2017-01-23 - DMFA #1726 Bar Talk.

[Zorro]

The best argument for money as in Gold and Platinum is that even with far future technologies you run up a matter creation energy limit.  To make Gold you essentially need a collision of Black Holes to create that much Fusion Energy.  That is why it never will be practical to create gold from energy VS mining natural Gold.

[Foxx Trotter]

Economics 101 = VERY BAD STUFF.

[Somebodyelse]

Didn't Amber already explain it a long time ago as it being hard to make things completely out of magic and it's easier to just make them the normal way?

Also money is a representation of goods and services. Being that it's hard to magic stuff up from thin air that would still qualify as goods/services for he production of it and would warrent a paycheck. The only X factor here is counterfeiting money via magic which you could solve by making money enchanted with something complex and tedious enough that counterfeiting isn't cost effective.

[techmaster-glitch]

The best argument for money as in Gold and Platinum is that even with far future technologies you run up a matter creation energy limit.  To make Gold you essentially need a collision of Black Holes to create that much Fusion Energy.  That is why it never will be practical to create gold from energy VS mining natural Gold.

Didn't Amber already explain it a long time ago as it being hard to make things completely out of magic and it's easier to just make them the normal way?

Close. Abel actually said that it's easy to make raw elements or compounds, but to actually shape something into fine detail is extremely difficult, magically. Raw gold and latex outfits = easy. Weaved fabric clothing = crazy hard.

Which actually does allow a direct way for currency to work in the world of DMFA, if currency is based off information (and using the word "information" in the loosest sense, could be as "simple" as an encrypted unique sequence of numbers) that is physically encoded in the piece of currency itself! Or any number of other options, this one little caveat to magic in Amber's world already allows for endless possibilities on its own.


....Incidentally. Amber, if you are reading this, then I actually have a small series of videos for you that you might possibly be interested in, starting here. They are short videos, informative, but most of all, entertaining! And no numbers are involved! I'm not even really saying these videos will be that helpful for DMFA, they're just fun videos that are a treat to watch

[Cassi-kun]

Also, it seems reasonable that many magic users would either be highly specialized in one or two areas, or else "kinda good" in many. Throw in the fact that those with magical talent may not have magical strength (or that said strength requires training to develop, and said training may not be available), and the fact that there are wholly non-magical people out there - mostly Beings, probably a few Mythos as well - a universal method of exchange for goods and services just seems reasonable to equalize who has access to what, especially the exchange of physical goods among the non-magical. The use of money is basically an intermediary step in bartering, so that somebody who lacks what their trade partner wants can still give that person access to what they want without having to go on a Fetch Quest every time you want grociers.

[Shadowdancer]

I imagine that even if a basic magic user could conjure up raw elements (and maybe it takes more than that), Furrae would still have an economy, but based more on manufactured goods and those few elements that can't be conjured.

The economy would be vastly different to what we are used to, but there would still be an economy.

Also, as mentioned above, I suspect that money uses whatever magic or material methods there are that make it difficult to copy. Given that modern money is made from paper or plastic, it is probably already magic immune as these are complex molecules, not to mention the artwork detail.

[Famout]

I can certainly see the trouble, when making a fantasy world best to be careful about things like magically made objects/portals and the like. Otherwise some crazy fan might apply science to the idea and make a perpetual motion waterfall/water turbine for unlimited power or other broken ideas.

(Love ya Tapewolf.)

[Drakkenmensch]

Katbox version of the site appears to be broken, all it gives is "registrations disabled" page now.

[Famout]

Katbox as a whole was hit by a nasty bug, to prevent too much spam here is their own message about it in a spoiler tag.

[spoiler]
Welcome to the Katbox. Please pardon our mess while we rebuild and re-organize!

Concluding a successful campaign to fund upgrades and changes to our website it was discovered that the site was host to a virus.  This virus was installing mailing scripts sending out millions of spam messages across the internet. This did not become noticeable until email server began blocking and sending back our legitimate emails, and upon investigation we found it was also generating error logs gigabytes large.

After manual attempts to purge the infection failed we turned to our host who was also unable to help. As soon as we got rid of mailing scripts new ones would be installed and the system would resume sending out a maelstrom of spam.   As far as we could tell that is all it was doing and we have not received any reports of site visitors experiencing pop-ups or attempts at infecting their computers.

Since none of our methods seemed to work we made the painful decision to wipe the site and start fresh. As we are a very small site staff-wise this is resulting in extended downtime.  We are coming back up piece by piece and when finished should come out of this better than ever.  The changes that our generous fans have helped fund are not in jeopardy and have only been delayed in implementation.  We hope to have something to show for that very soon.

