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T O P I C    R E V I E W
blade020877 Posted - 17 Apr 2017 : 03:45:11
So i was looking around some of the Ad&d sites and forum when i came across an eye catching possibility to made alot of gold very quick.
but is it too good to be true

quote:

Step by step guide
Prerequisites
Level 11 (minimum, will only net 3,000,000) Wizard, with max ranks in Weaponsmithing and the spells Wall of Iron and Fabricate.

Method
1. Cast Wall of Iron, creating a wall 55ft*5ft*2in=45.83cu ft of iron. This step costs 50gp in material components.

2. Cast Fabricate, converting 11 cu ft per cast into masterwork daggers. With 14 ranks in Craft (Weaponsmithing) and a wizard's crazy Int, you can't fail. Repeat until only 1-2 cu ft of iron remains. (4 casts). This consumes your 5th-level slots for the day, and takes 4 and a half minutes. The density of iron is 491lbs/cu ft. Thus 44 cu ft of iron weighs 21604 lbs. A dagger weighs 1 lb. Thus we create 21604 masterwork daggers, which sell for 151 gp each. That's 3,262,204 gp. Over 3 million gp. At level 11.

3. ????

4. Profit!

5. The spell description reads "You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material." therefore should any DM give you grief about singularity, connect each dagger by a thin thread of metal that can easily by clipped or removed after creation, thus giving you the countless daggers you were looking for. Folding the line of daggers may help conserve space for the plethora to-be.

Additional details
Teleportation will solve the economic problems; by selling to the entire world instead of just the local pawnshop, you can possibly find a market. And then spend your money to set up lots of local branch offices, with people capable of casting Sending or whatever to keep you informed of how business is going and what local demands are. Use this to track warfare and sell your weapons wherever they are needed. You probably won't be able to sell the maximum output of a level 20 wizard, but you'll make a very, very good profit, not to mention a lot of friends in high places if you sell at a bit below normal price. This assumesyou don't flood the market or somebody casts dispel magic on the daggers.

Upgrades
20th level wizard, without using any slots above 6th level.

Volume of Iron = 5*5*20*(5/12)=208.33cu ft.
Castings of Fabricate = 10 (use 6th level slots to fill as required)
Fabricate time = 20 minutes per day
Mass of Iron Fabricated = 200*491=98200 lbs.
Number of Mwk Daggers = 98200
Payout = 98200*151=14,828,200 gp
Profit = 14,827,700 gp. Per day.




or could you quip an army.

i can understand you could maybe only do it once as you would saturate the market.

is this wishful thinking?

cheers Follow gold hungry PC's
9   L A T E S T    R E P L I E S    (Newest First)
LordXenophon Posted - 30 Apr 2017 : 02:51:26
You might do better to turn your Wall of Iron into something people would actually buy. You might be able to sell a few solid iron daggers, but few people would want to use such a thing to fight with. It would be much heavier than a properly constructed dagger.

Try turning your iron into things people would buy in bulk, such as nails, door handles, fence sections, carpentry fittings, etc. You could also turn it into a smaller number of larger objects, such as anvils or cauldrons, so you don't need to find so many customers.
Wooly Rupert Posted - 22 Apr 2017 : 16:23:35
I won't swear to it, but I believe it's been previously adjudicated that once a wall spell without a limited duration is cast, the wall conjured into being is a permanent structure that exists without magic. In other words, you could dispel a wall of iron as it's being cast, but once it's there, there's no magic to dispel. A wall of fire, though, can be dispelled.

Basically, if it will disappear after the spell ends, you can end it prematurely. If it will continue after the spell ends, you can't end it so readily.
Markustay Posted - 22 Apr 2017 : 15:55:00
So you can just approach the local blacksmith of each town you're passing through, and make him a deal. Of course, not every town is going to have a blacksmith with that mush cash-flow lying around.

I would think if you did manage to do something successful in this vein, some gods might get upset, especially gods of trade (like Waukeen).

At first I thought Dwarves would be you new best friends, but you'd actually be competing with them (they don't just work the stuff, they dig it out of the ground as well). But if you can find Dwarfholds that specialize in something other than iron - and mine very little of anything other than that - you might be good. I know of at least one that does almost exclusively copper.

There's also group like the Zhents who'd want lots of iron to make steel so they can make their own weapons, but at the same time, they have a ton of their own mages, so why wouldn't they just be doing this?

