Quick and Dirty Mass Production

How to Beat High Enchantment Costs

By Dalton S. Spence

Last Updated:

Disclaimer: The material presented here is my original creation, intended for use with the GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games. This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games. GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

The page below contains the contents of three articles I sent to the rec.games.frp.gurps USENET newsgroup. Many thanks to maltesh@flashmail.com (Nana Yaw Ofori) whose response to my original post got me thinking about a new way to calculate Quick and Dirty enchantment costs. Page references in this document follow the standard GURPS convention; a one-to-three letter abbreviation (in this case T for GURPS Technomancer, B for GURPS Basic Set Third Edition or M for GURPS Magic Second Edition), followed by the page number.

On Tue, 07 Sep 1999 10:05:07 -0400 in rec.games.frp.gurps,
maltesh@flashmail.com (Nana Yaw Ofori) wrote;

> In article <7r22ks$5g2$1@mohawk.hwcn.org>,
dalton.spence@hwcn.org wrote:

> > In _Technomancer_ doing things with magic is usually much more expensive
> > than doing it the mundane way. For instance, cooking a meal with the Cook
> > spell costs $15 in energy, and doesn't improve the product one bit. The
> > enchanted cookpot that supposedly made Chili Wizard America's fast food
> > king would cost $1,500 per meal per day to industrially enchant.

>   Except, of course,  Chili Wizard probably wouldn't have the pots
> Industrially Enchanted. It costs too much for too little gain.  THey'd
> have the pots Quick & Dirty enchanted at a production cost of $450 per
> meal per day.  Using the standard rules, a 4 meal/day pot can be put
> together easily by a pair of standard Technomancer Enchaters with Draw
> Power and Powerston4es.

Thank's for setting me straight. I was thinking of one large heavily enchanted pot, not many small lightly enchanted ones. I've never believed in energy costs, since the energy you spend is what your wages are about. Using this axiom makes some pretty significant changes to the Q&D Enchant formula, as you will see below.

According to B152, a four meal per day pot would take two hours to produce because "it takes one hour for each 100 points of energy required (round up)." A three meal/day pot is more efficient, since at 90 points the casting takes only 1 hour, and all the power could be drawn from the NEMA powerlines. At 8 pots per day the cost would be $375 × 2 / (3 × 8) = 31.25 per meal/day or $93.75/pot plus 63 cents for the 4.5 kWh of NEMA power used. (I assume NEMA power costs twice the "reasonable commercial rate of $0.07 kWh" [T42] to make the Draw Power costs constant.) Factoring in a successful casting rate of 206/216, the expected cost/pot is $94.38 / 0.9537 = $98.96. Round this up to $100, add 50% for the procurment cost, and it would cost Chili Wizard $150/pot, or $50 per meal per day.

The above calculation assumes that quirked pots (6 out of every 212 pots delivered) would simply be returned by Chili Wizard for a full refund. However a 2.83 percent quirk rate might be unacceptable for such a large company, particularly when the quirk might result in poisoning a customer. Since casting an Analyze Magic spell takes an hour, a third Magery 1 quality control wizard could by hired at $250 a day [T100] to cast the spell on each pot while the next one is being enchanted. Each casting costs an additional $31.25 plus 5.6 cents for the 0.4 kWh of NEMA power the enchanters used via Draw Power to replace the wizard's fatigue with Lend Strength. (A mage with Lend Strength and one with Draw Power and a power source need no batteries to Steal Power from.) Add this amount to the adjusted price of the surviving pots, divide the total by the acceptance rate and you get $(94.38/0.9815+31.306)/0.9717 = $131.18. Round this up to $132, add 50% for the procurment cost, and it would cost Chili Wizard $198/pot, or $66 per meal per day.

NOTE: these are the costs for any Q&D enchantment of 65-100 energy points. Below that only one enchanter is required, so the base cost without Quality Control is $50, and $82 with it. Thus a 2 meal/day Cook pot would cost Chili Wizard $123 [$61.50 per meal/day] with QC or $75 [$37.50 per meal/day] without it.

