Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I have a question, how would you make a power for enchanting weapons and magic items instead of using the GURPS enchantment system. For instance, dwarves are supposed to be able to make magical items like swords and armor, yet they really aren't mages, they are just creatures with some sort of magical power that allows them to make enchanted weapons. This is the same for leprechauns, elves and many other magical creatures. Thanks.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I suppose one way of doing it is to give them an Affliction, that inflicts an always-on/aura Affliction on an item to grant abilities to its holder. Kinda crude...

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Probably easiest to make a variant of Gadgeteer, honestly.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I wouldn't define it at all in game terms. I really do think that "PCs can't make magic items" is critical to the feel I'm going for in DF. As soon as you define it, you make it possible in theory for pushy players to ruin the campaign of a weak-willed GM even more quickly than usual.

I'd just say, "Somewhere, there are people who have a power for this. It's easier than regular enchanting, which is why dungeon fantasy worlds have so many items."

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

This has seemed kind of curious to me since I've heard it. In D&D, PCs can (and do) make Magic Items, if DF is supposed to let GURPS do the DF subgenre as well as D&D, why the restriction?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

The big problem with PC enchantment is that being an enchanter tends to be a job. You don't really make PC smiths, so why should you make PC enchanters?

Frankly, the ability to do slow and sure enchantment is nearly useless to PCs, so I'd be perfectly willing to let PCs create magic swords with Armoury/TL3^ and a perk.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Perhaps you could "study" a power with gadget limitations?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

As of when? My vague recollection is that the last time I played D&D seriously (1st edition AD&D), only very high-level magic users could make magical items, and even then it was only rather inconsequential ones and it couldn't be feasibly done during adventuring. I suspect that's the kind of really old-school feel Kromm's going for: not only do PCs not have the ability to make magical items, they don't even have the time to do so because they're always actively adventuring. Time between dungeon crawls is spent healing up and looking for the next old man at a tavern, not in productive labor.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Because the FRPGs I'm aping are c. 1979 and don't let PCs make items without lots of pointless trouble. I'm well aware that 3.0/3.5 does let PCs make items relatively easily . . . but I think that's a mistake there, too. It's hard to justify delving if many of the items traditionally considered loot are things you could just make. All it takes is one PC with high Wealth and enchantment skills to make a GM's life hell. I'm not really convinced it's a good thing for the genre, whatever 3.0/3.5's creators might have thought.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

D&D enchanters have to expend beaucoup amounts of XP.

Which is how to do it in GURPS, too: Signature Gear.

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!

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Actually, that brings me to a subsidiary question about Dungeon Fantasy... given the presence of Alchemy in the Wizard template, and items like the Backpack Alchemy Lab in the gear section, I assume the same restriction doesn't apply to PCs brewing their own alchemical potions. Is it just the fact that by their very nature, potions have limited uses that makes being able to brew custom potions less problematic?

It seems to me, if that's the real dividing line, that it might not be too disruptive to campaign balance to allow Quick & Dirty castings by PCs, especially of one-or limited-use items like Scrolls and Spellstones, reserving only the bigger Slow & Sure enchantments to NPC enchanters. Things like boots of Haste (or worse, Great Haste), or enchanted weaponry and armor with more than a +1 bonus to anything, would still be beyond the reach of PC enchanters.

The other thing that occurs to me, is that if the GM wants to keep control of which types of magic items get into the party's hands by determing when they're found as plunder or for sale, it's almost as easy to do in a game with PC enchanters as without. After all, if you don't want them to be able to get six or seven sets of Haste boots, +5 swords, +5 rings of protection, etc., the GM running a game with no PC enchanters simply needs to say that no such items are currently available at Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, no matter how many GP the party has to spend. In a game *with* PC enchanters, the GM just has to also say that some or all of the ingredients necessary for the desired enchantment aren't currently available. If the players balk at that, use the desire for the required ingredients as the impetus to get them on a quest and back into the dungeon where the PCs belong....

"No, no - you need 20 grammes of *female*, *red* dragon's gizzard for a self-powered Wand of Fireballs. Luckily, I hear there's at least one nesting in the next mountain range over...."

