How to make magic items more common?
 

I am starting a TL4+3 game. Meaning regular tech reached TL4 before magitech took over for the next 3 levels, making it similar to TL7. Given this, one would think that magic items would have replaced many "modern" devices. Such as flying carpets instead of cars.

Trouble is, even using advanced enchanting rules such as the ones found in "Technomancer", the increased income of TL7 PCs, and this handy pricing reference site http://technomancer.jargon-file.org/...ncer4Items.pdf magic items are still prohibitively expensive.

A TL7 PC's starting wealth is $15,000 and all but $3,000 of that is tied up in cost of living. Thing is, even putting puissance +1 on a weapon costs 25,000. Nearly double your starting wealth, and more than eight times your actual spending money.

A one square meter flying carpet that can support 225 lbs will cost $18,000. Even if I inflict a "low ceiling" and restrict it to roads to make it more car-ish it probably still wouldn't approach the price of a smartcar nowadays which would be less than $5,000 GURPs dollars (given the $1 loaf of bread conversion), and has a lot more functionality.

Plus there's a bunch of incidentals. Instead of carrying an umbrella or parasol it would help flavor if people could have magic items that cast "umbrella" or "shade" spells. Trouble is that those would cost $390.

So I feel kinda conflicted. I want magic to be a pretty significant part of society. But I don't want to just tell players to take a weapon with revolver stats and just say it's a glowing crossbow. However, to allow sufficient enchantment to reach the level of basic TL7 equipment I would have to make enchanting dirt cheap. And if I do that how to I justify not skipping right past martial weapons and everybody just carrying giant-fireball wands?

The setting also takes place in a "high magic area" if that helps.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

If large portions of the world are high-mana, you can reduce the cost of Slow And Sure Enchantment. The abundance of mana in the world makes enchanting so simple that it's just a mainstream job, not just some arcane thing only a handful of mages can do.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

Enchantment costs are completely arbitrary*. There's no particular reason that is has to take an enchanter 250 days of work to create a mildly magical sword, so there's no reason that you should have to pay him some reasonable wage for that amount of effort. Pick how much you want the various enchantments to cost and just go with that.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

Get rid of prerequisites for the enchant spell.

Let enchanters put as many fatigue points into their magic items as they can expend; let them make just one enchantment roll per item or per month as part of job to reduce critical failures.

One Mage with standard 10 fatigue during an 8 hr day can generate 58 fatigue towards a project.

Assume a higher level Mage could have a couple assistants, effectively tripling the amount per day to 174.

Assume 25 days worked a month, 58x25=1450 energy per month for a single enchanter, 4350 for an enchanter with two helpers. Failures should decrease the energy output and/or introduce faults into the item.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

I thought that there were industrial magic rules to allow assembly-line enchanting.
I would look for those if that is not already what you are referring to in Technomancer.

There are also metachornic generators(Pyramid article) that may provide another option.

If you just need huge power sources for Q&D enchantment, take a look at urban magics(a Thaumatology expansion)

You could also GM fiat 'power points' where enchantments can be made for much less time and energy.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

The price of enchantment is designed to restrict it to rich fellas and master magicians. It can be reduced at your option. And if you do that, packing fireball wands instead of swords isn't that appealing because Missile Shields and Reverse Missile items become cheaper as well. And if you stick to the RAW, fireball wands are only usable by people with Magic Aptitude anyway.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

That lets you tap Powerstones twice as often and lets you get by with one half the Power enchantments otherwise necessary.

You could also modify the Power enchantment. Instead of costing 500 energy each for the first two levels but giving 2 energy per level you could have a local version that cost 250 for the first 4 but gave only 1 pt per level.

You can also sue concepts like Sacred Architecture to juice up Enchantment sites. If their Workshop gives +5 to Enchantment rolls any Enchanter could lead a 6 man circle and he usual sort of Master could have a 10 or 11 man circle.

Draw Power is a way to juice up Q&D Enchantment. Essential Metal/Orichalcum would let you build the MW level steam turbines necessary or you could have any sort of more esoteric large power plant you wanted. Even a simple circle could do 300pt Items and an enhanced circle could do much larger ones.

Then there's Paut. A Mage can drink his STx6 in ouces (energy pts) of Paut in a 5 minute period and use all of the energy for casting a spell (including enchantment). At $25 per ounce this doesn't lower things much but you're not stuck with that price. You can push it much lower if you want and credit Industrial Alchemy or special local ingreedients.

Thjs last option can make things very simple if you like it. The price of Enchantment will be overwhelmingly determined by the price of Paut and you can calculate total cost on a simple per pt basic up to the limit of possible Q&D. This limit could be pushed up to c.1000 energy by the right modifications too..

