I just not realized what REALLY makes diamonds and other gem components dumb: Dwarfs, kobolds and the underdark. dwarfs dig deep massive mines (some even connect to the underdark) so naturally they would find massive amounts of gems and **** tons of diamonds, kobolds are EVERYWHERE, more so in citys like waterdeep and neverwinter (who do you think builds and maintains there sewers, not joking its the lore, the city's even like them there because they take care of all the poo) and dig deep complex tunnels and are also known for hording large amount of gems and lastly the underdark, digging more caves in the underdark they are likely to find large deposits of diamonds and trade them to other races via the black market, and there are probably even more races that dig deep tunnels and mines that I can't even remember so the more than likely story is that Abeir-Toril has a massive abundance of diamonds and iron among other metals and gems so putting such high vaules on gems is just kind of dumb. also to pre counter the argument of "dwarfs and kobolds would horde there gems as well as the underdark races" it has been thousands of years of finding these AND trading gems and crystals, more than likely they diamonds might have been categorized as valuable but trade is a staple of being a dwarf so over thousands of years of trading them the market would have been over saturated with them, also the fact that diamonds are just crystallized carbon....there not even gems! GEMS I can buy being imbued with some type of magic power in a world with magic like rubies or emeralds, but diamonds are just crystals, and crystals are just everywhere, while much harder than normal crystals at the end of the day its just a clear crystals....I mean what WOULD be dope is a transmutation wizard using magic to make weapons and armor out of diamonds, not that would be some armor and weapons with interesting effects, like the weapons crit on 19s and the armor has a chance to deflect weapon attacks or even brake non magical weapons
A gem is just defined as a cut crystal. The fact that is was cut with artisan level craft would make it more valuable. Diamonds are also at the top of the hardness scale, so if that translates over to DnD, they would be extremely hard to make into gemstones. The difficulty would raise the value, and it would possibly be more difficult to do this with the tools at the time, unless you were a jeweler with considerable magic skill, then you could produce them easily with fabricate.
Aside from that, there's just the fact that it's valuable because people find it so. Value isn't measured just in rarity or usefulness, but how much people like something. Clothes can be $120, but effectively are just cloth, not even very functional clothes sometimes. There isn't much effort put into clothes like this a lot of the time as well, as it's just made in factories.
A gem is just defined as a cut crystal. The fact that is was cut with artisan level craft would make it more valuable. Diamonds are also at the top of the hardness scale, so if that translates over to DnD, they would be extremely hard to make into gemstones. The difficulty would raise the value, and it would possibly be more difficult to do this with the tools at the time, unless you were a jeweler with considerable magic skill, then you could produce them easily with fabricate.
Aside from that, there's just the fact that it's valuable because people find it so. Value isn't measured just in rarity or usefulness, but how much people like something. Clothes can be $120, but effectively are just cloth, not even very functional clothes sometimes. There isn't much effort put into clothes like this a lot of the time as well, as it's just made in factories.
You are wrong overall, a items vault isnt determined by want (or as you said how much people like said item) but by supply and demand, the more there is of something the lower demand so the item is sold cheaper, the lower the supply the higher the item is sold for due to fact there is less of the item
Now to drive this point in further, the dwarfs are super pumped about a bunch of stuff but nothing makes them happier then mining metals and gems and turning them into other stuff, doesn't matter what. So a large group of people has been spending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all year long for thousands of years making stuff! Now factor in that dwarfs also like buying and selling goods and having the knowledge that gems of various types are useful spell components they would be sold in massive chunks of gems to be broken up and sould as rough cut and sold on the cheap. The rulebook says nothing about the cut of the gem just the value as to reflect there size, but when you can buy cart loads of the gems by the cart load on the cheap it would extremely devalue said gems and most of all diamonds as they will be the most commonly found gem
Consider that "Diamond" and "Diamond worth 100 gp" and "Diamond worth 1000 gp" are all different in the same way diamonds differ in quality in real life. Small, imperfect diamonds are common - but only those of exquisite beauty or size garner high prices. It's those perfect diamonds which are worth more money due to their rarity and used as the components in these spells rather than diamonds in general being a rare phenomenon.
