FrankTrollman wrote:Yeah, as I understand the spellbook casting thing, any wizard can just sit down with a spell book and hack out a fabricate without even using a spell slot.
Fabricate isn't a ritual, so (as of the PHB leak, at least) a wizard can't literally do this
with Fabricate. That said, Mending, Minor Illusion and Prestidigitation are all wizard cantrips that have obvious market applications, and higher level spells can do more of the same. Not quite "more gold than they can physically carry" but easily "more gold than is particularly useful" if you have even an ounce of business sense. And even if you don't, there's always extortion.
Kaelik, just now wrote:That is the reason I came to the conclusion. That is super obviously the reason I came to that conclusion. The entire reason that the Wish Economy is called the Wish Economy (Even though it is really the post wish economy) is because you can obtain infinite amounts of gold really easily (such as with Wish), but you can't obtain major magic items as easily.
Kaelik, previously wrote:You can totally sell items that are worth infinite gold for finite gold if you want. Good thing you have all that gold now that you can't use to buy an item worth infinite gold unless you find someone as stupid as you.
This is the claim I'm disputing. There's two very different senses of the word "worth" being used in this conversation.
In one sense, magical weapons are not, in fact, worth an infinite amount of gold. They're not even worth 5000 gold. A normal person, in character, would get much more personal satisfaction out of spending the gold on food and comfortable clothing than they would from owning a more effective weapon.
In another sense, magical weapons are worth more than any amount of gold because there's no amount of gold that you can name which would be more difficult to obtain than a major magic item. Consider, as an analogy, the relative value of air versus a diamond. Obviously, the diamond both much more valuable and much more difficult to obtain than air. But if you had to pick just one or the other, very few people would choose suffocation.
Is it a paradox that people won't sell diamonds for air, and yet they won't give up breathing to own a diamond? No, obviously not. The same concept applies with magic items and gold without resorting to arguments about if Fabricate lets you make "infinite gold" or about any other kind of money making scheme.