I've never really understood why MJ likes to stop my game for a week every time I come up with a new spell.
That would be because you always surprise me with your approaches, and I have to wrestle with them to fit them into my categories.
I've also noted a problem in your suggestion
Five people in New Jersey, 500 dollars.
That might be a representative price for a mid-range hotel. The last time I booked a single room for Ubercon (more recently I have shared a room with another referee) I paid about $50 a night for a room at a nearby Motel 6; a quick check of rates at the Hotel Dupont in Wilmington Delaware informs me that their nightly rates run from $429 to $1500 dollars. Obviously you don't mean the rates of the top luxury hotel in the area, but the Hilton probably costs more than the Holiday Inn.
On the other hand, I kind of like the notion of "the cost of a night's lodging in a private room at an average hotel" as the sacrifice. As Scott observes, though, that requires you to know how much that would be. I think perhaps it could be randomized as "the cost of one night in the cheapest available private room at the next hotel or inn I pass," which obliges you to be aware of the places you pass and determine the rate at the moment you pass it, but that becomes a game in itself--whether you can map out cheap hotels and avoid passing expensive ones, or whether a GE roll tells us what you pass on your travels, so I'd like to avoid that.
I also like the notion that the sacrifice would be made as a contribution to a charity. You specify a "secular" charity, which might also tie your hands--in a high mag world, most charities are likely to be religious. In some worlds (Gamma World comes to mind again) there would be no charities, so your magic would be stifled until you versed to a world in which it was possible to catch up on your charitable gifts. On the other hand, it might be sufficient that the gift be made charitably and anonymously (the latter so that you would not benefit from it by status or gratitude), in which case I can see any of a number of means of distributing the wealth being valid.
So we're looking at a material component defined as "the value in local currency or fungible goods of a single night's local lodging in a private room or the equivalent, to be given anonymously as a charitable contribution."
It also occurs to me that in the ancient Middle East, the value of such a room is zero: it is incumbent upon locals to extend hospitality to travelers in the form of food and lodging as a moral obligation, and thus inns and hotels do not prosper in such lands. That becomes a problem with the spell, since free accommodations eliminate the value of the sacrifice. A pure socialist state might create the reverse problem: no charities, no needy persons to receive charity, and no means of distributing wealth to them. That, though, would become a problem for you to solve in such a world, and not really a problem with the spell itself.
The point was for the value of the sacrifice to balance against the number of persons affected by the spell. It is pretty typical for the second person to be -10, the third to be -5, and each additional person to be -2; so if we allow that there are as many coins as persons, the first three coins provide +6 against the -15 of the combined second and third is -9, and above that each additional individual is balanced by one additional increment of value.
I see it as the material component is one night's lodging, that in essence it would be the same as if the spell required Harry to provide a private room for a night in a place where he could only get it from someone else by paying a price; the material component of the room is then converted into a currency value based on local exchange rates, and dispersed through anonymous charitable giving.
Does that work for you?
--M. J. Young
