Explaining the Wish Economy

[Quantumboost]

Well, I'm sure someone would take the SuperCurrency if you offered it to them. It's much like someone offering a bartender the Mona Lisa to buy a beer. You're going to take that deal in a second. I mean seriously... yes you'll open yourself up to thievery, and you may not get a great deal for it, but you'll be able to get a fucking fortune. Even if all you care about is getting standard currency, you can easily trade it to someone for enough standard currency to live your life care free.

The Mona Lisa is a very, very bad example for this. A better example is: if you were offered some Energon cubes as a gift from some random person, and you knew that the Decepticons had a giant Energon detector that was within range of where you lived - would you take it? The smart answer is "no, I would not like to have evil shapeshifting robot jet monsters exploding my face, thanks anyway".

The price isn't just what you're giving in exchange for the SuperCurrency; if you don't have the means to protect it from the very powerful people who also want it, the price is also your life and possibly soul.

[Lago PARANOIA]

RandomCasualty, you're completely misunderstanding the value of gold again. I strongly suggest you read up on money. Banning infinite gold combos but not other infinite-resource combos doesn't do jack shit, no more than a DM going 'sorry, you can't buy anything ever'.

The smart answer is "no, I would not like to have evil shapeshifting robot jet monsters exploding my face, thanks anyway".

The price isn't just what you're giving in exchange for the SuperCurrency; if you don't have the means to protect it from the very powerful people who also want it, the price is also your life and possibly soul.

Your supposition falls apart though if I live next door to Superman or Kenshiro.

If you're going to have an economy at all, you're going to need to have some way to recognize ownership of property. And if you're going to have that you need a strong government. And if you're going to have that in a world as dangerous as Dungeons and Dragons you need to not only be able to have the Justice League and the Power Rangers on speed dial but you also need to have the Decepticons afraid of retaliation.

If you're afraid of the Decepticons rolling over and killing your ass then you have bigger problems than owning Energon cubes anyway.

But anyway, the biggest problem with the idea of supercurrency is that it needs to only be available to a select elite; otherwise it's no different from hoarding gold or pork bellies. The problem then becomes whether the supercurrency can actually be used for anything. If you can buy shit with supercurrency, why can't you just use regular currency?

The Tome series very poorly gets around this by having the supercurrency actually have a worth in of itself to the point where if you have it you don't need any other resources.

[shau]

If you're afraid of the Decepticons rolling over and killing your ass then you have bigger problems than owning Energon cubes anyway.

Peasants survive because they are invisible. It's not like the Duke of Ulster is afraid of retaliation of he kills a few dozen of them, and it does not help at all if the Duke of Ulster is an immortal liche who can summon epic monsters. That's bad, even worse than owning an energon cube, but if you own an energon cube you have all the problems you originally had plus some new ones. Making yourself noticed by the Duke as a peasant does not help at all because you are essentially entering into negotiations with a party that has "Kill you and everyone that lives near you." as a valid option.

If the JLA is on speed dial then the PCs stop being wonderful heroes and start being recognized as the murderous hobos that they are.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Peasants survive because they are invisible. It's not like the Duke of Ulster is afraid of retaliation of he kills a few dozen of them, and it does not help at all if the Duke of Ulster is an immortal liche who can summon epic monsters. That's bad, even worse than owning an energon cube, but if you own an energon cube you have all the problems you originally had plus some new ones. Making yourself noticed by the Duke as a peasant does not help at all because you are essentially entering into negotiations with a party that has "Kill you and everyone that lives near you." as a valid option.

And that's the ultimate problem. Even before you start having Energon cubes if you don't actually have a choice in whether you live or die you're not even participating in a basic capitalist economy unless the Duke owns everything (including your lives). Even so, you're just trading horseshoes and wheat (that the Duke ultimately owns) between yourselves and the Energon cube really belongs to the Duke. Along with your land, your hut, and your oxen.

Which is fine, manorialism really is that shitty, but if you're in this situation then someone ganking you and stealing your Energon cube is not stealing from you but actually stealing an Energon cube from the Duke. Unless the Duke has no idea of the cube's existence I would expect a response of some sort. Otherwise he has no business being a Duke.