A gem is just defined as a cut crystal. The fact that is was cut with artisan level craft would make it more valuable. Diamonds are also at the top of the hardness scale, so if that translates over to DnD, they would be extremely hard to make into gemstones. The difficulty would raise the value, and it would possibly be more difficult to do this with the tools at the time, unless you were a jeweler with considerable magic skill, then you could produce them easily with fabricate.
Aside from that, there's just the fact that it's valuable because people find it so. Value isn't measured just in rarity or usefulness, but how much people like something. Clothes can be $120, but effectively are just cloth, not even very functional clothes sometimes. There isn't much effort put into clothes like this a lot of the time as well, as it's just made in factories.
You are wrong overall, a items vault isnt determined by want (or as you said how much people like said item) but by supply and demand, the more there is of something the lower demand so the item is sold cheaper, the lower the supply the higher the item is sold for due to fact there is less of the item
Seriously dude, "Supply & Demand" being the cornerstone of real economic activity is more of a fantasy than diamonds being used to bring people back from the dead.
Notes: Removed the Meme Image per Site Rules & Guidelines.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
well on the contrary, in the D&D world if you have magic and potions that means they have a VERY STRONG grasp of science and understanding of elements, what do you think spell and alchemical components are! matter of fact all the alchemical components are just elements on the periodic table of elements! and now that we have the artificer class its pretty much the scientist class!
"Science" is a term you will find referenced exactly zero times in the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual. The concept of science as in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, or some other hard science does not exist in the D&D world. The closest you will find to a setting that does is Eberron, and in that campaign setting you will merely find it used to describe how the campaign setting has codified and industrialized magic. It's not about magic as science. It's about magic as technology. It's about Thomas Edison, not Albert Einstein, which is why we have the Artifacer and not the Scientist as the new class. What you will find in every book is a lot of stuff about alchemy, the arcane, and scholarship. "Science," when the word is used, is used in it's most general sense: systematic knowledge gained through study. It doesn't not mean that the natural and physical laws of our world must work identically to the fantasy worlds in D&D. Eberron calls magic a science the same way we can talk about the science of happiness, the science of getting rich, the science of dating, and so on.
I say that in D&D the only natural elements that have been discovered are the four classical elements of air, earth, water, and fire, as well as the positive and negative elementals representing life and death. Every source book for D&D confirms this. That's not just what has been discovered by in-game researchers. Every sapient being in the multiverse believes this, from the mortals up to the divine. It is as true as the sunrise. It is what is explicitly told to the DM as how the multiverse functions, too.
Remember, D&D is a universe where Good and Evil are not abstract concepts. They are real, tangible forces that can be contacted and manipulated and that manifest themselves as physical beings of sometimes overwhelming power. It's a world where there are observable, measurable, and describable moral, ethical, and spiritual forces that operate just as natural and physical forces do and that use their own set of laws. The afterlife is not a philosophy or speculation. It is known to exist. You can go there. Gods are known to exist. You can talk to them. There are countless forces in D&D that cannot be explained by real world physics. As a result, it's not particularly useful to marry yourself to strictly adhering to how they work. Doubly so when you find that doing so means you end up with nonsensical outcomes.
its just that in D&D science so SO advanced they skipped right to being able to shoot lighting out of there hands, turning lead to gold and being able to heal people by touching them! to top that off elfs live VERY long lives AND they reincarnate when they die and get most of there old memories back and even leave themselves things for there future incarnations, it only takes one elf wizard with some spare time to write a book about how gems form in the planets crust to explain these things, on top of that the wizard can just summon and talk to a spirit from the elemental planes to get a detailed explanation on how there element works because when you brake it down everything belongs to one of the four elements/states of matter: gas, liquid, solid or thermal. So yes I think THAT ANY WIZARD IN THE SCHOOL OF TRANSMUTATION will know how matter works and how to change it with advanced mathematics and chemistry along with a little magic. Having magic doesn't mean there will be LESS science it means there will be WAY MORE of it, spells are described as extremely complicated and advanced formulas expressed in different ways, sometimes mathematical, sometimes in song (with is just math making sound) or though gods (witch are beings who have a deep understanding of how everything in the universe works). so please, tell me again how magical people in D&D don't know how matter is forms and works.
