How to make magic items more common?

[mlangsdorf]

You're running into a problem that the original enchantment prices are extremely arbitrary (as you note), but that fixing them is a lot of tedious work. And while other people are willing to advise you on how to do that tedious work, we're not going to do it for you.

You have a pretty good idea for how you want enchantments to be priced in the abstract (roughly equivalent to equivalent TL7 technology), now you just need to go through the books and figure out the details.

ie:
The Parasol spell is equivalent to an umbrella, and should cost around $3-10 (umbrellas cost $5, per HT p30).

The Slow Fall spell is roughly equivalent to a parachute, and should cost around $1000-$5000, depending on how you calculate the trade-off between having to spend FP and not having to carry a 30 lbs of parachute.

Obviously, pricing stuff like Reverse Missile or Missile Shield is going to be much harder, because there's no real world analogue. But you can set out some sample prices for magic gear with one of those spells, and see the price at which all of the PCs buy it, one PC buys it, and none of the PCs buy it, and take some large percentage of the single PC purchase price as the price.

The big advantage here is that you're looking at end user price, not production cost. This is really how the stuff in Magic should be priced anyway, but it's not. Go ahead and correct the error while you're setting up your setting.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Pluribus

I am asking for advice on a price shift that will not break game mechanics. Advice on how low is too low, if/how I should change the energy increase between increments of enchantments like "Accuracy" or "Fortify", and how I might do all this without making one single item like a wand of fireballs become so much more price efficient than anything else.

Ah, OK. The game mechanics do not actually break if you hand out magic items for free.

If you reduce the cost by more than a factor of about 4, buying a magic item starts to look like a good deal compared to earning the character points to buy the ability yourself. Of course technology does that too, so it's not a new problem if you run high TL games, but magic can duplicate a much wider array of skills and abilities.

If you reduce the cost by more than a factor of 10 or so, buying a magic item that can do something starts to look like a good deal compared to hiring somebody to do it, even if you are only going to need it done once. The market for PC mages starts to disappear and you should see magic causing the same sorts of economic changes mechanization does - there will be more and more stuff that ordinary people will find cheaper to do with an enchanted item than to pay someone for.

If you reduce the cost by a factor of 100, magic is usually cheaper than even modern (or more advanced) technology. Expect the same kind of problems you'd see in a "post-scarcity" economy with ubiquitous AI - questions like exactly what are human adventurers supposed to do?

I am also hoping someone out there can point to a systematized means of doing this so that I do not end up having to go through the entire magic book to manually re-price every single spell. I certainly wouldn't mind if I found a spreadsheet made by somebody who has already done this.

That's quite a different exercise. Changing relative costs doesn't necessarily make magic items more common, it changes which ones are more common than others at whatever price level you set. Selecting certain items to lower the cost considerably is more akin to selecting which technologies to allow into the setting, and depends on what you want the setting to be about If you want injury to be no big deal, you can leave everything the same except healing enchantments, if you want major engineering projects to be affordable, and every town to have a wall, you might just lower the cost of tools that use Shape Earth.

1) I want items that run on magic to be as common in my setting as objects that run on electricity were in the 1960s or so. Probably more common than that even.

Note there are two variables here, the price you set the items at, and what you set starting wealth at. Assuming you are using the $15,000 starting wealth of high tech games - and you might as well with that much magic around everybody's standard of living is going to be better even for stuff that doesn't directly involve an enchanted item, since the people manufacturing it will use magic too - gizmos that do something genuinely useful, good quality guns and the like at that point run to hundreds to a few thousands of dollars, so you probably want magic items to be priced around $1 per energy.

"Reverse Missiles" makes you completely immune to all projectile based attacks, and causes them to attack whoever shot them instead. Enchanting it costs 600 energy. An increase of just 6x seems odd for the difference between something that is literally described as being exactly as useful as a parasol... and something that could send a two ton boulder screaming back towards the catapult that fired it.

There's some debate about whether Reverse Missiles would work on a two ton boulder, and that entire chain is one of the most debated ones from Magic, but still, it also costs 7 FT for a minute, and requires Magery to use the item unless you add enough Power to make it self acting, vs. 1 per hour for Shade, so it's less serious than it looks

Then there are time travel spells, I plan to just leave those out.

Unfortunately GURPS spells were created in essentially three stage, and the last one, for GURPS Grimoire, was full of spells that are overpowered, make sense only in certain contexts, should have been trivial options of the spells set as their prerequisites and so on. A good playtest for Magic for 4e might well have changed a lot of them, or at least provided some warning messages, but it didn't *have* a public playtest. Watch out for the Technological and Gate spells too.