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Hmmmm... if, as per DFA30, we can generally assume a cost of $20 per energy point for Slow & Sure enchantments, simply use the rules on DFD3 for Getting Stuff Cheap for any enchantments which a PC Wizard happens to learn. In addition, don't let them spend more on enchantment in a given day then they could earn with a standard job using their level of Wealth (an incentive for most Wizards to eventually buy Wealth up to Very Wealthy), and don't forget that they *also* need to spend to maintain their cost of living during this time period without recourse to more dungeon delving, and they have no actual income unless they sell the item at the end of the process.

I would also enforce the principle of exceedinlgy rare ingredients being needed for any enchantments I *don't* want them to have, and would play out such 'downtime' in very abbreviated fashion. For example, a given adventuring party might decide to spend about six weeks downtime at the nearest small city before going back into the dungeon, spending their hard-gotten gold and preparing themselves for the next trip. So, the mercenary Knight might spend five weeks of that at the local Armsmen Guild's training hall, and roll for his instructor's Teaching skill at the end to ensure that he got his additional point's worth of skill in some weapon skill; the Thief might make a few 'job' rolls to see if he found anything worth filching in the homes of the local burghers; and the Wizard, who's currently only Wealthy, can put in no more than, say $200 times 25 days, or $5000, 250 energy into a single enchantment the GM doesn't mind him being able to perform. Certainly, every day of city life *doesn't* need to role-played out, and the GM can allow the players to 'blue book' any amount of downtime between adventures desired, even years if he's ready for greater character change in between. I'm not sure I see this as any more contrary to a DF feel than the periodic trips to the magic shop to sell and buy magic items in games like Fate.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

A good idea, except that $20/SlowAndSureEnergy is specifically for used magic items. Commissioning a custom item is specifically not covered, probably so NPC enchanters can soak PCs for all they have, or so the GM can declare that the ultimate source of all enchantments is dungeons. Where do monsters get the stuff? Who knows!

Bringing in Jobs seems a little against the trend of simplification for DF1, and still has the problem of the wizard sitting around in town, making everyone else bored and poor.

It still results in the Thief making Job rolls, and if the Knight doesn't want to do any training doing nothing at all. If the half-orc wasn't allowed into town in the first place, he's making a random encounter roll EVERY DAY while the wizard farts around, too.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

The ability to craft items that are routinely available anyway doesn't cause problems. Thus, if alchemical potions are routinely available for sale in town, it doesn't really matter if the wizard can create some on his own (though I suspect the real reason for alchemy on the template is so he can ID potions).

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Jobs and other downtime stuff Aren't Going To Happen. Full-fledged GURPS exists for that. :) DF is specifically written from the perspective of the sort of gamer who would exclaim, "Who the hell uses Time Use Sheets, anyway?"

And yeah, Alchemy is mostly on the wizard template for IDing potions.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

There is a large topic about enchanting, Enchanting for GURPS?? Somewhere around here. Great points on subject are made there and several realy good articles in Pyramid are also mentioned.
As for Dungeons It shouldn't realy matter at all. I would suggest that if you Insist on having an enchanter in group, you will need the JOB rules from GURPS Champaing. I see GURPS DUNGENONS quite fine for weekend sessions.

The Crafting is realy too complex, to be enjoyed most of time. Making it too easy acctualy spoils the fun.

And for sure, is there a need for logic when there are hundreds of monsters that are all trying to get you?

Still as ever, GM has the final word even against hardcopy of Rules. Just before you start to make your own rules make sure you make it fun.

One more note for JOBS. I did understand that your job is more related to your skill and to your luck when trying to find an opportunity (roll). So buying a wealthy or very wealthy isn't need for that. You must buy that when you get rich. If you truly want to live a high status life or not is charater base choise. (Most people would - yet some rich people chose to get rid of money and live peacefuly without worries about there bankaccount.)

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

But they *are* allowed to use the Getting Things Cheap rules for potions, otherwise there'd be no point in saying that the portable lab was at -2 to make potions, right?