[IGTN]

The "someone" who kills you and ganks your energon cube might well be the Duke. Or the Duke's henchmen.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The "someone" who kills you and ganks your energon cube might well be the Duke. Or the Duke's henchmen.

Uh, yeah. That's why I said that the peasant didn't own the energon cube. The cube always ultimately belonged to the Duke and he was only letting the peasant hold on to it until he came to collect. If some bandit or Decepticon comes and jacks the cube the Duke won't just go 'sucks to be the peasant, they were almost a millionaire', the Duke will go 'hey, that's my cube biatch' and retaliate. And by retaliate I mean shapechange into an ancient red dragon and fuck Starscream up.

Welcome to the realities of D&D feudalism, a land so vile that even barbarism like droit de seigneur is welcomed because it means that the lord will (usually) only rape your spouse once.

[RandomCasualty2]

RandomCasualty, you're completely misunderstanding the value of gold again. I strongly suggest you read up on money. Banning infinite gold combos but not other infinite-resource combos doesn't do jack shit, no more than a DM going 'sorry, you can't buy anything ever'.

Yeah, it does.

Mostly, these combos really aren't infinite, they're just highly profitable. You can only cast wall of iron for however many spell slots you can prepare in a day. Because of the book value of iron, that's a lot of money, but drop the price of iron to something manageable and it just becomes a regular job, maybe not even a high paying one. Yeah you can do this everyday, but the barmaid can also work everyday too.

Same thing with flesh to salt. If salt isn't worth dick, then nobody cares if you can churn it out. That's just the way economies work.

Even if you could produce infinite salt, that doesn't even matter because eventually you'll run out of buyers. Everything is supply and demand and eventually the jerky is salty enough. The profit you garner from it may not even be worth the trouble of going from city to city selling it. All that stuff has a time element. So even if you can generate tons of crap fast, you still have to find a buyer for it. So your job goes from being craftsman to salesman.

The only time when it's bad is when you pander to the PCs and let them be the first people who did that tactic. But in reality, they wouldn't be. Likely the original creator of the spell actually thought of that use. So by the time the PCs get into the salt or iron production game, that ship has long sailed and the price of those commodities is in the tank to the point that it's probably not even worth the character creating it except as a side job when he's bored.

As far as why peasants can sell supercurrency, mostly it'd just be selling it to good aligned characters, who give them money as a sense of fairness, also since the money is not as valuable as the supercurrency anyway.

[Prak]

And by retaliate I mean shapechange into an ancient red dragon and fuck Starscream up.

I so want to see that fight...

And actually, I'd totally take the energon. I'd then put it on my front lawn and sit out there waiting for the decepticons. When they came by, I'd give them the energon and offer to take care of whatever plucky human side kick the autobots have. IE, become the Decepticons' brooding macabre human sidekick.

[Lago PARANOIA]

RC2, all of what you said is true, but it still doesn't change the fact that gold in itself is nearly worthless at this point in the technological era. Infinite gold doesn't do jack, it just means that people switch to some other currency. If you push hard enough you'll invent fiat money hundreds of years ahead of schedule. Which is what all money is, ultimately, but people didn't realize that all currency bases are fiat money until mid 19th century.

[K]

Same thing with flesh to salt. If salt isn't worth dick, then nobody cares if you can churn it out. That's just the way economies work.

Perfect economies work that way. Real economies don't because people will sell at the prices that maximize profits and manipulate the market.

It works like this: you undercut the people that produce salt by mining it or getting it from sea water, driving them out of business. Then as the sole producer of it, you raise prices again and any time someone tries to compete you drive them out of business again until no one is willing to compete with you.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that as a mid-level wizard you can control men's minds, send demon assassins, or set their entire village on fire and control the market that way.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that of the hundred or so guys on the planet who can use the spell, you don't even have to compete with each other. The guy that runs the salt scheme doesn't have to talk to the guy running the demon brothel or the guy using Fabricate to turn raw goods into masterwork items or the guy using teleport to sell spices from one side of the world for gems on the other side or the guy that sells ivory from fiendish elephants he called up. Literally any powerful magician can carve out a niche for himself for infinite wealth and the only limit to the schemes is the number of powerful magicians in the world.

