3.x - Magic Also Taketh

[unseenmage]

Broken economies. Broken economies everywhere.
As far as the eye can see magical creation is breaking economies and the spirits of the poor sad GMs forced to deal with evil munchkinizing players bent on monetary domination...

But no longer!


Welcome to the Magic Also Taketh thread where we will discuss methods and means by which magical gameworlds can, and will, limit or even outright destroy the economy breaking fruits of magical labor.
(Disclaimer: Permissive GMs will want to avert their eyes now so as to preserve plausible deniability.)

I will maintain a list of 'economy breaking exploits' in the OP and alongside them I will present their foils.
For example, say one were to allow their players to break wooden ladders into wooden poles for a profit. A simple, level appropriate, solution would be a warehouse fire. All those broken-ladder-poles go up in smoke and viola the players have an arsonist to ignore while they break more ladders find.

Economy Breakers
Animate Dead spell
Breaking ladders into poles exploit
Create Water + Water to Acid (St) spell combo
Distilled Joy (BoED) + Elation (BoED) spell combo
Fabricate spell
Hydra creature all-you-can-eat-buffet
Leadership & Simulacrum effects
Lyre of Building item
Planar Binding spell
Plant Growth spell
Portal to plane of infinite materials
Resetting Magic Trap item
Runic Guardian construct
Spell Clock item
Spellsong Nightingale construct
Spellstitched undead template
Troll creature body parts and bone harvesting
True Creation spell
Unseen Crafter spell
Wall of Iron spell
Wall of Salt spell
Wall of Stone spell

Market Forces
Annihilator (Un) creature (disintegrate effect)
"any creature that can eat more than it needs to." (thanks Fizban)
Disease (for creatures)
Disintegrate spell
Dragon eating habits
Dragon hoards
Earthquake spell (for structures)
Expenditure as expensive material components
Fire hazard (for the flammable)
Mage's Disjunction spell (for magic items)
Portal to plane of infinite customers
Oozes & Slimes creatures and hazards (for organic materials)
Rule Zero
Rust Monster creature (for metallic materials)
Sphere of Annihilation artifact
Sphere of Ultimate Destruction (disintegrate effect)

And here Fizban has provided a more comprehensive set of explanations and counters.

[Cosi]

This is stupid. You're trying to solve a systemic problem with local solutions. The solution to "players are flooding the economy with goods and gaining too much wealth" is to make the economics engine more robust and to make going over WBL less dangerous. Not try to think of individual hotfixes for each problem. Particularly not DM fait "it doesn't work, ha ha" reasons.

[Vizzerdrix]

I`ll play along. I`ve seen 2 critters that might fit into the list. I dont remember their names.

One was like a high cr rust monster that could disintergrate anything. This was in some faerun book. I remember it was purple and had 2 sets of rust monster antani.

The other was a gem eating monster from one of the psionic books. I think it was green.

Other than that, I think their was a 1st level power that people used to make poison. Their is vemon milking ones familiar or animal companion. I`m sure a clever person could aduse gem scarabs somehow too. Would all you can eat hyra buffets fit on this list?

[Lazymancer]

Is this a serious thread or a joke?

I hope for the latter, but I'd like to be realistic. It's not like we don't have people with the understanding of economy that would allow for Rust Monsters as Market Forces.

[Telonius]

Kolyaruts mete out punishment to those who break bargains and oaths.

I would think that breaking the social contract to the extent that an economy collapses might attract the attention of Inevitables. A specialized Macroeconomic Auditor division of Kolyaruts could be deployed to stop anyone trying a massive-scale cash grab.

[martixy]

You have economy breakers because you don't have a market economy, you have divine economy, or rather deus-ex economy. Prices and goods aren't based on supply and demand or any similar internal drivers, but are dictated from the ourside.

Of course, this is a game, so you don't need an elaborate economy till you need one.
Then the standard player disclaimer applies - don't break stuff you're not willing to suffer the fix of.

P.S. A rather common sense fix is not having something-for-nothing spells.

[Lazymancer]

P.S. A rather common sense fix is not having something-for-nothing spells.

Because nothing else can be weaponized economized.

Spoiler

Show

[unseenmage]

I`ll play along. I`ve seen 2 critters that might fit into the list. I dont remember their names.

One was like a high cr rust monster that could disintergrate anything. This was in some faerun book. I remember it was purple and had 2 sets of rust monster antani.

The other was a gem eating monster from one of the psionic books. I think it was green.

Other than that, I think their was a 1st level power that people used to make poison. Their is vemon milking ones familiar or animal companion. I`m sure a clever person could aduse gem scarabs somehow too. Would all you can eat hyra buffets fit on this list?