Getting around the limits of the Gurps Enchantment rules is an ancient pastime and has much prior art. If you don't like any of the above there's more.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

Thanks for all the advice. It all seems to boil down to just lowering the price really. I think I'll just have to fiat some of the "trivial" spells like Umbrella, after I think really hard to make sure they can't be exploited in crazy ways.

in addition to reducing the price, I think I'll have to adjust the ramping of power cost. Many of the costs seem to be on a nearly exponential curve. such as 250 - 1000 - 5000 There wouldn't really be a way to price that on a point per power basis that wouldn't have a weird disparity between where it starts and where it ends up. Even if it just doubled every level that seems more reasonable. Plus it would allow us to go beyond +3 and maybe be somewhat competitive with what normal tech would have been.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

They way I always do high magitech is allow for the invention of "mana concentrating" as a technology. Usually large and immobile (read: architectural), it would increase local mana, perhaps only for the purposes of enchanting - maybe only for the purposes of a specific enchantment! That way you can have your "umbrella" factory churn out rain-repellent headgear without destroying everything else.

Magic as written assumes enchanting is an artisanal process. If making an umbrella required forging all the ribs by hand and weaving your own polyster you can bet it'd cost $400! The innovations of high tech can be applied to magic, if you want to keep the feel of modern technology but add the window dressing of magic: automation, scale, and modern-ish supply chains should all be possible at TL 4+3. It requires changing the assumptions a little bit to make it possible - but it's no worse than comparing a blacksmith to a modern automotive parts plant.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

I addressed this problem in this thread. You'll probably want to drop the crafting requirement, though. I included it because it fit with my image of how magic worked in that setting.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

Another possibility is hew to the energy costs as written, but let some or all of the cost be substituted by using expensive materials ("an emerald the size of a plover's egg") or rare, magical materials ("I was able to make this much more quickly because I imbedded into its construction a dragon heartstring").

If you approach it like this, then adventurers can more fully participate in a magical economy without making magic items everyday items for all.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

You may find my article "The Material Difference" (Pyramid #3/66: The Laws of Magic, pp. 29-35) useful. It exists to answer a very similar question.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

Changing prices is a poor way to think about most of these solutions. Instead think of the prices staying the same in their native currency (effectively "mage-days") but the alternatives as adding rules for converting something else into "mage-days".

If you think of it like this, the Basic rules offer you the chance to substitute FP for mage-days at a 1:1 rate, provided you have the full cost available. Rules for purchasing enchantments with character points allow you to substitute a character point for 25 mage-days, again all at once. Other schemes convert something else to mage-days with or without a limitation on supplying it all at once or all in the same currency.

Personally if I were rebuilding Magic from scratch I'd probably price enchantments in character points to start with and have 25 mage-days or 25 energy buy you a cp worth of enchantment, but same principle.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

Well, I went and got the magazine, and no, the article is not useful to my question. The article relies on the PCs or other adventurers picking up objects that can contribute energy points. The question at hand in this thread is how to lower magic costs in a society, and a factory that makes Light/Darkness items isn't exactly going to be going out and hunting beings of pure shadow just to run their business. If anything they would farm them, and then it would just be a business expense.

So for my purposes this just says "Arbitrarily lower the price", which is what I've been saying since the start of this thread.

In the end I'm $8 poorer and rather annoyed about it.


The problem with this solution is that "Mage Days" are basically the thing that gives magic items their cost. If there is something else that replaces mage days, and is cheaper, then that simply becomes the new currency. Is Roc feathers are worth 10 mage days each, and are easily obtainable, then nobody is going to bother using mage days and the prices will be driven down by the cheaper production methods.

So again it just boils down to "arbitrarily lower the price".

Industrial enchanting already gives a linear increase in money cost per energy point. Saying that players can spend character points for gear worth a certain amount of energy points is just adding a new version of the "Signature gear" advantage (which gives money for character points) and players will just choose the more efficient one.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

In that case, I don't think anybody has a clue what you are looking for. Anything at all that makes magic items more common relative to other stuff can be called "arbitrarily lower the price" by that standard. That's what more common *means* after all - more people are willing to trade whatever the ultimately limited resource in their lives is for it. The law of supply and demand requires that if it's more common, it doesn't cost as much in those terms.

I guess we foolishly thought you were looking for ways to make items cheaper in a logical way, not for a revision of the fundamentals of economics.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

My solution:
Large numbers of Poor assistants to use items with Lend Energy enchanted on them. Even small children have 10 FP in GURPS; these can refill an enchanter's FP immediately after casting a Quick & Dirty enchantment; you only need like two or three of them per enchanter.

This doubles the amount of time in a day an enchanter can spend enchanting stuff so long has nothing needs more than 100 energy total.