And I'm all with the guys that say "it's a game, and you have to ignore some things." Sure, I agree with that in the sense that I think monetary wealth should just be moot after a certain level. The instant I get an army of fanatically loyal tiny men (Leadership feat, charm, whatever), we can just assume they can get me as much wealth as I need to buy things that can be bought with wealth and for the things I need to fight for we have adventures. I actually feel more like a hero when I don't have to worry about how I am going to drag a giant obsidian statue of a frog out of a underground and underwater temple so that I can sell it to buy a magic sword.

As far as why peasants can sell supercurrency, mostly it'd just be selling it to good aligned characters, who give them money as a sense of fairness, also since the money is not as valuable as the supercurrency anyway.

Adventurers are doing peasants a favor by taking any planar currency in the same way adults might take live hand grenades away from small children. The Deceptecon and energon metaphor is apt because while there are adventurers who might take vengeance for any killed peasants, those peasants are a still dead.

Heck, even the Mona Lisa metaphor works. If I work at a bar and someone tries to buy a drink with it, I'd know that either it's:

a.) Stolen, and I'll get in trouble with the authorities for owning it.

b.) Stolen, and the criminals who stole it will probably kill me to get it back or hide their traces.

c.) A fake AND the consequences of option A or B will happen.

DnD does not support capitalism in any fashion, and neither does the feudal governments of most DnD settings. Heck, the 21st century does not support capitalism very well considering only a small proportion of the world's people use it as a means of exchange.

Property rights are a interesting thing in that they only exist between people of equal power and they only belong to those people capable of enforcing them. In modern black market economies, for example, getting ripped off or killed for your stuff is totally common because parties involved don't have equal power. (See any drug cartel ever for a model.)

And in a world with adventurers and heroes, no one is going to run around risking their lives and their souls for mere property rights when keeping demons from overrunning civilization is a full-time job. I mean, did Frodo return Sauron's stolen property to him or did he keep it, use it, and then chuck it into a volcano because it was safer that way?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Property rights are a interesting thing in that they only exist between people of equal power and they only belong to those people capable of enforcing them. In modern black market economies, for example, getting ripped off or killed for your stuff is totally common because parties involved don't have equal power. (See any drug cartel ever for a model.)

I cannot stress this point enough; property rights only came into existence once government started to move out of the manorialism state.

Property is just a stupid buzzword, like natural rights or freedom. Property only exists at all because some government promises to recognize your claim of it and kick the asses of people who try to take it. Which works in Shadowrun or Mutants and Masterminds. This does not work in most versions of D&D at all (especially points of light) because there are people more powerful than any kind of government that would want to recognize the property rights of less powerful people.

Property can only exist for the non-powerful precisely because of of social contracts (which means that everything pretty much amounts to theft or slavery). Which is awesome for people living in developed countries. Unfortunately, social contracts haven't been invented yet. If you're not an adventurer or a lord, you don't actually own anything.

[Username17]

Also remember that producing "infinite wealth" or indeed infinite anything is really just a job. I can farm every year and make infinite rice, or I could boil sea water and make infinite salt. Producing some thing at some rate is "infinite" and shit, but honestly that´s not even a little bit important in the grand scheme of things.

If a really powerful person can produce some thing or another at a really high rate, it may still not be worth his fucking time to do. And that fact in no way implies that the thing in question will lose all its value. There is no particular limit to how much total barley the farmers can grow if they keep plugging away at it season after season, generation after generation - and yet people will continue to want barley. A cleric can produce hundreds of gallons of water a day, and not only is water still a valuable resource - but it´s not even worth his time to do.

The fact that a 9th level Wizard can cast Fabricate 3 times a day (for a total of 27 cubic feet of high quality metal work) seriously allows them to produce more wealth than entire medieval societies possessed in just weeks. But frankly, so what? That doesn´t match the industrial output of any modern society. Even if every Wizard of that level or higher spent their entire day casting Fabricate and preparing spells it would not be enough to maintain a modern quality of life and thus would not seriously impact overall market elasticity.

