Create Gold, Should it be allowed "Evil Grin" Options

[Joker9125]

Something that recently came to my attention in another thread was the idea of create gold. Lets look at the create food spell, its perminant and creates food that can sustain life. Any food that can sustain life has to consist of an incredibly complex chain of atoms of different elements. Now create gold would create a solid pice of gold that is all one element making it pure gold which would mean it would be worth about as much as gold radicals (40,000 :nuyen:). Now heres the catch the gold would have to carry the casters astral signature :vegm:

Player: I have made a create gold spell which is entirely within the rules.
ME: Ok since it makes pure gold it should make gold with the value of gold radicals
Player: SWEET!!!! Im gonna sell it.
ME: Ok you make some and notice it carries your astral signature
Player: Im gonna goto my talismonger contace and sell it

After this goes on for about a month gametime and he has sufficently killed enough lonestar mages to merit what happens next

ME: Ok so you and the rest of your team are inside the small backroom of a bar talking to Mr. Jhonson
ME: Secret Die Roll for a fireball spell (40 die and get 26 sucesses)
ME: Everybody roll your body against 6D+11
Players: WHAT!?!?!?!?.....Shit
Players: WHY DID WE ALL JUST DIE!?!?!?
ME: Apparently a Lone star mage that escaped getting killed by the our mage here went to a talismongers store and noticed a pice of gold with a very fimillar astral signature. His(points to mage character)
Players: Grumble
ME: ritual sorcery is a bitch eh?

[Kagetenshi]

Create Neutron Star.

~J

[Crusher Bob]

Sigh, how much Plutonium do I need to make a critical mass?

Allowing mages to make stuff is a very slippery slope...

Besides, if your gm is worried about it just learn create heroin instead. It's not much more complex that foor, and 99.9% of lab mice prefer it over food anyway :D

[Joker9125]

Ahh yes create Plutonium....What a wonderfull spell idea. Espically since the remains of an entire city wold be glowing with said mages astral signature.

I agree its a very slippery slope to allow players to create stuff, but im sure all the GM's out their could find new and creative ways to discourage it :vegm:

[FXcalibur]

That doesn't sound like much fun. True, within the rules and all it's perfectly feasible that something like this would happen, but you didn't give the team a chance at all. It just doesn't seem like good Gamemastering to me :|

It's close to an example I've heard somewhere, where everyone comes in for a session and immediately the GM asks them to roll body dice. Everyone dies, wonders what happened, and one of the PCs go "Haha, I sold you guys out to Aztechnology, isn't that cool?"

I'm not saying what the mage got isn't deserved; you do something like that you're bound to get it sooner or later. But I think you could have handled it differently, instead of a straight dose of lead (okay, fire :grinbig:) poisoning. The player can still be penalized, but it can be a roleplaying affair and enjoyable at the same time.

For example, the johnson they were meeting might have connections with the mage who found the gold, and is now in a position to threaten the team. That single hook alone is enough for several interesting possibilities.

It goes without saying that if this is the way your group likes to play, and they don't mind recreating characters all the time, then why stop? :P But still, I feel it could have been handled better nontheless.

[Ancient History]

I hereby nominate each of you for a Darwin Award.

Urge to kill...rising...

[Crusher Bob]

My list, My precious death list...
I'll have to raze the Earth to make sure I diidn't skip anyone.

[Kagetenshi]

I'm a busy mage and cannot be bothered to turn around, so I'll head back into town walking this way.

~J

[Joker9125]

The group i play with makes characters all the time. In fact we only have one player that would attempt something this cheesey and he literally has about 20 to 30 secondary characters(most of them mages) im just glad he hasnt studied the rules enough to realize how much more he can cheese the system more than he already is.

[Kakkaraun]

Actually...there are some characters for which a Create (Drug) spell would really fit. And, hey, it's better than Create Gold, because it's still really valuable (or is it in 2063?), and it's prossessed to nothing! ;)

[booklord]

What to do about mages out of control?

Stop them immediately.

Let's see Create Spells I have allowed
Create Food
Create Water
Create Air

House Rules
-----------------
Using create spells you can only create..

dead, organic material
basic elements ( fire, water, ice, earth, stone(no metals) , air )
Toxins ( poisons, toxic sludge, acid )

organic material used for alchemy such as making herb radicals must have at one point been alive or produced by a living thing. So dead organic material created by spell is useless.

The created material can only take on basic forms. For example using a Create Wood spell could be used to create a wooden spike. ( perfect spell for vampire hunters ) But you cannot make an intricately carved wooden sculpture.

Finally all have to be approved by the GM. The GM can refuse a spell for whatever reason.

