Spell Focus (as specialty)
• HD 3: Favored In Guild
• Master Specialist 1: Skill Focus (Spellcraft)
• HD 6: Mentor
• Master Specialist 3: Greater Spell Focus (as specialty)

Skills:

• Concentration: 11 (+9)
• Diplomacy: 11 (+15)
• Intimidate: 2 (+6)
• Knowledge/Arcana: 11 (+22)
• Profession/Teacher: 11 (+13)
• Spellcraft: 11 (+21)
• Use Magic Device: 11 (+13)

9400 gp

So, we have our staff members, with their vast array of abilities. Now, it's time for them to go into business together.

Spoiler: The Academy

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I want to start off clarifying parts of the build, and parts of what's going on here: these mages are not in it for the money. They are wizards. If they wanted to get rich, they have a universe worth of suckers to murder and loot. If they want to be lazy, they can sell spellcasting services for decades worth of tuition per day (if they could sell them all in that timeframe) or just more slowly over time more likely. They are not working in academia for the money, but for the love of educating the youth. They buy 12 businesses (one each). To do that, we'll need a total 828000 gp. We technically have 383200 from WBL, but that would also be spent on personal gear and stuff for magical experiments, so lets assume no money from WBL - they have to make the money if they wanna run a school.

One potential path to making their fortune is spellcasting services - using spells to provide services cheaper than they could otherwise be performed. Normally the benefit of magic is that it accomplishes things quicker rather than cheaper (at least, if you're having to pay for spellcasting services), but there are some that can be taken advantage of for profit. A "Wall Of Iron" spell is one such method: the spell costs 1010 gp to purchase via spellcasting services, and creates a wall of iron 40 ft x 10 ft x 4 inches (230400 cubic inches of iron). Normally, purchasing an Iron Wall via the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook rules costs 6000 gp and gets you a 10 ft x 10 ft x 3 inch section - it's very transparently far more expensive than spellcasting services, if there is a mage available capable of casting the spell. But even if we suppose there is no direct need for iron walls within the city at the moment, we can still use this spell to make money: we can summon the wall freestanding instead of anchored, such that it can be more easily broken up and transported as a trade good. Iron has a density of .284 pounds per cubic inch, so the wall we've created would weigh 65433.6 lbs; iron is a trade good that sells for .1 gp per pound. Thus, if the city has no need for iron walls for construction purposes, than purchasing the spellcasting services is still cheaper than purchasing iron from iron traders, and gives them iron for smithing (or just selling as a trade good themselves).

Each archmage could cast Wall Of Iron up to 10 times per day. Presuming that 20% gets taken by the guild and 20% gets taken as taxes, this leaves them with maximum daily profit from this one method of 24240 gp. If they did this for a bit over a month, they would make the money necessary to open their school. They probably wouldn't go that hard, though: dumping that much iron into the local economy probably won't destabilize its value as a trade good, since it's a rather large metropolis after all, but it could upset the mining guild or the merchant's guild that the city isn't buying this particular trade good in the typical way. This can still be a way to make money among others, but it'll need to be slower to avoid stirring the pot too much. Additionally, the wizards might not want to spend all their high level slots for a month making iron walls - that just sounds kinda boring, surely there's magic experiments that can be dealt with? Fortunately, there are other methods that can be combined with this.

Each of the 12 teachers can make scrolls. From here, we're going to make some...assumptions. Assumption 1: via the arcane guild, they are capable of selling magic items at full price rather than half price. This makes sense to me because...well, if the arcane guild can't sell magic items at full price, then who even can? Who are PCs buying from at full price if even the big magic guild has to sell at half price? So, being members of an arcane guild allows them to craft items by spending 42.75% the market price in materials (50% crafting base, 90% arcane guild, 95% favored in guild; .5 x .9 x .95 = .4275). Then the local government and the guild take their 20% each out of profits, leaving you with 60% of the market price as your reward for your work. So magic items crafted will give you a profit of (60-42.75) 17.25% of the market price. An 8th lvl scroll crafted by one of the archmages would take 3 days to make, and would net a profit of 517.5 gp after all is said and done. A 4th lvl scroll crafted by one of the specialists would take 1 day to make, and would net a profit of 120.75 gp. Overall, this shouldn't eat into their ability to provide spellcasting services mostly (as long as they're taking things kinda slow), and this means their average daily profit from scroll crafting would total to 1656 gp. If this was their only method of making money, it would take them 500 days to scrape the money together. They'd need to make sure to have the XP issue sorted out, though.

So some of their options include spellcasting services, and item crafting. What other ways are there to really make some money? Well...they could slay monsters. Dragons, preferably - they've got triple normal wealth for their CR. A white wyrmling (the weakest core dragon) would have 1800 gp worth of stuff, and it just goes up from there. Even a young adult black (like we see the order beat in OotS) is barely tough enough to give the archmages XP (assuming they can even gain XP), and that would net 13500 gp worth of loot. This is a great way to make money, albeit one that's a bit mean and a bit dangerous. Slaughtering nearby dragons for profit probably won't be the primary way they make money either. If it were, though, each of the 12 slaying a single white wyrmling per day would see daily profit of 21600 gp (well, at least half of that - a lot of it is probably tied up in pelts or trinkets or other things that they can't sell for full price even via the guild). But honestly, even if all of it is goods sold at half price, daily profit of 10800 gp would make the necessary money in three months.

If they wanted to be super-boring, the archmages could probably also Plane Shift to some part of the elemental plane of earth that's just solid diamond or whatever and get to harvesting. It's unclear if this is actually a thing you can do (it presumably is?) or how much money it could make you (probably a lot?), so I can't really say for sure how fast this would make the necessary money. Probably pretty fast, though.

Each of the mages could take out a loan from the merchant's guild (DMG2 pg 129) and a loan from their arcane guild (DMG2 pg 225) as part of the startup money, using the above methods to help pay back said loans over time. The merchant's guild will give bigger loans based on Diplomacy checks, so the archmages could get 7200 each while the specialists could get 6500 each. From the guild loans, they'll need to be paid back quicker, but the archmages could get 8000 while the specialists could get 4000. Between these 24 loans, we could have 144800 gp. That's about 1/6th of the total we need, so best to get those loans after we've gotten most of the money. Although really, that's more a thing to do if we're getting impatient and want the school open quick - if we're patient we could just keep making money the way we have been, instead of spending a day getting 145k in loans.

Some combination of the various methods, even taking things fairly slow, will allow them to build their way up to a million within a few years. Now that we've got our businesses up, let's look at the profit checks: they get +3/+1 for ranks in secondary skills, +1 for guild membership, +2 for time investment (40+ hours/week), +4 for being in a metropolis, and +1 for being a low-risk business. Thus, the archmages make profit checks as 1d20+46. The specialists make profit checks as 1d20+31. They are allowed to take 10 on this check; doing so gives the archmages a result of 56 (for profit of 155 gp/month each) and gives the specialists a result of 41 (for profit of 80 gp/month each). Business Events can influence profit checks potentially, most of them in some negative fashion, but those can generally be countered with spells or skills or just spending a bit of gold. Overall, the academy as a whole makes a profit of 1260 gp per month, not accounting for whatever nonsense the business events pull.

So now that we know the profit, we need to find out the costs.

Spoiler: Hidden Fees

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The result of the profit check is all the money made after all the hidden fees have been dealt with.

There are, at any given time, 349 students, 12 staff members, and 60 employees. Presuming good meals for the staff and employees, that's 36 gp for food per day, plus some for the students that have a meal plan instead of bringing in outside food in some fashion.

Paying a proper wage for the professional work of the expert employees (+10), we're looking at wages being 615 gp per week. As the business owners, the archmages and the specialists make wages out of profits, so it shouldn't be added in for determining how much tuition costs.

Upkeep for land/buildings you own (at least IRL) is generally eyeballed at 1% per year, so let's call that 8280 gp per year. This is assumed to be not just on the twelve 5k grand houses, but also on the 64k that got spent on something as part of starting the business. I'm assuming that "something" is the land the school is on, and so it requires upkeep, repair, and maintenance.

Let's assume 20% taxes on the money being made? That's the max the DMG mentions (pg 140).

Putting it all together, we make a profit of 15120 gp/year after spending:

• 13140 gp on meals for employees/staff.
• 31980 gp on employee wages.
• 8280 gp on land/building upkeep

All of which represents 80% of our income, since 20% got taken by the government. Thus, the amount of money the school made before all these costs was 85650 gp.

...and now, for the reason I made this whole freaking thread.

Spoiler: The Students

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Assuming there are 349 students attending this magic academy, each student is paying their tuition of ~245.42 gp per year (+182.5 gp if they're purchasing a meal plan for themselves). The average student who becomes a wizard will remain at school for 2-12 (average 7) years...well, assuming they're human, anyway. Thus, most of them will be paying about 1717.94 gp (or 2995.44 gp).

So here's the thing: most families, even richer aristocrats, aren't necessarily gonna have 2-5k burning a hole in their pocket for Jr to pick up a few spells. Poorer families would have almost no chance of sending a child to wizard school without financial assistance - they money they're making is mostly going into supporting the family. But here's the kicker...if they graduate, they're wizards. And as previous stated, that means they can make bank selling spells or making items or adventuring or whatever. A Wizard 1 with Int 11 who sells all their spells makes 25 gp/day. That's equivalent profit to a DC 350 Profession check. Spells are renewable sources of money more efficient than basically anything else in the system if you really work at it, and the guild is there to assist students in making money if they really need to. If you've got the Int and the dedication to get through wizard college, even 12 years is gonna be 5135.04 gp at most from this fantastic university. Go to the merchant's guild for a loan, and you can get 5000 sight unseen, and your labor can cover the rest; if you feel like getting enough to cover the whole thing at once, a DC 12 diplomacy check will get you a 5200 gp loan at a higher interest rate. Speaking of which...

A standard student will borrow 3000 gp (meal plan, why not) and spend 7 years learning before they start paying it back. By the time they're done, they'll owe 5846.15 gp; if they pay that off 25 gp/day as discussed above, it'll take you 241 days to pay off the loan. Of course, if you're a better wizard than that, you could pay it off faster...and of course, the fastest way to is to loot a few grand from a dragon and give that to the bank. That would take like...a week, tops? Unless you die of course.

And of course, if you went with the bigger loan and had to take 12 years, borrowing an initial 5200 has turned into 75669.96 gp owed to the bank. You're going to need 4 1st lvl spells to sell per day to get ahead of the interest payments (so Wizard 1, Int 11, but Focused specialist? Specialist Wizard 1 with Int 20?), but even then it's gonna take 3007 days to pay off. You could craft scrolls on top of that to make +3.75 gp/day, provided you could get a source of XP? But really, this is the kind of wizard who's going to need to adventure - there's just not another way of making money that fast. Or rather, there are such methods (like the diamond plane thing), but they require levels, and you need the money fast.

A final word: these number aren't really defensible. It'd be easy to lower the effective price of tuition by having cheaper meals and accommodations, paying for less skilled labor, assuming less absurd taxes, assuming much lower skill totals for these NPCs (and thus, much lower profit checks), but honestly even these values kinda feel in about the right ballpark to what I would've expected. You don't have to have your wizard have learned by going to wizard college and taking out loans to pay for tuition. Maybe you disagree about how many children in a given city are trying to become wizards at a given time; maybe you think there's fewer locals attending, or maybe you think a lot of people would've traveled from nearby towns to attend. There's a number of questionable things being assumed here.

The point of this thread isn't having a number that you, as a DM, can point to and say "that's why your wizard 1 owes 80 grand to the mob". This is about giving players backstory tools tying into interesting things that aren't really directly addressed within the rules, and we had to go the looooooooong way around to get there. Did your character take a long time to become a wizard and now owes 80k to the mob, and you need to adventure for massive loot unless you wanna spend another decade paying them off? Did your character flunk out of wizard school and now has to find an alternate means for paying your debts? If you wanna play a wizard who comes from a poorer family, this can help you get thinking about where the money for it came from, and how much it cost. Did you go to a shabbier university? Did you work your way through school to offset tuition costs? Children aren't statted up, but that doesn't mean they don't possess stats to roll - if they've got full ranks in cross-class profession and skill focus, they can be rolling +5 without anything else - that's 7.5 gp per week, that's 390 gp per year, that's base tuition covered with a bit extra for buying cheap food. It's a busy schedule, but if that's the character you're making...

These are interesting questions, and I've tried to use the rules here to provide something vaguely resembling an "official" answer that can provide guidelines for people walking this kind of path during character creation.

[JNAProductions]

This is surprisingly sensible for something so based in 3.5's ridiculous RAW.

Of course, some of the builds are a little... Goofy. :P

[Eurus]

I'm honestly not sure if a wizard reasonably could sell all of their individual spell slots each day, even in a major city... but that's kind of a tangential point at best, heh.

Anyway, I like this. Using the demographic information from the DMG for plot hooks is something I like a lot, and this is a fun approach to making a "wizard college" in a setting, and an interesting backstory element to play with. It's interesting that this school is pretty much totally contained within the city, though... I tend to think of wizard college as the kind of thing people come to from far and wide.

[Fizban]

If all twelve of them made a full day of selling their spell slots as spellcasting services, they would make 159040 gp.

There is absolutely nothing that says you can just walk into somewhere and sell spellcasting. There are prices for PCs to pay for spellcasting from someone who's available, and that's it.

Scrolls can be crafted to sell for a similar amount of profit, with a cap of 1,000gp per day at standard crafting speed and an overall limit depending on how much floating xp you have. Or at least, you could if you had a way to force all of those scrolls to be bought at full price, but while demand at half price is considered "yes," demand at a full price is up to the DM. With Merchantile Background you make a factor of 2.5 per scroll guaranteed, and/or whatever amount of cost reduction is allowed.

But since you've already invoked the business rules, that pretty well locks the value of anything that could be considered a business down to that, and claims that wizards could make "so much more money" because RAW when you're already using a rule that all but explicitly overrides such a claim. . .

There are, at any given time, 349 students, 12 staff members, and 20 employees. Presuming comm meals for all, that's 190.5 gp for food per day.

I would presume that an expensive wizard school which can only be attended by a small number of rich people, would not serve common meals.

Where's your staff estimate coming from? SBG requires 6 cooks per 100 people with the best kitchen. You could say every meal has. . . . four shifts, but this isn't modern pre-packed frozen dough cooking, they've got to chop those veggies and bake that bread for every meal. If you're counting 20 cooks, that leaves no room for cleaning or security staff, which a "wizard school" ought to have.

There are 349 students attending this magic academy. Each student is paying their tuition of ~434.84 gp per year. The average student who becomes a wizard will remain at school for 2-12 (average 7) years...well, assuming they're human, anyway. Thus, your average student will have 3043.9 gp of tuition by the time they've graduated to Wizard 1. This is from what is arguably one of the best wizard schools in the world, with instructors cheating pretty hard to be this good at what they do.

...but most families, even richer aristocrats, aren't necessarily gonna have 3k burning a hole in their pocket for Jr to pick up a few spells. Poorer families would have almost no chance of sending a child to wizard school without financial assistance. But here's the kicker...if they graduate, they're wizards. And as previous stated, that means they can make bank selling spells or adventuring. A Wizard 1 with Int 11 who sells all their spells makes 25 gp/day. That's equivalent profit to a DC 350 Profession check. Spells are renewable sources of money more efficient than basically anything else in the system. If you've got the Int and the dedication to get through wizard college, even 12 years is gonna be 5218.08 gp from this top-notch university. Go to the merchant's guild for a loan, and you can get 5000 sight unseen, and your labor can cover the rest; if you feel like getting enough to cover the whole thing at once, a DC 13 diplomacy check will get you a 5300 gp loan at a higher interest rate. Speaking of which...

Now we know why you had that loan thread. Yes, of course peasants can't send their kids to wizard school. Though since you've invoked the DMG2 business rules, which essentially add an entire extra and greater income stream to anyone with the privilege of owning land/"a business", the standard assumption of common farmer wealth ought to be shooting up again. The students themselves could all be business owners, controlling assets accumulated over time and granted by their families which don't fall under NPC Gear Value but do let them generate money out of nothing because they have money.

A standard student will borrow 3000 gp and spend 7 years learning before they start paying it back. By the time they're done, they'll owe 5846.16 gp; if they pay that off 25 gp/day as discussed above, it'll take you 241 days to pay off the loan. Of course, if you're a better wizard than that, you could pay it off faster...and of course, the fastest way to is to look a few grand from a dragon and give that to the bank. That would take like a week tops.

Except there is no automatic demand for sale of spellcasting. Sale of permanent magic items would do the job quite nicely, but those require reaching at least 3rd level to get the required crafting feats. As does amassing 3,000+gp in treasure.

Over time, at most half of 1st level NPC wizards will eventually reach 3rd, slowly replacing other 3rd level wizards who leveled up or leave (to replace higher level wizards who level up or leave). So at most half of these people will be able to pay that tuition with a lump sum even after they become wizards. The unknown survival rate of new adventurers plus the unknown time it takes for an NPC to reach 3rd level means that they're left with the same things they already had: profession checks, business rules, or getting put on retainer and/or paid for direct spellcasting by someone at some amount for some unknown frequency.

Maybe you disagree about how many children in a given city are trying to become wizards at a given time. There's a number of questionable things being assumed here.

You have assumed the maximum number of wizards, which has given you a bit less than 1/100 people being 1st level wizards. So, 1%.

But you also pointed out that the demographics are for adult population already at 1st level. The number of children in wizard school should be approximate to the number of children, which depends on the race (and can be somewhat pulled from the MM entries of non-humans). But being a powerful specialized trade taught at a school which is charging tuition, it is entirely reasonable to assume that they would accept only adults- though since adult in DnD starts at 15 for humans before roll for age based on class, both phrasings can work.

Did you work your way through school to offset tuition costs? Full ranks and skill focus in a profession would be +7 - that's 8.75 gp per week, that's 455 gp per year, that's tuition covered with a bit extra. It's a busy schedule, but if that's the character you're making...

There is no specific time cost for profession checks: it says you spend a "week of dedicated work," but then the business rules say you can run a business while also making a profession check at no extra hindrance as I recall. Presumably it is enough to prevent you from crafting or travelling or performing the "light activity" that constitutes long-term Heal care, but there are no numbers.

And considering the standard assumption, if any, ought to be apprenticeships, and apprenticeships are essentially free labor for X years until you're trained. . . well we've just got an apprenticeship system that requires you already be trained in a skill before they'll take you on and train you in this new skill.

Aside from you not being able to roll those checks because the reason it's taking years is that you're not yet 1st level and thus you don't have the bonus.

These are interesting questions, and I've tried to use the rules here to provide something vaguely resembling an "official" answer that can provide guidelines for people walking this kind of path during character creation.

A "school" in any medieval sense, for a small group of people, is going to function as a guild with apprentices. With exception of a few noble brats that everyone hates/fears to pick on who don't have to do chores, the students are going to be doing something of value while they're there while not getting paid for it, and by the time they "graduate" they'll be quite well bound up in whatever rules the guild has for reaching journeyman and establishing your own place of business (that doesn't infringe on other guild members' territory), and so on, breaking with those expectations at their own risk.

[AvatarVecna]

I'm honestly not sure if a wizard reasonably could sell all of their individual spell slots each day, even in a major city... but that's kind of a tangential point at best, heh.

Anyway, I like this. Using the demographic information from the DMG for plot hooks is something I like a lot, and this is a fun approach to making a "wizard college" in a setting, and an interesting backstory element to play with. It's interesting that this school is pretty much totally contained within the city, though... I tend to think of wizard college as the kind of thing people come to from far and wide.

There is absolutely nothing that says you can just walk into somewhere and sell spellcasting. There are prices for PCs to pay for spellcasting from someone who's available, and that's it.

Scrolls can be crafted to sell for a similar amount of profit, with a cap of 1,000gp per day at standard crafting speed and an overall limit depending on how much floating xp you have. Or at least, you could if you had a way to force all of those scrolls to be bought at full price, but while demand at half price is considered "yes," demand at a full price is up to the DM. With Merchantile Background you make a factor of 2.5 per scroll guaranteed, and/or whatever amount of cost reduction is allowed.

I'm not suggesting they necessarily could do so, or would want to. I think it's more likely that a high-level wizard will be able to sell spells, though. To use the founders as an example, they are the sole source of on-demand wizard spells of 5th to 8th lvl in the city. If the mayor or king or pope or whoever is running the town wants magic that strong, it's easier to source it locally. This is merely a demonstration of how quickly the money could be made if they were going all out on it.