3 wishes a day from a pocket Efreet sounds like a lot, and indeed it is enough to rapidly put to shame the game balance limits that "money" is supposed to represent in DnD. But it´s still just an industry as far as real production goes. That´s 25,000 gp per wish, at 50 gp a pound, that´s 1,500 pounds a day. That´s 547,000 pounds a year, or 248 tonnes. South Africa, for example, had their production of gold drop by 110 tonnes last year - going from 1,100 tonnes down to about a thousand tonnes. China´s gold production seriously increased by 304 tonnes last year. One adventurer in full-time Efreet milking mode would not constitute the extent of the PRC´s gold production increase from last year.

Yeah, it´s bigger than anything in the presented DnD economy. But it´s obviously not more than the world can handle, because our actual economy from right now is much bigger than that in every way.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

The important thing to remember is that if you have arbitrary gold then anyone selling something you want probably also has an arbitrary gold loop. I don't want your 100 tons of gold because a) its a bitch to move b) I can just make gold myself and c) a and b apply to everyone I'm interested in trading with.

It'd be like making currency of spit, I already have plenty and I certainly don't want yours.

[RandomCasualty2]

Perfect economies work that way. Real economies don't because people will sell at the prices that maximize profits and manipulate the market.

It works like this: you undercut the people that produce salt by mining it or getting it from sea water, driving them out of business. Then as the sole producer of it, you raise prices again and any time someone tries to compete you drive them out of business again until no one is willing to compete with you.

Well, that's until some other mage decides to sell salt to undercut you. And if you rise the price too high then people just won't buy salt. Maybe they'll find some magical way to preserve their meat or whatever (like gentle repose spells), or purify food and drink. And of course, if the prices are too high, then miners will once again go back to the salt mines to mine it.

This doesn't even take into account the fact that of the hundred or so guys on the planet who can use the spell, you don't even have to compete with each other.

Sure you do, because you're talking global schemes, and there aren't that many. There may well be like 3-4 salt barons or something, but they're certainly going to come into some competition. And naturally even low level people will enter into it with salt miners and initiate clerics saying "Fuck the salt, we can just purify your rotten meat."

Adventurers are doing peasants a favor by taking any planar currency in the same way adults might take live hand grenades away from small children. The Deceptecon and energon metaphor is apt because while there are adventurers who might take vengeance for any killed peasants, those peasants are a still dead.

Well honestly, the alarms aren't going to go off the moment you get ahold of planar currency as a peasant. Sure, the peasant will want to hide it. Just as if you'd given him a valuable diamond, but it's not like it becomes totally worthless to him. Seriously he could take it to a jeweller and sell it.

It all really depends on the world. If you live in lawless wasteland where people don't buy stuff, they just take it, then you won't have any economy anyway, because you have no law enforcing that farmer bill doesn't just slash the general store owner with a scythe and take his shit. At some point to have an economy you need some basic law and order.

And while it may not seem that there are any consequences for just killing people weaker than you, the main consequence is that people of your level or higher are going to find out about what you did (divinations are fucking powerful). So having that evil aura around you probably now means that nobody is going to want to deal with you, because they know you may just try to kill them. Also it's a pretty big draw for people more powerful than you to try to take you down, because at that point, everyone acknowledges you're a bastard and nobody cares if someone comes in and takes your stuff. It's a two edged sword and you probably have to sleep (or at least prepare spells) sometime.

You also end up collapsing the market. Nobody buys your salt anymore because you destroyed civilization. If you want to mass produce shit, you want global based trading operations. If you have to personally go to every market village you want to sell shit, you're not going to make a heck of a lot of money. You want large numbers of lackeys going around selling your swag. But if you have a reputation of not paying people and just taking shit, nobody will want to work for you either.

Property rights are a interesting thing in that they only exist between people of equal power and they only belong to those people capable of enforcing them. In modern black market economies, for example, getting ripped off or killed for your stuff is totally common because parties involved don't have equal power. (See any drug cartel ever for a model.)

Well property rights are enforced by good aligned characters. It's just evil people (like drug dealers) who tend to say that might makes right.

[Username17]

Sure you do, because you're talking global schemes, and there aren't that many. There may well be like 3-4 salt barons or something, but they're certainly going to come into some competition.

No. Medieval economies do not work that way at all.

Transport is expensive and difficult, and the demand for salt is constant. Distant producers literally do not compete with you at all.