The Annihilator is the bigger better Rust Monster. One of my favs so yeah, already listed.

Will add Hydra buffet to list.

Sorry but am unfamiliar with the rest.

[Fizban]

List of market breakers is missing Wall of Salt, and Wall of Iron for flat "gp" creation. Wall of Stone can build buildings which can be sold. If leadership can "abuse" craft rolls for gp, then Unseen Crafter ought to be on the list. Most people seem to think just having the idea of casting Plant Growth or using Animate Dead for labor suddenly upends the whole setting. There are a few creatures who can auto-animate things too. I'm also surprised you don't have Planar Binding on there considering it's basically the 1st resort of every "lol borked" plan.

Being as these aren't being specifically matched up, it's more of a list of forces of entropy. You can add "any creature that can eat more than it needs to." Dragons in particular can eat anything, and as much of it as they want. Calculations have shown that even a tiny number of Mind Flayers require an enormous amount of humans to farm sustain-ably. Various corporeal undead can eat and vanish massive amounts of flesh or food, and of course incorporeal undead can kill creatures by the bucketful while leaving the corpses to rot. Ekolids are a far more terrifying scourge than the usual "wightocalypse," spawning multiple flying fast healing DR having six natural attacking demons per kill. Gaze attacks can also wipe out arbitrary numbers of creatures. Supernatural disease that spread on their own and require magic to cure are essentially unstoppable. Any creature with at-will spell-like abilities is a source of abuse, either through their exact ability or Energy Transformation Field- anything with a blasting spell at-will is just as dangerous, if not more so, than a breath weapon or gaze attack. Basically, anything that hinges upon the assumption of stable humanoid settlements can be swept away with any number of supernatural threats: no market, no market abuse.

Permanent portals to other planes are a natural source of excuses for why entropy doesn't build up, and serve an equally effective excuse for introducing it. Over time, a permanent portal to the shadow or negative energy planes will let out an ever increasing amount of Shadows and Wraiths and whatnot, which must be kept in check.

[unseenmage]

... I'm also surprised you don't have Planar Binding on there considering it's basically the 1st resort of every "lol borked" plan.

Binding was just never my thing so I overlooked it entirely.

Being as these aren't being specifically matched up, it's more of a list of forces of entropy.

And once again you manage to express succinctly what I ramble on about instead. Thank you.

At first I was going to pair them up, and even give them all an appropriate level, but decided against as I'm no good at that aspect and it would have lead to a lot of duplication.

...Dragons in particular can eat anything, and as much of it as they want.
...

Y'know, I thought about adding this but wasnt sure if it was a RAW thing or not. Also dragonfire, wasnt sure how mythical its fire actually was by the books.

Permanent portals to other planes are a natural source of excuses for why entropy doesn't build up, and serve an equally effective excuse for introducing it. Over time, a permanent portal to the shadow or negative energy planes will let out an ever increasing amount of Shadows and Wraiths and whatnot, which must be kept in check.

Noted and added.

[Jack_Simth]

You can also use world-building. The things listed on the trade goods list are trade goods because they have some form of "magical essence", "divine spark" or whatever you want to call it that's extracted and used during magic item creation. However: much manipulation of such materials via spell consumes said magical essence. This also explains the spellcraft entry for identifying materials made or shaped by magic - with a bit of practice, you can detect that essence, and more notably the lack of it. So while salt from a Wall of Salt can be used to flavor soup, and you can use Wall of Iron to make a few barriers... when you go to use material from either as cash, you'll get a quick "I don't like counterfeiters" from anyone with Spellcraft or Appraise. When you try to make Art Objects via Fabricate, they will lack that luster of an actual handcrafted item. And so on.

Edit: As a side note, this also explains fixed prices on many things in the first place. Everything on the trade goods list is useful in magic item creation at the exact value listed - which includes the coins used to buy them, if the PC's are doing it. If any one item has the price go down because of a glut, the crafters pick up that item more often and others less (it's cheaper). Less demand for the other items means the price on them goes down on them, and the glutted item gets more demand so the price goes up... but the coins are in the same listing, so in very short order they reach equilibrium again.

A variation of this can be used to explain why nobody feeds towns with Everfull Larders (Stronghold Builder's Guide): People fed mostly on such things can't reproduce (takes some of that essence to make kids).

[Avigor]

...kinda disappointed cause I was hoping for a guide, not a list without explanations.