If they were taking things a bit slower, then each archmage selling a single 6th lvl wizard spell...let's say Wall Of Iron. It costs 1010 gp to purchase this spell slot, and you get 230400 cubic inches (~133 cubic ft) of iron out of the deal. A scroll that can get you the same amount of iron costs either 2450 gp if paying for a standard scroll, or 735 if the scroll is cheesed the way these wizards items are (although the scroll requires someone on-hand who can reliably hit a DC 36 UMD check). Iron is a trade good, which trades at full price even for PCs, and trades at 1 lb for 0.1 gp. This much iron wall would be 65433.6 lbs, and so buying this much iron as a trade good would cost 6543.36 gp (and either way, these chunks of iron would need to go to somebody who can break them down and reforge them into something useful).

Unless you have somebody on-hand who can hit the scroll cost, it's easier to get your scrap iron by asking a wizard 11+ to cast the spell. And if you're in a campaign where that kind of item shenanigans aren't kosher on either side of the screen, the wizard casting becomes the most economic choice period (and the school is also cheaper because the wizards aren't cheating their bonus quite as high).

Each archmage selling a wall of iron at that price without the buyer having a specialist UMDer would get 4040 gp profit per day with no assistance from the specialists, although they could almost certainly assist as well - they've got snazzy 3rd and 4th lvl spells that the larger number of wizards in the city don't have, although spells of that level are much less impressive. More likely in this situation, they'd have to undercut the scroll cost - let's go with 500 gp per casting, that way even if the buyer has a specialist and the restricted scrolls available, the wizards are still the better option. And they're still only selling a single spell a day, not "all their spell slots 6th lvl and up". That's still 2k profit per day, or ~60k per month from the archmages. The specialists can't fetch similar prices with their spells though - their spells are lower level, lower caster level, and aren't objectively better than buying a trade good directly.

Of course, if we really wanna get into the weeds, Fizban's idea about spell scrolls is a good one. All 12 staff members are in the arcane guild, and favored in said guild. As individual wizards they could hardly demand full price for spell scrolls, but the guild as a whole has that kind of bargaining power. Indeed, if the wizard's guild can't sell crafted scrolls for full market price, then who can? On top of that, being a member (and being favored) means that the wizards are crafting scrolls at 42.75% market price. That said, my guess would be that the guild takes a cut - lets go with 20% of the market price? That makes it equivalent to an extra tax of the largest size recommended for taxes. So that's 800 gp going back to our wizards, after they spend 427.5 gp to make it, so that's 372.5 gp profit per wizard per day. That profit also gets taxed (well, eventually), so 80% of that would be 298 gp per wizard per day. That's 107280 gp per month these 12 wizards are earning after double-taxed scrolls sold at full price. They still need to pay their guild dues (640 gp per month, for all 12 of them). If we assume that another 20% is just being spent on random stuff (maintaining their gear, food and lodging, snazzy hats, idk), that's still 86k per month they're making. After 10 months of working, they have enough money to buy all them buildings for the school.

But since you've already invoked the business rules, that pretty well locks the value of anything that could be considered a business down to that, and claims that wizards could make "so much more money" because RAW when you're already using a rule that all but explicitly overrides such a claim. . .

1) Business rules aren't presented as an alternative way to make money, there's nothing indicating you can't make money in other ways while running a business, you just have less time to do so if you're investing 40+ hours per week into your business.

2) This moneymaking is just for getting the initial cash necessary to open the school - once the school is open, the wizards can cease selling spells or scrolls, and I never said otherwise. The profit they're making that's listed in that post (at least, at that point in the post) is purely the money they're making from the university, not from any spellcasting or item crafting.

I would presume that an expensive wizard school which can only be attended by a small number of rich people, would not serve common meals.

1) +7 profession (4 ranks and skill focus) is enough to cover this expensive wizard school. I don't think a 0th lvl character would have that much, necessarily (how much bonus they have would be very debatable and I have no rules support at all for what that should be), but parents might have the income necessary. And depending on how good the family is at farming or whatever, they might just have the extra money to afford tuition already from savings. I'm not one of those people that insists commoners are dirt poor and have no means of affording things.

2) Merchant guild is available to give loans that would fully cover tuition for all years. Even if your family is dirt-poor and you have no skills to work your way through school, you don't need a diplomacy check to get 5k from the bank.

Which is to say, this is not an expensive wizard school that can only be attended by a small number of rich people - while it is among the most expensive a wizard school could be (given that it's 12 absurdly-cheating wizard schools rolled into one), it is still very much affordable for even 1st lvl commoners. That said, why not increase the meal quality to good? I'll make that a change to the OP.

Where's your staff estimate coming from? SBG requires 6 cooks per 100 people with the best kitchen. You could say every meal has. . . . four shifts, but this isn't modern pre-packed frozen dough cooking, they've got to chop those veggies and bake that bread for every meal. If you're counting 20 cooks, that leaves no room for cleaning or security staff, which a "wizard school" ought to have.

1) Speaking of changes to the OP, I actually screwed up on the employees, and I'll be adjusting the opening post to account for that. It's a holdover from when the business was just 4 universities instead of 12. The business rules indicate that for a university, you need 1 grand house and 5 employees. So it shoudl be 60 employees, not 20.

2) The food price was calculated as if you were purchasing common meals from the tavern every day, not as if you were buying the ingredients and then having the staff cook them. This price was not for the ingredients to cook 381 meals per day, it was the price to order 381 meals from McDonalds every day. Cooking at home is cheaper than eating out, but instead of doing that I'll be adjusting the OP to assume that instead we're ordering like...Red Lobster every day. That's probably fine.

Now we know why you had that loan thread. Yes, of course peasants can't send their kids to wizard school. Though since you've invoked the DMG2 business rules, which essentially add an entire extra and greater income stream to anyone with the privilege of owning land/"a business", the standard assumption of common farmer wealth ought to be shooting up again. The students themselves could all be business owners, controlling assets accumulated over time and granted by their families which don't fall under NPC Gear Value but do let them generate money out of nothing because they have money.

Incorrect. There's a reason the business rules are generally considered to suck: unless you're powerful enough that it's a nigh-meaningless stream of income, you're not actually going to be pulling a profit running a business. Even these four archmages, who are both powerful mages by normal standards and essentially cheating their way into having the biggest profit possible, are individually making 405 gp per month.

Profit check is your profession check (or whatever the primary skill is) -25, plus or minus any miscellaneous modifiers. If you can't reliably hit DC 26 after misc modifiers, you're not making a profit, you're making a loss. Additionally, starting a business of any kind in a city this big would cost at minimum 16500 gp, and would probably cost more. So no, in fact, you could not have it where every student was themselves a business owner. Even the parents are going to have trouble being business owners. Commoner 1s make up ~91% of the population (which reminds me, I need to get lvl 1 NPC class populations added to the OP >.<) and most of them will probably be a bit optimized for their given job, but not excessively so.

Spoiler: Average Lvl 1 Business

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Human Commoner 1

Wisdom 13

Trait: Specialized (Profession/Farming)

Skill Focus (Profession/Farming)

Profession/Farming: 4 (+9)

Let's assume there's two of them doing this for one business, a husband and wife duo who run a farm. The second one is a business partner who aids on the check. They don't have enough ranks in the secondary skills, they aren't members of a farming guild, and they're rural, but they spend 40+ hours a week working on things, and farming is a low cost/low risk business. So misc modifiers are +0. 1d20+8, plus whatever aid bonus the wife can give to the main check. She's only got 4 ranks, so she can't get the extra aid bonus via the Complete Adventurer rules yet, so that's limited to +2. +9 on a DC 10 check means she always aids. So the main roll will be 1d20+10.

They average -25 gp per month, on top of the risk of business events. And with that kinda time investment in their farm, it's probably going to replace making normal profession checks. And this is assuming that they just inherited an existing farm from their family - if they struck out on their own, they had to spend at least 3000 gp getting this farm off the ground, which means saving up money for years working on somebody else's farm or taking out a loan to start a business they can't actually succeed at long-term.

More than likely, they're going to take the less dangerous and more profitable approach of working on somebody else's farm business (assuming somebody is hiriing) just making profession checks. That would have the 2 of them making 19 gp/week instead of losing 25 per month. That successful farm is probably run by somebody who looks more like this:

Spoiler: Sucessful Lvl 1 Business

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Venerable Human Commoner 1

Wis 21

1 flaw that doesn't affect business

Trait: Specialized (Profession/Farming)

Feats: Skill Focus (Profession/Farming), Honest Merchant, Favored In Guild

Item: Masterwork Tool of Profession/Farming

Profession/Farming: 4 (+19)

This couple is pretty old and has been in the game for awhile. They've gone into business together and have a biological advantage in the form of being the 1/216 that have actual honest in-borne talent for profession (in the form of wis 18 to start). They each have +19, which becomes +21 when the one aids the other. They have the same +0 misc on the profit check, and have enough bonus that taking 10 is an option. If they do that, they're looking at a profit of 30 gp per month. If they each had their own farm business instead, that'd be 1d20+19 for each of them instead of a single 1d20+21, that would result in a total profit of 40 gp per month when added together.

And this farm, which is actually turning a profit, is equivalent to making 10 gp per week. Which is equivalent to a DC 20 profession check. Which they can each make all on their own, guaranteed, without risking business events. So after all that effort, after buying/inheriting the farm businesses, they're still not outpacing good old fashioned labor. This isn't to say that a 1st lvl business can't be better than straight profession checks...but a farm can't.

Or...well, that's not quite accurate either, it's just very difficult. A farm is 5 gp per point above DC 25 you hit, while profession checks are just half that in gp per week with no chance to fail. With a +16 or greater bonus, you won't make a loss on a farm. Assuming a bonus of +X, your profit running a farm business would be 5x-75 gp per month (if taking 10) or averages 5x-72.5 (if you roll the d20 and risk a bad roll), while straight profession checks make a profit of 2X+21 per month. Farm business becomes the better way to make money when your bonus becomes +32 or greater.

(And that's a single person with the same bonus making profession checks - if you've got a farmer at +12 with a dozen adult kids with +9 providing aid another, they could make 107.5 gp/month via farm business collectively, or they could all just make profession checks and make 513 gp/month that way.)

...I got sidetracked.

This isn't to say that a 1st lvl business can't be better than straight profession checks...but a farm can't.

If, instead of running a farm, they are running some kind of shop, making money gets much easier. If we change the above commoner 1 builds to be focused around Profession (Shopkeeper) instead, now the second pair are making a profit in a shop instead, which is 10 times as much profit as a farm. Now they're making 300 or 400 gp per month/3600 or 4800 gp per year, which is much faster than profession checks. Granted, they're still pretty optimized for the task as far as lvl characters gp. Of course, running a shop means twice as many business events, but them's the shakes.

Presuming a similar level of optimization for other skills, commoner 1s could make "better than equivalent profession check" money as moneylenders, shopkeepers, or innkeepers. Farming and service jobs just don't make a profit fast enough unless you've got a really big bonus.

Except there is no automatic demand for sale of spellcasting. Sale of permanent magic items would do the job quite nicely, but those require reaching at least 3rd level to get the required crafting feats. As does amassing 3,000+gp in treasure.

Over time, at most half of 1st level NPC wizards will eventually reach 3rd, slowly replacing other 3rd level wizards who leveled up or leave (to replace higher level wizards who level up or leave). So at most half of these people will be able to pay that tuition with a lump sum even after they become wizards. The unknown survival rate of new adventurers plus the unknown time it takes for an NPC to reach 3rd level means that they're left with the same things they already had: profession checks, business rules, or getting put on retainer and/or paid for direct spellcasting by someone at some amount for some unknown frequency.

1) Or join the guild for a bit and sell scrolls in a similar fashion. Guild membership is still 90% material costs for item creation, and it comes out to a profit of 4.75 gp per day (equivalent to DC 67 profession check). Also 1 XP per day, but let's be real: they're first level. They can keep ahead of that XP cost by killing a bat or rat once a month - so even if they're not inclined towards adventure, casting a single Magic Missile when they spot a rodent is enough to keep the money flowing in. Adventuring is more efficient way to make both money and XP, but it's also more dangerous. All of this is without selling a single spell, and it will still eventually pay back those student loans without having to engage in an actual Profession check.

2) While there's not guaranteed demand for spellcasting services, it's not easy to puzzle out a way that somebody would go to the lower-level wizards to get the job done. A scroll of identify would cost 125 gp, while a wand of identify would cost 5750 gp (115 per casting)...and both would require a UMD check. A casting of Identify from an archmage would cost 260 gp, and a casting from one of the specialists would cost 180 gp, so of course nobody is going to them. But a casting from one of the apprentice mages in the city would cost a mere 110 gp, the cheaper option for magic identification, and there's an awful lot of those mages in the city - enough that any given person who's come into possession of a magic item (or needs one evaluated to determine market value during a sale) could reasonably get in contact with one such wizard through the guild to get an item identified. Guild and government still take their cut, and this wouldn't happen every day for every wizard, but maybe once a week being called on to identify a single item is that much of a stretch, and that's another 70.4 gp per week (equivalent to a DC 141 Profession check).

3) Regardless of whether they're leveling up from adventuring or otherwise (somehow), the NPC rules already show us that there's half as many lvl 2s as level 1s, and half as many of lvl 3/4 as there are lvl 2. That's literally how those rules work out.

You have assumed the maximum number of wizards, which has given you a bit less than 1/100 people being 1st level wizards. So, 1%.

But you also pointed out that the demographics are for adult population already at 1st level. The number of children in wizard school should be approximate to the number of children, which depends on the race (and can be somewhat pulled from the MM entries of non-humans). But being a powerful specialized trade taught at a school which is charging tuition, it is entirely reasonable to assume that they would accept only adults- though since adult in DnD starts at 15 for humans before roll for age based on class, both phrasings can work.

1) Admittedly, I have assumed maximum rolls for the wizards. But this doesn't change the overall population of wizards in town - only the maximum power of the most powerful of them. If the roll was four 1s instead of four 4s, it would be 4 13th lvl archmages (well, just wizards - can't have archmage levels yet), 8 7th lvl specialists, 16 4th lvl wizards, 32 2nd lvl wizards, and 64 1st lvl wizards. The only thing that changes in the demographics by assuming maximum rolls instead of minimum rolls or average rolls is that the most powerful wizards in town are capable of 8th lvl spells instead of 7ths.

2) The OP already accounts for this - it is, indeed, the entire point of the 0th level column's existence at all. It is attempting to take a guess at how many "children" in a given city's child population are working to become wizards - this could be Harry Potter esque 11 year olds, or more likely 15 year old humans who are just starting down the path towards wizardry, but don't officially have a class level yet - they effectively still have a humanoid HD that will later become a class HD once they've actually settled into a class proper.

3) The 0th lvl percentages are accurate based on the assumptions I made, but those assumptions are...shaky at best. It's not obvious from the OP because I forgot to include the lvl 1 NPC class demographics, but actual wizards with actual class levels aren't 1% of the "full adult" population, they're...much lower. The city population is 40k, and the NPC lvl 1s aren't just "twice the number of lvl 2s" the way the PC classes are - they're determined as a percentage of whatever population is left over after the rest of the table is figured out. The adults in the table total to 1972 people - not even 1/20th of the full actual adult population of this metropolis. Of the remaining 38028 adults, 91% are commoner 1 (34605), 5% are warrior 1 (1901), 3% are expert 1 (1140), and the remainder are divided evenly between adept 1 and aristocrat 1 (191 each).

This is the real controversial point of the 0th level column, which you'd know if you were more familiar with the demographic rules when you posted: I think it's defensible that PC-class-wannabes make up a larger portion of the child population than actual PC-class adults, but what percentage are we talking here? Well, let's just look at commoners for a second: there's 34729 out of the 40000 adult population that are Commoners, with the vast majority being 1st level. That's about 7 out of 8 children being born to commoners; assuming a child population equivalent to 25% the adult population (25 being the average between 10 and 40), there's 10000 children and thus ~8750 children who were born to commoners. But I've listed 1430 as the "commoner children" (essentially, children aiming to become commoners because they can't or won't dream bigger). That's about 1/6th the actual children born to commoners, what gives?

...well...

The odds that a child will have Int 13 or higher (to use Int as an example) is ~25.93% (assuming they're rolling 3d6 for each stat in order). Of course, not every smart commoner child is going to aim to become a wizard - some will have good Str and Con too, and aim to be smart fighters. Some will have good Dex and aim to become rogues. Even those whose intelligence is the only notable thing about them might choose to become experts instead of wizards, or even just some other class entirely because that's where their interests lie. The same goes for Wis and Cha - a good roll there gives a child the opportunity to learn serious magic. So for any given child, there is a ~59% chance they've got a casting stat at 13+. And really all you need to maybe get started is an 11, which is gonna be 50% of children, so 7/8th have at least 11 in a casting stat and could maybe get a decent-ish career in such a field. I'm assuming about 5/6th of commoner children attempt to become something more than just a commoner, and while I can't provide a great explanation for arriving at that number (the actual way it was achieved is arbitrary), the conclusion feels appropriate.

(This also means that the number of children aiming to become scholars is only slightly larger than the number that actually become scholars when they grow up. This also feels fairly defensible? Staying within academia in general from generation to generation feels pretty reliable, and there will be more joining academia from other professions than expert children who end up as commoners.)

But it's just as defensible to say that the children population should be exactly proportional to the adult population - which is to say, 1/4th the adult population. That would put the number of students at 31 at any given time, although this would result in drastic changes to tuition seeing as the costs are being spread across far fewer students.

There is no specific time cost for profession checks: it says you spend a "week of dedicated work," but then the business rules say you can run a business while also making a profession check at no extra hindrance as I recall. Presumably it is enough to prevent you from crafting or travelling or performing the "light activity" that constitutes long-term Heal care, but there are no numbers.

On the one hand...I don't disagree with you? I mean I don't recall the business rules explicitly saying it was allowed, but I also don't recall them anything saying it was disallowed either.

On the other hand, this same post has you saying this:

But since you've already invoked the business rules, that pretty well locks the value of anything that could be considered a business down to that, and claims that wizards could make "so much more money" because RAW when you're already using a rule that all but explicitly overrides such a claim. . .

...which looks like you're saying that the wizards aren't allowed to do business rules + other sources of income, but commoners are? And this is how you're disagreeing with a post I made where all of the wizards mentioned only use a single source of income at any given time?

And considering the standard assumption, if any, ought to be apprenticeships, and apprenticeships are essentially free labor for X years until you're trained. . . well we've just got an apprenticeship system that requires you already be trained in a skill before they'll take you on and train you in this new skill.

Apprenticeship already has rules, in the Apprentice/Mentor feats. While there's nothing in those rules preventing a Humanoid 1 child from having it, they'd need a mentor, and there's only 12 wizards in the city who qualify for that feat...and they all work at the school. There could maybe be 12 students at school with the apprentice feat, but because of the number of students, most of them are probably going to flunk out of wizard college and become experts instead - they have the magical theory down, but just not the talent for actual magic, maybe. More likely, the 12 teachers are going to have Apprentices among the other adult wizards, with my guess being that the apprentices are particularly capable graduates of years past. Maybe they're grooming the ones that had Int 18 in school to replace the specialists for the next generation of teaching.

Aside from you not being able to roll those checks because the reason it's taking years is that you're not yet 1st level and thus you don't have the bonus.

"0th level" as a column is just my way of approximating the children, but they don't literally have 0 HD, they just don't possess a class level yet. That means they have a single humanoid HD, which gets replaced with class HD once they actually have a class (the same way it works for all races that have a single racial HD). They almost certainly don't have full ranks, since humanoid HD have no class skills except from feats granting them, but they could have a +5 before wisdom with some investment, which is enough to cover a solid chunk of the given tuition costs. Reaching +7 is within their reach, but it would require them to focus on it. More likely, though, they ones working their way through are looking at +2-4, and so while a good chunk of tuition is covered by their work, they'll still need to borrow money from somewhere, be it the bank or a relative.

A bit more to the point, this post isn't about saying that they have to have good investment in a profession check if they want to avoid having to pay student loans after becoming an adventurer, this is about giving tools to people who want to know if such things are mechanically viable. When making a wizard, one might ask the question "wait, how much does wizard college even cost? Could my smart farmer kid even afford wizard college?" And then you go looking for an official answer and don't really find anything. This thread is not providing an official answer, because I am not WotC, but it is providing a mechanically defensible answer, I think. This wizard college, which is actually 12 colleges masquerading as one, has 12 teachers who are basically cheating their way into the biggest profit they can possibly manage, and it still costs about 3k to become a wizard in total. The amount it costs per year, per month, per week, is roughly equivalent to the money you'd make if you average 17 on a profession check.