I suppose you're right that a true DF campaign isn't going to get into the use of extended downtime, and that if it does you can just go to the Jobs tables in Basic or Fantasy. Still, if a GM wanted to be a little bit flexible and allow an extension of the Getting Things Cheap rules for would-be enchanters wanting to do up a few Scrolls, or Spellstones, or +1 or flaming projectiles, I don't see how it would disrupt things any worse than allowing potion-making, or indeed than the regular buying of said gear in the local magic shop.

I guess you could go that route even for the bigger enchantments that the GM doesn't mind the PCs being able to make for themselves, at least not without special ingredients requiring another quest. It could be as simple as, you came out of the dungeon with $20,000 as your share of the treasure, that buys you the ingredients to take a week and roll vs. your skill to see if you made an item worth up to 1000 energy, or just wasted everything.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I hope, that will change - as the statement "GURPS Basic will NOT go PDF" :D

I love DF and would like to see more ready-to-use rules and tools than can even be easily memorized for all stuff, also jobs, fiefs, enchantment and monsters.

:)

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Oh, for sure. And you can expect more zippy rules like that one. Also, something in DF 4 will make this even more useful. I'm mostly talking about big-ticket items that require Slow and Sure Enchantment under the full-blown rules.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Once upon a time you had to be something like 9th level to write a scroll (and you had to have some rare monster bit you got for yourself), and 11th level to make permanent items (and they took even more exotic monster bits). Given how long levelling took back then, that's essentially the same as "no PC enchanting", especially as 9th+ level characters were 'name level' lords with lands, wizards' schools, and so on, and not dungeoneers any more.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

In D&D it sort of works because the only real source of wealth involves bashing things, and because serious items take enough XP to enchant that you have to go out and bash monsters fairly often to have the XP free. Also, levelling up to be able to make the 'good stuff' means bashing monsters. That said, it is too easy, IMO (and messes up play balance if the party wizard makes too many or too few items, or charges other PCs too much or too little for them).

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Why not have the enchantment power take a long time to do or that there is only a certain amount of times they can make an enchanted power in a given time period, like 2 times a year for a +1 sword or 1 time a year for a +2 sword , it takes two years for a +3 one ect.?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Um, because the OP was already complaining that the regular rules for enchantment took too long, and was looking for something *faster*, not slower?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Incorrect.

In AD&D, player characters creating magic items is poorly supported by the rules, and often ends up involving sucking majorly up to the GM.

Only with D&D 3rd Edition were player characters empowered to create the items they wanted to possess, without having to jump millions of hoops and their players manipulating the GM via all sorts of despicable metagame antics.

And this proves my point, excellently, that GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is not an attempt to recreate D&D3, but rather AD&D. Which expains why GURPS DF doesn't float my boat very well.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

No, it was a brilliant thing to do, as part of a larger collection of brilliant desing decisions that means that Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition is a player-oriented RPG rules systems, whereas almost all other RPG systems in existence, very much including AD&D and GURPS, are GM-oriened.

Incorrect. There is a third soluton which means that nobody will ever pump out vast quantities of permanent magic items. And without the enchantment process requiring huge amounts of time.

The GM not having control is the entire point of D&D3 being a player-oriented system.

edit: fixed quotes.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

One of my homebrew RPGs, Sagatafl, gives each character an amount of Essence, derived from some of the character's inborn attributes. Essence never renews or recharges, and is specifically intended to be spent on creating permanent magic items.

Most characters don't have any way to spend their Essence. Scholarly characters are likely to learn the Enchantment skill, so they can spend their Essence on making permanent magic items. Other charcters learn more exotic skills so that they can make trees magical. Other characters again are fortunate enough to have been born with inborn Powers that lets them spend Essence, usually to reproduce some of the effects of the Enchantment skill.

The result is a magic system from which you can derive a setting, and which is player-centered as opposed to GM-centered.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Kromm has been pretty explicit about GURPS DF being a remake of AD&D, and not of D&D3, and by now you all know that I'd much rather have seen a remake of D&D3. But let's accept Kromm's design goals (after all, nobody is going to try to force me to GM a GURPS DF campaign, ever).

