I could see this. Homebrewing a value of maybe 1/10th the value of your carbon source. 10gp worth of coal would give a 1gp diamond.
Just spitballing, because now that it's written down it seems wrong somehow. Anyone got any better ideas?
Edit: after a few replies, I have confirmed my own stupidity. My first though was way off base. I have since concluded that the gp value should only go up by a small percentage due to the effort put into the transmutation. However, based on the way natural diamonds are created, I have also concluded that it's the weight that should be the big change factor here. A large amount of coal (with variation due to purity), would render fairly small diamonds. The secondary factor would then be time and spell components expended during the process. Depending on your dm, and the world's economy, it may end up being more expensive to craft your own diamonds than to just buy natural ones.
It's already easy to manufacture wealth like this. Magic always will, and has always, broken the game. Buy some steel and fabricate full plate. Repeat. Become wealthy. Do in ten minutes which takes a mundane crafter weeks (with a chance of failure).
You would also need proficiency in smiths tools in order to fabricate any full plate worth buying, per the spell. But so long as you check that box, yeah you’re correct
That's my thought too, but then you'd have players who buy 1,000gp in coal to sell for 10,000gp in diamonds. Maybe a weight trade off, but keep same value instead. 1,000gp in coal is probably like half a ton of coal. But a 1,000gp diamond is roughly fist sized.
Also, as they flood he market with diamonds, the cost of diamonds go down. So the profits start to become lower and now they would need even more diamonds for their spells since their worth has dropped.
It feels wrong that the amount of diamonds needed for spells is linked to their market value.
Although, it would be a cool premise for a character that tries to artificially raise the price of diamonds so that they would need less diamonds to cast spells.
If you make diamonds priceless, would you be able to use one diamond infinitely in spells?
This. Your average shopkeep won’t be able to afford nor be interested in buying 10kgp worth of diamonds lol
Realistically they’d need to go to a very large city and find a filthy rich. That makes sense lore-wise, and it’s a perfectly reasonable way to balance it I think
Though I’d say 10:1 diamonds:coal is too high a ratio. I wouldn’t do more than 5x
Just make it take a long time. You want to turn 1000g of coal into 1500g of diamonds? Well look at that, this complicated magical process takes just as long as it takes to make an equivalent cost magic item as per the side hustle rules. What a coincidence.
The diamonds are useful as material components for spells etc, but are cloudy, flawed and ugly. No jeweler would buy them for their aesthetic, they are only fit as material
It prevents the limited natural resources from running out, so at a certain point diamonds‘ relative value would go up more than the coal simply because the demand isn’t declining, so an equilibrium of 1000gp of coal getting transformed into 1000gp of diamonds is strictly enforced by the immortal lich D‘Aebierzh‘s company to keep him in power over the resurrection market by controlling large scale coal mining, smear campaigning and sabotaging wooden coal transmutation… annnd we‘re back to reality.
That would make the price much higher than just buying a normal one. Maybe doing it not about the price but the quantity? Coal should be a somewhat cheap enough product for people to buy to survive the winter, or as a product more kind to beign transported than lumber, but the quantity they have is relatively small.
So, make it so that big quantities, enough for beign able to form diamonds, are not on stock on most of the world except in the cities with more trading market or in town with coal mines. Maybe at 1/2 of the original diamond cost so players have a real incentive to do the travels to those places.
Heck, you could even make it a social problem in your campaign / world. Some asshole wizard bought practically all the coal supply in the market and now most of the city won't be able to pass the winter.
If say a typically sourced diamond is 10gp, then you can have the "crafted" diamond at 1gp.
But then say, maybe you need 5 or 10 times the weight of the desired diamond in coal (or any factor you desire).
This amount of coal likely wouldn't be anywhere near 10gp to make a standard sized diamond; but as long as you keep that value above the 1gp sell value (maybe even go to or above 5gp), then you have some kind of trade off without it also being exploitable.
(And as its a homebrew, you could play around with the world's coal scarcity/supply, making this action less or more desirable. For example: low world supply and your party are in Arctic tundra, do you really need the diamond when making that fire could be the only thing keeping you alive?)
HOWEVER this does all assume max value is used at each step. So I would balance this by both requiring the PC to already have a high degree of familiarity with high end blast furnaces and alchemy tools (see below), and have the output value scale with time and use count to represent tool practice and to prevent ridiculous amounts of "free" resources from showing up until they can regularly pull somewhere in that range from a quick dungeon trip. You might also make it more difficult to find large amounts of pure enough carbon to get more than a few GP per cast initially. Maybe they're not anywhere near a coal mine so the locals just burn wood into crappy charcoal, or maybe it's a warm enough climate to make campfires rarely needed since oil lamps are a good enough light source.
You also can't use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan's tools used to craft such objects.
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u/amberoze Nov 13 '21 edited Nov 13 '21
I could see this. Homebrewing a value of maybe 1/10th the value of your carbon source. 10gp worth of coal would give a 1gp diamond.
Just spitballing, because now that it's written down it seems wrong somehow. Anyone got any better ideas?
Edit: after a few replies, I have confirmed my own stupidity. My first though was way off base. I have since concluded that the gp value should only go up by a small percentage due to the effort put into the transmutation. However, based on the way natural diamonds are created, I have also concluded that it's the weight that should be the big change factor here. A large amount of coal (with variation due to purity), would render fairly small diamonds. The secondary factor would then be time and spell components expended during the process. Depending on your dm, and the world's economy, it may end up being more expensive to craft your own diamonds than to just buy natural ones.