Magic item cleanup project

[hcobb]

They have to use ST at start because they not only don't have Mana, the maximum Staff level for a starting character is Staff I. Bye bye Molly.

(I kid, Molly would use the other four memory points to buy Alertness, Naturalist, or worst of all Charisma.)

[MikMod]

This:

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

This is the Simple Solution:

(1) Postulate that in your campaign world's history there was a Classical Age Of Magic many centuries ago.

(2) Postulate the 3 enchantment spells were forgotten and entirely lost at the end of the Classical Age (religious persecution might be a good excuse, but be as inventive as you want).

(3) All extant magic items are rare antique relics from that age, the few that are even remembered all hidden away, buried, or closely guarded, and none are for sale anywhere. Only the GM can introduce one, allowing it to be found or stolen in the course of a highly dangerous adventure.

(4) The PC lucky enough to find one can sell it for whatever they can get for it, but as it's irreplaceable they are highly advised to keep it. (Just thought of a new spell, Vanishing Coins (C) with which NPCs could buy expensive items from PCs... they would look, smell, feel and taste just like real coins for 24 hours.)

The End

(It's way too late at night to offer up my complex solution, so another time perhaps :-)

(Characters added to enable posting)

[hcobb]

If the only weapons effective against deadly monsters are staves then all your PCs shall be wizards sooner or later.

[Chris Rice]

I don't have a problem with their being listed costs to buy Magic Items in the rules (even if I never use them); they're just there as an initial guide for the GM.

However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the costs are far too low given the effort of making these items and their usefulness.

Consider: the time and resources it takes for a fairly powerful Wizard and their apprentices to make the thing in the first place is considerable, so I don't believe they would make these things with some vague idea of selling them on at a basic mark up price.

They would either make them for their own use, in which case they won't be selling them to you, or they will make them to order for you but at a much higher price that reflects the effort expended in making them and their usefulness to you.

Basically, I think the table of costs should be seriously revised to reflect these points.

[hcobb]

I have two issues:

• Magic items are in general too cheap.
• Some items (SF ring) are much cheaper and more useful than other enchantments/potions (enchanted armor)

[Chris Rice]

Originally Posted by hcobb

I have two issues:

• Magic items are in general too cheap.
• Some items (SF ring) are much cheaper and more useful than other enchantments/potions (enchanted armor)

Agreed. We therefore need to increase the costs and perhaps have some difficult to acquire components for most, if not all items.

[hcobb]

Easy way to drive up magic item costs is to copy the 18 from the Alchemists.

Revived Enchanter seeks new Apprentices, apply within.

[Steve Plambeck]

In addition to my Simple Solution (a few posts back) here is my Complex Solution:

(1) I can see keeping the ITL table prices (perhaps) for unpowered items. Then all the item gives you really is the ability to cast the spell as if you were a wizard who knew the spell. You'd pay the full ST cost to run the spell, but you wouldn't have to make a DX roll to turn it on.

(2) Semi-powered versions of the same items would cost 10 times as much as the table. Where a spell cost 1 ST per turn, it could cost 1 ST per minute.

(3) Powered versions of the same items would cost 100 times as much as the table. These still wouldn't be entirely free to use: where a spell cost 1 ST per turn, it could cost 1 ST per hour instead. I wrote in another thread about an easy way to manage that.

But I'd further limit the creation of these items by PCs as follows:

(4) Lesser Magic Item and Greater Magic Item Creation spells would cease to be spells altogether. They would become talents, expensive talents, with (in my world's case) an expensive Wizardry talent as a prerequisite. It's crazy those skills are listed as spells you can learn for the same 1 point memory cost as Blur or any other spell. If I'm not going to disallow PCs from making their own magic items (the "Simple Solution") then it has to be dang hard for a starting character to evolve to that point, and require a lot of sacrifice.

(5) The Weapon/Armor Enchantment spell is gone, period. For an enchanted weapon or armor to be made, the creator must know both one of the Magic Item Creation talents and the Master Armorer talent. For these things to be made they must be enchanted during the forging process. There's no picking up a finished sword somebody else made and enchanting it after the fact. Forging and enchanting are a single process, and require simultaneous mastery of both. (But also, the enchantment cannot be removed by a simple Remove Thrown Spells spell as it is now -- that's way too cheap to do even under the existing Weapon/Armor Enchantment spell rule!)

(6) Lastly, any of these items should take much longer to create. Where the tables say weeks they should say months, and in some cases years. If I allow a PC to make a +5 enchanted sword, it has to take a lot longer than the 10 weeks it would under the RAW. 10 weeks is like the time between two adventure scenarios within a campaign; no wizard should be able to turn up for the next adventure with a homemade Excalibur in hand. To create a significant magic item for themself, a PC must be required to retire from adventuring for a significant period of game world time (and do so with a means to house and feed themself for the whole period!) And yes, the effects of aging will end up applying to any PC who takes off years at a time to make enchanted items, even only a few of them. Meanwhile of course, events in the campaign world will march forward. Note here that the player doesn't have to stop playing week to week, but would have to play with new characters while their veteran wizard disappeared for quite awhile.

[Skarg]

I don't have time for detailed replies here now but about Weapon/Armor Enchantment times:

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

(6) Lastly, any of these items should take much longer to create. Where the tables say weeks they should say months, and in some cases years. If I allow a PC to make a +5 enchanted sword, it has to take a lot longer than the 10 weeks it would under the RAW. 10 weeks is like the time between two adventure scenarios within a campaign; no wizard should be able to turn up for the next adventure with a homemade Excalibur in hand. To create a significant magic item for themself, a PC must be required to retire from adventuring for a significant period of game world time (and do so with a means to house and feed themself for the whole period!) And yes, the effects of aging will end up applying to any PC who takes off years at a time to make enchanted items, even only a few of them. Meanwhile of course, events in the campaign world will march forward. Note here that the player doesn't have to stop playing week to week, but would have to play with new characters while their veteran wizard disappeared for quite awhile.

Even RAW, it is not only 10 weeks to do a +5 enchantment. Class A means doubling every level, so it's 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 weeks for +5. It also doubles the number of wizards, so even if one PC wizard has that spell, he'd need 15 more wizards to do it in 32 weeks. To do it all by himself, he'd take 16 times as long. 16 x 32 / (52 weeks / year) = 9.8 years for one wizard to enchant a +5 sword.

My house interpretation of Weapon/Armor enchantment back in the 1980's, was that each level was its own enchantment. So you'd have to do the +1 enchantment first, taking 2 weeks with one wizard, then the +2 enchantment, taking another 4 weeks with 2 wizards, then the +3 enchantment, taking another 8 weeks with 4 wizards, etc. And I also kept adding in the ingredient costs on top of the other costs. So a +5 sword enchantment ended up costing $75,300 (the base minimum price, not taking into account market adjustments) and taking 62 weeks by an increasing number or wizards as the project continued.

Not to mention all the other campaign considerations I've brought up before. The military, nobility, wizards, and other guilds and rich/powerful people competing for the service of those wizards who are willing to sell their services to enchant things, and some of them perhaps taking interest in whoever else has the money to commission enchantments or buy items.

And even with all that, we ended up deciding we needed/wanted our Magic Item Breakdown house rules.

[FireHorse]

Originally Posted by Skarg

… So a +5 sword enchantment ended up costing $75,300 …

With that kind of money, you could hire (and equip) 60 veteran mercenary spearmen, a captain to lead them, 30 veteran light crossbowmen with their own captain, and then 30 veteran wizards and a wizard captain for them, too.

And you'd still have a fair chunk of that money left over.

And whatever you were going to kill with that +5 sword would be way more dead.