And here's the way I always thought it worked (so I am not even sure if its RAW, but it makes perfect sense IMO): You cast Wall of Iron and its permananent. However, its also susceptible to dispell magic. So your wall of iron, once cast, may be standing there blocking a hallway in a dungeon for the next 10,000 years, or it might only last until the next MU walks up and thinks of casting dispell.

Now, what happens to a weapon or suit of armor made from the stuff? I wouldn't want to be using that when mages were present. You might wind up with some pretty pissed-off customers when all the iron you sold them just up and disappeared.
xaeyruudh Posted - 22 Apr 2017 : 10:23:51
Ah. I assumed from the "AD&D" in the original post that we were talking 2e. Moving over to the 3.5 SRD:

Still no.

quote:
Originally posted by LordofBones

Also, you actually can create masterwork items with wall of iron. The example wizard in the post has Craft (weaponsmithing)...


I don't see anything in the spell descriptions about creating masterwork weapons. The caster's skills are irrelevant because the caster is not physically crafting the daggers. Fabricate is crafting the daggers, and spells don't have skills.

At the end of the day, it's still just iron and you're not going to get masterwork weapons from iron unless you do some alchemical or magical alloymonkeying, and there's nothing in the wall of iron description that suggests the caster is free to alloymonkey as desired.

Obviously, that's just my personal opinion. You're free of course to declare otherwise for your games.

I stumbled over a site (looking for an "ironwall" spell) that the OP appears to have pasted from, here.

I think one of the opposing arguments there is a decent response:

quote:

Iron is a sufficient material for making daggers, but it isn't "state of the art" for even normal blades. Compared to the fine steel of a masterwork dagger, iron is softer, more easily broken or bent out of shape without returning to true, and does not hold as fine an edge. Using this method would not yield any number of masterwork daggers, but instead the indicated number of finely shaped daggers of a substandard material. They would be more valuable for the raw metal than as weapons, outside of any town with a crippling dagger shortage. With this method, you would burn all your 5th level slots to turn 21,604 pounds of iron into 21,604 pounds of iron in a different shape without improving at all on its value.

Just Fabricate the wall into 1 lb. iron ingots connected by small channels. According to the SRD 1 lb. of iron is 1sp. Not quite 15 million gp a day, but still enough to crash the market.



2160.4 gp per day, assuming you can find a buyer for every single ingot -- which in my mind is a job that will take more than a day.
LordofBones Posted - 20 Apr 2017 : 02:20:09
quote:
Originally posted by xaeyruudh

The short answer is no, it isn't possible.

The wall of iron spell in my AD&D PH creates a slab of iron which is 1/2 inch thick, and 15 sq ft in surface, per level. 15 sq ft is 180 sq inches, times 1/2 inch, means 90 in^3 per level. At level 11, this is 990 in^3 (0.57 ft^3). At level 20 it'll be 1800 in^3 (1.04 ft^3).



Effect: Iron wall whose area is up to one 5-ft. square/level; see text

A wall of iron is 1 inch thick per four caster levels. You can double the wall’s area by halving its thickness. Each 5-foot square of the wall has 30 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 10. A section of wall whose hit points drop to 0 is breached. If a creature tries to break through the wall with a single attack, the DC for the Strength check is 25 + 2 per inch of thickness.

Also, you actually can create masterwork items with wall of iron. The example wizard in the post has Craft (weaponsmithing); assuming the wizard only has base Int and levels ups, and maxed Crafting, that's a +29 to craft checks. Masterworks require a DC 20.
LordofBones Posted - 20 Apr 2017 : 02:15:08
quote:
Originally posted by Wrigley

Disregarding that math for me main problem with this is that 11th level charater should be in entirely different mindset that thinking how to use his spells to make profit. He should either be adventuring and thus holding most of his money in magical equipment (and obscene amount at that) or he should be in servis of or be himself ruler of some province and therefore have even bigger capital at his disposal. Abilities of this magnitude always have their impact in the world. You can teleport into prices treasury and steal his money much easier than what you describe. You can use the market as you suggest but you will always run into somebody that will not like that you eat out his pie...


