As a lot of magic changes are occurring at the moment, and there’s a good IC explanation, I figure it’s the best time to bring up something that’s been niggling at me:
The Alchemy Rituals will never be useful.
The Eight-Spoked-Wheel (the cheaper of the two) costs 1 mana crystal and 1 artisan resource per artisan resource produced.
The economy of the game has been well-crafted with enough stabilising factors (including such things as Verdant Bounty of the Twilight Bayou) that it is very unlikely for an artisan resource to be more expensive than a mana crystal; and even were that to happen you’d still have the cost of the other resource you were transmuting to account for.
Many rituals can scale their level in order to affect more targets at once, becoming more mana efficient as they do so; but these rituals cannot, so there currently seems to be no way to use the rituals that makes them anything other than an interesting way of throwing away resources.
Maybe there’s some aspect to the rituals I’m missing?
I understand it’s a ritual for emergencies, for when you realise you need a ritual staff, you need it tomorrow, you don’t have anywhere near enough Gloaming to do it, and can’t find anyone on the field who is willing to trade.
That being said I am curious about why it is so much worse than other such devices, The cauldron of Bravash, plays a very similar role, but effectively only has a mana cost. Similarly the herb cauldrons, on their 7 resources for a years worth of 2:1 exchanges, due to the herb market at a sufficient scale might be worth it. Moving back to Artisan materials there are a huge host of methods to turn them into mana, at a 2: 1 ratio (even better for certain rituals you can convert it for magnitude reduction, which has value in itself.) Not to mention that you can turn any material into autumn mana at a set ratio is absurdly easy to make worthwhile.
Especially when you consider you probably have to do a reasonable amount of legwork to get it to work in the first place, to get sufficient ingots 1 step along the path away from what you actually want you probably are going to have to go out and trade in the first place (Alternatively convert into something you can trade more easily but again it hasn’t removed the legwork.)
Perhaps you should consider that the ritual wasn’t written by a game designer trying to create a balanced game setting. Instead consider that long ago in the history before the Empire a group of Night Mages worked out how to transform the massive piles of Ambergelt into Weltsilver. This had been a problem for a long time due to their small and isolated woods where there was never any Weltsilver. Being a bunch of inbred hicks they never really wanted to find others to trade with. They created a ritual that solved their problem. Then the Empire formed, some Highguard turned up and a few years later the Conlave started. They might have been first in the queue when it came to adding new rituals to Imperial lore.
A) That’s not a good reason to have a trap option in the game design. If the option is useless, you’re going to have new players taking it and feeling bad that they made a mistake. Empire’s world was designed for the game, not visa versa, and in most cases this has been done very effectively.
B) Adding such a ritual to imperial lore would be a silly mistake, unless it serves some purpose other than being cast, as casting it harms the empire by wasting resources. Especially as adding it to imperial lore is a costly process.
It’s terrible but we’ve never been able to agree on a fix for it. At least one of us argues there is not fix for it because trade will always be the better option.
A potential fix would be to take the intrinsic value of an ingot (a crown, give or take) and convert the mana used in casting into an additional couple of ingots, say up to some fraction of the value of the mana you put in (valuing mana in the same fashion as the downtime buffs). So you get more out than you put in.
Trading is still better, but it’s no longer so much vastly better that you’d need to be selling your shoeleather on the Bourse auction before it’d be worth using the rituals rather than your feet.
I don’t understand the problem; it is almost exactly equal in terms of magical use, as putting experience into the Apothecary skill in the first place.
Trying to make it worthwhile, but with rules that fit with the existing premise, that is the transmutation of one substance into another. The best I can think of is increase batch numbers: keep the cost of performing the ritual the same, but allow it to work to change more than 3 resources, say 9 instead of 3 (As an example number).
1 mana + 1 resource = 1 resource
Will never be worth it, the cost is huge even as an emergency thing.
1/3 mana + 1 resource = 1 resource
Might be almost worth it under certain market conditions, and as an emergency is more practical a solution (even if inefficient.)
There are other models, that could work, but it moves it away from the fluff (I’ll be honest I’m mainly invested in it as I really grabs me flavour wise as a ritual, and it’s a pity it’s useless.)
Not quite, like Apothecaries an Alchemists/Master Alchemist (IC description for someone who can solo one or both respectively) again can perform the ritual as often as they like, are effectively in the same boat as Alchemists, in which every player with the right skill is competes to use that skill.
The Alchemist has the disadvantage of competing for a share of presently close to nothing (Maybe actually nothing, I have no idea if either ritual has been cast ever).
[quote=“Iulian”]A potential fix would be to take the intrinsic value of an ingot (a crown, give or take) and convert the mana used in casting into an additional couple of ingots, say up to some fraction of the value of the mana you put in (valuing mana in the same fashion as the downtime buffs). So you get more out than you put in.