A tonne of salt a day sounds like a lot, but it's not. Sicily employed 400 people mining salt in 1890, and produced 17,000 tons a year. 365 tonnes of salt is not ever going to make a huge dent in world demand. Although of course it will give a single person enough wealth to no longer care about picking up coins off the ground.

-Username17

-Username17

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Can't we just say that SuckCurrency buys goods and SuperCurrency buys magic?

Dick Cheney is worth between $30M and $100M. He has infinite of whatever SuckCurrency can buy.

He cannot negotiate with Bill Gates ($40B) in any meaningful way with SuckCurrency.

If they sit at a negotiating table, they negotiate with Power (make people do things for you) and Favors (future promise of doing things or making people do things). These are things that money can HELP you get, but you cannot buy them with money.

[RandomCasualty2]

No. Medieval economies do not work that way at all.

Transport is expensive and difficult, and the demand for salt is constant. Distant producers literally do not compete with you at all.

But you're talking about wizards who can teleport and things like bags of holding. That means you're dealing with a more modernized economy.

A guy on a horse with a bag of holding is all you need instead of a huge caravan. Shrink item + bag of holding is effectively infinite carrying capacity.

[Draco_Argentum]

But you're talking about wizards who can teleport and things like bags of holding. That means you're dealing with a more modernized economy.

A guy on a horse with a bag of holding is all you need instead of a huge caravan. Shrink item + bag of holding is effectively infinite carrying capacity.

Selling salt to everywhere is a lot of work to go to for gold. Given how easily gold dribbles out of high level caster's asses what do you think they're going to do with a mountain sized lump of the stuff?

[virgil]

We're talking about wizards (or other Wish-economy earners) who possess economic & military strength to dominate a massive population, claiming that it is a natural consequence for all of civilization to devolve into a post-scarcity economy. I don't see how such a setup could possibly be stable enough to reach such an outcome; you're talking an incredibly small segment of people here.

There are a tiny number of people powerful enough to even enter the Wish-economy, and of those only a fraction are actually willing to do more than live in personal opulence, and of those only a fraction are smart enough to be able to distribute it in a manner that's at all effective. Once you whittle it down to this small number, you now have to expect them to actually survive long enough to make a difference, which I consider uncertain at best. They're going to come off as conquerers attempting to buy loyalty & spread their names far and wide as potential targets to loot/kill.

EDIT: I've wondered about the baseline magic item economy. The usual method of selling barrels of masterwork locks is so wizards can purchase that nebulous category which is 'enchanting materials', with which to actually make their gear. What kind of market does this even look like? It's an untold story of the 'humble' magick shoppe, where the volume of components can (and usually does) exceeds the rest of the city's GDP.

[Username17]

No. Medieval economies do not work that way at all.

Transport is expensive and difficult, and the demand for salt is constant. Distant producers literally do not compete with you at all.

But you're talking about wizards who can teleport and things like bags of holding. That means you're dealing with a more modernized economy.

A guy on a horse with a bag of holding is all you need instead of a huge caravan. Shrink item + bag of holding is effectively infinite carrying capacity.

Ugh. That's stupid and you should feel stupid. Having access to good transportation doesn't make the producers in the economy automatically compete with each other. It makes the limiting factor of consumers or producers compete with each other. In some sort of vaguely balanced economy, that means that producers are competing against one another to get the money of consumers and consumers are competing against one another for the goods of the producers.

But in the D&D economy that is not happening at all. Not even a little bit. First of all, the consumers don't have bags of holding and teleportation circles. Only th wizards have those things, and in this model they are the producers. That means the producers only compete with each other if they decide to compete with each other, and the consumers are competing against each other whether they like it or not. What would make the producers decide to compete each other? Well, not much. The only thing that comes to mind is if they were producing more than there was elastic demand for, such that price competition could get rid of inventory that was otherwise not going to sell. And that's just not happening, because as previously noted: Wizards don't actually make very much.

