Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Fine Plate (for humans) stops 6 hits, -4 DX, $5,000 55.0lb MA 6
+3 Chainmail Stops 6 hits*, -3 DX $4,200 30.0lb MA 6
Leather w/Stone Flesh Stops 6 hits*, -2 DX $4,100 16lb MA 8

* - Also effective against high level occult zaps.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Stone Flesh is a massive bargain no matter how you slice it (well, unless your opponent blasts it with lightning and de-enchants it).

And yes, a simple comparison has those options more competitive for the (bogus as listed, as you well know since you've also complained about those) prices, but what master armorers mainly do is make fine weapons and armor.

In contrast. what wizards who can enchant do, could be all sorts of things. Even when they do spend their time enchanting, and even when they choose to make those enchantments publicly available for the listed book price (which in my campaigns, is almost never), they may be enchanting any number of other sorts of things rather than competing with master armorers.

And, enchantments can be added to fine plate just as easily as they can be added to leather or chain. (Which not only is much more protective, but also wears out much less quickly due to damage.)

So fine equipment is a different market from enchanted equipment, and the enchantment prices listed are super bargains.

The smart shopper (if he can find enchantment available at all) will figure out how much armor they can stand to wear (because of the weight, DX, MA, convenience and social issues) and then enchant that as much as they can manage.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Easy fix... anything you want to enchant must first be of 'fine' quality ($ x10). That will raise the baseline cost for all magic items.

I don't think you should be able to grab a mass-produced cuirass off the shelf at Ye 'Ole Walmart and expect it to be enhance-able.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

It seems to me it's usually not smart to do so anyway. Enchanting a non-fine weapon tends to be a waste of an enchanter's time compared to the item you can get if you do both.

The main reasons the above options might look like a bargain are because of the limited apples-to-oranges comparison, the fact that ITL doesn't list fine options for lighter armor, the assumption you can really get enchantments for sale at those prices.

Someone capable enough to use fine plate, and wealthy/influential enough to have enchantments made, would probably really want something more like this:

Fine Plate with +3 armor enchantment ($5000 + $4000 x magic markup)
Stone Flesh ring ($4000 x magic markup)

With no market to be a fair comparison, that's $13,000 (less than the price of a +2 damage +1 DX fine weapon, BTW) x magic markup (which there really should be), which would stop THIRTEEN hits per attack.

Moral: Stacking magic is wicked powerful, and should cost more than the listed prices. If you make magic items abundant, the game starts to become largely about what magic everyone has.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

There is no end to this sort of thing if you accept that magic items can simply be purchased at listed rates. Probably the first order question any group has to ask about their campaign is whether or not this is true. If so, your characters are effectively 'builds' of items constrained by the rule of 5. If not, your characters are more about their stats, talents and spells.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

^ Exactly!

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Armor breaks after 20 times its hits. Which means that enchanted fine plate needs 120 hits "to die".

The immunity to Break Weapon enchantment only exists for wizards so a magic sword breaks on average one in 216 uses, one in 432 for fine, and one in 1296 for very fine.

Wearing two rings, one of Stone Flesh($4k) and one of 1-die lightning immunity($5k) would ensure that both rings are safe against short of intentional destruction or a 4d+ lightning bolt rod. (You'll get fried, but the rings will be okay.)

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

A few suggestions to balance out magic items, instead of severely removing them from the setting. Keep the economy and price structure.

If there is a shortage of wizards that can perform enchantments, and there should be, with the new XP rules that limit attribute bloat. We need to recalculate things and see the prices in the book as a best-case scenario.

A good enchanter would need ST 8, DX 14 (+1 with a borrowed charm item) and IQ20. That is a 42 point character (with some spells taken with XP since it is hard to start at IQ 20 on top of that XP investment). That is a truly talented individual. And even the lesser enchanters that only have IQ18 and are not the ones doing the enchanting circle's trickiest things probably need ST 8, DX 8 and IQ 18 and some extra spells bought with XP. And that is an average 30p char that started with IQ 14.

A wizard that is 1 out of 300, that starts out with max IQ, I would give that a chance of (1/3)^6. That is about 1 in 1000. But let's assume that if you are a wizard born, you focus more on IQ in your upbringing, maybe 1/6 of your attribute points go into ST, 2/6 into DX and 3/6 into IQ. That still makes IQ 18 very rare. We are talking university professor rare. About 1% of all wizards get there and most of them would never be allowed to handle any difficult things on their own because one miscast might cost half the kingdom.

So 1 in 30 000 people could be an enchanter (if they wanted to) and out of them only a very select few could reach DX13-15 which is needed for big enchantments or they would be very risky and cost 10 times if not a 100 times more.

So if you take that into account, there should be a job for enchanters, separate from the normal town wizards, that pays way better. And another category again for those few that also have the required DX. Three times the average soldier's or sage's pay doesn't cut it.