"How much does wizard college cost, in terms of tuition?" About 434 per year, at least before I go make the slight changes that I'm about to make. It'll probably change a good bit after I recalculate, but I don't imagine we're talking orders of magnitude different.

"Is it reasonable that my poor wizard worked his way through wizard college?" Yes, it is, provided he's pretty good at it for 1st lvl character.

"Is it reasonable that my poor wizard with no skills could still afford wizard college?" Yes, the bank provides loans big enough to cover tuition, and once you're a wizard you have multiple options of paying back that loan that are more efficient than Profession checks, to the point that you could easily have it dealt with before you even started adventuring, if you want. Or you could have it not dealt with yet, and adventuring is you how intend to pay back the loan.

"Is it reasonable that my poor wizard could've gotten his parents to pay for the college?" Well yes. If they're decent at Profession checks themselves, and especially if there's a handful of family members rather than just a mom and dad, they could build up some pretty hefty savings and contribute to the college fund enough to cover it every year.

A "school" in any medieval sense, for a small group of people, is going to function as a guild with apprentices. With exception of a few noble brats that everyone hates/fears to pick on who don't have to do chores, the students are going to be doing something of value while they're there while not getting paid for it, and by the time they "graduate" they'll be quite well bound up in whatever rules the guild has for reaching journeyman and establishing your own place of business (that doesn't infringe on other guild members' territory), and so on, breaking with those expectations at their own risk.

The ones in school probably aren't apprentices, but I've already addressed that point. I definitely agree that the ones that graduate will almost certainly be joining the wizard's guild in some capacity.

EDIT: I've adjusted wages to account for the additional 40 workers, but when I went to calc the food costs, it turns out I was already paying for good meals, I just had it written down as common instead. It's still slightly more expensive now (more mouths to feed), but not significantly more as I originally expected. It's now about 600 per year/4k per 7 years in tuition, which is still within both loan range and Profession range if you're good at it (although now you need +13 to work your way through this wizard college without loans, which is a much more stringent ask especially for those that can't have it as a class skill. Still, you can get a solid chunk paid for on your own at least.

[Fizban]

In chunks for slightly reduced wall-ness:

Spoiler

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Of course, if we really wanna get into the weeds, Fizban's idea about spell scrolls is a good one.

Except you just trotted out a bunch of Wall of Iron calculations, which suggest anything else is superfluous. Pick a lane.

1) Business rules aren't presented as an alternative way to make money, there's nothing indicating you can't make money in other ways while running a business, you just have less time to do so if you're investing 40+ hours per week into your business.

What you mean to say is that they are presented as an alternative, that they do not preclude alternate methods of making money. Upon which I can disagree: If there are a set of business rules that cover all businesses, there is no reason to assume there is any method of reliably making money as the proprietor of a business not subject to the whim's of the DM regarding available customers that does not go through the business rules (because the rules are designed with the idea that they can cover any, and thus every, possible business, with a bit of expansion where needed).

You should also provide the breakdowns on how you're coming to these numbers. You say there's 12 businesses making only 3,420 per month, with take 10 results of 106 for a profit rating of 81- this suggests the risk multiplier is less than 5gp, so you must be taking out the specialist costs as well. The specialists' profit modifiers don't even matter, unless you're assuming that the on-site primary teachers and owners can't roll their own profit checks and leave it all to their specialists.

2) This moneymaking is just for getting the initial cash necessary to open the school - once the school is open, the wizards can cease selling spells or scrolls, and I never said otherwise. The profit they're making that's listed in that post (at least, at that point in the post) is purely the money they're making from the university, not from any spellcasting or item crafting.

For nearly a million gp they could just build their own custom fortress and run it however they want, rather than having to buy a bunch of businesses.

My point is that you keep switching between "lol RAW exploit means this doesn't matter" and "I've picked this number to matter." If the business/profession/loan/item buying and selling/etc rules matter, then they can't just pull money out of nowhere to build their fortress. Justifying one part with a casual "eh they sell some spellcasting" just cheapens the effort.

I also presume those heavily optimized statblocks for the teachers result in them having nice high profit checks? But you're using the profit check to set the tuition, so it would go down if they were worse at their jobs. Suggesting this is meant to be the most elite wizard school and all others would be much cheaper?

1) +7 profession (4 ranks and skill focus) is enough to cover this expensive wizard school. I don't think a 0th lvl character would have that much, necessarily (how much bonus they have would be very debatable and I have no rules support at all for what that should be), but parents might have the income necessary. And depending on how good the family is at farming or whatever, they might just have the extra money to afford tuition already from savings. I'm not one of those people that insists commoners are dirt poor and have no means of affording things.

Again, pick a lane. Either 3,000gp over 7 years is something that "even rich aristocrats" don't have "burning a hole in their pocket," or actually any 1st level commoner professional could match it or just take out a loan.

2) Merchant guild is available to give loans that would fully cover tuition for all years. Even if your family is dirt-poor and you have no skills to work your way through school, you don't need a diplomacy check to get 5k from the bank.

Which is completely ridiculous, but hey.

2) The food price was calculated as if you were purchasing common meals from the tavern every day, not as if you were buying the ingredients and then having the staff cook them. This price was not for the ingredients to cook 381 meals per day, it was the price to order 381 meals from McDonalds every day. Cooking at home is cheaper than eating out, but instead of doing that I'll be adjusting the OP to assume that instead we're ordering like...Red Lobster every day. That's probably fine.

Even with modern transport you can't just order hundreds of meals from down the road every single day. If you want to feed 400 people eating in the same place every day, you need a kitchen and staff to handle 400 people (a catering service is just a kitchen and staff that prepare the food off-site) (you'll also need room for food delivery and storage etc).

Part of the problem here is using the heavily abstracted business rules in concert with detailed meal pricing. The operating costs of a boarding school should include feeding all the attendees and live-in staff, and thus already be subsumed in the business rules. But you're running up individual weekly salaries and food costs like a Stronghold.

Incorrect. There's a reason the business rules are generally considered to suck: unless you're powerful enough that it's a nigh-meaningless stream of income, you're not actually going to be pulling a profit running a business. Even these four archmages, who are both powerful mages by normal standards and essentially cheating their way into having the biggest profit possible, are individually making 405 gp per month.

You should supply the full breakdown of their profit checks then. Except their profit seems to be making the tuition worse, since you didn't explain that calculation fully either.

Profit check is your profession check (or whatever the primary skill is) -25, plus or minus any miscellaneous modifiers. If you can't reliably hit DC 26 after misc modifiers, you're not making a profit, you're making a loss. Additionally, starting a business of any kind in a city this big would cost at minimum 16500 gp, and would probably cost more. So no, in fact, you could not have it where every student was themselves a business owner. Even the parents are going to have trouble being business owners. Commoner 1s make up ~91% of the population (which reminds me, I need to get lvl 1 NPC class populations added to the OP >.<) and most of them will probably be a bit optimized for their given job, but not excessively so.

Which can be negated by the owner hiring a specialist who does have sufficient bonus to run it for them, and the fact that long-running businesses have unlimited profit bonus due to re-investment. I'm not talking about 1st level commoners starting businesses in the big city. I'm talking about rich people/nobles from families that own multiple "businesses," and the fact that any business which lasts long enough to be inherited is probably so powerful it doesn't matter who owns it.

You have 1% of the population here, twice the remaining percentage aristocrats, but still only 1/3 the remaining percentage experts. Probably not enough that every student "owns" their own autonomous source of income, but plenty can.


Though there is also a problem with the demographics rules- they make the 90-etc% commoners, but then they also point out that 90-etc% of the population is found in villages or smaller. The 90% of people are farmers figure reflects 90% of the population living in small clusters of farms. Towns and cities should have increasingly higher percentages of non-farmers, yet the class breakdowns remain the same, meaning that the 90% commoners in a metropolis are still all skilled non-farming positions with workshops and whatnot, or that actually each "city" includes the number of common farmers required to be self-sufficient in food production.

The point being that Commoner 1 does not preclude having a big expensive business grown over generations that is sustainable with even a low bonus.

Let's assume there's two of them doing this for one business, a husband and wife duo who run a farm. The second one is a business partner who aids on the check. They don't have enough ranks in the secondary skills, they aren't members of a farming guild, and they're rural, but they spend 40+ hours a week working on things, and farming is a low cost/low risk business. So misc modifiers are +0. 1d20+8, plus whatever aid bonus the wife can give to the main check. She's only got 4 ranks, so she can't get the extra aid bonus via the Complete Adventurer rules yet, so that's limited to +2. +9 on a DC 10 check means she always aids. So the main roll will be 1d20+10.

They average -25 gp per month, on top of the risk of business events. And with that kinda time investment in their farm, it's probably going to replace making normal profession checks. And this is assuming that they just inherited an existing farm from their family - if they struck out on their own, they had to spend at least 3000 gp getting this farm off the ground, which means saving up money for years working on somebody else's farm or taking out a loan to start a business they can't actually succeed at long-term.

Yeah, because you've decided that running the business precludes their own Profession checks in spite of what the rules say, and forced them to found a business from nothing when their skill indicates they should not. Or had them inherit a farm that was barely worth inheriting.

And you've also completely botched the profit check total? If they started with +9 profession, how did they end up with only +10? It's skill+modifiers. The modifiers here are +1 low risk, +1 low resources, +2 partner, for a total of +13 from your starting skill total, spending only 8 hours per week. Since you've used arbitrary masterwork tools and assumed they have 3,000 5,000gp to start a low-resource business at Town tier for no penalties, they should have another +2 from a 50gp tool. That's +15 and they succeed taking 10. There's also no reason they couldn't be in the guild for another +1.

And the rules explicitly say you can roll a profit check while you "simultaneously work for the business earning gold each week with Profession or Craft check" (start of p181), so actually yeah, they do get the +2 for 40 hours, as well as another 15-20gp (for 60-80 per month) or so to save or offset bad tidings. The business rules are pure profit over time for anyone with sufficient bonus and starting capital.

And once they've saved 1,000- 1,250 (depending on if you count the house's cost) above their safety cushion, they can reinvest for a permanent bonus of ~2.5. Said investment pays for itself in 4 years, at which point you stack it and buy another in 2 years, then 1 year, etc up to the max 1/3 months, until an actual inherited family farm has lol bonus even if the owner has only one rank of profession because it's been gaining +10 per year.

The only serious risk is the "random" events table, which is skewed towards adventurers running exciting businesses and thus is almost entirely negative events causing massive gp damage and/or profit penalties. Of note is how every business operating in a region adds a 1/20 chance of a natural disaster, and the one that says to roll an extra encounter every month but reroll any beneficial results, as if that was likely to happen. But you're ignoring them, and anyone wanting to use the rules to model something will ignore them, so yeah. Either all businesses fail messily, or only those with such extra cash reserves and massive skill checks that they can offset every hazard on the table survive (in perpetuity becoming ever more profitable for the rest of time).

If, instead of running a farm, they are running some kind of shop, making money gets much easier. If we change the above commoner 1 builds to be focused around Profession (Shopkeeper) instead, now the second pair are making a profit in a shop instead, which is 10 times as much profit as a farm. Now they're making 300 or 400 gp per month/3600 or 4800 gp per year, which is much faster than profession checks. Granted, they're still pretty optimized for the task as far as lvl characters gp. Of course, running a shop means twice as many business events, but them's the shakes.

Presuming a similar level of optimization for other skills, commoner 1s could make "better than equivalent profession check" money as moneylenders, shopkeepers, or innkeepers. Farming and service jobs just don't make a profit fast enough unless you've got a really big bonus.

And yet, with only 1% of the population in this school, the 10% of non-farmers is far more than enough for every student to be from a family making more than profession checks, possibly even to the point of owning their own parcels of land/shares/etc. Even excluding that the farms nearby to a metropolis are almost certainly established multi-generational affairs with unlimited profit bonuses.

Which is why the DMG2 business rules are terrible for basing anything on. They're clearly and effectively designed for PCs with a few thousand in cash who want to play at owning a business, and completely fall apart if you actually run them for anyone in the world that actually owns a business for any length of time.

1) Or join the guild for a bit and sell scrolls in a similar fashion. Guild membership is still 90% material costs for item creation, and it comes out to a profit of 4.75 gp per day (equivalent to DC 67 profession check).

You should really be listing the citations for all these different guild rules, since there are so many you could be thinking of anything from anywhere.

Also 1 XP per day, but let's be real: they're first level. They can keep ahead of that XP cost by killing a bat or rat once a month - so even if they're not inclined towards adventure, casting a single Magic Missile when they spot a rodent is enough to keep the money flowing in.

Assuming NPCs earn xp the way PCs do, and that the DM awards them xp for an encounter with no threat, or for asking for trouble because they're mysteriously aware of game mechanics. I agree that simply assuming a crafter can sell an occasional magic item at full price and negligible xp cost to cover their upkeep and support their Gear Value is the right way to go about things, but if you try to push the system it can push right back. There is no measure of how long a caster/crafter/person using PC class abilities for pay will take to amass X amount of money to pay something off.

Adventuring is more efficient way to make both money and XP, but it's also more dangerous.

Depending on how strongly the DM adheres to the encounter guidelines, roughly one encounter of serious 50/50 danger per level, which should not be unfairly capable of trapping or tracking the party so as to prevent them fleeing. The main risk of adventuring comes from the tacit knowledge that where the PCs happen to get a nice progression of fights that increase their skills without killing them, random NPCs that walk out there have a high chance of dying, but how high still depends entirely on the DM/setting/narrative convenience and cannot be measured.

3) Regardless of whether they're leveling up from adventuring or otherwise (somehow), the NPC rules already show us that there's half as many lvl 2s as level 1s, and half as many of lvl 3/4 as there are lvl 2. That's literally how those rules work out.

Yes, that is literally why I re-stated them.

NPCs cannot rely on adventuring for treasure income.
No one can assume any given amount of demand for the hiring of any of their class abilities.
No one can assume any amount of guaranteed xp for crafting over time.

The last recourse is that NPCs do have a given Gear value linked to level, but since the only guaranteed method of advancement is via moving up the ranks in the city's hierarchy, that still comes at an un-measurable pace.

Spoiler

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2) The OP already accounts for this - it is, indeed, the entire point of the 0th level column's existence at all. It is attempting to take a guess at how many "children" in a given city's child population are working to become wizards - this could be Harry Potter esque 11 year olds, or more likely 15 year old humans who are just starting down the path towards wizardry, but don't officially have a class level yet - they effectively still have a humanoid HD that will later become a class HD once they've actually settled into a class proper.

Wait- what? It sounded similar enough to my own calculations of numbers of spellcasters in general and the doubling expansion that I didn't question it, but now that you've pointed it out. . . where is this even coming from?

This is the real controversial point of the 0th level column, which you'd know if you were more familiar with the demographic rules when you posted:

You really shouldn't insult my comprehension of the demographics rules when you're admitting that you made up an entirely new demographic, and failed to flag it anywhere noticeable- just in the header column of a table, which someone familiar with the rules will assume they already know the results of, with no other fanfare or explanation; With an extra side of suggesting I didn't put enough time and effort into my response.

I think it's defensible that PC-class-wannabes make up a larger portion of the child population than actual PC-class adults, . . .
I'm assuming about 5/6th of commoner children attempt to become something more than just a commoner, and while I can't provide a great explanation for arriving at that number (the actual way it was achieved is arbitrary), the conclusion feels appropriate.

What?

From what did you calculate 349. And why is it correct.

Particularly when it means that your 7-year wizard school is, now that I think about it, capable of outputting some 49 1st level wizards per year into a system that only has 64 1st level wizards in the largest possible city bracket. And what's the failure rate?

(This also means that the number of children aiming to become scholars is only slightly larger than the number that actually become scholars when they grow up. This also feels fairly defensible? Staying within academia in general from generation to generation feels pretty reliable, and there will be more joining academia from other professions than expert children who end up as commoners.)

Dunno about where you live, but in the US it's a well known fact of life that even people who get the college degrees they want often end up doing work they're vastly over-qualified for up to and in including flipping burgers, for years before getting the job they actually wanted to use the degree for, if at all. Unless your definitions of "scholars" and "academia" are so broad that they include things like "any amount of reading, writing, teaching, or working in a building dedicated to that purpose," the number of people who aspire to something will always be significantly smaller than those who attain it. If the job is not in high demand, is exclusive, the numbers get smaller. If this wizard college is pumping out massive numbers of 1st level wizards, whose services do little for most people? You'll quickly have huge numbers of students becoming "wizards," only to be paying off that loan with whatever they can scrape rolling craft/profession.

The fact that they can take any craft/profession skill regardless of the "wizard" school is the most powerful economic bit, but that applies to most characters reaching 1st level anyway.

But it's just as defensible to say that the children population should be exactly proportional to the adult population - which is to say, 1/4th the adult population. That would put the number of students at 31 at any given time, although this would result in drastic changes to tuition seeing as the costs are being spread across far fewer students.

Is that actual modern child population, or medieval, or your own number? A quick googling finds me a page that suggests 30-35% is more appropriate.

And as for the effects on tuition- well you don't seem to be clear on whether it should be considered high or low, so who knows whether that's good or bad.

On the one hand...I don't disagree with you? I mean I don't recall the business rules explicitly saying it was allowed, but I also don't recall them anything saying it was disallowed either.

On the other hand, this same post has you saying this:

...which looks like you're saying that the wizards aren't allowed to do business rules + other sources of income, but commoners are? And this is how you're disagreeing with a post I made where all of the wizards mentioned only use a single source of income at any given time?

The point is that for a source of income that is not explicitly governed by the rules, if the DMG2 business rules are in play, that is the most logical place to find the answer of what they're worth. And the only source of continuous income that is explicitly governed by the rules, is profession checks (selling loot is selling loot, a form of WBL conversion, not a source of income). So whether you're hiring yourself out for spellcasting, crafting magic items, trading magic items, or even generating trade goods out of thin air, a DM who is running businesses as business can describe your business as a business, and limit your achievable income to that of your business.

Particularly if they've decided any word which has had a mechanic associated with it now takes the mechanic over the actual meaning of the word, such as-

Apprenticeship already has rules, in the Apprentice/Mentor feats.

I knew the second I used the word you were going to jump to that. DMG2's special mechanics for giving PCs apprenticeship or mentor benefits have nothing to do with actual apprenticeships. From what I understand, actual apprenticeships were often the equivalent of selling a child into indentured servitude in the hopes they would end up better off than you could have done for them.

The DMG2 rules let a PC pay a token amount of time and money for some extra benefits, which don't even have anything to do with the optional training requirements and costs given in the DMG, which as a variant are normally not required for leveling up at all. Their most significant effect is in a PC forcibly increasing the level of an NPC by Mentoring them, so that their apprentice gains a free level and gear every time the mentor levels up.

Though funnily enough, when applying the rules to use by an NPC, it ends up partially mimicking the existing demographics, since in the end it generates one extra 5th level NPC for each 5 levels past 6th- so an 11th justifies one 5th, and a 16th would justify one more (while the previous could have gained say, 3 more levels).

But again, that's not the point. The point is that if your economic calculation results in the exact same medieval apprentice situation that was already the most reasonable assumption for sourcing the training of a small number of classed characters whose numbers are directly based on those of higher level, well great. The economic maths haven't broken anything. You now have a bunch of masters teaching their apprentices communally instead of separately, which is only sensible if you've got enough of them in the local area and are already committed to sharing your trade secrets (spells) between yourselves.

"0th level" as a column is just my way of approximating the children, but they don't literally have 0 HD, they just don't possess a class level yet. That means they have a single humanoid HD, which gets replaced with class HD once they actually have a class (the same way it works for all races that have a single racial HD).

Nope, children don't have stats. At least not in any WotC material I've read, for PC races. Replacing the hit die is what you do mechanically, sure, but that doesn't mean that's actually an endorsed method of statting children (no method is endorsed, for obvious reasons). Starting with a Humanoid hit die causes immediate problems when they have to rewrite their hit and skill points to match a new class as well.

A bit of sub-1st level data can be pulled from the 3.0 DMG's variant for multiclass 1st level characters (where they're even called apprentices), but since it still involves picking a primary class which determines hit points and skill points and as a fully 1st level (multiclass) character you start with 4x skill points, it still needs significant fleshing out to become an actual child/apprentice system.

this is about giving tools to people who want to know if such things are mechanically viable. When making a wizard, one might ask the question "wait, how much does wizard college even cost? Could my smart farmer kid even afford wizard college?" And then you go looking for an official answer and don't really find anything.

