If you have a limited production run and an artificially-depressed below-equilibrium price, the only people you're helping are scalpers.
And on the RoRs, Alchemist and Jinx are giving scalpers tens of thousands of dollars for every single dollar they make themselves, which sounds ridiculously daft.
Major scalpers can do stuff like make software to automate (spamming or just incredibly early) purchasing requests, and provide a convenient right-there address to avoid the delivery issues. And plenty of scalpers are just normal people--if you aren't as messed up as Bandit, would you rather use an RoR you got your hands on, or sell it for millions and wait until there's a more sane way to get them?
And there are going to be huge delivery issues. I bet barely any UPS drivers would deliver an untouched envelope with an Alchemical Solutions return address if the thing inside is worth 100 times their annual salary. And mail goes through lots of sorters and shippers, not just the last-mile delivery drivers; I doubt you'd be able to determine when exactly a paper ring went missing from an envelope.
And if it's "insured" but only for $250, that's kind of farcical.
(Tl;dr market/price manipulation doesn't work, and it doesn't work harder when it's ridiculously severe)
You are quite correct. And this is an issue that Jinx should be noticing soon. She and Al will have to do some brainstorming to come up with a solution and there's no guarantee that their answer will be the one that works best.
After all, that's still a problem that we on Earth are dealing with to this very day.
I only brought it up because he's using a D&D spell, which 'should' fall under D&D crafting rules. If you allow it to be made using another system, well, yeah, the rules don't apply.
It's just a monstrously powerful effect to let take effect for next to nothing. Note that 4550 gp is 45.55 lbs of gold, which is currently $32k per pound, which is 1.457 MILLION dollars to make by the D&D rules. So, yeah, a 99.94% price break is pretty substantial.
Coinage has, until recently, always been worth less than the precious metals that it's comprised of. There's a whole slew of history on it, from the production to the counterfeiting. I recently came across a fantastic video on old Japanese currency (I'd link it but I'm having a bit of trouble hunting it down on youtube).
So valuing the rings by the weight of the metal in the coinage they should be worth is not quite correct.
As to the actual cost following DnD-like rules, there's a method Al could pull off that would have an up-front cost of about 300 gp and then about 50 gp per craft but would produce permanent, full Rings of Regeneration. He'd just need to get a copy of Melf's Acid Arrow, buy some Rakshasha Eyes and Fenberries off the shop and he could produce as many rings as he wanted via the Neverwinter Nights method.
I can't recall if it was here or on Caer but there was a discussion about the limits of enchanting. The enchanting skill itself represents the ceiling of a potential enchantment's level. As in, Al or someone else using it could not create an enchantment equal to, say, a level 50 (mastery) spell without having the enchanting skill at or above level 50.
The spell itself represents the 'floor' of enchantment strength, provided the base power of the spell does not exceed the level of enchanting. A level 35 spell will always produce an equivalent enchantment, provided an adequate power source is supplied.
Through the use of external spells, potions or equipment it is possible to magnify or multiply the final result of an enchantment but those methods cannot be used to offset the actual cost. I believe the example I used before was the Meteor spell, which has a cost of 10,000 MP. The maximum amount of power in, say, a Grand Soul Gem would only be 600 MP worth at full charge.
With these restrictions, it is entirely impossible for Al to enchant Meteor into anything using a soul gem. And, one of the other limitations of the Nordic method utilized is that the objects do not recharge off of ambient magic. To do that would require using the Dunmeri methods but those are far, far more prone to failure.
Regenerate, however, has an equivalent spell/enchantment in TES and the sorcerers in-setting are able to use the restoration school of magic to extend their lives by centuries. Possibly even millennia, in the case of one particularly gifted
individual.
angry veterans go to town on some foolish gangsters.
poor alfred.