So assuming that these guys are like rock stars, the cost for magic items in the book assumes a guild that has severe salary restrictions or a government that only pays a fraction of their true worth. PC should never get that price unless they themselves are those super-talented individuals.

Weapon and armor enchantments, on the other hand, should only be somewhat more expensive than the list price. But even IQ 14 and DX 14ish, is hard to come by. And you almost have to do something dangerous or interesting to get that kind of XP, and ST as a dump stat might get you killed. So again, the job table and the price list is truly a best-case scenario or represent a very controlled situation. The first wizard on any project, the one handling the DX rolls is the bottleneck. The rest are much easier to come by.

So taking the change in XP into consideration, I would say, weapon and armor enchants should be at least 2 times more expensive, lesser magic items 10 times more expensive and greater magic items should never be available for order over the counter, they are just too rare. And if PC manages to set up a Greater Item Enchantment business, then it should make heaps of money, enough to attract so much political attention, that the profit would be in the hands of the powers that be. Probably comparable to opening/owning a good gold mine.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Don't forget that armors and weapons can be repaired by an armorer before they break from long use.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

My biggest pet peve is that so many magic items are always on, or have a 0 ST cost. Why? Let them cost ST, just like the spell they are made from, and if you want them to cost 0, make them cost x10 for each point of lower ST cost as the rules suggest.

The rules also say that items work like the spell they are based on, but in reality, half of them break this rule of thumb. And in the worst way, since ST cost per turn is a huge problem for wizards.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

It is a significant flaw of the magic item section of Advanced Wizard and the new ITL that the stated rules about self-powered items seem not to have been enforced when the tables and descriptions were put together. And a large fraction of items don't state clearly one way or the other whether they are self powered. Very confusing.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Nils, I agree that the new XP curve suggests fewer IQ 18 and 20 wizards to be able to enchant things. And since enchantments involve a series of DX rolls, and the costs seem to assume wizards mostly make their rolls, using non-DX 15+ enchanters will also drive up the prices to create magic items.

The tables don't leave much room for profit margins either, which is pretty economically unsound.

Although, there are some rules in ITL for selling magic items, which if GMs bother to read them, and assume the people selling the items tend to go through merchants with Business Sense and other reaction roll modifying talents, would tend to increase the sales prices.

As I have mentioned on other threads, what we ended up tending to assume in our old games, even with the old experience costs and the assumption there were some DX 15 IQ 18-20 wizards in cities, that very rarely would they be available for hire to enchant things, and when they were, they'd be in demand from the nobility, militaries, guild masters and other very wealthy and powerful people, and so had little or no reason to need to sell to scruffy adventurers for anything like the listed prices.

I think it's most interesting to think about how many wizards of what power exist in a campaign world, where they are and what they do with their time.

And considering that, if you were a DX 15+, IQ 18+ wizard . . . you'd be rather powerful and smart compared to most people. Even moreso now that the attribute curve is rather lower than it originally was. Being so capable, powerful and smart, how much of your time do you suppose you would be choosing to devote to spending to enchant magic items for other people? Any at all? If you did, would you be willing to only be paid Wizard Guild job rate for your work? How much of a fraction of the item's worth do you suppose you'd need to be paid to make it worth your while? Would you be more inclined to sell to some adventurers with no social status, compared to the nobility, or a guild master, or someone else powerful willing to throw in some favors involving their power and authority as part of the bargain?

We didn't think that'd happen very often.

And even so, due to magic item propagation due to loot and adventures, and the growing experience that games where the PCs and their enemies have magic items tend to end up being largely about how many items people have rather than much about what their characters are like, and people without magic items started being impotent victims by comparison, we also added our Magic Item Breakdown house rules. But adding a ST cost for all magic items would have a similar balance effect.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

I think the important details about the magic item creation rules are: the high IQ needed to even be in charge of such a thing; the large number of employees you need to be able to recruit, command and pay; and the long commitment of time to make anything major. Taken together, I find it absurd that anyone would then turn around and sell the product for the listed prices. Ask yourself what would be involved to create a PC who was capable of making, say, a self powered item with 2-3 useful spells on it, who then invested all the time and resources to do so. Would they then sell the thing for a few measly tens of thousands of silvers?

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Factors in magical item costs.

Example: Stone Flesh ring

First start with a physical appearance to make a salable product. Say a silver ring of $200

Next recruit an enchanter. This needs to be done every four years (because of job hazards and recruitment by others). Lesser Magic Item Creation is an IQ 18 spell so just charge the salary ($250/week).

Also recruit six apprentices, with $300/week salary.

You'll need a wizard's tower or other suitable infrastructure and security for that so add $50/week for the room rental on top of the $150/week to rent the lab and $50/week for supplies. (This is very cheap for the level of guards you'd want to hire, but assume a big complex with a lot of labs.)

