Spell Pricing for Spellcaster Specialists

How did you arrive at these costs? They seem significantly lower than crafting items that would supply one-time usage. I understand that items can be taken out on adventures, but 150gp for a 3rd Level Divine spell being cast versus the cost for a scroll of that level seems like a huge gap.

Hi Michael,
The costs were calculated as follows:
Monthly Wage of Spellcaster of Appropriate Level [Long formula is used to derive this, but it’s based on 3% x 80% x expected number of experience points, more or less.]
Daily Wage Rate = (Monthly Wage * .139) [this formula was based on a formula used by lawyers to calculate their billable rates]
Cost/Spell = (Daily Wage Rate / # of Spells per Day of that Level)
The monthly wage of a 5th level spellcaster is 582gp/month. The daily wage of a 5th level spellcaster is therefore (x .139) 81gp. A 5th level arcane spellcaster can cast 1 3rd level spell per day, so (81gp/1) = 81gp. For aesthetics, I smoothed this to 75gp.
Yes, that is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than a scroll (500gp x 3 = 1,500gp). That’s by intent and design. Obviously I could have made scrolls much less expensive. But I think doing so has harmful effects on the “feel” of the game world. Put in economic turns, magic in ACKS is primarily a service, rather than a product. It is, at best, a cottage industry that can turn out hand-made products. It cannot be mass produced in any effective way as doing so is simply not cost-effective. Only in very rare cases will you want a scroll - e.g. “I’m going into the underworld and need a scroll of remove curse 'cause I’m not likely to make it back otherwise”.
But most people who want to get a cure, have their house checked for curses, or other minor magic, will visit the local chapel or hedge wizard. They won’t buy scrolls. Likewise, an army will find it much affordable to have a chaplain for a company of soldiers than to equip legions of 1st level clerics with scrolls and potions. The same is even more true for mages and things like fireball.
The system thus yields numbers that make returning to the main town to hire a cleric to cast “restore life and limb” affordable, but carrying a bunch of “restore life and limb” scrolls quite costly.
Keeping magic from being technology keeps the game world more true to the sort of source material I prefer. Others may feel differently of course and can tweak the values as they see fit.

Oh, I agree with scrolls being expensive. Totally. I would rather magic items be rarer.
I was more concerned with the spells being too little in cost. 150gp is a year’s salary for an unskilled laborer (roughly equivalent to maybe purchasing a car in the real world). But, a car doesn’t have the same impact as say, removing a curse, curing blindness, curing diseases and so on. :slight_smile:
I’m not really wanting to change the prices so much as feel better about selling spellcasting for so low.

Well, the prices “are what they are” in the sense that if you follow the math (number of peasants, income of peasants, number of leveled characters, percentage of leveled characters which are spellcasters, wage required to justify the time and energy of a spellcaster, etc.) that’s what the result is.
To raise the cost of spellcasting you should lower the number of spellcasters proportionately.

Yeah, that’s something that may be the thing too. The availability of high level spells seems really easy to obtain.
Was this on purpose? Maybe I’m just being overly cautious about making this kind of magic available to my PCs.

It was on purpose in the sense that it all follows from the base line assumptions. You could certainly modify the assumptions and come up with different worlds.
What kind of magic are you worried about your players getting access to?

In the White Sandbox campaign, I have been taking the approach that getting someone to cast a spell means having to be involved with that person and the schemes, prejudices, etc. which powerful individuals are prone to.
Having the prices be low means that I can play with this social aspect without feeling that I’ll break the game as a result - if the Patriarch casts remove curse for free because the party did him a favor it’s not a problem that the party saved 150 gp, whereas if he is angry that the party has been supporting his foes it’s quite feasible for them to offer him 1,500 gp instead and see if that changes his mind.

Hey, that’ a good point, Tavis. And, the rules do mention spells costing more from Divine casters if alignment is different.

//What kind of magic are you worried about your players getting access to? //
Well, for one Restore Life and Limb for 500gp seems a bit cheap. That’s basically raising the dead for a small sum.
A 2nd Level adventurer will have that easily, especially if groups pool their resources. So, basically, from 2nd level onward, in most cases (Class IV and above), there is potential to simply restore life to any character.
That seems… a bit too accessible to me.

