The World of Avlis

... a portable hole?

Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT FOR AVLIS. Which is why I've put it in NWN GD. I don't even know if it can be done. I'm mainly posting because of idle curiosity, and because it's something I feel like piddling with when I have a few free hours at work. Maybe someday I'll add it to Gnomeworld.

This is how it would work: you'd buy a hole from a merchant, the wizard who makes them. The hole would be an item in your inventory and would weight almost nothing. When you use the item, it disappears from your inventory and a hole appears on the ground in front of you. The hole is a placeable with an inventory - more precisely, it's a p-chest. When you close the inventory, the hole placeable automatically disappears and the hole item reappears in your inventory. The hole item is plot, so you don't lose it (and everything you put in it) when you die - that'd just be mean.

Every time you put an item in the hole you spend a token amount of gold (say 5gp). ICly, the wizard you bought the hole from is renting you the space of a pocket dimension he's created. OOCly, this prevents people from powercrafting by mining a shitload of ore and then cramming it into their portable hole. It costs you nothing to take things out of the hole.

The hole might be keyed to you so that only you can open it - I haven't thought that through yet.

Advantages:
- if you have a second set of gear that you've put in the hole, no more naked runs.
- extremely convenient. Just like those guys in PnP, you really can pull a 10-foot pole out of your ass.
- you never ever need to look for an inn room ever again.

Disadvantages:
- you have to be careful where you open the hole. Nothing stops someone from killing you after you've opened the hole and then looting everything you had in it, or from sneaking up invisible and looting things from the hole while you have it open.

Anyway, back to the main question - how much would you pay for something like this? The idea is that it's for folks who don't have the skizzils to build a house and can't find an inn room. That said, I'm not thinking this would be cheap, as it's extremely convenient. I was thinking around a million gp, but I don't know the market for these things.

How incredibly useful..
How much would I pay for a potential house that I can carry with me and store all my goods only costing a nominal fee to deposit items...

How much does the average PC house cost? I think a million is under priced. For Role-Play values I would much prefer a House but as you say I dont have the know how to use the tool set to make one, but for adventuring convenience then the Hole is the business...I'd pay upto 5 million for something like that. It would be a Great Gold Sink too.

Where do I sign up?
Need a Mortgage first though

This is thinking at current avlis prices.

plot chests are 120k at the moment and are stationary.

Even a plot bag that kept the contents inside it at death would be worth at least 50k at a very conservative guess.

Now consider that a PChest has 25 pages, so ~1.25 mil.

Now add to the fact that it weighs a minimal amount, so you could effectively carry an entire pchest of plate armour around with you. I'd consider that doubles the price to ~2.5 mil. I'd do anything to carry around all the stuff Al could potentially use. It would mean you could have a complete set of equipment for different circumstances.

Granted the fact that someone could loot it while you had it open is a bit nasty so knock 20% off the value ~2 mil. Afterall you could still open it in a locked room or with friends around to counter that.

The charge for each item you put in to it. consider average sized items 1x2. that means you could fit 14 or 15 per page ~75 per page = 1875 for a full hole. thats minimal
Even if you filled it with 25 pages of iron ore thats only 4375 for a full hole.

You'd need to make the per item fee at least 50 to stop people mining it full like you intend it.

I'm normally pretty accurate with valuations on Avlis and I'd value such a hole at the 2 - 3 mil mark. Hell i'd pay up to 5 mil for it

On Avlis crazy prices, it would have to be something like 1million gold. And if I was paying that much I'd be most pissed if I had to pay 5gp each time I used it!

Basically, whats the cost of a p-chest + basic room, then multiply that by 5 or something for "convenience factor".

*Remembers the portable hole from his PnP group* Now that things was real fun! It was the weirdest and best magical item ever. Highly useful with very creative usage possibilities (We had a Doctor in our group - you get the picture).

The only problem with making it a huge price is it makes it a rich gits toy.

Why not charge a portion of the value of what you put in a hole, with a minimal level charge for hole use each time.

So say I stick my +1 nibbled badgerer in the hole, say base value 1100 gold, it costs me 10 gold for using the hole once, plus an extra fee for using such an item in the hole say 1% of value to have in the hole, 11gold.

(Tanmars +5 shocking hammer, 1% toolset costs 12 000 to stick it in plus 10 gold just to have it in the hole.)

The extra charge being the added effort in having bigger and more energetic items in a hole, the extra charge need to contain the extra magic being stuck in the hole.

The 10 gold being a minimal charge for someone opening a hole for you each time you put something in.

So if you do need to carry a second set of uberness shoved up your own hole.....it costs.

I'd want one.. but I fear it would de-value almost every other magic container and p-chest immediately. Plus, as noted, it would be a rich boy's toy only.

Wyrmwing wrote:I'd want one.. but I fear it would de-value almost every other magic container and p-chest immediately. Plus, as noted, it would be a rich boy's toy only.