In the meantime here is a list of comics currently back online, this will be updated as more and more of the site is rebuilt:



Las Lindas

The Eye of Ramalach

Yosh! Saga

The Katbox Forums

You can also check out our social media pages:

Twitter

Facebook



Thank you everyone for your patience. If you have any questions please let us know.  We currently do not have an ETA on when everything will be back online.
[/spoiler]

[Foxx Trotter]

Yeah, I saw that Amber's Katbox site was down the other day along with some other webcomics. Sage mentioned something during his stream on Friday about the Katbox being overhauled, but I wasn't sure as to the actual cause since I was in and out of the session handling other tasks. Thanks for pointing that out. Hopefully, they can get everything back up soon.

[kilroywuzheere]

I recently took Economics and from what I can tell Magic wouldn't change economies all that much.

The primary reason things cost money is scarcity. In our world, its materials and time that are scarce. With magic the materials part is just replaced with more time. So if it takes 3 hours to conjure up say, some whisky, that is 3 hours that the person who conjured it up couldn't conjure anything else up and 3 hours of their time that they would want to be compensated for unless they are going to be the only ones consuming it. Now since it only took 3 hours instead of the decade or two it takes in our world whisky would be significantly cheaper but that's still time and time still costs something.

And any time anyone wants something someone else can make that they don't know how to, there is economy. The only major difference is everything's relative value as the harder something is to make the more time and effort that goes into it and the more it costs. Simpler stuff like metals or stone might be incredibly cheap as there's not even the cost of transporting it anymore, while stuff like computers cost thousands upon thousands of dollars as its probably much harder to make things that detailed at such a small scale.

[Tapewolf]

I can certainly see the trouble, when making a fantasy world best to be careful about things like magically made objects/portals and the like. Otherwise some crazy fan might apply science to the idea and make a perpetual motion waterfall/water turbine for unlimited power or other broken ideas.
(Love ya Tapewolf.)

That's not unlimited by any stretch - it gives them a nice, constant base load.  For more serious amounts of power, they use mass-energy conversion, with the equipment to do that powered by the dam.

If you want broken, look instead at things like Daryil being 1000 years older than 'cubi can usually manage while still having his age frozen, and being able to do massively magic-intensive things like faking various Clan Leader traits for the entire clan, creating and maintaining a pocket dimension for the dam and still having enough energy to ascend afterwards.  That's going to take a bit of fancy footwork to fix, though it'll probably be something like a magical artifact at the end of the day.

In terms of magic as an economic mover, it is worth pointing out that Beings don't have anywhere near as much magic as Creatures.  If you exceed your mana pool the spell will use up part of your life force, which could mean knocking a few years or decades off your lifespan.  That's serious for a Being, but less so for a Creature who can live thousands of years.
So, when they're not murdering each other there is a very definite basis for Beings wanting to trade with Creatures.  The Beings get magical services and artifacts, though what the Creatures can get out of it is less clear, since a Creature can be an artisan as well as a Being.  That said, with the rise of electronics, Beings might be better placed for making them since the devices will be extremely sensitive to stray magic during manufacture.

[Lying Foo]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - no one, bar Fae, actually seems to be all that good at magic, at least outside their own specialties.  Heavy specialization with a few prodigious polymaths doesn't seem all that far from our own economy.

[Eboreg]

So, in essence, paper money is more reliable than gold.

[Dracologist]

I don't know exactly how magic works in Furcadia, or by extension DMFA, but when I write about fantasy settings that involve magic I typically set it up so that while drawing energies and creating weather effects takes time to learn and is more common creating something out of nothing is vastly more difficult to do and requires higher grades of magical mastery to really do.  Even then the item that was created might not stick around.  So if a person makes a sword out of magic, sure it's steel and all of the molecules inside of it are steel, but these molecules might not continue to be bound together as the energy made to create it conserves to other areas.  Because of this the weapon could very easily explode non-violently or simply fade out of existence.  If you want something that lasts then you need to just buy it and not take the risk of fighting the final boss without any weapons or armor.  That's just how I do it, no telling how Amber imagines it working in her world.

[Kenik]

If you're making it Fiat money you can easily say that the metals have slight impurities which are insanely hard to replicate. If you're using paper bills(which are actually made from cloth at least in the US) that works similarly as we've established that is hard to do.

Not to mention as said above, not everybody has the skills/desire to make coins using magic. Kind of like how most people have a vague idea of how to mine/refine gold, but don't because it's hard and expensive, and time consuming.

[Hariman]

I did not notice the yellowed eyes and pointy fingers in panel three at first glance. It's quite a nice little touch to get the dislike of economics and "eyes glaze over" world building.

[MT Hazard]

Anyone notice that the person in panel one is a reoccurring background character? They were last seen in 1513

[Kenik]

Anyone notice that the person in panel one is a reoccurring background character? They were last seen in 1513

I did not notice this, it is however, Rad.