That is not what I claimed. I never claimed that "magical people in D&D don't know how matter is forms and works".
I claimed that the knowledge in D&D that matter is composed of the four elements is both true and accurate. For example, you would never express water as a composition of hydrogen and oxygen; that would be nonsense. Instead, you would say that elemental water can be transmuted by application of energy into two distinct types of air (our term would be "isotope" or "phase", though that's an analogous usage of those terms). You could call those "phases" hydrogen and oxygen for player convenience, but you could use "flammable air" and "cibus vitae" if you wish. These two phases of air readily transmute into fire when combined together with fire, and that fire transmutes them back into vaporous water (fire often exists only transitionally). This description is not convenient hand-waving to conceal the ignorance of characters in D&D to the periodic table. This is a true and accurate account of elemental interaction in the D&D universe.
I claim that the observable and measurable outcomes of physical and natural laws in the D&D world are the result of the four classical elements, the positive and negative elements, and whatever other universal forces exist in the D&D world (magic, good, law, chaos, neutrality, divinity, etc.). The fact that the observable effects of physical and natural laws in D&D largely mirror our universe is simply something we accept as true in order to keep the game playable and relatable. There is no requirement that they exactly mirror our universe in actual fact, particularly when there are clear, necessary, and demonstrable effects that do not mirror our universe: dragons flying, teleportation not being time travel, multiple accessible planes of existence, manipulations to the flow of time or mutability of space, ability to retroactively alter reality, allowing for the actual annihilation of matter and energy, etc. There are so many ways that the D&D universe already breaks real world scientific laws that it's not even useful to assume that everything will always work the same.
It's perfectly reasonable, for example, to rule that gunpowder doesn't exist because the combination of charcoal, saltpeter, and brimstone -- all readily accessible to any alchemist -- does not burn when fire is applied. Gunpowder simply doesn't work because the elements and materials don't work that way.
No, you don't have to play the way I'm describing above. It's all flavoring that you can modify or ignore however you want. My point is that you don't have to adopt the assertion that the world works the same at all to still end up with an equally functional game. The rules are not a suicide pact.
Yes, you absolutely can play the game in such a way that the 92 natural elements composed of protons and electrons exist and function as we know them. However, even if you do that, why would you assume that doing so makes diamonds worthless? Further, why would you intentionally adopt rulings that make the game more nonsensical than it already is? If you arrive at the end of a chain of conclusions that expensive material components don't make sense, and the game requires expensive material components to make at least some sense (hint: it does), then why would you choose to complain that way you have chosen to flavor your campaign means that the rules don't make sense instead of deciding that your flavor needs work?
You are wrong overall, a items vault isnt determined by want (or as you said how much people like said item) but by supply and demand
First of all, but what exactly do you think demand is except want?
Second of all, gems are valued for both their beauty and their inherent magical utility. Further, the quality of the gem in terms of beauty and magical utility are the same (i.e., the gp value of the gem determines how useful it is for magic, which is true). Given that, aren't spells that consume gems necessarily consuming the most valuable gems? Aren't gems now a consumable resource, like cheese or wine?
Third, since the value of the gem is based on the gold piece value of the object in universe, then perhaps all you need to do is say that a 100 gp gem is the size of peanut M&M, while a 1,000 gp gem is the size of a golf ball, and a 5,000 gp gem is the size of a baseball. It doesn't matter how common something is. You can have $100, $1,000, or $5,000 worth of that object. All you're assertions suggest is that diamonds in D&D are much larger than the equivalently sized diamonds in our world.
Finally, even if there are means to create diamonds, nothing says that doing so is economical. Perhaps there's a spell that creates 5,000 gp diamonds, but it takes 6,000 gp worth of silver to do it? Perhaps it takes a hundred years to grow a diamond. Perhaps the god prohibit non-natural creation. Perhaps gems can only be created on the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Minerals. There are a thousand possible explanations you should be looking to before concluding, "This is dumb because you can build diamonds with magic."
Give it up, guys. The man is determined to tell us all how useless diamonds are. People have told him why the game says otherwise for two pages now. It's just not worth arguing anymore, he's not going to listen to the same advice packaged the seventh or eighth different way, either.
Good point, he's contradicting himself at this point.
