Hi Dan, everyone. That is not my understanding. In Advance Wizard (AW) page 26 at the bottom of the page it says, "Each week a wizard works, he must make his DX roll once." A bit later in the same paragraph it says, "If he misses the roll, no damage is done, but the week's work is lost. He does not have to start over, UNLESS he rolled an 18. An 18 ruins the entire spell, and the wizard must start over from the beginning." You may be thinking of building potions, where there could be an explosion. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So perhaps, the extra price is for the chance of rolling an 18? Well, since only the current enchantment is lost, it does not make sense to multiply it by the cost of the UNDERLYING item. But what is the chance of rolling an 18, for long enchantments? There is a 0.99537 chance of NOT getting an 18 on one roll. So this value to the 10th power is 0.9547. Doing this for the values from the book gives us: 10 weeks... 95.47% ---> +10% 18 weeks... 91.99% ---> +20% 25 weeks... 89.05% ---> +30% 40 weeks... 83.06% ---> +50% 70 weeks... 72.27% ---> +100% (The +10% etc. is the bonus given in the book.) So this is a valid reason to charge a premium for long enchantments. The chance of rolling an 18 builds up for long enchantments, and so wizards charge a bit more to make up for the rare disaster. They are responsible for making up the difference when they destroy a partly made enchantment. However, the premium Steve Jackson gave, was about double what he needed to. Nor does this explain why you multiply it by the underlying value of the item being enchanted. If I have a crystal ball made out of solid diamond (worth $5,000,000), why would the cost of the enchanting it be increased over one made of glass? This brings up another thought tho. Auto-failures come up a lot more often than an 18. (9 times more likely in fact.) Even a wizard with a 15 DX will fail his DX rolls, and not advance the item by that week. What is the chance of getting a 16 or 17 (thus blowing a weeks work)? It is 4.167% per week. So on long projects, you would be expected to blow a few rolls, and not make money on those weeks. That suggests that you should charge more for long enchantments to avoid getting paid less. Just out of curiosity, here is the chance of completing a 10, 18, etc. week project while NEVER rolling a 16 or higher. 10 weeks... 62.25% 18 weeks... 42.60% 25 weeks... 30.57% 40 weeks... 15.02% 70 weeks... 3.62% So as can be seen, the chance of not blowing at least one roll on long projects is remote. If that is what Steve Jackson was thinking of, he made two mistakes. First, it should be adding to the cost of the enchantment, and NOT to the value of the underlying item. Second, it should work on ALL enchantments that take that long. (That is, if a weapon / armor enchantment will take 16 weeks, because it is the 5th enchantment cast on an item, then it should use the D bonus. You could argue it should use the E bonus, since 16 weeks is a lot closer to 18 weeks than to 10 weeks.) On the other hand, the D, E, etc. bonuses are quite generous, (about double what they should be), so you could round down and still have the wizard make a profit. I suspect, Dan, that you have nailed it. The bonus for long enchantments is based on the chance of auto failures and destruction of the item. I have no idea why SJ, put in that line about the value of the UNDERLYING item. I'm going to treat that as a typo in my campaign. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The simple thing to do, is set up my spreadsheet to auto calculate the chance of utter destruction, and reduce the cost of ingredients per week to boost the profit high enough to make up for the occasional loss. (In other words, cook in the chance of failure into the costs of the items.) This sounds great, but it just won't work. In the w/ae example I gave above, a small value is baked in for a 1 week enchantment, but if it was the 5th enchantment on the item, then the baked in amount is wrong. This value has to be multiplied on to the end price AFTER you know how many weeks it is going to take. Warm regards, Rick. On 2016-11-03, at 3:02 PM, <drfaustus61@cox.net> wrote:
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