making Orichalcum.... Options

[Ninj]

According to MITS pg 42 when making Orichalcum metal the description states you need to add the one radical unit of copper, gold, silver, and mercury each in order to make Orichalcum.

My question is this. After the 28 day process finishes and the enchanting skill test is successfull how many units of Orichalcum are made??

Is it the same as producing radical units??

number of Enchanting skill successes * the number of material units used in process = total number of radical units

[shadd4d]

Nope. Each success produces 1 unit of Orichalcum. Only the radicals and refinement are multiplied.

Don

[Necrotic Monkey]

You get one unit of Orichalcum per success on the circulation test.

[Ninj]

but how many radical raw material units are used in the process??

In other words can I only create one unit of Orichalcum from one radical unit of copper, gold, silver, and mercury combined??

or phrased this way:

If I use just one radical unit of copper, gold, silver, and mercury how many units of Orichalcum are produced??

If I use just two radical unit of copper, gold, silver, and mercury how many units of Orichalcum are produced??

[shadd4d]

You use just 1 unit of each base. You can't put in 2 units of each base. Part of that is interpetation of the "special circulation" in the text. So no, you can't mass produce orichalcum by stuffing 10 radicals of each base in the circulation.

You use 1 unit of the bases. Units of orcichalcum produced = number of successes rolled.

Don

[Ninj]

OK. That makes more sense.

Thanks for the explanation.

[Necrotic Monkey]

You don't need to mass produce orichalcum. You're doing it by default.

The base TN for a standard magician is 4 and something as simple as two grades of initiation (costing a minimum of 22 Karma, giving you one to two more Karma Pool in the process) will set the TN at 2.

Now say you have an Enchanting Skill of 6. For flavor purposes, you gave your character a school of magic (let's say Norse) and the Enchanting Shop you purchased or rented is aligned to that school. Spend on Karma Pool point to give you an extra die and you're rolling 8 dice against a TN of 2. Use your other Karma Pool to reroll any failures, and you're nearly guaranteed to get 8 successes.

Now in just 28 days you earned over 700,000 nuyen. Sell it (for 350,000 nuyen) and use the rules for karma exchange (we'll assume the 5,000:1 ratio). Now you've scored 70 Good Karma. Use that to bond any focus you like instead of "wasting it" to lower the cost during the enchanting period, then blow the rest on whatever else you like.

Oddly enough, you can actually churn out even more cash by creating and selling gold radicals. Even an unitiated magician can circulate two units of refined gold in 2 days and produce upwards of 16 units of it by the end. That's nearly equivalent to orichalcum's value in the same period of time. And, of course, there's less investment in the beginning (you only have to buy or produce two units of refined gold as opposed to a gold, silver, copper, and mercury radical).


I really do dislike those rules for enchanting. The TN should at least be 10 minus your initiate grade... at least having a Grade 8 initiate churning out that kind of money is more plausable, whereas an uninitiated mage will have to spend months trying to create just a single unit. That would also give the insane cost for orichalcum (and the other radicals, all of which you can "mass produce" from a single unit of raw material) more weight.

[Ancient History]

Karma-for-Cash should always be applied carefully by GMs. Likewise, I make my players roll Negotiation on prices (350,000 nuyen? Let's see those successes, boy).

The main use of orichalcum, natch, is to make foci easier to bond. Not necessairilly less expensive, and likely more time consuming, but it can bring down the karma costs and that's what matters.

And, although no GM actually does it, there's nothing to say that during those 28 days some old enemies won't come cruising in to bust your head <ruining the process>, or wait til you're done and /then/ jump you for the goods. Hell, your local talismonger might jump you for the goods if they think they can get away with it.

Not that this should ever come into play, but some GMs home-rule that you cannot make more orichalcum than the combined mass of the component metals, no matter how many successes you roll. :P

[Necrotic Monkey]

[Ancient History]

I'm not contending your points, NM, I'm simply implying that those very reasons are why GMs should be careful when these rules come into play--it's easy to lose balance and let a magician make too much money, or buy too much karma.

[Dragonslayer]

This is a topic that usually comes up during my groups time spent playing D&D. Not sure who's played it but its stated somewhere that the common peasant can live comfortably on 25 gold pieces for thier entire life. Anybody who's ever played D&D has probably had their character wipe their arse with 25 gp. So then comes the question, I have 50,000 gp why don't I retire? The answer because the game is called Dungeons and Dragons, not retire and live comfortably in a rural manor. Likewise the name of the game we play is Shadowrun, not start a business and make enough nuyen to rival a megacorp.