[Joker9125]

[Kakkaraun]

Intoxicate sounds like it creates a drug inside someone's system. Create (Drug) would create a physical drug, which means that a.) you'd probably only have to suffer drain once for creating a larger amount of the drug (every success is a dose? I dunno), and b.) you could sell in bulk, rather than walking around offering to work your fun mojo on people. Also, a lot of folks would be wary about a mage messing around with their chemistry, whereas they'd probably have no idea it was magical if they bought it from a dealer.

[Nikoli]

Just quicken an area affect Intoxicate at your local busy intersection.... :-D

[Herald of Verjig...]

How often does a druggy perfectly consume a drug? Chances are they would have some trace quantities, and that would be a humiliating source for a warrant.

The more humiliating way would involve the GM deciding that the sig stays as long as the chemical nature of the drug remains. Some drugs never get digested or decompose, their effect is a result of the whole molecule. One of the worst would be from "Create LSD"...

[Kakkaraun]

HOLY SHIT! That's a good idea.

[Joker9125]

Good point. And create drug spell makes a better case for the above fireball scinario because im sure he would inadvertantly sell it to an undercover cop who would take it back to the evidence locker where it would be noticed by a mage who would remember that signature as the one who fried his close friend. :evil:

[Cain]

Unfortunately, I don't believe that an astral signature is enough to use as a material link for ritual sorcery. Since that's the only balance on the spell so far, I have to say that the whole thing is unbalancing.

[BitBasher]

It's for that reason I eliminated all the "Create" spells that create anything permanently, including Creat Food ect...

[ShadowGhost]

This is the kind of spell that shouldn't have been allowed in the first place. In the spell design section, MitS states:

[A Clockwork Lime]

I'd allow such a spell.

Of course the gold it creates wouldn't be able to pass even a cursory exam by a professional to see if it were real, nor would it be suitable for enchanting purposes.

Nothing in the books says the food created by Create Food is "real" food. For all we know, it just looks like it and has some flavorings added, ala soycrap. Put it under a microscope or otherwise test it, and it probably becomes evident that it's not even close to being genuine. It just magically gives you the amount of nutrition a real meal would... assuming you sustained it long enough for it to become permanent after you created it.

[Moonstone Spider]

On the one hand I kind of like abusing the create spells. On the other hand Create Gold just won't work outside of certain circles.

As I'm a Jeweler by trade I know a bit about how the precious metal industry works. Nobody buys any serious amount of gems or metals without testing it thoroughly, that's just how it works. What's more, artificially created substances just aren't worth anything.

Take Rubies as an example. Making a Ruby in a chemistry Shop or Facility isn't particularly hard. I can easily buy a half-pound chunk of flawless lab-created ruby for under ten dollars US. It's lab-created, it's worthless. Chemically it's identical to natural ruby, only an expert can really tell the difference (Created Ruby flaws look slightly different, rather than cracks or inclusions it typically has flow-lines where the molten material moved as it cooled).

The same would apply to a create gold or create diamond spell (Create Diamond is even nastier, after all Diamond is technically an organic compound and is also a pure natural element).

However there's also in-game canon to consider. We have the "Create Wealth" spirit power that allows free spirits to make jewels and gold magically. While it does say this created wealth carries the spirit's signature, nothing indicates that the wealth created isn't useful for enchanting or can't be sold. In fact it indicates that spirits often bankroll huge operations this way, indicating that:

1) It is possible to create gold and Jewels by magic.

2) These are apparently just as valuable in the 6th world as natural gold and jewels.

3) There's nothing to indicate that created substances can't be used in enchanting.

[Zazen]

That's an excellent point about the worth of jewels.

However, this still leaves industrially-useful materials to consider. Someone buying titanium to build a plane doesn't care if it's "genuine" just so long as it has the same physical properties. A little iridium will tip a lot of fountain pens, and that stuff is pretty expensive. If it acts the same it'll be worth plenty.

[GreatChicken]

Well, there's always the stock market rule of 'if you sell too much of it, the cost of it will drop sharply'....

[Moonstone Spider]

Given the scale that Industry tends to work on, it's extremely unlikely that a single mage, regardless of power, can really glut the market.

Take diamonds (I'm still using them because I have all the facts easily available.) In 1990 The worldwide output of gem-quality material was 99.1 million carats. Unless out mage does nothing but cast high-force create diamond spells 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a huge string of successes and no drain ever, he's not going to produce enough diamonds to be more than a rounding error on that scale of production. (I'm assuming the spell is going to produce carats for every 2 successes, obviously of the GM allows the player to create a metric ton of diamonds for each success this doesn't apply).

Now if you had thousands of mages doing this all the time then a problem might start to crop up. Which is why the best creation spell would be to create things that are consumed, such as food, gasoline, (Another organic compound after all), or various drugs and pharmaceuticals. Actually a spell like create Laes might well be more profitable than create Diamonds, and since the Laes would be used up when taken market glutting would be difficult.