Looking in the 3rd PDF, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: The Next Level, a few of the species templates have a Perk that gives a -10% monery cost discount on gear with the Elven or Dwarven prefix.

Why not make a full-blown Advantage (not a Perk) that lets the character produce magic items quickly, but at a cost nearly equal to their market purchase value?

Say that a +1 damage sword costs $5000.

editA character with the Enchanter Advantage would then be able to make such a sword in a single day, for market value -10%, or $4500, and character with the Master Enchanter Advantage would be able to make it at market value -20%, which is $4000, also in a single day.

Thus, making any magic items takes 1 day, but it is very costly. Almost as costly as buying it yourself.

Enchanter could cost 20 CPs, and Master Enchanter could cost 50 CP. Both lend themselves very well to the -20% Aspected Limitation, such as "Magic Weapons Only" (even though I think that it should often be a bit more, like -30% or -40%).

One could presume that NPCs can have Genius Enchanter and Supreme Enchanter, which gives a discount of -30% or -40%, but I see no problems with restricting this to NPCs.


Going off on my own, about Aspected for Enchanter, I think that Magic Weapons And Armour only should be -15%, and Magic Weapons or Magic Armour should be -20%.

Anything not to do directly with weapons or armour should be more than -20%, and even more if it is a narrow category.

Likewise, Magic Axes Only or Magic Swords Only, or Magic Mail Only, should be at least -25%, and probably -30% for a specific weapon type like axe or sword.

edits: 1 typo.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Agreed that this would work just fine, with the proviso that certain items may require special ingredients (beyond money, gems, etc.) which must be gained through another quest.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

b-dog IS the OP.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I do not realy get the "GM centered" and "player centered" stuff. What you propose on enchanting could be done by GURPs as well. By a dirty trick of homerules and regular limitations.

I have read something in gaming theory about tactic and comabat based systems. If you mean that by "GM centered". For me GURPS 4e offer optional rule that allow characters to change any roll result for character points. Without losing the balance, wich is generaly what the new systems are offering. (Something like meta-gaming)

More so I could hardly comply on the GURPS being "GM oriented" as most of what is written is for players as well as for GM. Only small chapters (two small for my liking) are for GM as advice how to run a game. (Wich is fixed with setting specific modules.)

In case of enchanting its not being specifically GM oriented, its simply because there was never a good system for enchanting, as for many other things that are not adveture-tactic-combat like. Why? There is a bunch of prejudice crap. Like how a leasure time (non adveture-tactic-combat) is borring, and how it would ruin the game if the players character gets something without blood. For my own view the problem is more in GM and Player creativity. Making the backround come alive. That is a hard work of course...Thats why so many games are about fighting. Combat now matter how tactical is easy.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

If you insist on having it, consider a spell that binds spirits to the weapons and design the spirits so they have powers which when used through the item function like spells.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Ultimately, what's going on here is me establishing a baseline for what PCs in a DF campaign can have and do, so that DF is more a game than a storytelling exercise or a soap opera, and so that DF PCs can be compared and even ported between campaigns. I think that GURPS tends to lack that, so I'm trying to inject it for gamers who want it. Enchantment is an NPC job because equipment with miraculous abilities has at best a shaky balance against innate abilities in GURPS, and allowing PCs to make magic items invites a new sort of abuse that depends heavily on what a particular GM decides to permit.

Beyond that, I just like the idea that delvers delve in order to get stuff they can't make or buy. It restores some of the mystique to a genre that spent the past 20 years or so stripped to its undies, tarted up, and parked under a streetlight in heels.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

I consider it roughly equivelent to starting a game where you tell players "You can use anything, from any GURPS book. No restrictions on anything at all, go nuts."

Yes, it can work, but your odds of everyone being happy with the results (including the GM) depend heavily on all the players being mature and co-operative.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Hm. By this logic, permitting PC 'enchantment' in the form of creating Gadgets with character points isn't any more abusive than any other way of buying new advantages, and thus seems like it might be acceptable in a game. How do you feel about that sort of enchantment, or do objects like that not fit your internal sense of what a magic item ought to be?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Gadgeteer with the magical connotation is exactly how I would describe the Artificer class. They aren't really mages, but make items better by fiddling with them and some of that fiddling comes from their imbuing or whatever you call it.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Of course, that balance can be just as easily shaken by what the GM decides to leave lying around the dungeon or available for sale in the local magic shop.