[Afgncaap5]

Honestly, I find that most players will back down from this kind of thing if you force them to roleplay all of it out. Especially if they do things like creating pocket dimensions with weird time laws to account for diamond harvesting and item creation, only to discover that your setting has Astral Pirates who sail the silvery skies waiting for just such an uppity wizard to do this sort of thing.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

Honestly, I find that most players will back down from this kind of thing if you force them to roleplay all of it out. Especially if they do things like creating pocket dimensions with weird time laws to account for diamond harvesting and item creation, only to discover that your setting has Astral Pirates who sail the silvery skies waiting for just such an uppity wizard to do this sort of thing.

Or you have the army of crafters they left in that dimension constantly call them somehow with updates or (in case of pirates) cries for help from the boss.

[unseenmage]

Honestly, I find that most players will back down from this kind of thing if you force them to roleplay all of it out. Especially if they do things like creating pocket dimensions with weird time laws to account for diamond harvesting and item creation, only to discover that your setting has Astral Pirates who sail the silvery skies waiting for just such an uppity wizard to do this sort of thing.

This in no way would deter me. Sounds like loads of ffun and like it is spawning an awesome astral pirate adventure.

[Afgncaap5]

This in no way would deter me. Sounds like loads of ffun and like it is spawning an awesome astral pirate adventure.

Oh, totally! I build these things so that they're doable, and the potential challenges the players wind up facing work a little less like typical D&D dungeon crawling and more like Doctor Who episodes. Sadly, I almost never get players who take the bait; they generally just act like they're thinking "Oh, that trick from the Internet didn't work? Darn it... guess I'll go slay that dragon or something..."

A shame, too. Razorbeard the Pirate's never really had his chance to shine, except in cameos in games of Cosmic Patrol, where he's a pretty different kind of thing.

[Fizban]

Come to think of it, expensive material components should be on the list of entropy sources, since you don't get that stuff back. Dragons hoarding the wealth is another economic sink, as is the legitimate use of Planar Ally/Binding when you pay the creature off with thousands of gp worth of stuff which it carts back to its homeplane. Speaking of planes, genies are another specific example of drains on the humanoid population, as they like enslaving people. The underdark can also count as a money/human capital sink for the same slavery/raiding/paying off reasons.

Dragon diets are described in the Draconomicon: they can eat "almost anything if neccesary" including rock or dirt, have a "vast" gap between what they must and what they are able to eat, and most can consume "half their own weight in meat every day." Dragonfire doesn't have any mythical properties in dnd aside from any artifacts the DM chooses to tie to it, but any breath weapon deals a bunch of damage to unattended objects over a wide area, which is fully capable of destroying magic items. And dead people can't attend items- the amount of loot that ought to be destroyed by excess blasting is probably pretty significant.

For that matter, damage from any source can destroy magic items, and once destroyed the components are lost just as surely as if they were spent on a spell. The Doomguard PrC is more infatuated with entropy than the Entropomancer, though I can't seem to find the magic destroying organization I was sure existed (Forsakers from Masters of the Wild are only required to sell their magic items and stop using any, not destroy them on sight). Gods have agendas and clerics to carry them out, which can most certainly include destroying the magic/items of rival/enemy faiths. BoED has a nifty redeeming mechanic, but plenty of things can't really be redeemed.

And that's the most versatile counter of all of course: the enemy organization. The easiest explanation for why something hasn't happened in the gameworld is always that someone/something you didn't think of is opposing it. And conveniently we have mechanics by which we can assign an amount of combat challenge to an amount of cash. Any "market destroying" thing the PCs do will attract notice from someone who doesn't want it being done, and as they make money they will be faced with appropriate challenges relative to that money, which conveniently are not carrying treasure of their own.

Oh, and the reason you can't break ladders into 10' poles is because ladders aren't made of 10' poles. A 10' pole is a smooth sturdy pole. The sides of a ladder may or may not be rounded, and have notches or holes in them to hold the rungs in place. No one wants to buy your obviously torn apart ladder pieces.

(You could also just admit it's a typo).

[unseenmage]

The real trick, of course, is finding entropy sources that can keep pace with wealth generation methods.

The old adage that 'destruction is easier than creation' might only be relevant here in the real world. Am unsure as yet weather we have enough in game RAWesque evidence for it to hold true in D&D-verse.

Hardness, for example, makes it so that wealth generation methods might outpace simple damage sources.
Which is why, at first, I focused on Disintegrate effects and Rust Monster type creatures which would seem to leave less matter the longer or more widely they're employed.

It also kind of depends on how far out one wants to zoom, so to speak. Crashing a town's or country's economy is one thing. Affecting the world? The planes? The many campaign setting-ed multiverse?

Time becomes a factor too. Resetting magic traps and Spell Clocks work on a different scale than a single untiring Dedicated Wright.
Then again, when time is an issue one can often compensate by adding volume. The more iterations of a particular wealth/matter generating process successfully active at once the less time is required to benefit from it.

