Re: (TFT) New file on Economics of Wishes in TFT.

[Rick Smith <rick_ww@lightspeed.ca>]

Hi Peter,
  I calculated the cost of a wish as around $200, for that IQ 35 wizard.  However, 
he could charge what the market would bear, and I think that $250,000 is a more
reasonable one than the price that was quoted in the book for wishes ($40,000).

  The odds of the wizard doing well in a battle of wills depends on if he has a 
charm, but not as much as it used to.  A +2 charm is huge with a one die roll,
pretty important in 3 dice rolls, and lesser importance in 5 and 6 dice rolls.  It 
does make the chance of a criticals (good and bad) considerably higher and 
lower respectively, and that DOES help the wizard.  In other respects, it is just 
a +2 IQ.

  How many wishes you want also comes into it.  If you are a PC, and you need
one wish, (say you will have only one chance at an assassination, and you 
NEED to roll a triple damage on your arrow shot), Attempting a Battle of wills to
gain a wish from a lesser demon is reasonable with an IQ 26 or more. 

  Lets say you roll 7 dice.  So the demon will have to roll 5 dice. 

  Against a typical lessor demon with an IQ of 13, it will have a 85% chance of
blowing a 5 die roll vs its IQ.  

  The chance of you making a 7 die roll is about 58%.  If you have a +2 charm, it
goes up to ~84%.

  You actually have a fair bit of leeway.  There is a pretty good chance of dying 
if the demon is much smarter than you hope, but you are unlikely to be turned
to ash.  Even if the demon gets lucky and ends up with an 17 IQ, you have a fair
chance of still getting the wish.

  Let us say that you are willing to risk death for a wish.  Two thirds of the time, the 
demon will have an IQ of 9, 10, 11 or 12.  It will likely blow a 4vsIQ, so then you only 
have to make a 6vsIQ.  If you hope for a bit of luck (no 6 is rolled on the 
1-die-reroll-5s), then an IQ of 23 is pretty good.  (A 21 with a +2 charm is even 
better.)

  But if you wanted to make a couple million silvers by building a bunch of wishes
that you hope to sell at $250,000 each, then I would want a +2 charm and a 30 IQ.
Odds are very good you will get the 8 wishes in a row with no deaths.  But you 
would be thinking seriously about the wisdom of trying for 4 million.  Which was 
the point of the essay.


  If you wanted PC's to be more willing to risk battle of wills, you could lower the
base IQ of demons a couple points.  But then you likely would want to give them
a MINIMUM IQ of 8 or 10 or so.

  Warm regards, Rick.



On 2015-08-29, at 11:13 AM, Peter von Kleinsmid wrote:

> Well-reasoned and very cool. Have you run some numbers to see what the new cost/effect/odds are for wizards of different IQ levels using this system?
> 
> I too had very few if any wizards with IQ 35+ in my TFT campaign worlds (even as the pinnacle wizards). Also very few wishes existing or being used. Like most high-level magic items, potions, spells, etc., wishes were very rarely just on sale.
> 
> Clearly though you're right that there does need to be a persistent danger, or else there's a point (as you identified at IQ 35) where a wizard could crank wishes out with practically no risk. I'm sure they wouldn't then go selling them for $200 though. Probably they'd use their IQ 35 to think of something much more useful to do (for their own ends) with a pile or wishes... which would seem to be a possible power dynamic for the campaign to be concerned with, if it's true.
> 
> I realized pretty early on when players started heading for town wizards' guilds trying to buy stuff, that it didn't make sense for much strong magic to be available for general sale. After all, it takes a very rare and very powerful wizard, and often a team of apprentices, components, time, risk, etc., to make such things, and powerful wizards are smart and have their own interests and things they'd like to do, other than sell a wish (or even a simple magic item) to some random person. And, any items a wizard or the guild might actually want to sell, they'd probably tend to sell to influential people in their community, such as another wizard, or a duke. They also probably have a waiting list of people who want to buy magic. As for the "market" price, as Advanced Wizard says, magic (especially powerful magic) would be a seller's market, with the book prices being more of a minimum, tending up towards whatever someone has and is willing to pay.
> 
> PvK
> 
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