So the total operating costs are at least $800/week

DX 12 is about the best you can hope for from an enchanter so each ring takes an average of around seven weeks at a total cost of $5,600 and the selling price needs to be around double the production costs to deal with retail markup so the final selling price is $10k plus or minus haggling.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Nice example! So according to the table, this activity gets done for a loss, or possibly at-cost if you did it for a living in your own tower and somehow didn't have to worry about infrastructure costs, etc. The notion that a 38-40 point character with a team of hired wizard underlings would think this is a good use of time is just completely absurd. No player character would do it for less than 50 grand.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

The listed enchantment costs do not include cost of living for apprentices, for one thing.

I.e. ye old magic shop has empty shelves because all the would be enchanters starved to death in grad school.

It is quite reasonable to charge double listed price for LMIC and triple for GMIC. (W/AE is easy enough so that "common" magic arms and armor are at listed prices, with uncommon configurations being very rare.)

Potions are mass produced in facilities located where the ingredients are much cheaper than listed. Go ahead and apply the potion creation rules for any players who long to lose money on every batch.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

100% markup seems pretty tame to me, especially considering the power / force / capabilities of many magic items, and who at the higher levels of society would be interested in them. These aren't just luxury items, and I don't think there's usually going to be surplus supply except for terribly impractical items (or which there aren't many and who would intentionally make them?) or items which almost no one can afford.

See for example this article about estimates of current markups on modern goods: https://www.wisebread.com/cheat-shee...n-common-items

And that's only talking about the margin for retailers... wholesalers also have costs and profit margins, and the companies that create things are below them and have their expenses and profits too.

If industrial bluejeans, shoes and furniture get marked up 350%, items enchanted by IQ 18 enchanters with teams of wizards and apprentices... I really think it's a seller's market and depends on who can afford them and how desperate the seller is for cash. As well as various power considerations including possibly taking things by force.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

You can't really compare with commonly mass-produced items today. And big expensive things, usually have a lower mark up and fewer levels between the producer and the end customer. But still.

I would go with the listed prices as an absolute minimum. And with at least a x2 for all magic items. And a lot more for a LMI. GMI with multiple enchantments on them is government investments.

In general, I prefer to keep the system and adjust it, so it doesn't play too big of a part in the world. If you make airships cheaper than sailing ships, your world will change, but if you make them available but really expensive or rare for other reasons, they will add spice to your game world, but they won't completely change harbors, trade, travel, warfare, and the fishing industry.

So, make it available to the PC if the story needs it or the PC work for it, but limit it so the world is still recognizable. A world needs a lot of stereotypes to work, with some added well thought out changes, adding too many strange things will just make it inaccessible and confusing.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Nils,
Great insight. I used to have all magic items at x3 list price, if available. I now see that was too simplistic. From your well reasoned and clear explanations this seems to be a better approach:

Modifiers to list price for unusual and magical equipment:

Fine Weapons x1
Fine Plate x1

Wizard's Chest x1
Books/Tomes about Spells x1

Chemical Potions & Gas Bombs x1 (not magical)
Alchemical Potions & Gas Bombs x2
Magical Scrolls x2

Enchanted Weapons & Armor x2

Less Magic Items x10

Greater Magic Items NA. Not on the common market. If you can persuade a great enchanter to create a GMI it will be x50 at a minimum and must also be worthy to the enchanter for other reasons (for political/social gain, for a deeply held cause, or for a personal quest that you will see through. And so on). And then you will need to come back when it is completed. If ever so. Word will get out that such a task is under way, and opposing forces may see the effort twarted or even the enchanter slain. It may be to your best interest to include or pay off the local power before even engaging the enchanter. Furthermore, GMs will want to refrain from having GMI as found items unless they are central to the quest.

Re: Alternatives that cost less, weigh less and encumber less than Fine Plate
 

Axel, the list looks good.

But I would be a little bit careful about the x10 for LMI since some of them do have ST cost and other balancing factors. But new, made to order, should have a hefty premium on them. This also makes other items worth more on the second-hand market, so a lot of the payment could be made with other loot.

GMI might be a little steep at x50 and roleplay services. I would probably go with one or the other.

The important part is to compare magic item prices with mundane prices or castles, counties, large houses, prestige, raising an army, hiring a retinue of 10 or 100 people and so on. A king can give away a barony title to a guild to get that Crown of Crownliness, but an adventurer might have a hard time choosing between one and the other as a reward for his services or when selling his loot.

My rule of thumb, when I GM is to never say no, just make it hard enough so the players face a real choice. And once they get the money, resources, favors together to get that uber item they had in mind, show them something else that will give them more viable choices like spending it all on a treasure map or a party fit to impress their new wealthy friends, or a dowry for marriage, or a share in a large manufactory, or reveal that many apprentices were hurt in the enchanting process, so they might end up razing the guild instead of employing it and then they find other comparable loot instead.