[Fizban]

You mean Hardening as in the spell? It's a money sink itself that basically just protects from bumps and scuffing. A sufficiently determined person can smash through it without too much difficulty, or use the falling damage trick: 200'= 20d6 to anything. People also love Adamantine weapons, which while not perfect (they only smash hardness of less than 20, which means 19 or less), will still wreck any Hardening-'d items without serious caster level or Mithral starting hardness.

Hard objects are pretty difficult to destroy with un-optimized AoE damage, but there are still monsters and spells that can do it. It's more that a lot of items can be easily destroyed by wanton blasting-while some magic items say they're mithral or adamantine, and magic weapons/armor get some bonuses on top of their larger hp to begin with, most do not. It only takes 22-30 fire or electricity damage to break most steel items, or just 2-12 for weaker materials. That's not counting if they catch on fire, and acid or sonic only requires half the damage even if the spell doesn't explicitly bypass hardness. Many oozes also ignore damage and just annihilate gear on a failed save.

Infinite traps and spell clocks are on my list of "not even worth considering," but obviously you just fight fire with fire and make your entropy devices infinite. You basic matter creation (Water and Walls) creates far less than a 10' cube per casing, which is your standard matter destruction. A sufficiently souped up Wall of Fire can incinerate quite a bit even without being permanent or infinite.

For speed of income, you can if necessary simply interrupt them. I believe I brought this up in a previous thread (you were probably there too), but the existence of divinations that can contact the gods and gods that can see the future (any greater deity), means that the DM can justify having your operations attacked before they've even begun. Essentially the only way to hide from a god is with another god, so you need DM approval to hide your doings. Of course you might have trouble justifying where you're getting all the encounters that are capable of finding and attacking PCs who've managed to hide from everything short of the gods, but if the PCs are trying to go small-scale infinite well the DM has an infinite number of infinite planes from which to draw Schrodinger's NPCs and outsiders.

And if the question is actually being phrased in terms of crashing the economy, well the DMG already says that's under direct DM purview. The most you can really justify RAW is draining the ready cash out of a population center, then possibly buying everything out from under them, which still assumes they're robots who are forced to sell to you.

Someone wanted a more direct guide- I'ma go down the list one by one. there's not always direct magical "counters," but there's plenty of "weasely" things the DM can say to counter the players weaseling even before just saying no.

Spoiler

Show

Animate Dead: "Creeping darkness effect" LM/BoVD states that creating undead leads to more spontaneous undead, threatening apocalypse, entire classes and organizations are dedicated to eradicating undead. A single casting of Celestial Brilliance (BoED, 4th level) on a rock lasts for a week and annihilates puny undead in passing, all you have to do is get the rock in position.

Water to Acid: The acid created by this spell is actually superior to PHB acid in that it destroys metal, but this means they are not equivalent and thus there is no RAW price you can try to sell it at. Like any liquid, smashing the containers effectively ruins the stock-and possibly a lot more around it in this case.

Distilled Joy: The casting time vs/income of this spell is no disastrously problematic, at 50gp/day you have plenty of time to throw plot at them before wealth is out of control. Attempting to abuse it via infinite casting pleasure dungeons is likely to attract the ire of every Good deity (and the main market is Good outsiders). Paying for a properly cushy lifestyle for your "blissful" cattle will eat into profits. More importantly, the existing item for the evil counterpart explicitly keeps the day long extraction time with a whopping 64,000gp cost, making it doubly obvious any infinite scheme is the DM's own fault. You can waste it as easily a smashing the container and leaving it spilled upon the ground, and as a pile of Permanent magical effects they're easy to detect without further countermeasures.

Fabricate: Has sharp limits on volume, limiting what you can do with it. The most reliable value you can get is converting raw materials into art objects (a trade good) to triple your money with each iteration, and yeah there's not much counter to that aside from actual market forces depressing the value of art over time. You can play dumb with NPC traders who lack the Appraise skill to valuate the art objects and thus refuse to accept them for anything more than their raw materials worth, resulting in no wealth gain (and that applies to all the commoners those traders trade with too)- or who pretend to play dumb because they're in league with/don't want to anger the craft guilds you're trying to shove out, since when you leave they still have to deal with those people.

Lyre of Building: This provides only rough labor, which is at a bit of a premium in a medieval 90% farming economy, so it's not really stepping on anyone's toes- but it also doesn't create much wealth. Unless you can convince someone to "buy a bridge" off you, buildings are very valuable but the only serious "buyers" are the people you had to buy the land from in the first place- you do remember that the king owns all the land, right?