Let's go back to our “tonne of salt a day” man. He's 9th level, like pretty much all the Wizards with a money generation system. And the smallest city that can generate someone like him is the “Small City” - a city defined in the DMG as having more than 5 thousand people in it and no more than 12 thousand. Now, on average such a city will in fact have one guy like him. Smaller towns will have zero. A tonne of salt sounds like a lot, and for something you can abracadabra up with a handwave it totally is. But people go through about a kilo of salt per person per year even before we get into industrial uses. But ignoring the tanners for a moment, our tonne a day man can exhaust his home town's salt needs for the year in 5-12 days of work. His home town and the surrounding smaller cities have no competition for him at all, and he can run around salting people until he runs into another city with a similarly endowed wizard. Assuming that he takes the weekends off to drive around his fire chariot full of cheerleaders, he can make salt for 260,000 people in a year. Then it's back to his home town to start the process over again. If he sticks to tows that have no possible competition for him, that's 71 towns through the year.

But wait! What if he comes from a Metropolis? Granted, there are enough mouths to feed in the city to use up one Salt Merchant's entire yearly production before anyone even has to go outside to the towns and villages, but the tables in the DMG tell us that there are about 44 Wizards high enough level to do that. If only there were some kinds of other wealth generation systems that the wizards could be using to generate money instead. Oh shit, there totally are. Fabrication, Efreet Binding, Iron Conjuration, and so forth. In fact, when you total it up, none of the Wizards in the metropolis have to leave town to sell their crap, because the fact is that hundreds of thousands of consumers is more than you can personally deal with even if your supplies are very large.

And by modern standards, again and still, the productions of those wizards are not very large. 260 tonnes of salt? Are you fucking kidding me? Not only does that qualify as a world upheaving quantity, it's not even enough to count as a major supplier at any point in history. The fact that you're doing this wouldn't cause the intergalactic giant heads to come poking you for crashing the salt market, it wouldn't even put national salt mines out of business.

TL;DR: Wizards in D&D can treat demand as globally and even interplanarly fungible, meaning that they amount that they can sell before prices fall are very very large. And while the amount they produce with stupid spell combos is large compared to the amount of money Andy Collins thinks you are supposed to have – it really isn't a large amount compared to the world, let alone the infinite layers of the abyss.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

But in the D&D economy that is not happening at all. Not even a little bit. First of all, the consumers don't have bags of holding and teleportation circles. Only th wizards have those things, and in this model they are the producers. That means the producers only compete with each other if they decide to compete with each other, and the consumers are competing against each other whether they like it or not. What would make the producers decide to compete each other? Well, not much. The only thing that comes to mind is if they were producing more than there was elastic demand for, such that price competition could get rid of inventory that was otherwise not going to sell. And that's just not happening, because as previously noted: Wizards don't actually make very much.

The reason for competition is the fact that you're able to produce more than the demand in your area. When supply > demand, to maximize your profits, you have to deal over a wider area.

I mean I guess you could be content with just having your own areas and splitting the wealth, but since when has any robber baron been content doing that? You're going to get wizards who expand their businesses as far as they'll go, and when you've got teleportation circles, bags of holding and shrink item, those businesses can go really far.

Let's go back to our “tonne of salt a day” man. He's 9th level, like pretty much all the Wizards with a money generation system. And the smallest city that can generate someone like him is the “Small City” - a city defined in the DMG as having more than 5 thousand people in it and no more than 12 thousand. Now, on average such a city will in fact have one guy like him. Smaller towns will have zero. A tonne of salt sounds like a lot, and for something you can abracadabra up with a handwave it totally is. But people go through about a kilo of salt per person per year even before we get into industrial uses. But ignoring the tanners for a moment, our tonne a day man can exhaust his home town's salt needs for the year in 5-12 days of work. His home town and the surrounding smaller cities have no competition for him at all, and he can run around salting people until he runs into another city with a similarly endowed wizard. Assuming that he takes the weekends off to drive around his fire chariot full of cheerleaders, he can make salt for 260,000 people in a year. Then it's back to his home town to start the process over again. If he sticks to tows that have no possible competition for him, that's 71 towns through the year.

Yeah, for every 5000-12000 people (on average lets say, 8500 people), you'll have one 9th level wizard. And yet he can make salt for 260,000 people per year. So you're basically saying that a wizard is operating at under 4% of his total capacity if they just divide up the population evenly. And of course, higher level wizards will be able to produce even more salt.