He said people in real life put diamonds at a high price, because jeweler stores market them like that, and that there's a ton of diamonds. Now he says it's about supply and demand, not mattering about how people prize them, but also saying the more of something there is, the less valuable it is.
well if stuff are just as rare as the real world, then diamonds would possibly still be less valuable since here on earth, the value of diamonds has been sneakily inflated by making shure only a fraction of the diamonds mined actiually make it to the market
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
dude diamons are not "kind of rare" and what value, have YOU EVER TRIED TO SELL A DIAMOND? you will be lucky to get 50 bucks regardless of how valuable you think it is, the only people who make money off of diamonds are jewelry companies because they want to sell them, what are they going to tell you: hey do you want to buy this very pretty but common stone they can just make by the thousands in a lab or mind tons of it from mines? nope they are going to tell you it is worth thousands so they can sell it too you for thousands lol. Just google it if you don't believe me. https://diamondfoundry.com/blogs/the-foundry-journal/are-diamonds-rare-1 (just one articular) on top of that as I stated before any transmutation wizard would 100% know how they are formed and making alot of heat and pressure with a spell would be stupid easy, I can think of several spells that already do that XD. GOLD however is very VERY rare, on our planet we only have about a total a few Olympic swimming pools worth of it.
its as you said,lt does not matter what you think the price should be,what matters is what the spell needs. its not about how rare or hard to find the diamond is,or how easy it is to make,its about the value of the gem,and l dont think a lump of coal you cook into a crystal in your basment would be enough to count as the 1000 gp needed for the spell. the magic to revive someone needs 1000 gp of diamond to work,weather that is one big,shiny,see threw gem you buy for 1kgp, or 1000 small,dull,foggy gems you buy for one gold each,you still need 1k gold worth of diamonds,and that is not something you or l decide,but the dm/the gods/the weave. l am well aware of the false scarcity and the big diamond scam,but this is not earth,this is a land with magic (which some argue is science so advanced you dont understand it,but thats another matter) and are (in some settings) just getting flintlocks,and dig out ore useing pickaxes and manual labor,not big drills,so while they might be just as plentiful as in real life,it still takes hard/skilled work to acquire and cut/polish them,which l think,the time and energy/skill needed to make them,is what makes them so valuable (in dnd) .
also,as Trirhabda said maybe diamonds in this world are not just carbon,but the remains of some god,or as you said,crystalized magic.
No magical reason if you want to say diamonds are a false economy - dragons and kings have been hoarding them for centuries in their treasure vaults, so 'new' diamonds are super rare and expensive.
Diamonds are just compressed carbon? What is this carbon of which you speak? Never heard of it! Oh, you find carbon in wood do you? Well try crushing your pencil between your bum cheeks and see how many diamonds you get out. And they're the most common thing found in the Earth apart from Iron? Garth, when you've finished making the tea grab a spade, nip outside and get me a bucket of diamonds from the garden. They're easy to find apparently, you'll be back in time for supper I imagine.
Diamonds are an intrinsic part of the Earth herself, an embodiment of her ability to create life. Which is why those who know their secrets can use them to restore the dead to life or heal grievous injuries with them. Personally I don't dick about with them that much - we all know what happened to the Dwarfs that tried mining the Mother Goddess too much - almost complete genocide of their species, earthquakes, volcanoes and I'm sure my cloak still smells of fish from that bloody tidal wave!
Some people... next you'll be saying the world is a sphere (It's not, I've seen the edge, bloody impressive if a bit noisy), the Gods are some anthropic explanation for natural phenomena (I've met three of them, nice people generally but the Sun's a bit up himself) and you can't blow stuff to hell with a pellet of bat poo. I've met a bat mage; he was dangerous with just his own resources. A supply of insects and he could fart fireballs. Broke the ice at parties I can tell you...