Michael,
Let me try to answer your implied question of “what were you thinking?! making it cost 500gp” on a few levels.
First, simulation: The average person in the assumed world only earns 3gp per month so 500gp represents a sum of money vastly outside of their comprehension. A fine warhorse costs 250gp, and that cost is often likened to the cost of a sports car in the modern world. So 500gp is a lot of money. It seems a small amount of money only because adventurers are exceptional sorts. The pricing is, as far as I can tell, “correct” within the overall economics of the world.
Second, balance: The real “cost” to restore life and limb is not the gold piece cost, but the side effects.A few bad rolls on the side effects table can render a character unplayable, or at least substantially crippled. In our play test campaigns we have had several characters retire or commit suicide because Restore Life and Limb left them so monstrous or broken. Most uses of Wishes ever found have been to try to get rid of side effects.
Third, fun over time: ACKS is built to support play from level 1 to level 14. Much of what makes it unique only kicks in at 5th - 9th level. While getting from level 1 to 2 remains a harrowing challenge, I don’t think having that high of a risk of permanent death over the course of the campaign works well in a sustainable empire-building game. Therefore, the death system is designed to be somewhat attritional. One death is not a problem, but after a few deaths your character is going to show it.
That said, if you want to make resurrection rarer, you have several good options:

  1. Remove Restore Life and Limb. Only the ritual Resurrection is available. This will make it unaffordable to virtually everyone.
  2. Add an expensive or rare component to Restore Life and Limb if it is used to restore life rather than limb. For example, it might require the essence of an undead spirit. You can either rule that this is available (500gp) or make it be an adventure to get.
  3. Remove Restore Life and Limb. Give a +5 bonus to all rolls on the Mortal Wounds table. Wish your players good luck!
  4. Rule that Clerics will only restore life to members of their church in good standing, which requires a 10% tithe on all wealth. The RLL itself will not be unaffordable but the players will feel they paid for it.

I totally forgot about the table for when you are Restored to Life! Good call on that.
This helps a lot, Alex. Thanks for your feedback. I think this is enough information and insight to make a decision going forward.

Rise, Rise… Rise! It is alive! (Sorry about the necro…)
Lots of fascinating stuff here. Much kudos for talking about how you’ve worked this stuff out.
(1) Wanted to add a link the The Alexandrian’s take on death & dying:
http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/advanced-rules/optional-death.html
which seems to have a lot of potential – keeping mortality at a level that allows the campaign to proceed towards higher levels, yet preventing the revolving door of death. …though Tampering With Mortality table definitely makes sure that door hits you on the way out. :slight_smile:
(2) The availability of high-level spellcasters seems seriously off to me in comparison to what the demograpics in Secrets section say:

  • Population supporting one leveled characters of 7th level or higher: 5414 [*]
  • 22% of leveled characters are clerics, so you need an average of 24,609 people to support one cleric capable of casting a 5th level Divine spell.
  • 11% of leveled characters are mages, so you need a staggering average of 49,216 people to support one mage capable of casting a 4th level Arcane spell.
    …yet there are 1d4 5th level Divine Spells per day available in a city of 2500-5000 people, and 1d2 4th level Arcane Spells available in a town of 625-1250 people.
    For clerics it sort of looks like that when calculating the availability you’re not factoring in that only 22% of all leveled characters are clerics, but the availability of Arcane spellcasters seems completely off. Or am I goofing up the math here?
    Is this just an artifact of using different methods to arrive at different things, or a deliberate choice to make sure higher-level spells are accessible as a service?
    [* 1 / (1/10000000 + 1/3250000 + 1/1200000 + 1/450000 + 1/160000 + 1/20000 + 1/8000) ]
    (3) While I see what you’re saying re. the wage scale used to derive spellcasting costs, the way the costs of Divine magic scale seems a bit odd:
    2nd level spells cost 4 times as much as 1st level ones,
    3rd level spells cost 3.75 times as much as 2nd level ones,
    4th level spells cost 2.17 times as much as 3rd level ones,
    5th level spells cost 1.53 times as much as 4th level ones.
    The Arcane spell costs scale at rates 4x, 3.75x, 4.3x, 3.84x, 3.6x which seems more reasonable – given that class demographics say that population needs to approximately triple for each additional character level supported.
    EDIT: Though even for arcane casters that doesn’t look right, since you need to go up by two class levels per each spell level – meaning population goes up by a factor of ~9.