Of course, but my preferred solution would keep them delving. Let PCs learn Enchantment spells, and once they've started building a stronghold, tower, workshop, whatever (i.e., they've got a nice bundle of accumulated treasure), let them create enchanted items they've got the spells for in anything from a couple days to a couple weeks, depending on how much downtime the other character types are willing to tolerate - if the fighters want to train up some skills for a couple weeks, there might be more time, for example. Don't worry about energy costs, except as a basis for item costs.

Then, apply the Getting Stuff Cheap rules, spend the money less whatever discount you're able to get, and the item is created. The money went towards special ingredients, assistants, whatever; don't sweat the details.

That's for items you don't mind the PC enchanter churning out whenever needed - maybe a couple of Scrolls, replacing a Staff, etc. For anything that you *don't* want them making for themselves, for example items that wouldn't be available for sale in the local magic shop either, make it more difficult. There are several ways to do this:

1) Where do they learn the spell? Unless the PC wizards have Wild Talent, the GM has total control over what Enchantment spells other wizards are willing to teach the PCs. Seeking out the only grimoire known to have a certain spell in it, or the wizard who keeps its secret (and has some errands for you) can even be the stimulus for a quest or a few.

2) Are they authorized to make the item? Guild rules might grant certain wizards monopolies on certain items, and they *can* tell what you're trying to make from the ingredients you're buying. Opportunity for an intown adventure; straight up combat with an oppressive wizards guild for a proper munchkin feel, or more social interaction if branching out into other genres. Even in DF, the combination of your bard's silver tongue and a large donation to the guildmasters retirement fund *might* just do the trick here.

3) Can you find all the ingredients? Getting that dragon gizzard or djinni snot might be the stimulus for *another* quest or two.

Basically, I'd just exert the same GM control over what it's possible for them to make on their own as I would on what's available at the magic store or to be found in the dungeons. If a ring of invisibility would be too disruptive to campaign balance, they'll have to jump through just as many, if not more, hoops to make one than it would take to find one in the next dungeon, and neither might end up happening in the end....

3)

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Yes but what suggestion you made could be done mostely with only value per item. No system of how it realy works is nessesary. More so making any system balanced is somewhat imposible for single GM. And even better, why to waste the time by figuring out how it works, if you could use that time more on other stuff. Many complains about standart enchanting system and other alternative systems are that you cannot truly do what you need. Most of time fun would need something else then GM counting if his next action is possible or even how it was done in first place (considering numbers beyond a dungeon for example)

As an enchanter freak my general experience is such that I have wasted the GM'S time for other players by making him focus on my enchanting.

While I state clearly that I can't find single player made item that would be unbalanced. I had to pay every single item with effort and blood (sometimes the "real in game" thing).

There is other way for GM, not paying close attetion on crafters. That way it can only became unbalanced, as player will have only system "against" him. Or the other alternative is that GM makes it un-attractive for the player.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Oh, an alternate way of doing Eberron Artificers is to just have a limitation such as Material Focus on his magery,and buy spells normally. If he just needs a single item to use any of his abilities, go with a normal limit; if it's a different item for each spell, I'd probably treat the Size of the focus as 2 greater than the size of any individual focus. This fairly accurately replicates the way an Eberron artificer works in play.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

For Infusions, sure but Artificers are good at making items that are usable by anyone (with a casting class or UMD ranks).

Edit: Though now that I've read DF; I can see it's not especially relevant to Eberron, as you pointed out upthread.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy Enchantment Power
 

Except for the whole GMs buy 20x the number of RPG books that players do. And the whole you can only play what someone is willing to GM thing. I've always felt that was the big obstacle holding GURPS back from greater success. GURPS is a real bear to GM. Were it not for the DF series I doubt I'd have ever been willing to attempt to DM GURPS again.