Plant Growth: This spell is grossly overestimated. It increases yield by 30%, but since yield isn't defined it doesn't actually do anything. Either there's a bunch of extra food of indeterminate value, or you make 30% more gp off your farming checks, or the DM decides it suddenly uplifts the setting by shifting farms to trade jobs. None of these are RAW, so trying to claim it has RAW impact is laughable. Regardless, this is where "anything that eats more than it should" comes in, with countless supernatural monsters (and spells that can summon them) that ravage crops. A single monster could easily reduce the yield of a region by 30% or more, making Plant Growth a requirement to survive rather than a luxury, and that's without even killing the peasants directly.

Portal to infinite materials: The only planes of infinite materials with a RAW justification that I'm aware of are the Elemental Plane of Earth, and the first layer of Acheron. Prospecting on the plane of earth gives about a 5% chance every 8 hours of finding a valuable metal (avg 22,000 over 22 hours of further mining) or uncut gems (avg 3,025gp after gemcutting), with an equal chance of finding an elemental pocket or chamber that could contain an encounter- and the digging rules don't actually preclude separate random encounter rolls (which RAW don't go lower than 5% per hour, call it 44% per 8 hours for .95^8). The given encounter table is around EL 10, which is 5,800gp per encounter. With around a 50% chance per mining roll of an encounter but only a 5% chance of loot, you're facing plenty enough encounters to make up for any mining you do.

Acheron is similar: while the plane is made up of floating iron cubes, you'll need time to harvest that iron, and the DMG gives an EL 15 random encounter table, so unless you can harvest more than 22,000gp per encounter you're not breaking the bank. A cubic foot of iron is worth 49.1gp and weighs 491lbs, and you have to get it back to the material plane or wherever you're selling it-you're probably doing better than Distilled Joy, but at what risk?. Being a plane that's at constant war it's also less likely you'll find a place unpopulated enough to roll for minimum encounters.

True Creation: trades xp for gp, unless you're ignoring the cost with something else, which is a problem with something else rather than True Creation.

Unseen Crafter: this is another one that has no particular counter aside from simple market/opposition/supernatural pressure. Technically it can't make weekly gp checks, but if you set it to creating art objects of arbitrary value to guarantee it finishes them you pump out a stream of trinkets that triples your value at the rate of approximately (10+skill mod)^2/10 per week, *spell slots*caster level/7, (roughly 30-60gp * how many weeks worth of crafters you cast in profit per week as long as raw materials are available). At level at which Unseen Crafter becomes available you can make a useful amount of money off it, but Fabricate still beats it.

Wall of Iron: at cl 12 for efficiency, you get 75 cu ft of iron for 3,632gp, assuming that it can be melted down and used as normal iron. Unfortunately this is not what the spell says: it instantaneously creates a flat, vertical iron wall that is subject to rusting, perforation, and other natural phenomena. It does not say that it creates a volume of recyclable, tradable iron. The DM can simply rule that the Iron Wall created by Wall of Iron is not suitable for any purpose other than what it's created for, fluffing it however they wish. As for magically destroying it, a single Rust Monster can destroy a 10' cube of iron per round, making it explicitly useless. A fire resistance/immune Rust Monster could even go after the foundry. The Rusting Grasp spell isn't much of a substitute, but an acid substituted Wall of Fire probably doesn't leave much of use behind.

Wall of Salt: same rulings as Wall of Iron, except you can destroy it via water effects rather than Rust Monsters, if you're using that motivation rather than simply ruling against it.

Wall of Stone: while I said myself that you can make valuable buildings with Wall of Stone, the problem of buying the land to build it on and then who you're going to sell it back to remains.

[unseenmage]

Wow. Well, that was thorough.
I'll link it in the OP if you don't mind.

As far as Distilled Joy + Elation, I prefer to Greater Humanoid Essence my Constructs and farm them. Farming Simulacrum joy is neat too.

My favorite use for Fabricate is mining. Just arrange your area so it encompasses whatever you're trying to extract then "craft" the material into an easily removable form. May take multiple castings to get at the material you dont have line of effect to.

As for mining Acheron, high CL Animate Objects to just make the material into a creature and Greater Plane Shift and/or Greater Teleport away.

Fabricate mining + Animate Objects teleporting could snag Earth plane materials fairly quickly too.

I was unaware that Water to Acid's acid differed from basic acid. A nice catch, thanks for the info. Is still my favorite low-ish level cash cow though. Last time I worked up the math it makes enough that, assuming you can sell it, it pays for shipping barrels and flasks and you still profit even selling at theoretical bulk price of (IIRC, its been a while) 1/2 price.