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I just not realized what REALLY makes diamonds and other gem components dumb: Dwarfs, kobolds and the underdark. dwarfs dig deep massive mines (some even connect to the underdark) so naturally they would find massive amounts of gems and **** tons of diamonds, kobolds are EVERYWHERE, more so in citys like waterdeep and neverwinter (who do you think builds and maintains there sewers, not joking its the lore, the city's even like them there because they take care of all the poo) and dig deep complex tunnels and are also known for hording large amount of gems and lastly the underdark, digging more caves in the underdark they are likely to find large deposits of diamonds and trade them to other races via the black market, and there are probably even more races that dig deep tunnels and mines that I can't even remember so the more than likely story is that Abeir-Toril has a massive abundance of diamonds and iron among other metals and gems so putting such high vaules on gems is just kind of dumb.
also to pre counter the argument of "dwarfs and kobolds would horde there gems as well as the underdark races" it has been thousands of years of finding these AND trading gems and crystals, more than likely they diamonds might have been categorized as valuable but trade is a staple of being a dwarf so over thousands of years of trading them the market would have been over saturated with them, also the fact that diamonds are just crystallized carbon....there not even gems! GEMS I can buy being imbued with some type of magic power in a world with magic like rubies or emeralds, but diamonds are just crystals, and crystals are just everywhere, while much harder than normal crystals at the end of the day its just a clear crystals....I mean what WOULD be dope is a transmutation wizard using magic to make weapons and armor out of diamonds, not that would be some armor and weapons with interesting effects, like the weapons crit on 19s and the armor has a chance to deflect weapon attacks or even brake non magical weapons
A gem is just defined as a cut crystal. The fact that is was cut with artisan level craft would make it more valuable. Diamonds are also at the top of the hardness scale, so if that translates over to DnD, they would be extremely hard to make into gemstones. The difficulty would raise the value, and it would possibly be more difficult to do this with the tools at the time, unless you were a jeweler with considerable magic skill, then you could produce them easily with fabricate.
Aside from that, there's just the fact that it's valuable because people find it so. Value isn't measured just in rarity or usefulness, but how much people like something. Clothes can be $120, but effectively are just cloth, not even very functional clothes sometimes. There isn't much effort put into clothes like this a lot of the time as well, as it's just made in factories.
Also known as CrafterB and DankMemer.
Here, have some homebrew classes! Subclasses to? Why not races. Feats, feats as well. I have a lot of magic items. Lastly I got monsters, fun, fun times.
You are wrong overall, a items vault isnt determined by want (or as you said how much people like said item) but by supply and demand, the more there is of something the lower demand so the item is sold cheaper, the lower the supply the higher the item is sold for due to fact there is less of the item
Now to drive this point in further, the dwarfs are super pumped about a bunch of stuff but nothing makes them happier then mining metals and gems and turning them into other stuff, doesn't matter what. So a large group of people has been spending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all year long for thousands of years making stuff! Now factor in that dwarfs also like buying and selling goods and having the knowledge that gems of various types are useful spell components they would be sold in massive chunks of gems to be broken up and sould as rough cut and sold on the cheap. The rulebook says nothing about the cut of the gem just the value as to reflect there size, but when you can buy cart loads of the gems by the cart load on the cheap it would extremely devalue said gems and most of all diamonds as they will be the most commonly found gem
Consider that "Diamond" and "Diamond worth 100 gp" and "Diamond worth 1000 gp" are all different in the same way diamonds differ in quality in real life. Small, imperfect diamonds are common - but only those of exquisite beauty or size garner high prices. It's those perfect diamonds which are worth more money due to their rarity and used as the components in these spells rather than diamonds in general being a rare phenomenon.
Seriously dude, "Supply & Demand" being the cornerstone of real economic activity is more of a fantasy than diamonds being used to bring people back from the dead.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
"Science" is a term you will find referenced exactly zero times in the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual. The concept of science as in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, or some other hard science does not exist in the D&D world. The closest you will find to a setting that does is Eberron, and in that campaign setting you will merely find it used to describe how the campaign setting has codified and industrialized magic. It's not about magic as science. It's about magic as technology. It's about Thomas Edison, not Albert Einstein, which is why we have the Artifacer and not the Scientist as the new class. What you will find in every book is a lot of stuff about alchemy, the arcane, and scholarship. "Science," when the word is used, is used in it's most general sense: systematic knowledge gained through study. It doesn't not mean that the natural and physical laws of our world must work identically to the fantasy worlds in D&D. Eberron calls magic a science the same way we can talk about the science of happiness, the science of getting rich, the science of dating, and so on.