Trading is still better, but it’s no longer so much vastly better that you’d need to be selling your shoeleather on the Bourse auction before it’d be worth using the rituals rather than your feet.[/quote]
This is probably the simplest approximate fix that we could reasonably implement.
My thought as to an unobtrusive fix would be to make it scale with the number of units of material.
Something like transmuting 3 or 4 materials base, and +1 magnitude per 2 additional units.
This makes it clear that it’s not meant to be a replacement for trade (as on a small scale it’s still inefficient) but means that when there’s a major imbalance you can convert 24 of one material into 24 of another for only 8 mana (or 9 mana in the retrograde wheel).
Simply making it affect more materials would also work, but I really like the way ritual scaling works, and I think the Wheels being used for big imbalances seems appropriate
The thing is that it’s neither a fun effect nor practical. Yes, if you burn a pile of mana on it front of one of those Eternals, I’d expect you to get some attention. Aside from that it is an extremely expensive desk toy that costs XP to learn and 3-4 mana a time. There are plenty of rituals that burn mana for limited practical effect but are fun, such as Freedom of the Soul. There are rituals that are directly linked to an eternal and dispense fun, such as Challenge the Iron Duke. There are ones with obvious dodgy, trolling or plot potential like Turns the Circle.
Churning Cauldron of Bravash suffers similar problems. It is massively overpriced as a slow way of replicating herbs to deal with a shortage. Allowing extra magnitude for greater efficiency would encourage doing one massive, high-efficiency casting. It’s easier to make one big ritual fun because it’s involving more people. The efficiency increase at greater magnitudes is a bribe to encourage involving more people in the roleplay . With either Alchemy or Cauldron there’s no reason to go above minimum magnitude and minimum awesomeness of performance. If you do a big ritual, it’s more worth putting some effort behind that one performance.
I think reducing the Magnitude of the 2 low-end alchemy rituals to Mag 2 might (might) mean they ever get cast at all. Increasing the output of the transmuted material is probably a better option though.
If I were designing it now I’d go with one of the following options:
Either raise or remove the maximum amount you can do in one go, or allow an Additional magnitude that was increaasingly efficient (so +X for double, +2X for triple or quadruple and so on).
I’d consider adding additional magnitude to move something more steps in one go.
I’d make sure it had at least one variable so the damn mask was not utterly pointless.
I’d not make the mistake of looking at Churning Cauldron because I’d have noticed that this is a limited transform rather than a reasoanbly free creation.
As I said, however, before we can change it we need to agree it needs to be changed and we do not all three agree that it needs changing at this time.
I’ve repeatedly considered having Murit or Soghter provide a boost to it, but that’s unsatisfying so I haven’t.
I know that it and Cauldron work differently, the point is that they are both rituals that:
*Let you deal with a shortage of a certain thing in a very inefficient way.
*Don’t scale either to increased magnitude or increased numbers of Items put into the ritual, unlike the “trade X for Realm mana” rituals.
*Are Magnitude 8, which means they end up with people sitting around in a regio on starting PCs while a Ref counts the new beans out.
They have different features and mechanisms but shared drawbacks, and both fall foul of “shoe leather is cheaper than mana”. Although the alchemy rituals are far worse for this because you could conceivably need 5 of a herb within the hour and not be sure you could rush-buy it, whereas craft resources are of very limited use on-field.
Churning Cauldron turns mana into herbs instantly - no other effect in the game does that. I am happy with Churning Cauldron. I have not enthusiastically connected an item to that ritual then failed to remember that to work with an item like that it needs to incentivise variable magnitudes.
The alchemy rituals just swap the descriptor on the lumps of stuff you have in your hand, and charge you mana for doing so, and that’s not satisfactory.
Guess I shouldn’t have grouped Churning Cauldron and Alchemy together as “stuff meant to solve an on-field shortage/surplus of This Thing.” I wasn’t bothering about what exact things went in, just the prices of them (originally worked out from the “base” price of 9 Crowns/Number of Resources per season). Never mind.
I was comparing all of the “transform X into Y” rituals to Before the Throne of Estavus which “instantly” (well, up to an hour’s time, same as Cauldron) swaps resources and a couple of mana for Realm mana. That ritual is an excellent way of dealing with an on-field price crash in whatever your mine put out or a shortage of mana.
I’d thought the mask was there to let a starting PC do both Alchemy rituals without a Regio, as a Mask is usually an inefficient prestige buy. The Masks in general could use a look because even using them in the massively profitable Gathering the Harvest, we can’t make the Straw Mask worth the effort so the Corsair’s Bloody Mask has no chance.
Execptions being that the Strigine Mask is pretty nice if you want to stick the Archmage of Day in the Regio and have him run Eyes of the Sun and Moon all day long, the Cowl of Ashes is a cheap way to boost up to the Mag 20 for Whisphers Through the Black Gate, and the Captain’s Mask is a good one for a solo Spendid Panoply spammer.
<insert emoji meaning: no personal attack intended - just general comment>