Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I was rather hoping that DF would make it easier to convert Eberron, if I was ever inclined to do so. I guess not. Oh well.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Yes. My influences are T&T c. 1975 and AD&D c. 1979, with a nod to Rogue and NetHack, of course, and the Diablo series and other CRPGs that predate "crafting." No post-1970s RPG or post-crafting CRPG is significantly influential here. I'd say that zombie movies and Lovecraft have more pull on my thinking than does, say, 3.0/3.5 or WoW.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

*shrug* You could convert everything but PC enchantment. I'm not sure how huge that is there, but unless the setting revolves around it, I can't see it being a Big Deal.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Eberron has an important character class called the Artificer, who is all about creating magic items (including some specialized rules for temporary magic items). I'm not sure that DF is a particularly good match for Eberron in any case, though; Eberron is really a TL 3+3^ magical world, using magic as technology (you also have things like the Warforged, who are a PC quasi-golem race).

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

There's an entire "basic class" the Artificer, built around item creation.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

In GURPS terms, the artificer should probably be built as a cinematic TL 3+3 gadgeteer, not as an enchanter. Lots of Eberron magic items don't really follow the enchantment rules anyway.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

If you *want* to have Wizard PCs able to enchant items while their friends are spending their downtime at the guild training hall building up skills, or attending to their fiefdoms, or fulfilling their clerical duties, etc., etc. - that is, if you allow for enough downtime between adventures that it's at all relevant - there are several ways to do so.

1) In another recent thread, Kromm presented a way of costing out enchantments like wands of fireball using a variation on the rules for Spellstone, that can be done pretty quickly basically by serial Quick & Dirty casting. Other enchantments small enough to be done Q&D, especially with Power Items and Energy Reserves added, are also within reach of the budding PC enchanter.

2) If you don't like the times for Slow & Sure enchantment, just decide on a means of speeding them up. This also has the advantage that, if it scales with mage skill or Magery level or whatever, that even at a fairly low cost per energy point, it lets better enchanters earn their way into higher levels of Wealth. It could be Skill/10 points of energy per day, or Magery points per day, or Magery^2 per day, or some other formula you like. Doesn't matter too much, since while it's for NPCs only balance doesn't matter, and if you let PCs into the goodie bag, it probably won't be the most munchkin thing they're doing (The Zombie and Charm reigns of terror are probably more problematic, for example). Remember, being a munchkin is *meant* to be a part of DF, at least to a limited extent.

3) You could disregard the usual enchantment rules and just go with Meditative Magic enchantment at 1 CP/200 hours per 25 energy points, or 1000 energy points, or whatever seems right for your campaign. Note that at the lower levels, it's still hard to understand why modern enchanters are even bothering to compete with the masses of magic items mined from the dungeons, except as an academic exercise or a hobby, but maybe that's exactly what it is and will discourage avaricious PCs from even bothering. At the higher levels (e.g., 1000 per CP), even with a low $ charge per energy point, the enchanters could end up Very Wealthy or Filthy Rich, explaining why they don't adventure anymore. I would advise only allowing the energy points garnered in this way to be spent on bonafide enchantments or permanent versions of other spells, though, so that they don't overshadow personal FP, Power Items, and Energy Reserves.

4) You could go a totally different route, and allow an Enchanter variation on the Gadgeteer advantage. If doing so, I would suggest allowing lesser or simpler enchantments as Simple inventions according to the usual Gadgeteering rules, but more powerful items might be built as Gadgets, i.e., abilities with Gadget limitations and paid for with CP (which again, like Meditative Magic, could be garnered at 200 hours per CP or so of 'study', in this case, invention time).

5) Other means exist to bring the cost and/or time to enchant down. Others have suggested assigning an energy point value to pieces of magical creatures, rare minerals or jewels, etc. There could be mana springs that provide a daily quota of energy, if you can keep control of them. Or, anything valuable could in and of itself be convertible to magical energy, although destroying the substance or its valuable nature - e.g., extract the magic from $20,000 worth of gold coins, garnering 1000 energy points towards your enchantment but also destroying the coins or turning them (back?) to lead. There could even be an Enchantment college spell for scavenging the points back from existing magic items for recycling into new items. This could apply even to Gadgets from #4, with whatever ratio of $ and energy points to CP value you approve for your campaign. E.g., the enchantress Willow of the Rosy Mountain needs a lot of magical energy, pronto. She happens to have access to a bunch of magical tomes that are either enchanted with Scroll, Permanent Scroll*(a variant version of the spell), or are Gadgets with things like Magery bonuses and Modular Abilities built into them. She casts her Drain Magic Items spell and gains energy points corresponding to the energy and CP invested in the books (or maybe just 1/3 the value, parallell to the way Leech and corresponding spells work) as the magic words float away from the books and onto her skin... you get the picture.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Basically because allowing player enchantment into D&D was probably a huge mistake ;)

You've got basically two options with player-driven enchantment.

Either it's slow, and your enchanter holds up everyone else, running up their bills in town, while he makes some magic item, and boring the pants off of them, or it's quick, and he starts pumping out a series of magical items perfectly tailored to the PCs strengths and weaknesses, creating a synergy that PCs don't normally get from dungeon-salvaged loot.

Either way the GM looses control over magical enhancements in the game, and unless he's prepared for the significant "virtual" increase in power he can find himself rapidly wondering what the heck happened.

If you have a player who's willing to build an enchanter, he's basically turning the game into a Monty Haul one, whether the GM wanted it that way or not.


Enchantment schemes that cost the PC unspent XP or CP tend to mitigate things somewhat by slowing down advancement through intrinsic abilities, but at least in D&D enchanter-happy players seem to see it as a good investment because the good gear makes it significantly easier to earn XP later, meaning they make up the investment very very quickly.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

The points I've put in boldface are my actual objections as the architect of DF.

Slow enchantments add an element of boring not-fun that I've taken huge pains to filter out of GURPS for this series, what with my totally simplified cost-of-living, travel, and foraging rules. Thus, if DF gets enchantment rules, they need to be fast, but . . .

Fast enchantments -- whatever the cost in $ and points -- allow customized items, which is where things get dicey. As long as the GM decides when Haste boots show up as loot, or for sale and at what price, low Basic Move is a drawback. As soon as Haste boots can be produced . . . well, expect nobody to raise Basic Move ever again. A huge part of the fun of old-style dungeon crawls was figuring out what to do with, say, a magic sword that nobody could use. I mean, I saw AD&D magic-users give up magic and dual-class to fighter just to use a cool sword! That's the feel I'm going for here.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

And hurrah for your efforts and inspiration here!