Haven't you already found multiple sources for guild dues? Does Complete Arcane really say nothing on the matter? I'm pretty sure there's a book out there with information on a wizard college in Silverymoon, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was one in Sharn: City of Towers as well. You could even total up the training costs from the DMG.

Ah, found it: Silver Marches p62, The Lady's College. 500gp+500/wizard level per year, main benefits are four free spells per year if you study 4 hours per day every day, further spell-copying with fee based on scroll cost, and most significantly the ability to craft items without the appropriate feats at a small markup. Average residence is around 100 with a long waiting list, and those waiting are taken in and put on servant duties until their name is up. It's not designed for turning kids into 1st level wizards, but when you consider that starting 1st level spells are 3+Int, a year or so at a cost of 500gp+ waiting list can get there just fine. Or there's what, about 20 cantrips in the PHB, which would extend that to six years. At a total of 3,000gp.

"How much does wizard college cost, in terms of tuition?" About 434 per year, at least before I go make the slight changes that I'm about to make. It'll probably change a good bit after I recalculate, but I don't imagine we're talking orders of magnitude different.

Depending heavily, really almost entirely on the number of students you made up. Which you admit is not only far larger than the number of current 1st level wizards- but by acknowledging a 25% child ratio and considering the adult population of wizards, you actually do have near an order of magnitude or more students than one would expect (even worse if only children of 13+ are considered).

You've said multiple times that the near-cheating prowess of these wizards is keeping costs down, but you didn't provide the exact breakdown and it sounded to me like you were actually adding the profit onto the costs that were divided into tuition. Regardless, either the vast majority of students fail wizard college, making it a scam, or the number of students is so low that the cost rises by that order of magnitude to 30,000 and the "school" is a dozen wizards with around two apprentices each, give or take.

And you could have already learned by apprenticing yourself to a single wizard, rather than paying a cost that seems to be derived mostly from adding up the weekly wages of more than a dozen people's profession checks.

Really the exercise is far more indicative of the feasibility of "wizard college" in the first place. Historically there were a couple of colleges for rich people in the biggest cities in the land, so yeah sure it could work, and 1% class sizes does seem reasonable. And either explodes the number of wizards and requires a re-write of the demographics rules, or reveals that it takes more than just Int 11 to pass wizard training.

Just don't pay any attention to the cost of spellbook ink.

"Is it reasonable that my poor wizard worked his way through wizard college?" Yes, it is, provided he's pretty good at it for 1st lvl character.

"Is it reasonable that my poor wizard with no skills could still afford wizard college?" Yes, the bank provides loans big enough to cover tuition, and once you're a wizard you have multiple options of paying back that loan that are more efficient than Profession checks, to the point that you could easily have it dealt with before you even started adventuring, if you want. Or you could have it not dealt with yet, and adventuring is you how intend to pay back the loan.

"Is it reasonable that my poor wizard could've gotten his parents to pay for the college?" Well yes. If they're decent at Profession checks themselves, and especially if there's a handful of family members rather than just a mom and dad, they could build up some pretty hefty savings and contribute to the college fund enough to cover it every year.

Aside from the bank giving out house-sized loans to anyone with no credentials or collateral, sure.

The ones in school probably aren't apprentices, but I've already addressed that point. I definitely agree that the ones that graduate will almost certainly be joining the wizard's guild in some capacity.

Essentially the only thing the distinction is doing, is affirming that they're free to leave or waste their money failing classes, and suggesting that there is no significant buddy/guild/etc culture that unites them in nepotism.

[AvatarVecna]

Except you just trotted out a bunch of Wall of Iron calculations, which suggest anything else is superfluous. Pick a lane.

Why is it invalid to say "wizards have multiple ways of making money on a scale large enough to matter"? Why do you apparently consider it a controversial statement to say that magic can be used to make an impressive amount of money? It's not about saying "this is objectively the best way to make money", it's about saying "enough money could be made to pull this off through a number of different methods, so it's not unreasonable to think that they could get the money".

You should also provide the breakdowns on how you're coming to these numbers. You say there's 12 businesses making only 3,420 per month, with take 10 results of 106 for a profit rating of 81- this suggests the risk multiplier is less than 5gp, so you must be taking out the specialist costs as well. The specialists' profit modifiers don't even matter, unless you're assuming that the on-site primary teachers and owners can't roll their own profit checks and leave it all to their specialists.

Yeah I guess elementary math is hard so I'll break it down for you:

1) The archmages have 1d20+96. Taking 10, they get a total of 106 on the check. -25 makes their profit modifier 81, which is then multiplied based on risks. For a university, that is 5 gp. 81x5=405 gp. Because each archmage is running a separate business, this makes for a profit of 1620 gp/month among the archmages.

2) The specialists are each running their own business as well; they are specialists in that they are specialized in a particular wizard school, not "specialists" as the term is used in the business rules. I realize this can be a little confusing. They roll 1d20+60 for their profit check. Taking 10 makes that 70, -25 makes 45, x5 makes 225 per specialist, which makes 1800 for the specialists as a whole.

3) 1620+1800=3420

"The specialists' profit modifiers don't even matter"

They are each running their own business, so yes their bonus matters.

For nearly a million gp they could just build their own custom fortress and run it however they want, rather than having to buy a bunch of businesses.

You are correct, but this thread isn't about finding out how cool a school you could build with a million gp, it's about finding out what could be expected for tuition, with the business rules as a way of measuring how much money the school is making.

My point is that you keep switching between "lol RAW exploit means this doesn't matter" and "I've picked this number to matter." If the business/profession/loan/item buying and selling/etc rules matter, then they can't just pull money out of nowhere to build their fortress. Justifying one part with a casual "eh they sell some spellcasting" just cheapens the effort.

Low-level nonmagic characters can't pull money out of thin air the same way high-level mages can, which is why the profession checks and loans matter for determining what students who can't yet cast spells can afford. How much wizard college costs to own and operate barely matters, because the archmages could do a hundred different weird magic things to make the money, but the students can't bend the cosmos to their will even in little ways yet, so they have to get that money the old-fashioned way.

It's also hilarious that you're chiding the big-time for essentially pulling money from nowhere, when they can just instantaneously summon a wall's worth of a trade good. Like, the only way it could be more on-the-nose is if it was Wall Of Gold instead of Wall Of Iron.

I also presume those heavily optimized statblocks for the teachers result in them having nice high profit checks? But you're using the profit check to set the tuition, so it would go down if they were worse at their jobs. Suggesting this is meant to be the most elite wizard school and all others would be much cheaper?

Now this is a fair point. At least from the mage's point of view, investing this heavily in their Knowledge/Arcana check isn't about making a profit (because they have other ways they could use to make money instead), but about providing the best education...but you are correct, their statblocks being that optimized is driving the tuition up, and that's probably not particularly fair to the students. I still think it's fair to say that the teachers at a wizard college will be aiming to be good at the skill, and will probably have been the brightest bulbs of their own classes (so 18 base Int), but the item familiar and the cheesed items are probably a bit much. Heck, I'm not even really sure what a masterwork tool of knowledge/arcana should even be...a big book of lore maybe? Eh. Bonus points, if they don't buy those items, then (at least the archmages) have gear and gold enough to exchange for land and buildings more directly, rather than having to *handwave* *mumble* *spellcasting* their way into making the money.

If those changes were made to the statblocks, we'd be looking at +42 and +28 profit checks for archmages/specialists respectively. Taking 10 with +42 means 52 total, -25 makes 27, x5 makes 135 per archmage, x4 makes 540 gp per month. Taking 10 with +28 means 38 total, -25 makes 13, x5 makes 65 per specialist, x8 makes 520 gp per month. Total profit is now 1060 gp/month, a bit less than a third of the profit the school was making before.

...but that doesn't mean tuition has been cut in thirds. With the same number of students, and staff, and employees, the food costs haven't changed. It's still the same number of buildings, the same value of land, so repairs and maintenance costs haven't decreased. Taxes have changed slightly because the change in profit means a change in income. Staff and employees is still the same number with the same profession bonuses they had before...although while I'm on that, I said somewhere in the previous post that the wizards never benefited from more than one source of income at a time, but that turned out to be incorrect - the wizards running the school are adding their wages to the natural costs of business, when really whether they get paid or not should be determined by whether the school as a whole makes money or not. Of course, the wizards are fine with whatever they get even if it's nothing, because they can still make money in ways besides teaching - nobody goes into education for the paycheck, after all. But the 60 employees are definitely being paid as part of the profit check, so they'll still count for wages.

Profit/year after everything: 12720 gp

Food/year: 76832.5 gp

Employee Wages/Year: 31980 gp

Maintenance/Year: 8280 gp

Total income (post taxes): 129812.5 gp. With taxes at 20% (which is admittedly fairly harsh but eh), this represents 80% of gross income.

Gross income: 162265.625 gp/year

This amount is spread over the 349 students, for tuition of 464.94 gp per year. It's lower, for sure. But not that much lower. And now the teachers are merely "slightly more competent than usual NPCs" rather than "cheating optimizers who inexplicably opened a school instead of declaring war on god or something".

Again, pick a lane. Either 3,000gp over 7 years is something that "even rich aristocrats" don't have "burning a hole in their pocket," or actually any 1st level commoner professional could match it or just take out a loan.

Both are correct.

Spoiler: even rich aristocrats

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3000 gp is a lot for your average noble to have just sitting around. 3000 gp is a lot for any given NPC to just have ready and waiting. We have the average gear of a given NPC with a PC class in the DMG, so we can see the kinda cash they've got on hand; for NPC classes, we'd kinda have to guess, but it can't be more than NPC WBL, so let's just use that. NPC WBL has them with 3300 gp worth of stuff at equipment/cash at lvl 4, and the NPC tables in the DMG put the average level where a given NPC has 3k lying around in cash at about 7th level (or about 6th level, if we ignore the outlier monk, who gets big cash piles inexplicably late compared to the other sample NPCs). Even if we go with level 4, though, we're talking 448 adults in the city who have that kinda cash lying around; if we're talking level 7 (where that pile of cash is a fraction of their wealth instead of their life savings), we're talking 192 adults in the city. City's adult population is 40000, that's 1.12% at best and probably closer to 0.48% of the population that can even consider going to their money bin to pay for wizard college.

(Of course, at this point, we're also getting into parts of the rules that don't have a great deal of consistency when comboing through things. For example, if we go back to that first spoiler in the OP and assume every NPC has full NPC WBL in cash sitting around, the amount of ready cash in the community is ~44.5 million. But the official way to calculate the amount of ready cash in a community is "GP Limit" x "Population" / 20, which in this case is 200 million. So the community collectively has about 5 times as much physical cash available as the individuals have available to each of them? I guess we could sorta parse it as having money caches around the city that total to ~155.5 million that don't belong to any given individual but rather belongs to the metropolis as a whole, or maybe that belong to a collective of individuals too big for them to individually take too much from it?

This could be guild funds - that explains why individual members can borrow up to 500 per level but have to pay it back in a month - that's not anybody in particular's money, that money belongs to the guild as a whole? But at this point, I'm mostly just guessing to try and explain an inconsistency between the community building rules and the individual building rules, where the community is almost 5 times richer than the sum of its parts. Like, even if they all had PC WBL instead, that'd still be 61 million. It's just one of those inconsistencies that annoys me.)

[spoiler="any 1st level commoner"]It's worth mentioning that it's "any 1st level commoner who has their tuition costs covering room and board already". A "Humanoid 1" student going to school who has (for example) 2 cross-class ranks in Profession, Wis mod +1, Skill Focus, and a trait for specialization, has a +7, and a loaned Masterwork Tool. 1d20+9 will average 19.5 result, which means they average making 9.75 gp per week. Using the new lower tuition total calculated earlier in this post (assuming a 7 year education), and accounting for annual interest...if you start working off the loan when you start school, by the time you finish your 7 years (365 weeks), there's 1051.26 gp left to pay off assuming interest was collecting while you were in school (which, I don't think that's how it works IRL, but also idk how loans might've worked for schooling in renaissance times). Now you're a wizard, and you have more efficient ways to make money, particularly if you can work through the guild instead of going it alone. But if you just keep making profession checks the same way you have for 7 years so far (except now with full ranks as part of your upgrade to a full class HD), you still pay it off after another couple years of work (another 102 weeks).

Which is completely ridiculous, but hey.

Banking institutions within the city offering to provide loans sufficient to attend college or buy a house? Yeah man, that sounds completely unrealistic.

[quote]Even with modern transport you can't just order hundreds of meals from down the road every single day. If you want to feed 400 people eating in the same place every day, you need a kitchen and staff to handle 400 people (a catering service is just a kitchen and staff that prepare the food off-site) (you'll also need room for food delivery and storage etc).

Part of the problem here is using the heavily abstracted business rules in concert with detailed meal pricing. The operating costs of a boarding school should include feeding all the attendees and live-in staff, and thus already be subsumed in the business rules. But you're running up individual weekly salaries and food costs like a Stronghold.

The profit the business makes is after accounting for however much they paid to feed everybody who lives on the campus. That's literally what "profit" means - it's the money the business owner's are actually taking away at the end of the month after paying for all the costs that have accrued. You're literally complaining that I'm making tuition help the school pay for food. That's kinda a big part of what tuition is for.

You should supply the full breakdown of their profit checks then. Except their profit seems to be making the tuition worse, since you didn't explain that calculation fully either.

I've made their builds much simpler and cut down on the bonuses, and even (rather fairly) stopped giving them wages on top of their profit. This has drastically reduced the money the mages were making running the business, and has very slightly reduced the tuition costs. It's easy to say "you didn't show your work" and then refuse to check if it was viable yourself - you have two whole posts proving how easy it is to just whinge without actually proving your complaints are valid.

Which can be negated by the owner hiring a specialist who does have sufficient bonus to run it for them, and the fact that long-running businesses have unlimited profit bonus due to re-investment. I'm not talking about 1st level commoners starting businesses in the big city. I'm talking about rich people/nobles from families that own multiple "businesses," and the fact that any business which lasts long enough to be inherited is probably so powerful it doesn't matter who owns it.

And yet you're complaining about me using RAW exploits. The business rules function fine outside of indefinite reinvestment, where your ability to make profit increases with your actual ability to run the business. To use a farm as an example, a farmer can keep buying land to plant crops on, but at some point he's just not going to be able to plant it all, not unless he improves as a farmer.

Though there is also a problem with the demographics rules- they make the 90-etc% commoners, but then they also point out that 90-etc% of the population is found in villages or smaller. The 90% of people are farmers figure reflects 90% of the population living in small clusters of farms. Towns and cities should have increasingly higher percentages of non-farmers, yet the class breakdowns remain the same, meaning that the 90% commoners in a metropolis are still all skilled non-farming positions with workshops and whatnot, or that actually each "city" includes the number of common farmers required to be self-sufficient in food production.

I'm not really sure what point you're even trying to make in this paragraph - first part reads like you think the percentage of commoners should be lower in cities than in rural areas, and second part reads like you have a good explanation for that. I can only assume that you're trying to say that some commoners will be part of a more profitable job than farming, which is correct to a degree: farms and service jobs are a worse source of income than Profession checks, but moneylenders, shopkeepers, and innkeepers will be making more. I guess commoners could try out other business types too? But they probably shouldn't.

The point being that Commoner 1 does not preclude having a big expensive business grown over generations that is sustainable with even a low bonus.


Yeah, because you've decided that running the business precludes their own Profession checks in spite of what the rules say, and forced them to found a business from nothing when their skill indicates they should not. Or had them inherit a farm that was barely worth inheriting.

You've misunderstood that section. It's not me saying "this is objectively true", it's a response to your hypocrisy. You said wizards can't be selling spells or crafting items or doing checks for money while they're running a business, that doing other things to make to make money would be part of their business check and thus folded in with the profits from the business. And then almost immediately, you turn around and insist that commoners can do what amounts to the exact same thing - money from non-business sources.

But since you've already invoked the business rules, that pretty well locks the value of anything that could be considered a business down to that, and claims that wizards could make "so much more money" because RAW when you're already using a rule that all but explicitly overrides such a claim.

...

Though since you've invoked the DMG2 business rules, which essentially add an entire extra and greater income stream to anyone with the privilege of owning land/"a business", the standard assumption of common farmer wealth ought to be shooting up again. The students themselves could all be business owners, controlling assets accumulated over time and granted by their families which don't fall under NPC Gear Value but do let them generate money out of nothing because they have money.

This, right here, is naked hypocrisy, and it's what I was replying to by getting into the weeds of commoner businesses. If, as you say, running a business "locks the value of anything that could be considered a business down to that", then commoners could not do Profession on top of their business, and the common trades for a commoner are less profitable as businesses than if you were just making the check directly, and doesn't run the risk of making a loss instead of a profit. Of course, if you are allowed to run a business on top of making money in other ways (which, to your credit, you have no proven is explicitly legal, with profession as an example), then the business is a bit of a money sink for the first couple but their profession checks will keep ahead of it for awhile.

The whole point was "If commoners are as hindered as you're wanting wizards to be hindered, they couldn't even run a farm in a rural area without being very optimized for the task. Just give them both their supplemental income."

And you've also completely botched the profit check total? If they started with +9 profession, how did they end up with only +10? It's skill+modifiers. The modifiers here are +1 low risk, +1 low resources, +2 partner, for a total of +13 from your starting skill total, spending only 8 hours per week. Since you've used arbitrary masterwork tools and assumed they have 3,000 5,000gp to start a low-resource business at Town tier for no penalties, they should have another +2 from a 50gp tool. That's +15 and they succeed taking 10. There's also no reason they couldn't be in the guild for another +1.

A miscalculation, apparently at some point I added a +1 in the build but not in the calculation. +9 base, +2 time investment, -4 rural, +1 low risk, +1 low resource, +2 partner, total +11. +13 if we assume a masterwork tool. The first couple cannot run a profitable farm if they live in a rural area unless they have an additional form of income. Either commoner couple could run a profitable business if they were in a town instead of being rural - although unlike you, I'm not sure there's going to be a farming guild outpost in a town?

Also while a masterwork tool for profession/teacher is probably a bit silly, a masterwork tool for profession/farming seems a bit more reasonable (I'm to understand this nifty invention called the cotton gin was pretty useful for speeding up the harvesting process, as an example).

And the rules explicitly say you can roll a profit check while you "simultaneously work for the business earning gold each week with Profession or Craft check" (start of p181), so actually yeah, they do get the +2 for 40 hours, as well as another 15-20gp (for 60-80 per month) or so to save or offset bad tidings. The business rules are pure profit over time for anyone with sufficient bonus and starting capital.

You are correct, I didn't see that bit, although I assumed it was legal. The part of my post that assumes it was not was only to point out how ridiculous it would be for commoners who run farms if they weren't allowed supplemental income like what you were trying to deny wizards.

And once they've saved 1,000- 1,250 (depending on if you count the house's cost) above their safety cushion, they can reinvest for a permanent bonus of ~2.5. Said investment pays for itself in 4 years, at which point you stack it and buy another in 2 years, then 1 year, etc up to the max 1/3 months, until an actual inherited family farm has lol bonus even if the owner has only one rank of profession because it's been gaining +10 per year.

1000 gp. It's a bit of an arbitrary distinction, but the upgrade rules specify that it's about

The only serious risk is the "random" events table, which is skewed towards adventurers running exciting businesses and thus is almost entirely negative events causing massive gp damage and/or profit penalties. Of note is how every business operating in a region adds a 1/20 chance of a natural disaster, and the one that says to roll an extra encounter every month but reroll any beneficial results, as if that was likely to happen. But you're ignoring them, and anyone wanting to use the rules to model something will ignore them, so yeah. Either all businesses fail messily, or only those with such extra cash reserves and massive skill checks that they can offset every hazard on the table survive (in perpetuity becoming ever more profitable for the rest of time).

On the one hand, you're correct that I ignored business events in the original post. On the other hand, the reason I did that is because most of them can be trivialized with either money or spellcasting, both of which the magic school kinda has available. A farm in a rural village doesn't have that same kind of cushion and would need to account for it.