I say that in D&D the only natural elements that have been discovered are the four classical elements of air, earth, water, and fire, as well as the positive and negative elementals representing life and death. Every source book for D&D confirms this. That's not just what has been discovered by in-game researchers. Every sapient being in the multiverse believes this, from the mortals up to the divine. It is as true as the sunrise. It is what is explicitly told to the DM as how the multiverse functions, too.
Remember, D&D is a universe where Good and Evil are not abstract concepts. They are real, tangible forces that can be contacted and manipulated and that manifest themselves as physical beings of sometimes overwhelming power. It's a world where there are observable, measurable, and describable moral, ethical, and spiritual forces that operate just as natural and physical forces do and that use their own set of laws. The afterlife is not a philosophy or speculation. It is known to exist. You can go there. Gods are known to exist. You can talk to them. There are countless forces in D&D that cannot be explained by real world physics. As a result, it's not particularly useful to marry yourself to strictly adhering to how they work. Doubly so when you find that doing so means you end up with nonsensical outcomes.
That is not what I claimed. I never claimed that "magical people in D&D don't know how matter is forms and works".
I claimed that the knowledge in D&D that matter is composed of the four elements is both true and accurate. For example, you would never express water as a composition of hydrogen and oxygen; that would be nonsense. Instead, you would say that elemental water can be transmuted by application of energy into two distinct types of air (our term would be "isotope" or "phase", though that's an analogous usage of those terms). You could call those "phases" hydrogen and oxygen for player convenience, but you could use "flammable air" and "cibus vitae" if you wish. These two phases of air readily transmute into fire when combined together with fire, and that fire transmutes them back into vaporous water (fire often exists only transitionally). This description is not convenient hand-waving to conceal the ignorance of characters in D&D to the periodic table. This is a true and accurate account of elemental interaction in the D&D universe.
I claim that the observable and measurable outcomes of physical and natural laws in the D&D world are the result of the four classical elements, the positive and negative elements, and whatever other universal forces exist in the D&D world (magic, good, law, chaos, neutrality, divinity, etc.). The fact that the observable effects of physical and natural laws in D&D largely mirror our universe is simply something we accept as true in order to keep the game playable and relatable. There is no requirement that they exactly mirror our universe in actual fact, particularly when there are clear, necessary, and demonstrable effects that do not mirror our universe: dragons flying, teleportation not being time travel, multiple accessible planes of existence, manipulations to the flow of time or mutability of space, ability to retroactively alter reality, allowing for the actual annihilation of matter and energy, etc. There are so many ways that the D&D universe already breaks real world scientific laws that it's not even useful to assume that everything will always work the same.
It's perfectly reasonable, for example, to rule that gunpowder doesn't exist because the combination of charcoal, saltpeter, and brimstone -- all readily accessible to any alchemist -- does not burn when fire is applied. Gunpowder simply doesn't work because the elements and materials don't work that way.
No, you don't have to play the way I'm describing above. It's all flavoring that you can modify or ignore however you want. My point is that you don't have to adopt the assertion that the world works the same at all to still end up with an equally functional game. The rules are not a suicide pact.
Yes, you absolutely can play the game in such a way that the 92 natural elements composed of protons and electrons exist and function as we know them. However, even if you do that, why would you assume that doing so makes diamonds worthless? Further, why would you intentionally adopt rulings that make the game more nonsensical than it already is? If you arrive at the end of a chain of conclusions that expensive material components don't make sense, and the game requires expensive material components to make at least some sense (hint: it does), then why would you choose to complain that way you have chosen to flavor your campaign means that the rules don't make sense instead of deciding that your flavor needs work?
First of all, but what exactly do you think demand is except want?
Second of all, gems are valued for both their beauty and their inherent magical utility. Further, the quality of the gem in terms of beauty and magical utility are the same (i.e., the gp value of the gem determines how useful it is for magic, which is true). Given that, aren't spells that consume gems necessarily consuming the most valuable gems? Aren't gems now a consumable resource, like cheese or wine?