Another thing I sometimes like to do is drop Q&D entirely but reduce the listed energy requirements to 5-10% of their current listing depending on how common I want a particular magic item to be.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

The issue is that you don't just want to make magic items more common - you want to do so in a manner that is consistent with your gameworld, your idea of enchantment, or what (if any) actual goal you have behind this. The problem with this is that no one else really knows what your gameworld looks like, or how you think enchantment should be done, or what you are trying to accomplish.

Arbitrarily lowering the price changes nothing but the economics of enchantment - none of the rules change, there is simply enough competition to justify cheaper enchantment. After a point, this is probably not realistic, but hey, nothing is perfect, and this is the simple route.

Allowing exotic materials to reduce enchantment costs is helpful for certain circumstances, and has the added benefit of being a method uniquely suited to typical PC groups. But it may not suit your idea of magic and is not likely the kind of thing that could be utilized on a large scale, so really nothing is becoming more common.

So:

1) What do you / don't you want to see happen with magic and magic items in your gameworld?

2) How do you / don't you want magic to work?

3) What ultimate goal are you trying to accomplish, if any?

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

One idea I toyed around with years ago was separating enchantment into two steps - fabrication, and enchantment.

The first step might require P^0.5 man-hours of labor, spent engraving runes or bathing the item in the blood of a virgin or whatever - perhaps it can be done by apprentices or non-mages.

The second might require the mage to build a reservoir of energy - he can fill it any way he chooses (Draw Power, anyone?) but the reservoir leaks some amount of energy AND becomes harder to contain as it gets larger. Every time energy is added to the reservoir, a skill roll is made at a penalty relative to the size (-2*log10(P) is what I initially planned, so -2 at 10pts, -4 at 100pts, -6 at 1000 pts, etc), with large or critical successes slowing the leak rate, and failures either increasing the rate or even discharging the reservoir in some chaotic combination of magical effects. It makes enchanting powerful items much faster, but also much riskier, since a leaking or uncontrolled reservoir could have tremendous and destructive effects.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

In that case I will restate it as clearly as possible, for you and anyone else that may be confused.

I want magic items to be more accessible for narrative reasons, but I am not particularly interested in the narrative reason that the price is lower. The players are probably not going to take a tour of the inside of a factory anytime soon, but they are going to need to buy equipment and I want them to be able to actually afford it.

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.

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.



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.

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.


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."






This however, does look promising. Because it asks how the customer base effects the prices.

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.

I want a player wielding an enchanted crossbow to feel as capable and powerful as if they were carrying a TL7 gun. Not necessarily because it has the same damage dice, but because of the magic effects they have been able to customize it with.

The PCs are in a region that follows a rather warlike deity. There is an emphasis on being able to form a militia if called upon. Instead of a "Right to Bear Arms" they basically have an "Obligation to Bear Arms". It's not all about weapons though. I want there to be plenty of practical magic items, and even ones simply for luxury.

Most of all, and this is the point of this thread, I want them to be reasonably priced. Not so high that you'd have to buy several levels of wealth to dream of owning a single enchanted item, but not so low that everyone drowns in their own pile of gear, or that some uber-spell is accidentally made too easy to obtain.

2) I am more or less fine with how magic works in GURPS. People can cast spells using their own FP, but often it is better to use a device for that purpose (like using a remote vs walking across the room to change channels on the TV). What I do have a problem with is the pricing of enchantments. Both in dollar amount, and how oddly some things are priced. 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.

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

3) I want the world to be a TL7 equivalent through use of magic items. These items will often be based on a foundation of TL4 technology. Much like steampunk, but instead of Victorian devices modernized through steam power, it's "Age of Sail" devices modernized through enchantments.

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.

For the most part the party will go shopping at the same places any other civilian could. If they want a more powerful weapon, they buy or custom order a more powerful weapon from the store, or obtain it through the black market.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

If you do not want to simply reduce the energy costs of magic items simply by dividing by ten (or whatever), here are some perks to make enchantments more effective:

Faster Enchanter: add 1 EP/day to enchantment, as many levels as levels of magery possessed by the enchanter are possible, so a magery 3 enchanter could have three Levels of this perk and put a total of 4 EPs/day into enchantment

Enchanter´s Helper: if assisting in enchantment one does not cause a -1 to die roll, but only one helper per Level of magery of the lead enchanteris possible, so our magery 3 enchanter could have three helpers

Better Enchanter: if leading an enchantment, one assistant does not cause a -1 to die roll, as many levels as levels of Magery are possible, Prerequisite: Enchanter´s Helper, so the magery 3 enchanter could have three assistants without Enchanter´s Helper without a skill reduction

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

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.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

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.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

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.

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.

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."

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!

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.

Re: How to make magic items more common?
 

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.