[Cassi-kun]

Anyone notice that the person in panel one is a reoccurring background character? They were last seen in 1513

Aw dangit, I just looked her up before I came to the forum today! I wanted to be the clever one *fake sobbing*

[Merlin]

Anyone notice that the person in panel one is a reoccurring background character? They were last seen in 1513

Ooh neat! I thought the colours looked familiar, but couldn't place em

[Prroul]

Some other things to consider:

Abel said it would be fairly straightforward for a mage to get the components to make something. However, he's also been living at SAIA for the past 400 years. What he might consider easy to obtain at SAIA may or may not be actually easy to obtain in the Real World(tm).

Being that raw materials are easy and crafted materials hard, Fiat money becomes more financially secure. Take, for example, a dollar bill. Let's say it is now woven fabric instead of just meshed fabric and paper pieces in a vat. With an extremely tight/unique weave that very few people, outside the government weavers, can do. Suddenly that money is incredibly difficult to counterfeit, and becomes a very stable currency (relative to the stability of the government issuing it, of course).

Now let's tack on a combination of magic and machinery. Let's use Magic to create... say... spider silk. Then use a weaving machine from JyCorp to weave it in a tighter weave than anyone else can manage, and do it with a unique pattern. That money becomes almost impossible to counterfeit, and valuable because it is ridiculously lightweight, very durable (use a simple fire resistance cantrip to prevent its flammability being a liability), resistant to tearing, extremely foldable, and actually carries more advantages than the current monetary system. Best of all, you can tell a counterfeit with nothing more than a monocle or other method of magnification, simply observe the weave and see if it meets government standards.

[Jenseven]

Well, you could say that in order to create an object out of matter, you'd need the equivalent of regular matter, as per matter conversion. This would also allow for basic physics to remain constant and sensible like in the real world. Matter could be converted to energy and vice versa.

So, how would that affect economics?
Well, I think most people would not like wizards and mages to excavate their backyards in order to create things and make massive holes in places so that they can convert the earth into whatever magically created objects they want to sell. So, this would lead to mages needing to find base raw materials. In which cases the garbage services and recycling centers could make a tidy profit with compacting their trash into 'generic resource blocks' that they can sell to the wizards and mages.
So that would allow for a basic economy to function, and also paying the mages would need to be paid for the purchase of these blocks and for their time investment and required energy to make such objects.

Now, a more powerful mage could convert energy into matter, but I think we could explain that away when a very high level mage thought it would be a cool idea to make a mountain fortress out of ambient energy and plunged the whole world into a decades long ice age. As you could expect, most people would not like that happening again, so that practice would be heavily regulated.

[Alondro]

I can certainly see the trouble, when making a fantasy world best to be careful about things like magically made objects/portals and the like. Otherwise some crazy fan might apply science to the idea and make a perpetual motion waterfall/water turbine for unlimited power or other broken ideas.
(Love ya Tapewolf.)

That's not unlimited by any stretch - it gives them a nice, constant base load.  For more serious amounts of power, they use mass-energy conversion, with the equipment to do that powered by the dam.

If you want broken, look instead at things like Daryil being 1000 years older than 'cubi can usually manage while still having his age frozen, and being able to do massively magic-intensive things like faking various Clan Leader traits for the entire clan, creating and maintaining a pocket dimension for the dam and still having enough energy to ascend afterwards.  That's going to take a bit of fancy footwork to fix, though it'll probably be something like a magical artifact at the end of the day.

Eh, you could just go the Charline route and say his mom was an ancient Egyptian goddess.  That basically lets you get away with anything.   

[Cassi-kun]

I can certainly see the trouble, when making a fantasy world best to be careful about things like magically made objects/portals and the like. Otherwise some crazy fan might apply science to the idea and make a perpetual motion waterfall/water turbine for unlimited power or other broken ideas.
(Love ya Tapewolf.)

That's not unlimited by any stretch - it gives them a nice, constant base load.  For more serious amounts of power, they use mass-energy conversion, with the equipment to do that powered by the dam.

If you want broken, look instead at things like Daryil being 1000 years older than 'cubi can usually manage while still having his age frozen, and being able to do massively magic-intensive things like faking various Clan Leader traits for the entire clan, creating and maintaining a pocket dimension for the dam and still having enough energy to ascend afterwards.  That's going to take a bit of fancy footwork to fix, though it'll probably be something like a magical artifact at the end of the day.

Eh, you could just go the Charline route and say his mom was an ancient Egyptian goddess.  That basically lets you get away with anything.   

Or make it a Clan Quirk relating to his parent clan(s). One of my clans has an "unofficial quirk" of longevity.