Spoiler: A list of events

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Accident: -700 gp

Admirer: Questgiver

Bad Competition: -10.5 gp for three months (-31.5 gp total)

Bad Weather: -105 gp

Banditry: Encounter (their EL = your ECL -2)

Booming Business: +20 gp

Burglary: Thief (their level = your level -2), possibly lose all gold on site +700 gp worth of stuff

Employee Unrest: DC 30 Diplomacy check or -25 gp/month)

Fire: Fire

Franchise Offer: spend money to make even more money (long-term good, short-term bad unless you broke the bank)

Good Competition: -17.5 gp/month for ~5 months, then +22.5 gp/month forever

Important Customer: New ally/contact, +25 gp

Infestation: DC 25 survival check and -70 gp, or use spells; otherwise big penalties growing forever

Irate Customer: -100 gp

Mistaken Identity: Sidequest?

Monster: Monster (their CR = your ECL), failure means -30 gp/month until you spend 2200 gp

Natural Disaster: -100 gp

No Encounter: -

Protection Racket: =105 gp/month unless you deal with the group behind the racket.

Sabotage: 50% chance of no effect, 50% chance of -20 gp

Spectacle: +10 gp

Spell Gone Awry: A single spell goes off; easy to deal with immediately if someone is on hand to counterspell/dispel, otherwise there's some consequences

Unexpected Taxes: -43.75 gp

Unusual Patron: +5 gp/month for the foreseeable future

Wounded Adventurer: Questgiver

The only one of these that can seriously inconvenience the wizard academy is the protection racket, and that's because it might well have the thieves' guild or the mercenary's guild or something similar as "the group behind it". If it's some small gang that's not part of the guild, then even our NPC non-adventurer teachers still have some pretty impressive high-level spells available to deal with the problem. Most of the bad stuff can be solved with money or spells, but that one has solid potential to get into city-wide economic and political issues, which are a bit harder to solve by just nuking them with fireballs.

And yet, with only 1% of the population in this school, the 10% of non-farmers is far more than enough for every student to be from a family making more than profession checks, possibly even to the point of owning their own parcels of land/shares/etc. Even excluding that the farms nearby to a metropolis are almost certainly established multi-generational affairs with unlimited profit bonuses.

Which is why the DMG2 business rules are terrible for basing anything on. They're clearly and effectively designed for PCs with a few thousand in cash who want to play at owning a business, and completely fall apart if you actually run them for anyone in the world that actually owns a business for any length of time.

The business rules work fine as long as you aren't using the investment rules over multiple generations to get an arbitrarily high bonus to the profit check. This is like saying that Planar Binding should be banned because some people use it to try and score free genie wishes.

You should really be listing the citations for all these different guild rules, since there are so many you could be thinking of anything from anywhere.

If you open the same book as we've been working in so far to page 223, you'll find rules for guilds. Quoting relevant sections, bolding/underlining for emphasis:

Spoiler: Length

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Once a character has joined a guild, she can immediately enjoy the benefits. New guild members receive general benefits, as given in the following section, that are indistinguishable from one guild to the next. An active guild member (one who has taken the Favored in Guild feat) enjoys all these general benefits plus one specialized benefit specific to the guild type (see the Favored in Guild feat, page 227, for details).

• All guildhouses include barracks and kitchens, so that every member can be guaranteed food and a safe place to sleep while she’s in the vicinity. In smaller guilds, she might need to cook for herself, but the food is supplied.
• Membership in a guild means a better likelihood of a positive response to requests. The initial attitude of a fellow guild member is always one step closer to helpful than her normal starting attitude (see Player’s Handbook page 72).
• Guild members help their own. A character gains a +2 circumstance bonus on Diplomacy or Gather Information checks made while talking to a fellow guild member.
• The guild subsidizes the cost of goods, supplies, and guild-related services, reducing the price to a member by 10%.
• Any member who falls on desperate times can call upon her guild for aid. To make such a request, she must make a Diplomacy check with a cumulative –2 penalty for each previous call for aid she has made to that guild. If aid is given, it most often comes in the form of a monetary loan for a term of one month (see Table 6–12: Guild Loans for amounts and Diplomacy DCs). If the member fails to repay the money on time, she is typically expelled from the guild, and the loan is absolved. Certain guilds (especially criminal guilds) have stricter penalties for those who default on guild loans. Such guilds might even hire assassins to make examples of those who fail to repay.
• Every member gains a contact specific to her guild (see Table 5–1: Contacts, page 154, for sample contacts).

Favored in Guild
You are an active and valued member of your guild.

Prerequisite: Membership in a guild.

Benefit: Select one of your guild’s associated skills. As long as you remain a member of that guild, you gain a +2 competence bonus on all checks made with that skill. As a fringe benefit, you also gain an ability relating to
your guild’s type, as described below.

• Arcane: The guild subsidizes the creation of magic items, reducing your raw material costs by 5%.
• Criminal: The guild opens up new options for black marketeering. Once every character level, you can purchase any product or service for 75% of its actual price in any city in which your guild maintains a guildhouse.
• Government: You gain a +1 bonus on Diplomacy and Intimidate checks when dealing with members of any guild, including your own.
• Mercantile: You can charge a little bit more for the goods and services you sell, since membership in the guild implies quality. Once per character level, you can sell a good or service for 100% markup over its regular price in any city where the organization maintains a guildhouse.
• Mercenary: Members of the same mercenary guild tend to use combat tactics that mesh well with each other. Whenever you are adjacent to another member, each of you gains a +1 competence bonus to Armor Class.
• Naturalist: A naturalist guild uses a complex and constantly evolving set of trailglyphs and blazes to keep its members informed of dangers, shelter, good hunting, and other hazards or hidden benefi ts in the wilderness. You gain a +2 competence bonus on any Survival check made to keep from getting lost or to avoid a natural hazard, such as quicksand. In addition, you can choose a particular type of creature from the following list: animal, fey, giant, monstrous humanoid, plant, or vermin. You gain a +5 competence bonus on any Knowledge (nature) check you make concerning your chosen creature type. Performer: While in a city that has a guildhouse, you can substitute a Perform or Profession check for a Diplomacy or Gather Information check by offering your service for free. In addition, you gain twice the normal income when using the Perform or Profession skill to earn money.
• Psionic: The guild subsidizes the creation of psionic items, reducing your raw material costs by 5%.
• Religious: Your faith is bolstered by active membership in the guild. Once per character level, you can deem a particularly insidious mind-affecting ability possessed by an enemy to be a test of faith, thereby gaining a one-time +5 bonus on your Will saving throw.
• Scholastic: Once per character level, you can take 20 on any Knowledge skill in which you have at least 1 rank. Using this ability takes 1 hour, and you can do so only while you are in your guildhouse, since you must research the desired information in the guild’s holdings from other guild members to accomplish the task.

It's generally understood that an arcane guild's general benefit of reducing the price of goods, supplies, and guild-related services by 10% applies to the material requirements for crafting items. It's debatable if this is true for most other guilds (I doubt any DM would agree to read it as "you buy everything at 10% off because you're part of a guild", I'd say it kinda needs to be guild-related to get the discount - like they buy it in bulk and have the negotiation power of a guild), but it's pretty defensible for an arcane guild.

A 1st lvl CL 1 scroll would be 25 gp on the market. Crafting it yourself would normally cost 12.5 gp in materials, 1 XP, and 1 day of work, and you could sell it for 12.5 gp. I'm kinda making the assumption that the arcane guild sells magic items crafted by members for full market price (because if they don't, then who even does?) and just takes a 20% cut, so it being sold by the guild results in the crafter getting 20 gp pre-taxes for the scroll

Assuming NPCs earn xp the way PCs do, and that the DM awards them xp for an encounter with no threat, or for asking for trouble because they're mysteriously aware of game mechanics. I agree that simply assuming a crafter can sell an occasional magic item at full price and negligible xp cost to cover their upkeep and support their Gear Value is the right way to go about things, but if you try to push the system it can push right back. There is no measure of how long a caster/crafter/person using PC class abilities for pay will take to amass X amount of money to pay something off.

I think the game gets different in some very strange ways if you assume NPCs can only occasionally craft magic items on account of being incapable of getting XP normally (and how "occasionally" is left kinda arbitrary). High-level NPCs did not just spring forth fully formed from the forehead of Zeus.

Depending on how strongly the DM adheres to the encounter guidelines, roughly one encounter of serious 50/50 danger per level, which should not be unfairly capable of trapping or tracking the party so as to prevent them fleeing. The main risk of adventuring comes from the tacit knowledge that where the PCs happen to get a nice progression of fights that increase their skills without killing them, random NPCs that walk out there have a high chance of dying, but how high still depends entirely on the DM/setting/narrative convenience and cannot be measured.

NPCs of PC classes have very slightly more dangerous encounters than PCs of PC classes (if for no other reason than attributes tend to be higher for PCs than NPCs, but also PCs tend to be better built for combat). Nonetheless, even in your own example "disagreeing" with what I said, you're saying that default adventure design tends to have one encounter per level with a serious chance of killing a party member (or even pulling a TPK). Adventuring is more risky than sitting in the city teaching kids and crafting scrolls - surprise!

Yes, that is literally why I re-stated them.

I think I've found the disconnect, and I'm actually not sure how to correct for it.

For PC classes, if the highest-level character indicated is 2nd level or higher, assume the community has twice that number of characters of half that level. If those characters are higher than 1st level, assume that for each such character, the community has two of half that level. Continue until the number of 1st-level characters is generated. For example, if the highest-level fighter is 5th level, then the community also has two 3rd-level fighters and four 1st-level fighters.

The example doesn't match itself. Half of 5 is 2.5, and they choose to round it up to 3. Half of 3 is 1.5, and they choose to round it down to 1. There is no text outside the example to indicate how rounding is generally supposed to be handled for this rule's purposes, so there's no clear indication of designer intent. Are we supposed to round up every time, and it should be 1 5th/2 3rd/4 2nd/8 1st, and the step from 3rd to 1st is a mistake in the example? Are we supposed to round down every time, and it's 1 5th/2 2nd/4 1st, and the step from 5th to 3rd is a msitake in the example? Is the example fully correct, and rounding alternates (so 1 7th would create 2 3rds, 1 9th would create 2 5ths, and so on)? Is the example fully correct, and it's random how it rounds?

Your statement where there are half as many at lvl 1 as there are at lvl 3 is more supported by the text, but intent is ambiguous and difficult to parse and I've long since defaulted to always rounding up just because it results in slightly more characters of higher levels and PC classes without throwing demographics off all that much.

NPCs cannot rely on adventuring for treasure income.

This thread is not ultimately about the lives and stories of the NPCs - it's about providing mechanical support for questions PCs might have about their backgrounds. It is about saying that there's reason to say student loans can be a thing, and that they can be significant enough that you need to make money fast to pay them off, and that adventuring is the only way to make money fast enough to pay your debts. It's not the default set-up for PC wizards, but it's an option in the toolbox if you wanna add that complication to your character.

No one can assume any given amount of demand for the hiring of any of their class abilities.

As any basic economic class will tell you, demand and market value go hand in hand. If X is what the market deems the value for a good or service to be, that's what you can expect to get selling it. How frequently? Unclear, sure. But if the demand was too low, the market price wouldn't be where it is. It's cheaper to buy spellcasting services than it is to buy scrolls of similar capabilities, even though at best there's like...a thousand casters total (at best) of any class in a given metropolis.

No one can assume any amount of guaranteed xp for crafting over time.

I mean...there's a few ways to get XP from money, but none are ideal. Liquid Pain or Ambrosia can be purchased and ingested to gain XP that can only be used for crafting. They're expensive to buy relative to the XP given, though, so this isn't helpful for making money by crafting items unless you've put some serious effort into otherwise reducing the XP requirements for the item. The other way is the sacrifice rules, where a DC 15 check will get you 45 dark craft points (well, DC*3; you can aim for higher DCs, but DC 15 is the minimum), XP that can only be spent on crafting a single item. It taints the item with evil, though, and you have to perform a live sacrifice and hit the DC. A single rank in Knowledge (Devotion) is sufficient to attempt it, and it requires a living sacrifice, not a sapient one, so you can just buy some chickens (1 cp each) and sacrifice-spam (explicitly an option) until you hit the DC at least once that day. And then you can consume the dead chicken for sustenance I guess. The downsides to this are less mechanical in nature, but no less important: if the wizard's guild affords crafting without ever gaining XP because every wizard is sacrificing a dozen chickens a day to make magic items that are spiritually tainted, there's gonna be political backlash, at the very least.

The last recourse is that NPCs do have a given Gear value linked to level, but since the only guaranteed method of advancement is via moving up the ranks in the city's hierarchy, that still comes at an un-measurable pace.

You really shouldn't insult my comprehension of the demographics rules when you're admitting that you made up an entirely new demographic, and failed to flag it anywhere noticeable- just in the header column of a table, which someone familiar with the rules will assume they already know the results of, with no other fanfare or explanation; With an extra side of suggesting I didn't put enough time and effort into my response.

and failed to flag it anywhere noticeable- just in the header column of a table

So, you might have noticed a few paragraphs of text before the table. If you had read them, you would see how the calculations were done. Here's a quote, so you can read them for the first time without having to scroll all the way up:

In a given metropolis, the set population is the adult population. On top of this, there are children within the city totaling to approximately 10-40% of the adult population. We'll average this to about 25%. These children will make up the "0th level" column in the following table. This represents less what they will definitely grow up to be, and more the path they are on, the dreams they have, the talents they possess. It doesn't represent true ability, but what they might be if they push themselves into rising above themselves.

This is not to say that nobody would become a commoner or expert or aristocrat on purpose: it's entirely possible that a given character will pursue pure academia, or will never dream of more than just working on the family farm, or is raised from birth to join the nobility, and so on. To calculate this, I will find the population that would be 1st lvl NPC classes as if they were calculated the way PC classes were and then triple that. The actual number of 1st lvl NPCs will be calculated normally, this is just for approximating child populations among the classes relative to each other. So for example, if this entire metropolis was just commoners and clerics, and the calculation indicates there are 100 clerics and there would be 700 commoners if the 1st lvl commoners were calc'd like PCs and then tripled, then 1/8 of the child population would be clerics and the rest would be commoners.

Metropolises are 25000+ adult population. It's unclear what an average one would look like normally. if we look at the Epic Level Handbook, we can see that a Planar Metropolis (a distinction that 3.5 does not have anymore) started at 100000, so I feel comfortable calling a 40000 metropolis average, maybe even a little on the meager side as far as metropolises go.

This table assumes (approximately) average rolls across the board, with the exception of wizards which I will maximize because I feel like it. Additionally, I'm aware that there is text in the community section that indicates rolls that would result in characters over 20th level just make 20th level versions instead, but you will take my epic commoners from me when you pry them from my cold dead hands.

What?

From what did you calculate 349. And why is it correct.

First post, and the above quote, explain where the number came from. Once again, it's the least RAW part of the original post - the conclusion feels like it's resulting in about the right number of students, but the process to arrive at that number was arbitrary.

Particularly when it means that your 7-year wizard school is, now that I think about it, capable of outputting some 49 1st level wizards per year into a system that only has 64 1st level wizards in the largest possible city bracket. And what's the failure rate?

As part of that big quote from before the table that you apparently didn't read, I'm not assuming everybody who goes to wizard college passes. I don't really have a guess at the number that graduate each year, because the pass/fail rate doesn't affect the number in attendance at any given time, which is the number I cared about for calculating tuition. If one wished to figure out what the pass/fail rate might be, you'd have to figure out how many wizards are leaving town to "make room" for the new wave of graduates such that the demographics don't change (presumably, these 1st lvl wizards are going out to become adventurers, and will mostly be dying to the tougher encounters because they're lamer than PC wizard 1s).

Dunno about where you live, but in the US it's a well known fact of life that even people who get the college degrees they want often end up doing work they're vastly over-qualified for up to and in including flipping burgers, for years before getting the job they actually wanted to use the degree for, if at all. Unless your definitions of "scholars" and "academia" are so broad that they include things like "any amount of reading, writing, teaching, or working in a building dedicated to that purpose," the number of people who aspire to something will always be significantly smaller than those who attain it. If the job is not in high demand, is exclusive, the numbers get smaller. If this wizard college is pumping out massive numbers of 1st level wizards, whose services do little for most people? You'll quickly have huge numbers of students becoming "wizards," only to be paying off that loan with whatever they can scrape rolling craft/profession.

Once again, that section before the table is talking about exactly that: not all of them pass. Some of them go on to become experts instead - being knowledgeable as teachers and tutors but not having an aptitude for magic. The school is not flooding the city with wizards, it is attempting to teach wizard wannabes to become wizards (and some portion of them are failing)

Is that actual modern child population, or medieval, or your own number? A quick googling finds me a page that suggests 30-35% is more appropriate.

Since a scholar like yourself is obviously intimately familar with the demographic rules by now, of course you don't need me to remind you that on pg 137 of the DMG, as part of the table that indicates the population for a given community, there is a footnote stating that the table numbers indicate the adult population, and that the child population (those that are not adults yet, and thus do not have the class levels of adults that would be indicated by the rolls per class that are done as part of settlement generation) ranges in size from 10% to 40% of the adult population of the settlement. The average of 10% and 40% is 25% so that is the number I've gone with. Admittedly, I'm unsure if it's historically accurate or biologically viable. However, 30-35% IRL is still within the bounds indicated by the rules, so it's also an acceptable numbers - it's entirely possible that I've underestimated the number of children that should be in this settlement.

And as for the effects on tuition- well you don't seem to be clear on whether it should be considered high or low, so who knows whether that's good or bad.

Your attempts to obfuscate my position are very helpful. I hope I've made myself clear that a few grand isn't money most characters (even most nobles and PC-classed NPCs) will just have lying around, even as a few grand is about the kind of money a kid could make with Profession over the course of several years. Both of those statements are fairly defensible and they are not as contradictory are you pretend them to be.

The point is that for a source of income that is not explicitly governed by the rules, if the DMG2 business rules are in play, that is the most logical place to find the answer of what they're worth. And the only source of continuous income that is explicitly governed by the rules, is profession checks (selling loot is selling loot, a form of WBL conversion, not a source of income). So whether you're hiring yourself out for spellcasting, crafting magic items, trading magic items, or even generating trade goods out of thin air, a DM who is running businesses as business can describe your business as a business, and limit your achievable income to that of your business.

And now that you're no longer talking about you're darling commoners, we're back to saying that supplemental income has to be part of the profit check. Lovely.

I'll drop this part of the argument because I can clearly see there's no convincing you. My last word on the statement is that I don't think selling spellcasting services to those in need is a business expense of teaching people enough magical theory to cast spells. Spells might be used as practical examples in class at useful moments, but I'm not going to hand around a hat that needs a gold piece from each student attending the lecture before I'll agree to cast it.

Particularly if they've decided any word which has had a mechanic associated with it now takes the mechanic over the actual meaning of the word, such as-

I knew the second I used the word you were going to jump to that. DMG2's special mechanics for giving PCs apprenticeship or mentor benefits have nothing to do with actual apprenticeships. From what I understand, actual apprenticeships were often the equivalent of selling a child into indentured servitude in the hopes they would end up better off than you could have done for them.

I'm aware of the existence of realworld apprentice/master relationships, but at least as far as figuring out their effects on the game, the mechanics are what we have to base it on.

But again, that's not the point. The point is that if your economic calculation results in the exact same medieval apprentice situation that was already the most reasonable assumption for sourcing the training of a small number of classed characters whose numbers are directly based on those of higher level, well great. The economic maths haven't broken anything. You now have a bunch of masters teaching their apprentices communally instead of separately, which is only sensible if you've got enough of them in the local area and are already committed to sharing your trade secrets (spells) between yourselves.

I'm not trying to break anything. I'm just trying to have a defensible number to point to if I wanna make a character who owes student loans for wizard college, purely for story reasons as part of making a character instead of just a build. Some combination of rules where I'm not just making a number up, I can show my work and say "see, this is affordable", "see its reasonable I could've gotten a loan for this much".

And then you just came in and took a giant ****ing dump on the whole ****ing idea for no ****ing reason.

[AvatarVecna]

Nope, children don't have stats. At least not in any WotC material I've read, for PC races. Replacing the hit die is what you do mechanically, sure, but that doesn't mean that's actually an endorsed method of statting children (no method is endorsed, for obvious reasons). Starting with a Humanoid hit die causes immediate problems when they have to rewrite their hit and skill points to match a new class as well.

And if it doesn't have official stats it can't have any stats ever, got it. It doesn't mechanically exist until it gets that first level, until then it's just a vague entity of ambiguous capabilities.

Haven't you already found multiple sources for guild dues? Does Complete Arcane really say nothing on the matter? I'm pretty sure there's a book out there with information on a wizard college in Silverymoon, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was one in Sharn: City of Towers as well. You could even total up the training costs from the DMG.

