Have you seen sand through an hourglass? Of course, preparing the warehouse and moving the iron from the warehouse to markets will also cost money. And again, if you have Gate spells, why are you interested in the logistical problems of moving 10 million lbs of iron balls around? Yeah, yeah... scroll, whatever. Your entire argument is based on the supposition that the GM is going to make it easy for you by not putting in a single obstacle. Seriously: heavy (trap worthy!) iron balls are FALLING through your gate into a warehouse. Most warehouses are not made to have big ass cannon balls rocketing through them! Again, every GP spent making this possible eats into your comparatively trivial profit margin.K wrote:
It shouldn't take more than 20-30 seconds for the balls to roll in under their own power. As an experiment, get a box and fill it with marbles; then tear a hole in the bottom and see how long it takes for the box to empty.
And you have them roll into a warehouse prepared to accept tons of metal balls.
Ok, if you want to play it that way: Summon said Earth Elementals, task them to find you big piles of Gems, then send them through a portal back to to the plane of earth... one they can then return through to deliver the goods. They can and do swim through 'earth' just fine, and since 'time is nothing' the 'eight hours' per roll (searching through tunnels, rather than earth swimming) to find 10% of the time a 'Gem Vein' on the Elemental Plane of Earth is trivial. Again: Why are you wasting your time with 1 sp a lbs iron at this point?Earth elementals can't travel to the Plane of Earth, have no ability to find gems and can't travel back under their own power.
No, they are making 1 million, singular, in gold. So every 100k off of that is a full ten percent drop in your loot.Why would they carry 50lbs? They'll use carts and sleds and crap, so all of your calculations are wasted.
And sure, it might cost several hundred thousands in gold. Good thing they are making millions in gold.
Now, lets look at adding a cart or wagon to the equation. A cart costs 15gp, and requires an animal to pull it, the cheap option is the mule for 8 gp, which brings our cost, so far, to 23gp. Unlike the laborers, who I assumed would just somehow buy food for 8 years of work from their payments, the mule requires feed, for one month thats 1.5 gp, and you still need the teamster, for another 3 sp a day (or... 9 gold a month), so we're up to, lets round off, 33 gp for one month, with an additional 10 gp a month after that...
Which means you need to move with that cart 1000 lbs of Iron every month just to break even, not counting the first month.
Now, a Mule has a strength of 16 and can pull 1150 lbs. A cart weighs 200 lbs and the Teamster weighs about 150. Being generous, you can just about break even every month (that's twice!), meaning you aren't losing money by putting it in a cart, other than the initial outlay, but no matter how long you haul the iron, you are not MAKING any money either.
You might do better with a wagon, which has two mules and still only one teamster, and you might try a stronger animal, but honestly, we then start wondering how sturdy that cart or wagon is.
At that point its just simply better to hire an assload of dwarves, build a smeltery and forge on the site and start shipping finished goods that have a higher profit to mass ratio.
But you still aren't making enough money to break the economy doing that.
Are the demons selling it for you too? It doesn't matter how fast the Demons are, you are the one who has to find someone to buy it. And yes, having demons show up with a quarter million tons of iron a day is going to be obvious to people... and if Joe the Wizard shows up and starts selling millions of tons of iron, people are going to put it together quickly.Umm, what? Why would it taking over a month matter? How are people going to find out you are a demon summoner? Why is finding markets an issue when using demons who can travel hundreds of miles a second.
At best its an argument for why people shouldn't bother to go on adventures, since there are other ways to just make money if you want to just hand wave away the time investment.Basically, none of these arguments are obstacles to people doing it, or will stop the argument with the DM who tries to stop you.
The fact that it can be done at all is an argument for why adventurers shouldn't be involved in the economy. It's far easier to say "it would take several years of work to build up the trade network necessary to sell the iron" than to come up with flimsy and solvable problems involving logistics that will only upset players and DMs.
Seriously, I had one of my players start with 300 gp at 1st level in my current campaign. If instead of buying weapons and armor he decided to retire, he could live at least as well as a mercenary for at least 5 years. That's not terribly long, but since we're already in the business of selling big ass iron balls for a decade or two, he might as well just start hiring people and running trade caravans for an arbitrarily long time. As long as he can show a steady profit stream to the GM, all he has to do is wave his hands and say 'poof, enough time has passed, I will now go adventuring... but first I will buy every epic magic item I want!"
Hell, I could do this in the games I've played in. I showed how its trivially easy to 'hand wave' a few months in Traveller as an asteroid miner and wind up rich enough to buy entire worlds.
Hell, you don't even need to get stupid with it, just take a profession and the GM has to give you enough down time to make as much money as you need... presto! Heck, you don't even need to have a profession, hire yourself out as an unskilled laborer for 1sp a day at that rate! Only 5000 easily handwaved years until you can buy that +10 sword you always wanted!
Your entire argument is based on handwaving problems away, especially time. The GM is under no obligation to let you do that. Its not cock blocking to point out that your adventure should be adventuring, not spending a decade of his life moving iron balls around for (comparative) chump change. Divided by a party of four, your 700k profit, over 8 years seriously works out to less than 22k gold a year under optimal conditions. You can make more money faster by just finding a new monster to stab in the face until you have leveled enough (in less than 8 years of game time in any game I've ever played... seriously, 1st to 14th level in about six months game time in the last campaign...) to just ask for piles of gold.