But wait! What if he comes from a Metropolis? Granted, there are enough mouths to feed in the city to use up one Salt Merchant's entire yearly production before anyone even has to go outside to the towns and villages, but the tables in the DMG tell us that there are about 44 Wizards high enough level to do that. If only there were some kinds of other wealth generation systems that the wizards could be using to generate money instead. Oh shit, there totally are. Fabrication, Efreet Binding, Iron Conjuration, and so forth. In fact, when you total it up, none of the Wizards in the metropolis have to leave town to sell their crap, because the fact is that hundreds of thousands of consumers is more than you can personally deal with even if your supplies are very large.

You're assuming that all the people can afford this crap. Fabrication really only becomes profitable if you're selling suits of full plate, high quality locks or something similarly expensive. The demand however ends up drying up fast for that, because you're selling to a very select population.

Really the majority of wizards are going to either be selling salt or iron. The high level ones capable of chain binding can sell a ton of other shit, but that's not until you're actually powerful enough to find an efreet.

And it's interesting that you mention the fact about wizards not outproducing major salt mines, because you're leaving out a main competitor, which happens to actually be salt mines of peasants. To actually buy the shit the wizard is selling, the peasants definitely are going to need to actually be working and producing something. So the wizards are going to actually have to let them compete or pretty much crash the economy and then nobody can even afford to buy their goods.

[virgil]

To actually buy the shit the wizard is selling, the peasants definitely are going to need to actually be working and producing something.

Precisely. Continue this line of thought. If the wizard displaces the local population's need for salt miners, then they will redistribute themselves to produce something else. If the same wizard diversifies his production, which will narrow the purchasing demographic needed for his services, then this same population will continue their specialization into fields the wizard doesn't have the ability to cover. After a point you have to wonder why our wizard even bothers doing this; peasants have absolutely nothing to give the wizard in exchange for handing out piles of salt or gold that he couldn't just instantly have for himself.

And if no character that's within the Wish economy has an incentive to distribute his wealth, then the peasants make do with what they get on their own and largely survive on their own. Besides, if you wanted to be closer to a medieval or Iron Age economy, they'd more likely use something roughly equivalent to a barter or gift economy anyway; the cities using gold or what-have-you and being more resilient because of the sheer volume of material demand (likely not as reliant on surrounding farmlands).

[RandomCasualty2]

Precisely. Continue this line of thought. If the wizard displaces the local population's need for salt miners, then they will redistribute themselves to produce something else. If the same wizard diversifies his production, which will narrow the purchasing demographic needed for his services, then this same population will continue their specialization into fields the wizard doesn't have the ability to cover. After a point you have to wonder why our wizard even bothers doing this; peasants have absolutely nothing to give the wizard in exchange for handing out piles of salt or gold that he couldn't just instantly have for himself.

Well the basic unit of stuff that the wizard would want to buy is the components to make magic items. We don't really know what this stuff is, but shops apparently sell it, so we figure it's herbs that can be picked, ointments that can be brewed or what not. And it's sold for gold.

I mean I'm assuming here that the wizard can't just create gold, since that's part of the initial stipulation, that the wizard can produce goods, but not basic gold itself. Since once you can create currency, then you don't even need to bother selling crap anymore.

[virgil]

We're looking at the consequences of high level magic on an economic model, and we're keeping the component shop nebulous enough to be a vending machine for Golden Goose Cola? You're even ignoring that while a fabricate wizard can't whip up gold, our 11th level binding wizard can (who could also just summon the components). Then there's the fact such a facet, nebulous or not, would still fall under the community GP limit. Those are limits far below the level needed to cause even a short-term hiccup in the economy, likely including the market that the wizard specifically 'flooded' to meet his needs.

[RandomCasualty2]

We're looking at the consequences of high level magic on an economic model, and we're keeping the component shop nebulous enough to be a vending machine for Golden Goose Cola? You're even ignoring that while a fabricate wizard can't whip up gold, our 11th level binding wizard can (who could also just summon the components). Then there's the fact such a facet, nebulous or not, would still fall under the community GP limit. Those are limits far below the level needed to cause even a short-term hiccup in the economy, likely including the market that the wizard specifically 'flooded' to meet his needs.

Yeah, well at the start of the discussion I said that gold creation breaks the economy and that specifically you can allow wizards to create goods, but not actual money.

Once you can create actual money, then the economy is pretty much fucked beyond repair.