Look, just about everything for sale now on Avlis is a "rich kid's toy", my character runs around with 23k gold. It is enough to keep me stocked with arrows, heal kits and potions. But I came to the conclusion a long time ago, that I ain't ever going to be able to afford, a) a house, b) a fancy elemental sword, c) fancy armor, d) a car... oh wait, they don't have those on Avlis yet do they

Sure, a portable hole will be a rich kid's toy, just like a house is a rich kid's toy. There is a big void between the "haves" and the "have nots". Portable Holes costing 1 mil + don't make much difference to the "have nots".

As it is not for Avlis, i can't give any reasonable amount of money, as it's largely dependent on the economy of the world you'd put it in.

Generically speaking, i'd say it's the ultimate storage, so i'd say it should cost a character a rib out of the body if he's at say the 70th percentile of the levelcurve on the server, and still a hefty sum if he's at the 80th percentile. At the 90th percentile i'd say it should be fairly affordable for a character.

Mickey.

I like it!

Anyone ever read the description of a Bag of Holding? That hole theory is just the way I imagined it!

Edit:

something like that shouldn't be buy-able, but reward drops only.

JollyOrc wrote:something like that shouldn't be buy-able, but reward drops only.

in which case it is the equivalent of a +5 uber vorpal weapon with a custom description

No self-respecting girl would walk around with a giant hole and surely would not be opening it all over town. The jokes would be neverending.

Other than that, it sounds pretty neat.
Oh and cost, depends entirely on the world. If gold is easy to come by and stuff is too, then not as much.
If it is like here, then it would go for a lot.

Alphonse wrote:

JollyOrc wrote:something like that shouldn't be buy-able, but reward drops only.

in which case it is the equivalent of a +5 uber vorpal weapon with a custom description

as it's not for Avlis, this might happen quite more often. Keep in mind that we no next to nothing about the world this is for.

Guess I should have been more clear - pretend it's for Avlis, or a CoPaP world. Since y'all's experience draws mainly from Avlis/CoPaP (you never know, one day Gnomeworld might link with CoPaP).

Also, some other stuff:

- if you put any kind of magic bag into a portable hole, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

- you could only own one hole at a time. You could buy more of the hole items, but they'd just open to the same p-chest.

And yeah, it'd be a toy for the rich. The uber-convenience of the hole means it would be a rare item. It should not be a common item - my PnP waited years before they got a portable hole, and when they got it they freaked out, it was like the gates of heaven had opened up or something. JO's idea about them being DM-drop only is interesting, but that removes their gold-vacuuming potential

2 - 3 mil if they were common enough for everyone who wanted one to be able to get one.

upwards of 5 mil if they were rare

using avlis money

Neat idea if you could code it right.

My suggestion would be ..
instead of 5gp per item, do it like the p-chests, where you have a certain amount of space and items, and can "upgrade" both by paying gold .. even tie it so that you have to be at one of the "wizard/merchants" to upgrade it.

Alphonse wrote:2 - 3 mil if they were common enough for everyone who wanted one to be able to get one.

*cough*

You suggesting that every character who wants it can get 2-3 million? I'm really doing something wrong here...


I'd say 2-3 million would be good, and would indeed make it rare (as in: like 2-3 dozen players would have it after half a year; rare but not extremely special). I'd never pay that amount of money, but then i don't mine and don't have mor than 2/3 pages of stuff in my P-chest anyway. 1 million would be a price i'd buy it for.

Khaelindra wrote:

Alphonse wrote:2 - 3 mil if they were common enough for everyone who wanted one to be able to get one.

*cough*

You suggesting that every character who wants it can get 2-3 million? I'm really doing something wrong here...

no i meant that there are enough around that anyone with enough gold could get them

I would pay for it with Thorfinn's Soul....

Alphonse wrote:

Khaelindra wrote:

Alphonse wrote:2 - 3 mil if they were common enough for everyone who wanted one to be able to get one.

*cough*

You suggesting that every character who wants it can get 2-3 million? I'm really doing something wrong here...

no i meant that there are enough around that anyone with enough gold could get them

Ok, gotcha!

Free - or 1 gp, then. But rental as per the above post - at a fraction of what you store; every time the hole is used a % fee is charged based on the item's value (or even the item's current market rate).

This fee would be directly transfered to the wizard who was maintaining the "space" that the hole contains (look - if he can make a hole that can be folded up and moved around, he can certainly set up a rental system); the wizard sets amounts for all items - ie all items set to value by default, wizard sets higher rates for items he chooses to, then gets say 1-2% or some such of these amounts; could even supply the purchaser of the hole with a list of 'higher than usual' items.

That wizard would become very rich in a short amount of time and be able to buy any one of the cities in Avlis (or whereever)

Economics, man - don't sell for a flat rate that only a few can afford, sell them cheap and milk the market (anyone in the UK will be familiar with Sky)

Problem with the renting idea is then the whole miners ore bug would step in. Ore value would be peanuts so people will just store that in there instead of 1337 gear.

Talwin Hawkins wrote:Problem with the renting idea is then the whole miners ore bug would step in. Ore value would be peanuts so people will just store that in there instead of 1337 gear.

Not if the wizard chooses to inflate the value of ore (maybe it interferes with his spells, mabe he just has a thing against smiths) - it would only need to be a few thousand per lump....

The you would have to cose each type of ore. Then each craftable component. Good luck.