I've found the apprentice costs, which require you to already have 1 HD. But unless we agree that children have stats prior to becoming adults, they can't take that feat so they can't become an apprentice. They can't make money so they can't afford guild dues, and guild services don't involve teaching you magic, they involve employing you for skills you already possess. Which is why guild dues also aren't an appropriate way to approximate wizard college costs - they're not running a wizard college that turns children into wizards, they're running a wizard union that turns wizards into profitable wizards. Complete Arcane mentions colleges in a "here's a thing you could do for your background" way but it doesn't provide rules for it. There's a college you can join, but not as a child looking to become a wizard - rather, as a wizard looking to teach and benefit from the library, it seems.

Training rules are for improving on stats. You can't say children have no feats prior to gaining their first class level anymore than I can say children have any feats other than those specifically granted by the class. If we could agree that Humanoid 1 is an acceptable approximation for a child, we could use the retraining costs in PH2 perhaps. If we assume a child starts with literally nothing, and becomes a Human Wizard 1 with Int 15, DMG training rules indicate that leveling up from "0th" to 1st would take this child 26 weeks and 2770 gp, plus any "related expenses" for the skill/feat trainers and double the cost of any expensive material components the learned spells might possess; it also maybe costs 2100 gp in spell-scribing ink. The gp expenditure is either pretty close to both my estimate and the official answer in Silver Marches you mention below, or is way higher than either of them because of spell ink costs, but the time expenditure is so low compared to basically any wizard starting age (maybe thri-kreens can become wizards that fast, I'm not sure). GP/Time costs can be lower depending on how many cantrip sources are allowed, but time is already sooooo low. If it takes just 26 weeks to go from child to wizard, why does it take humans an average of 7 years? Training rules are better for what they were intended for: leveling up.

Ah, found it: Silver Marches p62, The Lady's College. 500gp+500/wizard level per year, main benefits are four free spells per year if you study 4 hours per day every day, further spell-copying with fee based on scroll cost, and most significantly the ability to craft items without the appropriate feats at a small markup. Average residence is around 100 with a long waiting list, and those waiting are taken in and put on servant duties until their name is up. It's not designed for turning kids into 1st level wizards, but when you consider that starting 1st level spells are 3+Int, a year or so at a cost of 500gp+ waiting list can get there just fine. Or there's what, about 20 cantrips in the PHB, which would extend that to six years. At a total of 3,000gp.

There's 37 cantrips in total, but that's dependent on sources. Although given where we're quoting the price from, maybe you're fine with weird sources.

I've been looking for a solid official price for wizard college on and off for a couple months now. This thread was just an attempt at gesturing towards an answer that could be said to have vague rules support. It's good to see that 3000 gp is (at least for one particular college) the official answer.

EDIT: Because I forgot to say it when initially posting it, thanks for finding an official tuition for wizard college. I hadn't scoured a lot of the splashbooks yet, I've mostly been looking at online discussions on the (correct) assumption that I'm not the first person to look for such a thing, but none of those gave me any luck with a source - just a lotta people shrugging their shoulders or saying there's no official answer so just make one up.

You've said multiple times that the near-cheating prowess of these wizards is keeping costs down, but you didn't provide the exact breakdown and it sounded to me like you were actually adding the profit onto the costs that were divided into tuition. Regardless, either the vast majority of students fail wizard college, making it a scam, or the number of students is so low that the cost rises by that order of magnitude to 30,000 and the "school" is a dozen wizards with around two apprentices each, give or take.

I have not said that. the near-cheating prowess of these wizards is why they're making a big profit, no how they're keeping costs down. What's keeping tuition down is the number of students.

With this number of people in attendance, it's only a scam if you believe that every person with a high Intelligence is guaranteed to succeed as a wizard unless their education is sabotaged, and that everybody who successfully becomes a wizard stays in the city (as well as all the wizard who already live in the city). Whatever wizards die off or move or try to become adventurers are replaced with the new class of graduates that stuck around. And as far as pass/fail goes...some smart people in D&D land might just lack the ability to perform magic, no matter how much theory is stuffed in their head.

(That's not to say that it's definitely not a scam, just that demographic rules are no guarantee that it's a scam.)

And you could have already learned by apprenticing yourself to a single wizard, rather than paying a cost that seems to be derived mostly from adding up the weekly wages of more than a dozen people's profession checks.

The wages of the business owners have been removed from the calculation. The wages of the employees are explicitly part of the profit check, and thus the wages have to come out of income before we arrive at profit - income was bigger than profit before we paid our employees. That's...that's just how business works.

Really the exercise is far more indicative of the feasibility of "wizard college" in the first place. Historically there were a couple of colleges for rich people in the biggest cities in the land, so yeah sure it could work, and 1% class sizes does seem reasonable. And either explodes the number of wizards and requires a re-write of the demographics rules, or reveals that it takes more than just Int 11 to pass wizard training.

I've not ever said that all you need to become a wizard is Int. But "having Int" is a pretty important step if you wanna become a wizard - you ain't getting to cast spells if you don't have at least a 10, and you won't be able to excel unless it's higher than that, and that's assuming you have magical aptitude at all. Int is just the part of a child's theoretical-but-nonexistent statblock where you could look at it and think "this person might be able to become a wizard" or not.

Aside from the bank giving out house-sized loans to anyone with no credentials or collateral, sure.

Banks tempting children with piles of money to fuel their education dreams in order to trap most of them in a neverending cycle of debt sure is unrealistic.

[Efrate]

On money lending, it would make a LOT of sense even without the tongue in cheek real world jab you had there, why would a school NOT have a deal with lenders? You get accepted with an essay or whatever, and the college acts as a guaranteer of the loan. They can pay in trade goods, free spellcasting, whatever. Seems like it has all the earmarks of a mutually beneficial partnership.

Especially because something like a gaeas could be part of whatever contract. Even with a lot of students defaulting and running away, the college could subsume the cost (wall of iron, spellcasting, binding things to create tonnes of saffron, whatever) and keep things working for everyone. Plus how well is a barely trained wizard or a drop out hiding from wizards who want to find him/her?

You could even do a darker enforcement either with a liquid pain farm until debts are met, "temporary" zombie labor until you are paid off, and have some combinations of grad students act as enforcers. Or deals with other organizations. Jimmy the Knife always find his man, and his guildmaster does not mind a bit of freelance and them owing him some favors.

Your entire city would be enriched by easy access to casting, and i could see everyone working together and trading on favors and castings to keep things running smoothly.

Even without going full tippyverse, you are well defended from any threats, have a cleaner, brighter and safer city, and have discounted or free teleports for diplomatic relations with important people.

[Coidzor]

Your entire city would be enriched by easy access to casting, and i could see everyone working together and trading on favors and castings to keep things running smoothly.

Come to think of it, isn't the wizard academy in Silverymoon an important component of its prosperity? And that's one where you can pay off your tuition by working for the city after graduating, too.

[remetagross]

I'm rather pleased to see how the various "shot in the dark" figures sprinkled in the rulebooks here and there cancel each other's randomness out in the end and produce a somewhat reasonable number.

[Maat Mons]

According to an answer I got in the Simple RAW thread, the +10 bonus from the Commerce domain applies to profit checks when running a business. So the Wizards could all have a nice bonus from the Domain Granted Power ACF. Or they could dip Cleric and get double that with the Domain Focus ACF.

[aglondier]

A few thoughts I've had while reading this thread...

The starting age for a human wizard is 15+2d6. Assuming this wizarding academy is "the finest institution in the land", it is reasonable for that to come in at the upper end of the scale, 1st level wizards who graduate from the academy are usually around the age of 25-27. If you go off the traditional starting age for apprenticeships of 13, then they are spending 12-14 years learning wizardry. This sounds reasonable, and fully in line with the OP.

With such notable and powerful personages, it would in fact be unreasonable for at least one of them to not be involved in the politics of the city/state. Requiring arcane spellcasters to be licensed, with many hoops to jump through if you are not a graduate of the academy. Spellcasting services are only available from academy approved vendors, likewise scroll, potion and magic item sales. Total monopoly. A 1% cut of everything trickling back into the academy's coffers from all past and future graduates, means they can actually subsidise tuition without effecting quality.

A Pathfinder 3pp product has a feat called Ring Apprentice, available at 3rd level, that allows for the forging of lesser and minor magical rings, up to 1000gp. The feat is automatically upgraded to Forge Ring when the caster reaches 8th level. House ruling similar feats for the other item creation feats would allow your "0-level" wizards to make magical trinkets for their own use, and for sale to help fund their tuition. Sure, the children of nobles and merchants might not need to go this route, but for the children of commoners and working class folk, not only does it relieve the financial burden, but being able to give your dad a vest of his occupational skill +1 would be both a boon to the family, and a sign of their money achieving something.

I remember reading a supplement years ago for running 0-level characters, with an eye to being able to play multiclassed characters at 1st level (ie a 0/0 at 1st level character becoming a 1/1 at 2nd level). It worked okay for playing 0-level apprentice characters. Sorry, forgotten it's name though...never mind, yay google...the Genius Guide to Apprentice-Level Characters...should work for 3.5 okay...

As for your archmages, rather than four optimised teachers, I would go one optimised teacher, one item crafter, one abjuration/security specialist and one retired adventurer. More rounded, more capable, less likely to fall over the first time an assassin is sent by political rivals/opponents... Between your 8 specialists you can cover each school, or drop a couple in favour of more esoteric fields of study such as elemental or war magics... (perhaps the local war academy or king/ruler subsidises the training of siege mages)

[Maat Mons]

Okay, I didn't realize you already had a Competence bonus from a homebrew item. I still think a +20 Competence bonus to all Professions at 1st level without items (let alone custom items) is pretty impressive. So I still feel that Cleric with Domain Focus in the Commerce domain is awesome for entrepreneurial characters in general.



There's also another matter I'd like to address. I had hoped to get a definitive answer on how the rules work before I posted about it, but it seems my post in the Simple RAW thread is destined to languish away unanswered.

Every three months, you're allowed to reinvest into your business to improve future profitability. For a university in a metropolis, this reinvestment costs 16,000 gp. If the university persists for 100 years, and the owners reinvest every single quarter, that'll be 400 times they add a permanent +1d4 bonus to all future profit checks.

Now, this is the part, I'm not completely sure of. Each reinvestment represents an upgrade. Assuming each upgrade counts as a different bonus source, all these untyped +1d4 bonuses stack. So, on average, you'll have an extra +1,000 bonus on all future profit checks.



I'm really not following your numbers for profits. In any given business, only one person makes a profit check each month. Specialist employees each add +2 to the check. And business partners can each add +2 to the check, if they succeed on their Aid Another action.

The highest modifier among the business partners is +96, so you'd use that. Then the three other business partners add a total of +6 from Aid Another. And the 8 specialist employees add a total of +16. Assuming you take 10 every month, that's 640 gp in gross profits.

Coincidentally, 640 gp is also what you have to pay each month for the specialists.

[AvatarVecna]

Every three months, you're allowed to reinvest into your business to improve future profitability. For a university in a metropolis, this reinvestment costs 16,000 gp. If the university persists for 100 years, and the owners reinvest every single quarter, that'll be 400 times they add a permanent +1d4 bonus to all future profit checks.

Now, this is the part, I'm not completely sure of. Each reinvestment represents an upgrade. Assuming each upgrade counts as a different bonus source, all these untyped +1d4 bonuses stack. So, on average, you'll have an extra +1,000 bonus on all future profit checks.

This is correct, and it's why assuming you can re-invest indefinitely makes as little sense as every other unlimited loop in the game. To paraphrase an example I made earlier: a farmer can buy more land for his farm, but if he doesn't improve as a farmer, there's gonna reach a point where he simply can't tend all that land. At some point you can't just throw money at the problem, you're going to need to improve your actual ability to conduct the business and that's generally going to result in more employees or leveling up (which NPCs don't do by default).

I'm really not following your numbers for profits. In any given business, only one person makes a profit check each month. Specialist employees each add +2 to the check. And business partners can each add +2 to the check, if they succeed on their Aid Another action.

The highest modifier among the business partners is +96, so you'd use that. Then the three other business partners add a total of +6 from Aid Another. And the 8 specialist employees add a total of +16. Assuming you take 10 every month, that's 640 gp in gross profits.

They're not specialist employees, they're specialist wizards. Each archmage and each wizard specialist is running their own business, which collectively makes up the school. The full math of it is spelled out somewhere in one of the big response posts, but it should also be in the OP: each wizard is running a mini-school as part of the big-school, and profits are being pooled for the collective big-school. This also means the big-school is facing 12 events per month, but this is still not enough events for mid/high level wizards to really care about very much.

[Endarire]

Did you just make the 3.5 version of Unseen University from Discworld?

[AvatarVecna]

Did you just make the 3.5 version of Unseen University from Discworld?

Not really familiar with Discworld, so at the very least it's not on purpose.

[Efrate]

Is your librarian an awakened or at least more lntelligent orangutan? This is the important question.

More seriously, its more sorcery in discworld terms and has less reality bending properties, though mistakes happen so maybe.

On s more serious note, over what time frame does the increased access to magic/money making of said city and the draw thereof turn a metropolis to a planar metropolis?

[AvatarVecna]

Is your librarian an awakened or at least more lntelligent orangutan? This is the important question.

More seriously, its more sorcery in discworld terms and has less reality bending properties, though mistakes happen so maybe.

On s more serious note, over what time frame does the increased access to magic/money making of said city and the draw thereof turn a metropolis to a planar metropolis?

That's a difficult question for me to answer, mostly because it's not the one I set out to answer when I delved into the rules systems. One could argue that because a good deal of the set-up is dependent on the population rules in the DMG, that the school can't really cause things to deviate from there - perhaps students are coming from far and wide, or are leaving to make their fortunes as wizards elsewhere. Not everybody who attends college IRL ends up living in that same college town, after all. But how the population changes over time is almost entirely within the control of the DM, as is the flow of mages who either stay in town or leave for elsewhere.

If I were to guess, I'd say that the influence and fame of such a wizard school full of capable teachers has the potential to grow much bigger, with more staff and more buildings and more students, and at some point their influence over local politics will probably shift the city more towards a mageocracy - again, we can look to IRL college towns, where over time local ordinances will warp to take into account how much the college matters to that town. The school brings in money and the students do business there - it stands to reason that the school will end up discussing laws pertaining to business and to students frequently. But, as I am not a city planner or a school administrator, all I can do is hypothesize that such influence would accumulate over time, but not how quickly or to what end.

As far as turning into a planar metropolis, there is no worry of that: the rules in the DMG supercede previous 3.0 versions of the same rule, including the rules in the 3.0 Epic Level Handbook detailing planar metropolises. The DMG has no such rules for Planar Metropolises, and normal Metropolises are presented as making up anything with 25000 or more adults (unlike how it's presented in the ELH). Furthermore, there are enough contradictions between the two tables that this isn't merely an omission, but part of a number of overarching changes to how the population tables are determined - and while one could perhaps figure out what a planar metropolis might look like (in terms of total population and the proportions thereof), it's not explicit RAW. We're basically guessing at that point, even if they can perhaps be defensible guesses, and a bit more to the point: even if we could say for certain how big a city has to be to count as a Planar Metropolis, since we can't say for certain how fast our city is growing, we can't be certain how long it will take to reach that Planar Metropolis threshold.

(There is a section on Planar Metropolises in the 3.5 Planar Handbook, but it only lists examples with such a title, not any actual rules for general cities bearing such a title.)

[Fizban]

Well, I wasn't going to further respond 'cause I was tired and wanted to do something else the last couple weeks. But the thread's been back on the front page for a few days, and I was just digging for old threads all day while in hurry up and wait mode, so I suppose that's as good a mood as any.

Before beginning I think I should note that I was not considering this a particularly antagonistic exchange, aside from one brief insult. And I think we're mostly fine by the end.

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Why is it invalid to say "wizards have multiple ways of making money on a scale large enough to matter"? Why do you apparently consider it a controversial statement to say that magic can be used to make an impressive amount of money? It's not about saying "this is objectively the best way to make money", it's about saying "enough money could be made to pull this off through a number of different methods, so it's not unreasonable to think that they could get the money".

Because using those values generally signals a complete disregard for any sort of underlying logic. This goal of generating a wizard school by building up from certain underlying logical rules, is fundamentally at odds with the blatant disregard required for most money making tricks. Mentioning such tricks as justifying the startup cost only undermines the basic premise: if you care about things making sense, their money needs to come from somewhere and should not involve rules exploits. If you're willing to accept money coming out of nowhere, then what does it matter where the baby wizards come from?

Yeah I guess elementary math is hard so I'll break it down for you:

This does not bode well.

Low-level nonmagic characters can't pull money out of thin air the same way high-level mages can, which is why the profession checks and loans matter for determining what students who can't yet cast spells can afford. How much wizard college costs to own and operate barely matters, because the archmages could do a hundred different weird magic things to make the money, but the students can't bend the cosmos to their will even in little ways yet, so they have to get that money the old-fashioned way.

It's also hilarious that you're chiding the big-time for essentially pulling money from nowhere, when they can just instantaneously summon a wall's worth of a trade good. Like, the only way it could be more on-the-nose is if it was Wall Of Gold instead of Wall Of Iron.

So what you're saying is that money matters, but only for low level characters or when you find it to be convenient? You're relying on a bizzarely specific setup with phenominal cosmic philanthropists who could do a hundred different weird magic things to make money, but want to teach people how to be wizards as the primary thing that they do, and yet are charging money for it.

Both are correct.

3000 gp is a lot for your average noble to have just sitting around. 3000 gp is a lot for any given NPC to just have ready and waiting. We have the average gear of a given NPC with a PC class in the DMG, so we can see the kinda cash they've got on hand; for NPC classes, we'd kinda have to guess, but it can't be more than NPC WBL, . . .
But the official way to calculate the amount of ready cash in a community is "GP Limit" x "Population" / 20, which in this case is 200 million. So the community collectively has about 5 times as much physical cash available as the individuals have available to each of them? I guess we could sorta parse it as having money caches around the city that total to ~155.5 million that don't belong to any given individual but rather belongs to the metropolis as a whole, or maybe that belong to a collective of individuals too big for them to individually take too much from it?

And there's the problem. NPC Gear Value is NPC Gear Value, not NPC Cash Flow. Without some sort of organizational system or DM derivation, there is no value for what rich noble can afford. This is 3,000gp over 7 years? That's 35gp per month. That's less than 4 bottles of fine wine. How much wine does a rich noble go through per month? The DMG's highest upkeep bracket is Extravagant, at 200gp per month. Even "Common" upkeep of living in inns and eating tavern meals is 45gp per month.

The only barrier here is in treating the 7 year total as a lump sum requirement. And makes zero sense when anyone can get a loan with no credentials.

Banking institutions within the city offering to provide loans sufficient to attend college or buy a house? Yeah man, that sounds completely unrealistic.

With absolutely zero credit or employment check? Yes, yes it is. Government-backed college loans work because govermnents back them, governments which are not faux-medieval monarchies. You can't even rent an apartment without a credit check. So no, this mysterious medieval banking system where anyone can walk up and get 5,000gp for nothing makes no sense. Unless you redefine the government into one which passes laws to benefit the people's education by guaranteeing school loans for them beyond what their current economic status would normally get them.

Which only works if you advance the setting to the point where a sufficient number of people are no longer farming that such colleges can exist in large enough numbers for it to even be considered. You need mandatory education before the concept of common secondary education can go wide enough to be a thing. A setting with a modern college/loan/etc system would logically need modern demographics, where the percentage of people farming is. . . really small. Like, reaaaaaaly small. 1.3% small.

Part of the problem here is using the heavily abstracted business rules in concert with detailed meal pricing. The operating costs of a boarding school should include feeding all the attendees and live-in staff, and thus already be subsumed in the business rules. But you're running up individual weekly salaries and food costs like a Stronghold.

The profit the business makes is after accounting for however much they paid to feed everybody who lives on the campus. That's literally what "profit" means - it's the money the business owner's are actually taking away at the end of the month after paying for all the costs that have accrued. You're literally complaining that I'm making tuition help the school pay for food. That's kinda a big part of what tuition is for.

Actually what I'm really complaining about is that it's not clear what numbers are going where. You're totaling up the meals, but what for? The numbers are scattered through paragraphs. You keep hammering a tuition number and going on about how these wizard's profit check is so good, before now realizing that actually their profit check was making things worse. Even this response-

Profit/year after everything: 12720 gp

Food/year: 76832.5 gp

Employee Wages/Year: 31980 gp

Maintenance/Year: 8280 gp

Total income (post taxes): 129812.5 gp. With taxes at 20% (which is admittedly fairly harsh but eh), this represents 80% of gross income.