(2) The availability of high-level spellcasters seems seriously off to me in comparison to what the demograpics in Secrets section say:

  • Population supporting one leveled characters of 7th level or higher: 5414 [*]
  • 22% of leveled characters are clerics, so you need an average of 24,609 people to support one cleric capable of casting a 5th level Divine spell.
    …yet there are 1d4 5th level Divine Spells per day available in a city of 2500-5000 people

APM: You are correct that you need, e.g., around 25,000 people to one cleric capable of casting a 5th level Divine spell.
However, in order to have 1d4 5th level Divine Spells per day available, you need to be dealing with a Class III city. A class III city has 2,500 to 4,999 families, which isr 12,500 to 24,999 people. I think you are mis-reading the chart on p231 to be people, not families. A class III city is a big city.
Further, the rules assume that for each city of 12,500 to 24,999 people, you need to have a population of 125,000 to 249,999 families, or 625,000 to 1,249,995 people. In a population of that size, there are 16 to 32 7th level Clerics, and higher level clerics on top of that.
So even a Class III city existing in a vacuum could have 1 7th level Cleric, and a normal Class III city in an average realm will certainly have at least a few of the 16-32 in the realm.
Because the game assumes a pyramid of levels, you can’t calculate the number of high-level characters in a city by just calculating the size of the city and treating it as a realm. Cities exist within realms, and many of the high level characters will be in the cities.
I hope that makes sense.

(3) While I see what you’re saying re. the wage scale used to derive spellcasting costs, the way the costs of Divine magic scale seems a bit odd:
2nd level spells cost 4 times as much as 1st level ones,
3rd level spells cost 3.75 times as much as 2nd level ones,
4th level spells cost 2.17 times as much as 3rd level ones,
5th level spells cost 1.53 times as much as 4th level ones.
APM: It’s a product of the funky cleric spell progression. A 5th level cleric has 2 1st and 2 2nd, while a 6th level cleric has 2 1st, 2 2nd, 1 3rd, and 1 4th, and a 7th level cleric has 2 1st, 2 2nd, 2 3rd, 1 4th, and 1 5th.
Mathematically it works out as follows:
5th level cleric:
Monthly wage: 582gp
Billable rate: 81gp per day
Highest level spell: 2
Spells of that level per day: 2
Cost per Spell: 40.5gp (smoothed to 40gp per ease)
6th level cleric:
Monthly wage 1,171gp
Billable rate: 162gp per day
Highest level spell: 3 and 4
Spells of that level per day: 1
Cost per Spell: 162gp (smoothed to 150gp for ease) for 3rd
7th level cleric:
Monthly wage: 2,327gp
Billable Rate: 322gp
Highest level spell: 4 and 5
Spells of that level per day: 1
Cost per Spell: 322gp (smoothed to 325gp for ease) for 4th; 322gp (increased to 500gp to reflect that some might be cast by 8th level casters) for 5th
8th level cleric:
Monthly wage: 4,665gp
Billable rate: 644gp
Highest level spell: 5
Spells of that level per day: 1
Cost per spell: 644gp (reduced to 500gp to reflect that some might be cast by less-expensive 7th level casters
So the costs are more-or-less correct. In order to give it a smoother progression I created separate prices for 3rd and 4th level spells and then bumped up the cost of 5th level spells a bit. On the “supply side” 3rd/4th are the same to a 6th level caster and 4th/5th are the same to a 7th level caster, but the game works better with the slight adjustments I made.

blink
Families. Yeah. That makes a whole lot more sense. Thanks.
blush

This is a bit off-topic, but with the issue of the starting city charts being brought up I just couldn’t resist.
I was confused about the families thing too and in my game it led to humorous results. I started the game in a village and I thought the chart said that a village could have 100 people rather than 100 families. When the game started, and I brought up the population, one player thought that 100 people was too small a population. It quickly became and running gag when the PCs killed a member of a rival criminal guild, and the players joked about how the already small population had just decreased.
Later, after thinking about what the players said I looked at one of the other city charts and it listed that a village could have 100 families not 100 people.