Third, since the value of the gem is based on the gold piece value of the object in universe, then perhaps all you need to do is say that a 100 gp gem is the size of peanut M&M, while a 1,000 gp gem is the size of a golf ball, and a 5,000 gp gem is the size of a baseball. It doesn't matter how common something is. You can have $100, $1,000, or $5,000 worth of that object. All you're assertions suggest is that diamonds in D&D are much larger than the equivalently sized diamonds in our world.
Finally, even if there are means to create diamonds, nothing says that doing so is economical. Perhaps there's a spell that creates 5,000 gp diamonds, but it takes 6,000 gp worth of silver to do it? Perhaps it takes a hundred years to grow a diamond. Perhaps the god prohibit non-natural creation. Perhaps gems can only be created on the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Minerals. There are a thousand possible explanations you should be looking to before concluding, "This is dumb because you can build diamonds with magic."
Sigh.
OTL
Give it up, guys. The man is determined to tell us all how useless diamonds are. People have told him why the game says otherwise for two pages now. It's just not worth arguing anymore, he's not going to listen to the same advice packaged the seventh or eighth different way, either.
Please do not contact or message me.
Good point, he's contradicting himself at this point.
He said people in real life put diamonds at a high price, because jeweler stores market them like that, and that there's a ton of diamonds. Now he says it's about supply and demand, not mattering about how people prize them, but also saying the more of something there is, the less valuable it is.
Also known as CrafterB and DankMemer.
Here, have some homebrew classes! Subclasses to? Why not races. Feats, feats as well. I have a lot of magic items. Lastly I got monsters, fun, fun times.
well if stuff are just as rare as the real world, then diamonds would possibly still be less valuable since here on earth, the value of diamonds has been sneakily inflated by making shure only a fraction of the diamonds mined actiually make it to the market
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
its as you said,lt does not matter what you think the price should be,what matters is what the spell needs. its not about how rare or hard to find the diamond is,or how easy it is to make,its about the value of the gem,and l dont think a lump of coal you cook into a crystal in your basment would be enough to count as the 1000 gp needed for the spell. the magic to revive someone needs 1000 gp of diamond to work,weather that is one big,shiny,see threw gem you buy for 1kgp, or 1000 small,dull,foggy gems you buy for one gold each,you still need 1k gold worth of diamonds,and that is not something you or l decide,but the dm/the gods/the weave. l am well aware of the false scarcity and the big diamond scam,but this is not earth,this is a land with magic (which some argue is science so advanced you dont understand it,but thats another matter) and are (in some settings) just getting flintlocks,and dig out ore useing pickaxes and manual labor,not big drills,so while they might be just as plentiful as in real life,it still takes hard/skilled work to acquire and cut/polish them,which l think,the time and energy/skill needed to make them,is what makes them so valuable (in dnd) .
also,as Trirhabda said maybe diamonds in this world are not just carbon,but the remains of some god,or as you said,crystalized magic.
No magical reason if you want to say diamonds are a false economy - dragons and kings have been hoarding them for centuries in their treasure vaults, so 'new' diamonds are super rare and expensive.
but how does the spell know they are worth that?
Magic.
Diamonds are just compressed carbon? What is this carbon of which you speak? Never heard of it! Oh, you find carbon in wood do you? Well try crushing your pencil between your bum cheeks and see how many diamonds you get out. And they're the most common thing found in the Earth apart from Iron? Garth, when you've finished making the tea grab a spade, nip outside and get me a bucket of diamonds from the garden. They're easy to find apparently, you'll be back in time for supper I imagine.
Diamonds are an intrinsic part of the Earth herself, an embodiment of her ability to create life. Which is why those who know their secrets can use them to restore the dead to life or heal grievous injuries with them. Personally I don't dick about with them that much - we all know what happened to the Dwarfs that tried mining the Mother Goddess too much - almost complete genocide of their species, earthquakes, volcanoes and I'm sure my cloak still smells of fish from that bloody tidal wave!
Some people... next you'll be saying the world is a sphere (It's not, I've seen the edge, bloody impressive if a bit noisy), the Gods are some anthropic explanation for natural phenomena (I've met three of them, nice people generally but the Sun's a bit up himself) and you can't blow stuff to hell with a pellet of bat poo. I've met a bat mage; he was dangerous with just his own resources. A supply of insects and he could fart fireballs. Broke the ice at parties I can tell you...