Rulership doesn't pay much relative to murderhoboing, and wizards with their 20+ Int and material-creation spells can easily become trade moguls as long as they don't flood the market. The same thing can be accomplished with wall of salt.


quote:
What do you describe seems to me like a player unhappy with archievements of his character so he tries to find a hole in rules to get it by himself. Solution for this problem is to speak with your DM and tell him about this and how would you like this played in the game. If you are just playing with the rules than YES there are holes size of America in them about economics and prices. D&D haven't been built like a economic game and simplifies most of this aspect so it will not interfere with the gameplay.



That's...not what it is at all. Why wouldn't an in-character player of a spellcasting class that prides itself on being purely intellectual not try to manipulate the economy with the resources he has? It's an easy way to support the party and have a decent cash flow during party downtime? It's like how spellcasters can get around labor problems with a steady supply of summoned minions, or druids cornering the agricultural market and so on.
Wrigley Posted - 17 Apr 2017 : 11:46:32
Disregarding that math for me main problem with this is that 11th level charater should be in entirely different mindset that thinking how to use his spells to make profit. He should either be adventuring and thus holding most of his money in magical equipment (and obscene amount at that) or he should be in servis of or be himself ruler of some province and therefore have even bigger capital at his disposal. Abilities of this magnitude always have their impact in the world. You can teleport into prices treasury and steal his money much easier than what you describe. You can use the market as you suggest but you will always run into somebody that will not like that you eat out his pie...


What do you describe seems to me like a player unhappy with archievements of his character so he tries to find a hole in rules to get it by himself. Solution for this problem is to speak with your DM and tell him about this and how would you like this played in the game. If you are just playing with the rules than YES there are holes size of America in them about economics and prices. D&D haven't been built like a economic game and simplifies most of this aspect so it will not interfere with the gameplay.
xaeyruudh Posted - 17 Apr 2017 : 04:35:14
The short answer is no, it isn't possible.

The wall of iron spell in my AD&D PH creates a slab of iron which is 1/2 inch thick, and 15 sq ft in surface, per level. 15 sq ft is 180 sq inches, times 1/2 inch, means 90 in^3 per level. At level 11, this is 990 in^3 (0.57 ft^3). At level 20 it'll be 1800 in^3 (1.04 ft^3).

Poking around online I find a mass of 7850 kg/m^3 for iron. There appears to be a bit of a range for that value, but that's what I'll use for an example. 7850 kg/m^3 times a conversion factor yields 0.28 lbs/in^3. Multiply that by the 990-1800 in^3 of iron, and you'll have 280-510 lbs of iron. If you melted it down, you'd have a cube of iron which is 10-12 inches on each side.

Fabricate handles up to a cubic yard, so you'd have no trouble turning this iron into a pile of daggers, assuming your DM allows you to make many items with one casting. But you'd get only 500 daggers "and change" from each wall of iron spell.

The big reason this "get rich quick scheme" falls short is that there's no way you should be able to get masterwork daggers from the fabricate spell. Sure, you can declare "masterwork daggers" to be the "product" you want the spell to create, but there's no indication in the spell description that it's capable of fine craftsmanship. In fact, it says "the quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication." Even if the DM lets you get away with everything else, at best you'll get 500 ordinary daggers -- which as Wooly pointed out, will only be the *metal* parts of the dagger (and thus uncomfortable even if you can make the blade and handle in one piece) and iron daggers just won't sell in most shops... definitely not for 150 gp apiece. You'd probably be lucky to get 100 gp for the whole pile.

Keep looking for the big score!
Wooly Rupert Posted - 17 Apr 2017 : 04:02:50
You're not going to have nearly as many people interested in iron daggers as you will steel ones.

Also, bladed weapons consist of more than one piece. If I was a DM and one of my players tried this, he'd have 21604 iron dagger blades, with no hilt and thus no way to wield them. To be able to sell them, he'd have to find smiths to put hilts on all of those weapons -- and I'd expect that a lot of smiths would demand up-front payment for wasting their time on something they themselves won't be able to sell.

And with all of that aside, most communities don't have that much gold laying about, and unless there's a war on, people aren't going to be rushing to buy daggers of iron or steel. 21604 iron daggers would be thousands of lumps of rust long before you were able to sell them all.

Just because the rules allow it doesn't mean it's going to work, and rules shouldn't trump logic. Someone once pointed out that under D&D rules, it's pretty much impossible to starve to death... Sometimes, you just have to use common sense and ignore what the rules say.

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