Though as a side note it would be interesting to design a campaign specificly around making orichalcum and other radicals and selling them for profit. Most of my groups campaigns are kinda nonstandard so it seems like a fun idea to try. NM since you seem to know these numbers have you figured out how long it would take 1 mage flooding the market with radicals to earn enough nuyen to equal Lofwyr? I think at that point they would have officially collapsed most markets and kinda ruined a number of game mechanics. And that's funny to me.

[Ol' Scratch]

Nah, I never calculated it like that. But considering a competent Grade 2 initiate can make about 700,000 nuyen each month, that's 8,400,000 nuyen a year. He's not going to rival Lowfyr any time soon, but I doubt if he'd be complaining.

'Course if he just does it for a couple of months -- let's say three -- and then trades all that cash in for nuyen, he'll have 420 Good Karma. That can produce quite a few powerful Ally Spirits, all of whom would have the Enchanting Skill and access to their own Enchanting Shop. Make each one of them Force 8 (so they'll have a Magic of 8 and thus a low TN for the circulation tests) and spend a good chunk of that Karma boosting your own Enchanting Skill to an obscene level, and... well... I dunno. It's all just insane.

A base TN of 10 reduced only by initiate grade instead of Magic Rating and/or a base time of 6 months would go a long way to making the rules for enchanting radicals a lot more reasonable.

[BitBasher]

Only with an incompetent GM.

Remember that the amount of cash per karms should be adjested to the campaigns income. The game recommends that you pay the players a little more than it costs them for their lifestyle each month, with occasional windfalls, and one run a month. In that financial scenario, 5000 is a lot to pay for a point of karma, as you have virtually no spare cash. In the case that a player makes 700k a month, then the amount should be adjusted to about... oh, 350k to 700 or so for a point of karma.

[Adarael]

This is also assuming a couple of things. Namely,

A) Your GM even allows the cash-for-karma rule - mine doesn't, for example.
B) Nobody gets wind of your operation and decides they should get paid to 'protect' you, or decide they deserve to skim off the top of your operation - especially magically juiced folks like the Triads or Yakuza.
C) Those folks you pissed off, when you did those shadowruns? Considering you can't really do much of anything other than enchant during the radical-creation phase... If they catch up to you, bad stuff might happen to you. Or your contacts. Or your family.
D) To quote:

[Ol' Scratch]

[SirKodiak]

The reason you don't do this is because the price of Orichalcum is artificially inflated by the 2060 version of DeBeers. They'll let you produce a little for your own use or those of a friend, but if you start producing in any quantity they risk having you devalue Orichalcum, which could destroy their business. So, you get a visit from some toughs who destroy your lab and knock you around a bit. If you try to set up again, you get a second visit, which this time ends with you in a shallow grave. And no group of Shadowrunners is going to be able to stand against the kind of magically-powered muscle that rich a cartel is going to be able to send.

This, of course, doesn't come from the rulebooks. It's just my standard way of handling players who try to play weird games with the economy. I applaud the creativity of coming up with those sorts of hacks, but it makes for a boring game.

[tisoz]

[SirKodiak]

[Herald of Verjig...]

There is a suggested price for the cost of an enchanter using some of his own karma. It's with the magical services costs in the back. You can infer that the price is at least constant for getting a mage to do work on you with his karma, but much past that is questionable.

[Adarael]

Several problems with my analysis? I think not. I think there is no such thing as an insurmountable problem when it comes to too much cash - because my mage had 7 million nuyen for a period of about a year. Now he has none. Let us explore the possibilities, yes? And address, point by point, the concerns you raise....

1) (Why would) anyone would know the character was enchanting,

Um. Because, they were shadowrunners, and if they have 50 karma they've probably done enough jobs for SOMEONE to want them under surveilance. Barring that, the purchase of the 100,000 nuyen Enchanting Shop is a pretty big tipoff (I've notice most players don't start with one of these). Thirdly, after they've sold the first batch, you can bet they're gonna be known as enchanters by at least the guys they sold the stuff to.

2) after his first time of doing it, he's scored enough cash to set up a sweet security system,

Any security system can be penetrated, I guarantee you. The people in question probably defeat 'impossible' security systems for a living, since they *are* shadowrunners. It's added peace of mind and an early warning system, sure, but it's not foolproof.

3) that he can get the rest of the team to cover his back on the promise that he's going to set them up with a huge amount of cash for less than a month's work of doing nothing but babysitting

Well, that's actually not something I dispute at all. They SHOULD back him up, yeah.

4) an arsenal of elementals bound to the shop and the veritable mansion he'll be able to buy after the first month

Hardly a veritable 'mansion' unless he's renting it - buying anything so grandiose is still very expensive. Elementals still take time to summon, though - and you can only summon a couple before the next lunar cycle.

5) all the other advantages and power that having a drekload of cash brings.
To quote:

[BitBasher]