In Summary: Q&D Enchantment costs $50/mage-hour, plus $32 per Enchantment if a Magery 1 Quality Control wizard is hired to cast Analyse Magic to identify and eliminate quirked items. Below is a table showing the costs of Q&D enchantment using the no-energy-cost rule. At point ^[1], the lead enchanter's effective skills must be at least 20, violating assumption 4 of the sidebar on T41, and at point ^[2] his wages begin doubling as per the "Wizards for Hire" sidebar on T100, thus increasing the "effective" number of mages being paid (x+y where x is the number of assistants and y is the base multiplier for the lead enchanter). Operating expenses are $15.625 per true mage-hour calculated from the $125/mage-day Industrial Enchantment rate on T41 .

Energy Cost (points)	Effective number of Mages	Time (hours)	Effective Mage- hours	Cost to Enchant	Operating Expenses	Total Cost to Enchant
1-64	1	1	1	$50	$15.63	$65.63
65-100	2	1	2	$100	$31.25	$131.25
101-128	2	2	4	$200	$62.50	$262.50
129-192	3	2	6	$300	$93.75	$393.75
193-200	4	2	8	$400	$125.00	$525.00
201-256	4	3	12	$600	$187.50	$787.50
257-300[1]	5	3	15	$750	$234.38	$984.38
301-320	5	4	20	$1000	$312.50	$1312.50
321-384[2]	5+2	4	28	$1400	$375.00	$1775.00
385-400	6+4	4	40	$2000	$437.50	$2437.50
401-448	6+4	5	50	$2500	$546.88	$3046.88
449-500	7+8	5	75	$3750	$625.00	$4375.00
501-512	7+8	6	90	$4500	$750.00	$5250.00
513-576	8+16	6	144	$7200	$843.75	$8043.75
577-600	9+32	6	246	$12300	$937.50	$13237.50
601-640	9+32	7	287	$14350	$1093.75	$15443.75

Since "skill levels over 25 are normally unavailable" [T100], so are Q&D circles with more than nine assistants. Even at its highest level, Q&D costs per energy point are only slightly more than half that of Industrial Enchantment, assuming daily salary is the same. Quality Control costs $32+$15.63=$47.63 more per enchantment.

After considering this for a while, I realized that this had serious implications for the production of powerstones in Technomancer. I had already written up a spreadsheet to emulate the Powerstone Cost table in Brett Slocum's excellent article "The Compleat Powerstone" (see MI p108-111 or the original article in Roleplayer 18 for details) slightly modified to reflect Technomancer gem prices, and inserted the new labor cost calculated below. (NOTE: the >quoted lines are lifted straight from the article and the :quoted equations were adjusted by me for inflation.)

:Gem Cost as per B153 times inflation: ($10 × P^2 +$40 × P) × 15
>Number of Gems needed: 1/(0.9815^P ).
Wages: Daily Wage / Maximum Castings per Day = $375/8 = $46.875
Power Cost: Rate per kWh × Energy Cost /10 = $0.07x20/10 = $0.14
:Labor Cost: average number of castings needed × (Wages + Power Cost)
:            = $47.015
>Total Cost: (Gem Cost × Number of Gems) + Labor Cost.
>Retail Price uses a markup of 100% over the Total Cost.
>Zero-Quirk Probability: 0.9717^P.
>Zero-Quirk Price: Retail Price / Zero-Quirk Probability.
>Listed Price is the price from GURPS Magic  (p. M20) × 15

>Prices have been rounded to convenient values. Costs have not been
>rounded.

What bothers me about technomantic powerstone enchantment is the waste of talent; an enchanter with Draw Power and a NEMA powerline can spend 64 points of energy on a Q&D casting [sidebar TM41], but each powerstone casting only costs 20 points. He could spend three times that and the cost of producing the stone would be almost the same ($0.25 more per casting for additional electricity). Which got me to thinking; using the energy-for-skill rule, tripling the energy of the casting would increase the skill level by 5, giving the the stone a Power (not strength, just skill) of 20. Now most enchanted items with a Power of 20 can function at Power 15 (ie. normally) in a low mana area. Could a powerstone enchanted at that skill level recharge faster, say at twice the rate or one mana level higher?

Second question: if NEMA powerlines carry oz particles, could the mana-enriched electricity be used somehow to create temporary high or very high mana areas for accelerated powerstone recharging?

Third question: what do you think the government would charge to truck powerstones into the Very High Mana area around the Trinity site for high speed recharging?

Notice: GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.