Gross income: 162265.625 gp/year

which finally puts things mostly in context, is still lacking in context. It looks like you're supposed to add up the first four numbers and than multiply by something to account for the taxes, but you haven't actually said that's what you're doing. I still have to do the math myself to confirm it, which means the presentation still is not clear.

So, the point of adding up the meals is that. . . the profit doesn't actually matter. The profit total is actually less than 10% of the total income required. The vast majority of your calculation is food (of the quality and for the number of students you chose), wages (for the number of teachers you chose), and upkeep (for a series of buildings you chose).

We could have got there a lot sooner if you'd presented it that way in the first place. The DMG2 rules barely even matter here. The majority of the cost of wizard school is the cost of eating while you're at wizard school.

It's easy to say "you didn't show your work" and then refuse to check if it was viable yourself

It's also easy to show your work, instead of demanding the reader re-create it themselves from a rambling unclear stream of thought.

Not that I haven't posted maths which could be just as difficult to follow before, I had some trouble following my own fire elemental steam calculations when revisiting them- but I don't get mad at people for asking for clarification.

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Which can be negated by the owner hiring a specialist who does have sufficient bonus to run it for them, and the fact that long-running businesses have unlimited profit bonus due to re-investment. I'm not talking about 1st level commoners starting businesses in the big city. I'm talking about rich people/nobles from families that own multiple "businesses," and the fact that any business which lasts long enough to be inherited is probably so powerful it doesn't matter who owns it.

And yet you're complaining about me using RAW exploits. The business rules function fine outside of indefinite reinvestment, where your ability to make profit increases with your actual ability to run the business. To use a farm as an example, a farmer can keep buying land to plant crops on, but at some point he's just not going to be able to plant it all, not unless he improves as a farmer.

Indeed. But then, I only need to use the business rules to generate noble income because you haven't accepted them as having any. And businesses that are "owned" by a single person and yet eventually buy up everything to the point that it's impossible for them to fail, are a real thing. And I'm not repurposing any rules to generate that infinite growth into income, that's just what it already does. Economy destroying Wall of Iron or Fabricate tricks, or arbitrary "I go sell some spells" statements, are not using their original mechanics as expected. Unless you want to tell me that the PHB actually intended PCs to have infinite money at X level. A PC business will require years and years of investement, as demonstrated, before it becomes too big to fail. An NPC can have whatever non-Gear assets the DM says they have.

I'm not really sure what point you're even trying to make in this paragraph - first part reads like you think the percentage of commoners should be lower in cities than in rural areas, and second part reads like you have a good explanation for that. I can only assume that you're trying to say that some commoners will be part of a more profitable job than farming, which is correct to a degree: farms and service jobs are a worse source of income than Profession checks, but moneylenders, shopkeepers, and innkeepers will be making more. I guess commoners could try out other business types too? But they probably shouldn't.

The demographics rules look to have created the Commoner class specifically to represent farmers, but then they use the overall population percentage of farmers even on the smaller scale of individual cities, which are not composed of farmers. It suggests that either there's a problem with the city demographics, or the number of cities. Either there should be very few small population centers, because cities already include all the nearby farms, or cities should have more experts because they are literally concentrations of experts supported by farmers in separate little villages.

Overall it's just a weird setup. The point of that paragraph in particular was that it's an interesting digression.

You've misunderstood that section. It's not me saying "this is objectively true", it's a response to your hypocrisy. You said wizards can't be selling spells or crafting items or doing checks for money while they're running a business, that doing other things to make to make money would be part of their business check and thus folded in with the profits from the business. And then almost immediately, you turn around and insist that commoners can do what amounts to the exact same thing - money from non-business sources.

So your argument is: "No, we're both hypocrites!" -?

Also- No, that's not what I said? Wizards have a bunch of "money making" things that aren't actually covered by any "economic rules." As I have stated numerous times, the only ongoing income rules are for Craft/Profession, and things such as DMG2's business rules. It is entirely reasonable to say that attempts to regularly craft and sell items, or get people to pay you for spellcasting, or even sell trade goods you pulled out of thin air, all effectively average out to a "DMG2 Business." Stating that Commoners can own businesses does not contradict that in any way.

You seem to be thinking it's because wizards don't have the time. It's not the time, it's that adding dedicated rules overrides any theoretical open-ended "calculations" they were using to make money out of nothing.

Deliberately using an open-ended set of rules that can cover any sort of business, while allowing some businesses to ignore those rules to generate wealth faster, is hypocritical. There happen to be a couple bad rules that can be interpreted as giving PCs money out of nothing, usually tied to spells. What if I added a bunch of bad rules that let non-spellcasters pull money out of nothing? A plant or animal that you're supposed to fight, but actually you can take a seed or an egg and you'll get more for free, all you need to do is set it up first with a bit of skill. . .

Actually that's too good. I was setting that up more to skewer "carving up the dragon" rules and wacky "rare magical plants," but that's also literally just farming. A wizard is a "spell/magic item/raw iron" farm.

If, as you say, running a business "locks the value of anything that could be considered a business down to that", . . .
You are correct, I didn't see that bit, although I assumed it was legal.

Yes, as I say. And you say you assumed it was legal, yet rather than taking the optimal route and having them gather that income, you ignored it.

A miscalculation, apparently at some point I added a +1 in the build but not in the calculation. +9 base, +2 time investment, -4 rural, +1 low risk, +1 low resource, +2 partner, total +11. +13 if we assume a masterwork tool. The first couple cannot run a profitable farm if they live in a rural area unless they have an additional form of income. Either commoner couple could run a profitable business if they were in a town instead of being rural -

And now you list the rural penalty you failed to mention before- not that being rural matters. A 1st level commoner can own a successful business, if they're not so far out that they're taking a penalty because no one visits their business.

although unlike you, I'm not sure there's going to be a farming guild outpost in a town?

Towns gets their food from where, exactly? Guild gets its farmers from where, exactly?

The business rules are an abstraction. There is zero mention of restrictions on what businesses are allowed at what size. Farms don't even rightly belong next to the types of businesses filling out the rest of the system, but there they are. Your choice of rural and demand that a rural "farm" be successful from nothing with 1st level characters, is setting them up to fail.

You are correct, I didn't see that bit, although I assumed it was legal. The part of my post that assumes it was not was only to point out how ridiculous it would be for commoners who run farms if they weren't allowed supplemental income like what you were trying to deny wizards.

I'm not denying wizards "supplemental" income- any DM that wants money to matter, is denying "supplemental" money exploits. Rolling them into the DMG2 Business rules, since you're wanting to use them here for some reason, is generous, if anything. Allowing them to remain mechanically unchanged for normal use, merely setting a reasonable income cap that requires some business acumen.

On the one hand, you're correct that I ignored business events in the original post. On the other hand, the reason I did that is because most of them can be trivialized with either money or spellcasting, both of which the magic school kinda has available. A farm in a rural village doesn't have that same kind of cushion and would need to account for it.

Which is essentially admitting that you're using a broken system, making no effort to fix it, and then smugly declaring that a dozen high level wizards are better at "business" than a pair of 1st level commoners.

The business rules work fine as long as you aren't using the investment rules over multiple generations to get an arbitrarily high bonus to the profit check. This is like saying that Planar Binding should be banned because some people use it to try and score free genie wishes.

You keep calling me a hypocrite, but now you're complaining about my breaking the investment rules when you're excusing the wizard school's startup cash with. . . a bunch of broken rules and/or assumptions. When I'm "breaking" the business rules in order to show that NPCs can have fiat level wealth with which to pay for the wizard school you put a price on, which normally costs nothing.

And yes, Planar Binding should be banned if it's broken. Of course it's only broken if the DM lets it be broken, and they're also the one who makes the call on banning it. Which is why consistency is important. Which is why excusing half of your setup with "lol rules broken" and then saying "no commoners don't get to use rules exploits, only wizards do," is both transparent and self-defeating.

So, do rules usually work fine as long as you're not trying to break them, or not?

Spoiler

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If you open the same book as we've been working in so far to page 223, you'll find rules for guilds. Quoting relevant sections, bolding/underlining for emphasis:

Ah, so in this instance you're using the DMG2 Guilds. Not sure why you quoted that much just to prove that there's a slight discount on item creation. The bigger question is where the magical 5,000gp out of nowhere for anyone with no qualifications came from.

This thread is not ultimately about the lives and stories of the NPCs - it's about providing mechanical support for questions PCs might have about their backgrounds. It is about saying that there's reason to say student loans can be a thing, and that they can be significant enough that you need to make money fast to pay them off, and that adventuring is the only way to make money fast enough to pay your debts. It's not the default set-up for PC wizards, but it's an option in the toolbox if you wanna add that complication to your character.

You develop a giant mess of numbers dependent upon a whole NPC organization, which is even supposed to be a valid link to generated characters, and the NPCs don't matter?

I mean sure, maybe that's how you roll, but if I see a thread about generating a whole big NPC organization out of NPC demographics and NPCs doing X/Y/Z, I'm going to assume that said organization and NPCs are supposed to matter. Not disappear into the ether once someone is happy to hear they have an Xgp debt they're supossed to pay off. Which will come out of treasure, which was supposed to be split evenly, so now I have to somehow make sure that the other PCs all have Xgp worth of money sink or they'll all be over WBL. When I could have just made up a number based on easier factors.

As any basic economic class will tell you, demand and market value go hand in hand. If X is what the market deems the value for a good or service to be, that's what you can expect to get selling it. How frequently? Unclear, sure. But if the demand was too low, the market price wouldn't be where it is. It's cheaper to buy spellcasting services than it is to buy scrolls of similar capabilities, even though at best there's like...a thousand casters total (at best) of any class in a given metropolis.

And none of that has anything to do with the DnD economy. Prices in DnD are based on what adventurers of X level will pay, which is based on the treasure adventurers of X level are supposed to have/find. Something having a gp cost the PCs can pay for does not mean they can sell any amount of it they find at that price forever, especially if "it" is a spell they can cast every day, if the DM cares about basic economics in any way.

You have one set of rules meant to emulate some type of economy. You have another rule which if read a certain way will obviously break that economy. What is the appropriate ruling? This is one of those arguments that shouldn't even be an argument.

Spoiler

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So, you might have noticed a few paragraphs of text before the table. If you had read them, you would see how the calculations were done. Here's a quote, so you can read them for the first time without having to scroll all the way up:

To calculate this, I will find the population that would be 1st lvl NPC classes as if they were calculated the way PC classes were and then triple that. The actual number of 1st lvl NPCs will be calculated normally, this is just for approximating child populations among the classes relative to each other. So for example, if this entire metropolis was just commoners and clerics, and the calculation indicates there are 100 clerics and there would be 700 commoners if the 1st lvl commoners were calc'd like PCs and then tripled, then 1/8 of the child population would be clerics and the rest would be commoners.

Hmm. Nope, read it three times now and it still doesn't makes sense. Maybe if you'd just shown your work, I wouldn't have to attempt to re-create it.

Ah, might have it now. If I explicitly work backwards point by point. 1/8 is yes, the ratio of clerics to commoners you made up. Those numbers are specifically "if the 1st level commoners were calculated like PCs and then tripled", so actually the 100 and 700 and 1/8 numbers don't mean anything at all. So ignore most of the paragraph and focus on extending the normal generation and then tripling it, I guess because 2/3 of people don't get the job they want (hey, that actually lines up somewhat with reality!*). So all you're really saying is that you're generating kids that want to be X by tripling the 1st levels. Wait, no- you're generating a new ratio based on those arbitrarily tripled values. But you tripled all the values, so the ratio is the same, and the tripling doesn't matter either.

-Wait, no, you're only tripling the commoners and experts. You're tripling the numbers for the NPC classes, then adding up all the 1st level members of each class, and using that to find ratios to apply to the total child population.

Okay, so now I have to add up the numbers you generated for 1st level members- but wait, the table is already using the percentage values for the NPC classes. So I have to note the PC-class-style-generated 1st level members of the NPC classes, triple them, then add up all the "1st level" members. Then I can use that to get the ratios you applied to the child population, to get the "349" that you say is correct and you totally fully explained.

Assuming I'm reading that right.

Yeah no, I think you should show your work better.

*Except not as it turned out. Though if 2/3 of people irl have jobs they don't like, treating child aspirants as triple the 1st level results might be pretty good. It ensures only 1/3 of people pass wizard school, though. A quick googling's first result has a 62% graduation rate, so 1/3 may be too low. Although considering how easy it is to get a full ride loan in this world, maybe the graduation rate should be low to reflect the number of people wasting their time- but if 2/3 of those time-based loans were defaulting, they wouldn't be making the loans.

As part of that big quote from before the table that you apparently didn't read, I'm not assuming everybody who goes to wizard college passes. I don't really have a guess at the number that graduate each year, because the pass/fail rate doesn't affect the number in attendance at any given time, which is the number I cared about for calculating tuition.

You. . . don't care about the pass/fail rate. Of the wizard college you designed. You care about the number of students because it affects tuition, but not any other effect this wizard college has on the world.


I think it is finally clear why we're arguing.

Since a scholar like yourself is obviously intimately familar with the demographic rules by now, of course you don't need me to remind you that on pg 137 of the DMG, as part of the table that indicates the population for a given community, there is a footnote stating that the table numbers indicate the adult population, and that the child population (those that are not adults yet, and thus do not have the class levels of adults that would be indicated by the rolls per class that are done as part of settlement generation) ranges in size from 10% to 40% of the adult population of the settlement. The average of 10% and 40% is 25% so that is the number I've gone with. Admittedly, I'm unsure if it's historically accurate or biologically viable. However, 30-35% IRL is still within the bounds indicated by the rules, so it's also an acceptable numbers - it's entirely possible that I've underestimated the number of children that should be in this settlement.

Shockingly enough, I don't normally need to concern myself with the number of children DnD assigns to its towns. Though when I do think about it, I remember that DnD has a bunch of ridiculously long-lived races with unknown birth rates, and thus the number of noncombatants and children varies wildly between Monster Manual entries. And of course, a scholar such as myself who considers the number and size of medieval towns to be significant in the designing of a faux-medieval world, would perhaps be concerned that 25% or 1 in 4 is a bit low, back when free child labor was required for survival and families often had several children.

You throw shade back at me for questioning your numbers, right after I realize you completely made up one of your most fundamental numbers. Let us consider ourselves shaded.

And now that you're no longer talking about you're darling commoners, we're back to saying that supplemental income has to be part of the profit check. Lovely.

There is no supplemental income. That is a concept and term you just made up. There are obviously stated approved sources of income, and there are things people make up based on prices given for PCs and then try to say give them infinite money because there's no DM to contradict the "rule" they just twisted. You can shout "supplemental income" all you want, it doesn't mean you can pull money out of nothing just because you're allowed to pay someone else to do something. The spellcasting service rules do not give PCs money. Anything which seriously considers that reversal takes whatever semblance of an economy the game had, and throws it completely out the window.

I'll drop this part of the argument because I can clearly see there's no convincing you. My last word on the statement is that I don't think selling spellcasting services to those in need is a business expense of teaching people enough magical theory to cast spells. Spells might be used as practical examples in class at useful moments, but I'm not going to hand around a hat that needs a gold piece from each student attending the lecture before I'll agree to cast it.

What? That has so little to do with anything I've said, or even that you've said, that I have zero idea where it's coming from, at all.

I'm aware of the existence of realworld apprentice/master relationships, but at least as far as figuring out their effects on the game, the mechanics are what we have to base it on.

So, because DMG2 wrote a feat-based "Mentor/Apprentice" system for tying PCs and NPCs together mechanically, the classic indentured servitude apprenticeship is no longer valid?

Because that's the mechanical effect on the game I'm talking about there. No one needs to pay for wizard college, because most wizards learn via apprenticeship, which is paid for by their free labor during the apprenticeship. Which is not a price for wizard college- but the point I was making is that it's kinda funny how the price of wizard college can be offset by an amount of labor equal to the amount given for apprenticing instead of wizard college.

Heck, with the apparent possible failure rates, apprenticeship is probably a better prospect.

I'm not trying to break anything. I'm just trying to have a defensible number to point to if I wanna make a character who owes student loans for wizard college, purely for story reasons as part of making a character instead of just a build. Some combination of rules where I'm not just making a number up, I can show my work and say "see, this is affordable", "see its reasonable I could've gotten a loan for this much".

And then you just came in and took a giant ****ing dump on the whole ****ing idea for no ****ing reason.

Considering how unclear much of the math and logic was, the logical split of using a bunch of demographic and economic rules while also explicitly giving lip service to exploits that spit in the face of said economics rules, the number of arbitrarily assigned numbers, and the apparently complete disregard for the significance of this institution for anything other than justifying one tiny number on a character's backstory sheet. . .

Yeah, I suppose I've been at odds with this on many, many levels. I showed up looking for a big project on building a wizard college that makes sense, and instead I found. . . this.

I cannot understand going through these lengths to derive a wizard college just to get one number that makes sense, while completely throwing out everything else it would make sense to cause. It doesn't make sense. It makes it's own result retroactively stop making sense.

And if it doesn't have official stats it can't have any stats ever, got it. It doesn't mechanically exist until it gets that first level, until then it's just a vague entity of ambiguous capabilities. . .
But unless we agree that children have stats prior to becoming adults, they can't take that feat so they can't become an apprentice. . .
Training rules are for improving on stats. You can't say children have no feats prior to gaining their first class level anymore than I can say children have any feats other than those specifically granted by the class.

I. . . don't really care about the children's stats or lack of stats. You want the price of training, the DMG has prices for training.

The point of that humanoid HD swap not being how it works is only because that's not how it works, not because it has any bearing on making up a wizard college or the price of training.

If it takes just 26 weeks to go from child to wizard, why does it take humans an average of 7 years? Training rules are better for what they were intended for: leveling up.

So double the time because kids. Or assume that the average is based on apprenticeships where a lot of the time is spent doing free labor instead of actually learning, which is why people with money are willing to pay for wizard college, which is the equivalent of rolling a 2 on their 2d6. Or both.

There's 37 cantrips in total, but that's dependent on sources. Although given where we're quoting the price from, maybe you're fine with weird sources.

There are 19 cantrips in the PHB where it says wizards start with all the cantrips. I would use a round 20 for any such calculations.

I've been looking for a solid official price for wizard college on and off for a couple months now. This thread was just an attempt at gesturing towards an answer that could be said to have vague rules support. It's good to see that 3000 gp is (at least for one particular college) the official answer.

EDIT: Because I forgot to say it when initially posting it, thanks for finding an official tuition for wizard college. I hadn't scoured a lot of the splashbooks yet, I've mostly been looking at online discussions on the (correct) assumption that I'm not the first person to look for such a thing, but none of those gave me any luck with a source - just a lotta people shrugging their shoulders or saying there's no official answer so just make one up.

Glad to be of service. The rarer the reference, the nicer it is finding an opportunity to make use of it.

I have not said that. the near-cheating prowess of these wizards is why they're making a big profit, no how they're keeping costs down. What's keeping tuition down is the number of students.

With this number of people in attendance, it's only a scam if you believe that every person with a high Intelligence is guaranteed to succeed as a wizard unless their education is sabotaged, and that everybody who successfully becomes a wizard stays in the city (as well as all the wizard who already live in the city). Whatever wizards die off or move or try to become adventurers are replaced with the new class of graduates that stuck around. And as far as pass/fail goes...some smart people in D&D land might just lack the ability to perform magic, no matter how much theory is stuffed in their head.

(That's not to say that it's definitely not a scam, just that demographic rules are no guarantee that it's a scam.)

Well it sure felt like that's what you were saying, but anyway.

If we're talking about wizard college, that's comparing it to modern college, where generally yeah anyone with high intelligence should succeed unless they're sabotaged or otherwise victim of luck. People with average and even below average intelligence can and do graduate, C's get degrees and much is more a question of effort and the ability to maintain that effort. The number I googled earlier was about 60%, which if you consider the economic and random hardships across several years, I wouldn't be surprised if that basically did include everyone who didn't encounter some problem. If the people entering are of a representative distribution of intelligence, that percentage by definition includes those below average.

The wages of the business owners have been removed from the calculation. The wages of the employees are explicitly part of the profit check, and thus the wages have to come out of income before we arrive at profit - income was bigger than profit before we paid our employees. That's...that's just how business works.