[Brandy]

I don't know if you will find this useful or not, but in my own game world, I assigned all of the spells available a skill difficulty (Easy, Average, Hard, and Very Hard). Why I did this probably isn't important, just that I did it. Anyway, what that let me do was to dump all of the energy costs in Gurps Magic, and create a set of generic guidelines and costs for creating magic items. The effect of this in my gameworld was that even with the economic assumptions in Gurps Magic, Magic items for some spells (Easy spells for non-mages, and Average spells for mages) would be crafted easily enough to have commodity pricing and be generally available.

Under these assumptions, it was possible for anyone to own some magic, but not necessarily to go down to market and pick up an item for any given spell -- some were still too difficult/ expensive to produce that way.

If you're interested:

Re-worked college of enchantment.
Some of the magic items that I made commonly available.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Pluribus

I do not care how the factory works. Enchanting could be powered by the tears of kittens for all it matters to the questions I have asked thus far in this thread. I am looking for numbers, not names of magic reagents.

Bear in mind that GURPS in general (and this forum in particular) attracts "builders" who DO care about the process and rules. And I would expect that sooner or later, someone in your game is going to want to enchant something, and you are going to need to figure out a PC kitten-tear-extraction technique. I recommend that one of them take Sadism.

Originally Posted by Pluribus

It's not even important how long it takes them to enchant things. The setting is an industrial society. For comparison, in real life even a generic Tabasco Sauce takes up to three years to make, but you don't put in an order and wait three years to get your sauce. You just go into the store and pick out one they already have sitting around.

How long WILL matter as soon as the PC's ask for something unusual or decide to manufacture on their own. Tabasco takes so long to make because part of the manufacturing process is "stick it on a shelf", but the man-hours of labor will directly impact price.

Originally Posted by Pluribus

My first post, and all of my subsequent posts have said "I plan to lower the price, but I am not sure how much I should lower it." and almost every reply has basically said "You should lower the price."

If that is all you want, then what you need to do is look at the indicated items, find the 1960's equivalents (where they exist) and adjust the price accordingly. At $1/pt, a +1/+1 Accuracy/Puissance crossbow costs an extra $750, while +3/+3 costs $15k - that on its own seems reasonable for what you are seeking, but you will likely need to adjust some prices.

I would probably tell my players "Enchantment costs are $1 (or whatever) but some items are in higher demand and will cost more - no, I won't give you a list, supply and demand are constantly changing. Ask me an item, I'll tell you the price."

Originally Posted by Pluribus

For example, "Shade" prevents you from getting sunburned, and enchanting it costs 100 energy. "Reverse Missiles" makes you completely immune to all projectile based attacks, and causes them to attack whoever shot them instead. Enchanting it costs 600 energy. An increase of just 6x seems odd for the difference between something that is literally described as being exactly as useful as a parasol... and something that could send a two ton boulder screaming back towards the catapult that fired it.

Please note that an item that casts a spell still requires either Power or energy from the wielder. Shade costs 1pt/hour, Reverse Missiles costs 3-7pts/min. "Always on" versions would cost 600 pts for Shade and 2,600 pts for
Reverse Missiles (after paying the initial 4pt difference).

Also think about the ramifications of this - if I can buy an Always On Reverse Missiles enchantment for $2600, chances are every serious fighter will have one. Missile weapons will be secondary, and things like fireball wands will be the weapon of choice. Really, the biggest play issue with cheap enchantments is that it will totally rewrite the foundations of nearly every kind of interaction, from combat to trade to romance. Think about it, because your players sure will!

Originally Posted by Pluribus

There are no ruins full of powerful artifacts. There is little practical reason for an object that is really old to be better than one that is new. Unless it is some forgotten technique like a Stradivarius Violin. Just don't expect it to lay waste to your enemies.

There are actually lots of reasons for old magical items to be more powerful, but they all depend on various narrative decisions. If magic is 100% knowledge based and that knowledge has never been interrupted, then the power of magic items will smoothly increase over time. But if the great enchanter Bezapsit died without sharing his technique, or if his impervious armor used up the last of the unobtanium on the planet, then that centuries-old relic might represent an irreproducible apex.

[tantric]

I have a TL3+2 game, and I simply don't use the enchantment rules.It seems to me that the whole point of the enchantment rules is to make magitech impossible. Instead, I let master artisans just take a Trained By Master Smith advantage and then learn new skills for each type of magical item they make. GURPS enchantment rules are designed for making swords +5 hard to get for adventurers, not $15 magical glowstones for commoners. I believe that Ghostdancer has an article about cheap RPM enchantments, too, but I can't advise you to buy something I haven't read (and I find having questions answered with "go buy my stuff" deeply annoying). I've begged for a specific magitech supplement for a decade. If you search for my name and 'enchantments' you'll find the threads where we hashed this own, or just PM me. 'Course, I haven't play tested my rules.