Blur Ring costs less than a Blur Spell

[hcobb]

Blur(T): Costs 500 XP and 1 ST per turn used.

Blur Ring: Costs $3000 (or 300 XP) and no ST to use.

So play it smart and don't learn the Blur spell.

[larsdangly]

Or, you could say the Blur ring 'costs' an IQ of 18, the Create Lesser Magic Item spell, and your own magical laboratory and bevy of apprentices. So maybe go ahead and get that spell if you don't think are up for the investment required to make the item.

[Skarg]

This is low down on my nearly-endless unwritten list of reasons why I would almost never play with XP exchangeable for money.

It's also on my list of reasons I don't have trivially-available magic items for sale (and when a good magic item is for sale, it's probably not at list price).

[Celjabba]

As always, "assuming it can be purchased".

Also, the spell make it far easier to give blur to someone else mid-fight.

A solo wizard (with a couple apprentices and a few red shirts with crossbow in front plus a physicker close by, of course !) will likely prefer the ring.
A wizard who work with a team will likely find a use for the spell.

[Steve Plambeck]

Agreeing fully with Skarg's two reasons, I'd also like to sing the refrain I've used in other threads related to magic item costs.

If using the costs in the tables, best to take those as the costs or values for the UN-powered versions of the items. Semi-powered versions should cost at least 10 times more, and fully powered versions 100 times more. Again, that's only if you allow PCs to shop from the table, which I would never do.

That would bring the cost/value of Henry's Blur Ring up to $300,000. And it should be the sort of toy only the emperor of the known world can afford.

[larsdangly]

We need to come up with a numbering or naming scheme for our debates so we can cut to the chase more easily. I feel like we always have several open threads at any given moment that involve a certain distinguished member proposing a white-room argument involving magic item purchases, followed by several dozen responses to the effect that no one really plays like that.

[Anaraxes]

You can cast the Blur spell more than once.

[Axly Suregrip]

I believe Henry's point is that the Lesser and Greater magic items' (and this one in particular) standard prices are grossly too low.

And yes, they are.

[Skarg]

Taking Lars' suggestion of just listing the relevant known issues this brings up:

Blur(T): Costs 500 XP and 1 ST per turn used.
#XPCostsToLearnSpellsAndTalentsIsHighForLowAttribu teCharacters
#OriginalITLLetYouLearnUpToYourIQWithoutXP

Blur Ring: Costs $3000 (or 300 XP) and no ST to use.
#MaybeMagicItemsShouldAllCostFatigueToUse
#ConvertingXPToGoldIsWeird
#GMsMightNotWantToMakeMagicItemsEasilyBuyable
#MagicItemsListPricesAreLow
#SomeMagicItemListPricesAreGreatBargains

So play it smart and don't learn the Blur spell.
#IgnoreTheIssuesAndThereWillBeGameyWeirdness

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Skarg

#IgnoreTheIssuesAndThereWillBeGameyWeirdness

Well, exactly. And the threads Henry starts like this one are absolutely great for uncovering these issues, issues that when left hidden do (for some of us) "gnaw at the heart" of the game -- if that's not too overly-dramatic a way of putting it :)

$3000 to save a wizard tying up one point of memory sounds like quite a good deal to me, without including the big freebie of running the spell ST free too. And if it's for a non-wizard to be able to use the spell without tying up 3 talent points worth of memory? If that isn't a huge bargain, even for a totally unpowered item, I don't know what is!

One little concession I might make for these much-too-inexpensive magic items is to allow the owner to turn it on and start continuing spells for free, but every turn thereafter they would have to pay the regular cost. For Blur that would only save the user 1 ST on turn 1. It's a cheap IQ 8 spell anyway. If the item's spell was Summon Bear, that would save that initial 4 ST on turn 1, but then cost the 1 ST per turn normally required to continue that spell. That seems to me to be a whopping, big, generous enough ST savings right there. I feel any of these items from the official table have such ridiculously low prices they shouldn't be any easier to use than that.

I'm not adverse to considerably more expensive magic items running as self-powered or semi-powered, and certainly NPCs might own such a prize when it fits the story. But if a cash value is to be assigned to those items, it ought to be pretty astronomical.