I'm not saying those wages are wrong, just that it's silly to pay for wizard college in a world where there are sufficient wizard apprenticeships- and while we're there, it's silly to run a school rather than taking apprentices if most of the students never actually succeed. The question still lies in that graduation rate: if it's actually a sound investment, then sure, but as noted the number of students it takes to keep that price down indicates either a change to the demographics in response, or a massive failure rate that is just not feasible.

In the end I really think the biggest problem is that you just can't say PC classes can be mass trained like that, not without changing the demographics rules, and thus you can't base it on those rules in any part. The real factors limiting increase in education were, essentially, food. Food production had to advance so that more people would have time to learn things. But even then, PC classes are presented as so rare that if you double them along with the number of well educated people you get. . . 2% instead of 1%*. Wizards, and PC classed people in general, are so few that they can't logically come from anything other than extremely limited apprenticeships or lucky geniuses.

Wizard college simply does not and never has worked in DnD, at least in the 3.x and below editions. Much like magic items suddenly being "invented," or discovering other exploits when there was no mechanical reason for them not to have been made before, there must be some reason it doesn't work, whether it's overriding the printed rules that cause the problem or simply accepting that something out there counterbalances it. If wizards or other PC classes could be increased in number so simply as just getting a school together, there would not be so few of them. Experts and Aristocrats get excess percentage effectively reflecting the available money and training, but not PC-classes, those are specifically generated from higher level individuals, and only them.

Wizard college only works if you throw out the demographics rules as given. For a faux-medieval world, if 10% of the population is skilled, make those 10% all PC classes, and divide them between those classes taught in the city (which you'll want much smaller than the what, 11 in the PHB?). You can still generate the same number of high level NPCs, some of which have schools and some don't, but you have to get rid of the concept that PC classes are inherently more difficult to learn to some unspecified degree, which is a fundamental part of the standard rules. (And you still have to recon with the nature of spell levels yet further dividing your casters into normals and super-rare uber-geniuses).

Banks tempting children with piles of money to fuel their education dreams in order to trap most of them in a neverending cycle of debt sure is unrealistic.

If your faux-medieval bankers are so big that they can afford to give out those sorts of loans to anyone and play the long game to keep extracting interest, then fine, sure, why not. I don't think medieval bankers gave out such loans, but the entire college and student loans concept is already far outside of that realm, so if you're advancing available schooling, sure advance banking to support it.

Generations of debt-slaved failed wizards can be the justification for the bank's uncapped investment bonus making them too big to fail.


Final note- It shouldn't be all that surprising that numbers based on wages and food on one side line up with wages potentially made on the other. If wages and food/housing/etc costs are appropriate, then these numbers will balance out. If you can divide the cost of the teacher's wage with other people to the point that it plus your housing and food are within your own wage, you're stable. The actual cost of the college is food, maintenance on the building which includes the student housing, and the wages of teachers which pay for their food and housing, plus some amount of premium/luxury in the wages/owners' profit. If the owners are intentionally taking no more than any other employee, who all make near the same amount of money their students could make, of course the price will be low enough to pay with your own work.

If anything the problem is that a 1st level character with full profession bonus working full time doesn't need college, because they're already the equivalent of a professional degree and job, as evidenced by them using the same wage rules and similar bonus as the professionals they would be taught by.

[AvatarVecna]

I too have much less fire in me than I did previously, which is why I don't really have it in me to respond to any of that - the whole thread has honestly soured me on you in how you engage with content. idk maybe in a month or so I'll have a week to set aside, so that I don't have to make a day of pointing at pages in books over the course of what at this point would probably be three mega-posts. The potential gains just aren't worth the time or mental energy investment.

[Fizban]

Entirely fair. I'm a bit miffed at some other posters since a thread or two ago, and if that's me for you now, welp that'll happen sometimes.

[Efrate]

Hate to be that guy, but magic solves food and most maintenence. Selling spellcasting or getting it from faculty or groups that maintain the school via contract should also give opportunities to graduated wizards.

Remember reality and physics matter much less becuae magic sidesteps all of that. Prestidigitation is your cleaning, a few planar binding solves all your food issues, at least in raw materials. Need to pay cooks maybe, but amount and abundance of food is easily solved. There plenty of ways to get a sizable amount of resources for free via magic. Which in turn makes profits higher. Also that makes the university a better guaranteeor on all loans. They can also handle collections and such and with intelligence that high can easily advance thungs that way.

D and D is generally post apocalyptic, but it is not hard to get a LOT of progress back and advance with a collective effort of multiple high level casters.

[Maat Mons]

How do you use Planar Binding to get food?

I usually just use an Everful Larder, from Stronghold Builder's Guide. It costs 15,000 gp, which isn't cheap. But in this case, it's saving you 75,000 gp in food costs every year. So you'd be a fool not to get one.

[AvatarVecna]

Hate to be that guy, but magic solves food and most maintenence. Selling spellcasting or getting it from faculty or groups that maintain the school via contract should also give opportunities to graduated wizards.

Remember reality and physics matter much less becuae magic sidesteps all of that. Prestidigitation is your cleaning, a few planar binding solves all your food issues, at least in raw materials. Need to pay cooks maybe, but amount and abundance of food is easily solved. There plenty of ways to get a sizable amount of resources for free via magic. Which in turn makes profits higher. Also that makes the university a better guaranteeor on all loans. They can also handle collections and such and with intelligence that high can easily advance thungs that way.

D and D is generally post apocalyptic, but it is not hard to get a LOT of progress back and advance with a collective effort of multiple high level casters.

Without getting too deep into the weeds of things (which kinda amounts to "spells for cleaning and cooking and fixing stuff are more expensive en-masse than just hiring people, unless you're buying an at-will item in which case surprise surprise everything breaks"), I'm going to reiterate that I'm not really trying to make a Tippyverse kinda thing here. I'm not trying to move society forward, I'm not trying to achieve post-scarcity, I'm not trying to flood the world with fledgling wizards. I'm trying to see what the operations of an existent wizard college might look like.

This started with the understanding that, in the typical D&D setting, there exist wizard colleges that a given wizard might have attended, which for the most part are run and populated by NPCs generally more in line with WotC expectations than forumite expectations. These wizards perhaps leveraged a big of their significant (but, on account of being NPCs, not "ultimate cosmic") power in order to get the school started and keep it running in the face of adversity, and at least the ones in the OP are certainly optimized towards making some actual profit from the business side of things, but even that's more because I wished to than because it really fit the setting. In retrospect I probably should've designed their builds to be trying a bit less (maybe ending up around +30ish instead of +90ish). They'd be making far less profit, but it'd lower tuition by...maybe 25% at most, because a lot of those costs are just coming from food and upkeep.

Yes, there are steps they could take to solve these issues. Getting "Greater Planar Binding" into their spellbooks would cost 2550 gp at most, and that's a potential path to power of the "ultimate cosmic" variety - which, yes, could be used for eliminating their food budget issue. But even if you're just looking at using such spells to make deals with beings that can cast Create Food & Water at-will (rather than, say, chaining efreeti), that's still the kind of thing whose availability warps the setting. If the NPCs can pull this kind of thing, the society will quickly change in drastic and far-reaching ways.

And while that stuff is interesting to think about for a bunch of reasons, it's not really helpful for telling us what a given magic university is going to look like in the setting as it currently exists.

How do you use Planar Binding to get food?

I usually just use an Everful Larder, from Stronghold Builder's Guide. It costs 15,000 gp, which isn't cheap. But in this case, it's saving you 75,000 gp in food costs every year. So you'd be a fool not to get one.

Because they're NPCs, I'm generally trying to avoid leaning too heavily on magic via items (honestly even the custom items I did were probably going way too far), and SBG stuff is part of that. If PCs wanted to start their own university and take advantage of lots of weird stuff like that, that's their business, but I'm kinda assuming that it's better to work with local farmers than to circumvent them, for political and in-universe theological reasons (don't wanna piss of guilds or deities by using magic to go post-scarcity).

There's probably a creature that can be summoned via Planar Binding that's capable of casting Create Food And Water at-will. Probably some kinda good low-level good Outsider? But the Greater version can definitely be used for it (and is something the archmages could cast if they had it), since GPB is capable of...basically anything the DM allows it to be capable of, since the upper limit in theorycrafting is "infinite number of infinitely powerful wishes". Even if that should never be what actually happens in a game on either side of the screen.

[Maat Mons]

I feel like your estimations of the relative cheesiness of some things is a little backwards. You seem to regard several things suggested here as more cheesy than things already in your original draft, when they are actually, in my view, much less so.



For example, your original post assumes that NPCs can easily and effortlessly break the game's economy. The Wizards are assumed to be able to earn enough money to destroy the concept of wealth-by-level via selling their spellcasting services. No regard is given for how much spellcasting the local economy actually needs or can afford to pay for.

If NPCs are doing such things, why not the PCs? What's to stop a PC Wizard from spending a bit of time in town and generating arbitrary levels of wealth to buy himself gear well beyond what he's supposed to be able to afford at his level?

Meanwhile, you're treating the idea of using a cheap magic item to become self-sufficient as if it were going to bring the world's economy to its knees. Trimming down the expenses of a small and elite group of individuals is not going to break any of the game's underlying assumptions. But allowing the selling of spellcasting services be an unlimited money-printing machine sure is.



The original post also utilizes the notoriously-broken custom item guidelines. I've never once had a DM who would let me knock 60k off the price of a magic item just by adding in arbitrary restrictions on use that would have no effect on me. At that point, why not get every single item at 1/3rd cost by getting it with limitations that you don't care about? Why has anyone ever crafted an item at full cost?

Come to think of it, I've only once had a DM who allowed any use of the custom item guidelines at all. And he very quickly reversed his stance after seeing the effect it had on the game. All other DMs, and all the rest of that one DM's campaign, it was published items only, and maybe an item that merges two printed items together. But even those were viewed with great suspicion.



Item Familiars are another thing I can't imagine any real DM ever allowing. But once again, they're right there in the original post.



The broad trend is that you're exploiting broken rules, and then refusing the suggestions of others on the basis that they're exploiting broken rules. This would maybe be reasonable if the exploits you were using were less broken than the ones you were rejecting. But in many cases it's the other way around. So far, I think Planar Binding is the only suggestion you've rejected that has actually been cheesier than what you're already doing.

Making a mockery of wealth-by-level? Fine, apparently. Slightly trimming back on everyday expenses? Broken, apparently.

I'm sorry if this comes off as combative. But it's very frustrating to try to help flesh out a concept, only to have all my suggestions swatted down by what appears to be a double-standard. I'm suggesting things that I feel are quite reasonably. And they're being treated as game-breaking, even though things that actually are game-breaking are being treated as fine and normal.



And, on the subject of everyday expenses, why is eating in the cafeteria being treated as mandatory for students? Why can't the school just have a cafeteria, and allow students to eat there for a fee, if the students want? Then frugal students could pack a lunch from home, but students willing to spend the money to have the school staff cook for them can still do so.

[AvatarVecna]

I feel like your estimations of the relative cheesiness of some things is a little backwards. You seem to regard several things suggested here as more cheesy than things already in your original draft, when they are actually, in my view, much less so.

I don't regard them as more cheesy - it's why in multiple posts I've made within this very thread, I've disavowed some of the cheese. In the post you're "responding" to, I admitted exactly that thing you're now going to complain about.

For example, your original post assumes that NPCs can easily and effortlessly break the game's economy. The Wizards are assumed to be able to earn enough money to destroy the concept of wealth-by-level via selling their spellcasting services. No regard is given for how much spellcasting the local economy actually needs or can afford to pay for.

Within the larger discussions that occurred before you arrived, various methods of acquiring the money were presented that provide incentive to the purchaser to buy magic via the wizards rather than buying the thing the magic would make through other means. And spellcasting services weren't the only one - item crafting was also suggested, which they can actually make a profit on as a result of the guild. Additionally, if we were just sticking to WBL rather than delving into item shenanigans for extra profit, then WBL/loans from the bank/loans from the guild would've been enough to finance the school.

If NPCs are doing such things, why not the PCs? What's to stop a PC Wizard from spending a bit of time in town and generating arbitrary levels of wealth to buy himself gear well beyond what he's supposed to be able to afford at his level?

The DM. You may note that this is already a problem with crafter casters and artificers that's well-understood to be a problem - turning time into money is just easier for mages, and that's a way that magic can screw up the game balance even if people aren't abusing broken spells and items.

Meanwhile, you're treating the idea of using a cheap magic item to become self-sufficient as if it were going to bring the world's economy to its knees. Trimming down the expenses of a small and elite group of individuals is not going to break any of the game's underlying assumptions. But allowing the selling of spellcasting services be an unlimited money-printing machine sure is.

I'm not saying that a room that gives infinite food is going to drive the world to its knees, I'm saying that about the guy who was talking about at-will spell items. A room that makes food just isn't a normal building and would be on top of the buildings already being purchased. It's extra, and I'm not comfortable having NPCs delve into the stronghold building rules. It's a thing almost certainly being done within the world, but it's not great at giving us an idea of what a given wizard college is going to look like. If it's a thing that's used on occasion, sure - I could even maybe understand larger kingdoms having them on hand for important locations. But building one into what is intended to be (even if the current version doesn't reflect it well) a more standard wizard college, it normalizes that thing. And then (to quote you) "If NPCs are doing such things, why not the PCs?".

Please cease being butthurt that I saw your suggestion and said "nah im not gonna use that" and acting like I shot you dog.

The original post also utilizes the notoriously-broken custom item guidelines. I've never once had a DM who would let me knock 60k off the price of a magic item just by adding in arbitrary restrictions on use that would have no effect on me. At that point, why not get every single item at 1/3rd cost by getting it with limitations that you don't care about? Why has anyone ever crafted an item at full cost?

Come to think of it, I've only once had a DM who allowed any use of the custom item guidelines at all. And he very quickly reversed his stance after seeing the effect it had on the game. All other DMs, and all the rest of that one DM's campaign, it was published items only, and maybe an item that merges two printed items together. But even those were viewed with great suspicion.

Item Familiars are another thing I can't imagine any real DM ever allowing. But once again, they're right there in the original post.

The things there have been disavowed and only existed in the first place for making a tiny bit of profit once the school was up. If they were removed (as I've mentioned a few times now), it wouldn't change the broad strokes of things.

The broad trend is that you're exploiting broken rules, and then refusing the suggestions of others on the basis that they're exploiting broken rules. This would maybe be reasonable if the exploits you were using were less broken than the ones you were rejecting. But in many cases it's the other way around. So far, I think Planar Binding is the only suggestion you've rejected that has actually been cheesier than what you're already doing.

Already disavowed, and since asking people to read through the thread rather than spilling salt in posts is gonna get tedious at this rate, I'm just going to edit them out.

Making a mockery of wealth-by-level? Fine, apparently. Slightly trimming back on everyday expenses? Broken, apparently.

I'm sorry if this comes off as combative. But it's very frustrating to try to help flesh out a concept, only to have all my suggestions swatted down by what appears to be a double-standard. I'm suggesting things that I feel are quite reasonably. And they're being treated as game-breaking, even though things that actually are game-breaking are being treated as fine and normal.

I. Was. Not. Talking. To. You. I was talking to the guy trying to pull stuff with the cooking and cleaning using magic - only at-will would really be viable, and that would be broken. At-will magic tends to be the hard line I see on items in the games I've played unless it's really small stuff, so even though yeah a magic freezer that fills itself with food probably isn't breaking the game, being at-will magic makes me nervous about including it in a general write-up. But that section was more directed at the parts about "why even hire cleaning staff when prestidigitation can do the job".

And, on the subject of everyday expenses, why is eating in the cafeteria being treated as mandatory for students? Why can't the school just have a cafeteria, and allow students to eat there for a fee, if the students want? Then frugal students could pack a lunch from home, but students willing to spend the money to have the school staff cook for them can still do so.

That's worth considering. It's not something I thought about prior to making the post, but thinking on it...I'm honestly not sure. On the one hand, that's definitely a thing in modern colleges (hell, modern school systems period), and it'd drastically reduce tuition for them. Profits via the businesses have to remain steady, but when costs go down, tuition will fall with it. On the other hand...well there's a couple things I'm thinking and I'm not sure about.

Firstly, there's the apprentice discussion from earlier about how where in an apprenticeship, it's a much more controlled experience. It's possible that supporting the school by paying for food is just part of the deal that students need to accept to attend - not buying in the cafeteria maybe just isn't an option. They can choose to eat outside food if they like but they're still paying for it. This feels generally fitting to the setting, but I don't really see these particular wizards operating that way on purpose - they're running a school to teach, not to make a profit, so pushing prospective students away feels counterproductive to that.

Secondly, there's how it complicates things with the business rules. If the school and the food aren't a package deal you're purchasing together, is it really fair to lump the food the cafeteria buys in with the money that counts towards school profits? It feels like it would make more sense for the cafeteria to essentially be its own business? But that makes things even more complicated: it's either a service business or a shop business (like, food shop?), but both of those are going to have small facilities that might have trouble with the volume of students. Additionally, even if it's only the one of them, there's no such thing as a cheap business in a metropolis, and even if they've not spent a cent the teachers are going to be having trouble.

Somebody would need to be business owner, and I've been kinda hesitant to have people own more than one business themselves (since I think it's weird for them to work at more than one, and also it's a bit weird for the headmaster to also be a lunchlady?), but then who would run the business? That's the 12 most powerful wizards in the city, who else is running the wizard college. One of the Wizard 4s? They'd probably be terrible. High level cleric, maybe using the tricks you mentioned earlier? Maybe, but unless any given magic college has a mid-level cleric of a magic deity running the kitchens...idk, it feels weird, yknow? You'd figure they'd be running their own temples or something. For similar reasons about working multiple jobs, I'm leery about the employees of the school being the "business owners" of the cafeteria.

...I'll probably just have it fall under the university businesses still, and just ignore that it feels like it should be its own thing. It'd be a whole lotta work otherwise just figuring out the logistics to make sure the kids eat.

Oh that actually reminds me:

Okay, I didn't realize you already had a Competence bonus from a homebrew item. I still think a +20 Competence bonus to all Professions at 1st level without items (let alone custom items) is pretty impressive. So I still feel that Cleric with Domain Focus in the Commerce domain is awesome for entrepreneurial characters in general.

So, this is a great idea, albeit one that's better for PCs and the NPC churches in the city than it is for the wizard's college. The long story short is that the wizards are built assuming the population rules, which don't make mention of multiclass characters - it's not illegal to have a cleric 1/wizard 15 instead of a wizard 16, and the former can certainly perform better* as business runner, but it's another thing I'm shying away. The tables says this is the number of high level wizards, so I'm just making them wizards. (And as previously stated, removing the "moar bonus" parts of the build is now on my to-do list, especially since making a profit was never really the priority.)

I'll also say that there's a couple things worth keeping in mind about this particular combo, as useful as it is:

1) Domain Focus ACF is dragon magazine material, which even the forums tend to be allergic to by default. Even when that's not really fair to the material and it did nothing to warrant that reaction.

2) More problematically, the Commerce Domain gives a bonus to profession checks to make a living. Now I'm not contesting that this counts as "making a living" - even if it wasn't designer intention when they wrote it (like they intended it just for the PHB profession moneymaking stuff), I don't think they'd have a problem applying the bonus to the business rules. What's actually a problem here isn't "to make a living", but "profession checks": while a university like this makes profession checks to run a business, not all businesses make profession checks. Most of them do, but some are weird and use Perform...or Craft...or Intimidate...or...base attack bonus? What nonsense is this? In any case, if I were DMing, I'd probably allow a Commerce Cleric's domain power to apply to all business types even if not profession-based, because I firmly believe that if they'd the domain after DMG 2, that's what it would do. But at least by default, even if dragon mag is on the table, clerics can't run every business better by default.

[Maat Mons]

All right. Fair enough. It seems I missed some important details in later posts. I interpreted things that were not directed at me as if they were. And treated rejection of my suggestions as a personal offense. I apologize. It is your thread, and you are free to use, or not use, whatever material you like without having to justify yourself to me.

And thank you for continuing to give thoughtful responses to those of my comments that are constructive, in spite of the one's I've made that aren't.

[Raven777]

This is surprisingly sensible for something so based in 3.5's ridiculous RAW.

Just gonna add this oldie but goodie to the discussion, because the central premise is close to this thread's and is really important for a 3.5/PF DM or designer (and some interested players) to internalize :

One of the most impressive things about 3rd Edition is the casual realism of the system. You can plug real world values into it, process them through the system, and get back a result with remarkable fidelity to what would happen in the real world.

3.5 is not just a RPG, it's also an incredibly robust simulation. And that's why I love it so much.