The Ritual Path Magic system is awesome, but its means for creating enchanted items seems a little lackluster to me. In particular, it doesn't jive very well with a setting in which magic items can be bought, sold, or found as loot.
I recently picked up
Pyramid 3-66: The Laws of Magic, and loved every article in it. The one on Material-based Enchanting particularly caught my eye.
I'm aware that
a treatment exists over at Ravens N' Pennies, and I'm hoping to expand on that. For example, while I understand Rice's rationale for measuring everything in terms of "hours" (where 200 hours of work = 1 character point worth of gadgets), I found it was awkward to write like that. Instead, I'll be measuring things in points of Essence. This is purely a naming convention: 1 point of essence is still worth 0.5% of a character point.
I'm hoping to allow granularity on a level finer than multiples of 200 Essence. For example, since 1 point of ER with -80% worth of limitations works out to [0.6], it stands to reason that a sufficiently limited 1-point powerstone equivalent should be producible for only 120 points of essence. (This means that the point-cost of powerstones will scale linearly with their capacity. Is there an important game-balance reason why the cost of
GURPS: Magic powerstones scale quadratically with their capacity, or is that just an artifact of the enchanting method? The formula is explained pretty clearly on p 20.)
On a somewhat related issue, I find that building the traditional "Magic Sword" using the items-as-advantages approach is surprisingly awkward. The obvious thing to do is to price it as a ST-based Innate Attack, with whatever other modifiers are appropriate, but the cost of most of those modifiers scales with the ST of the wielder (see Powers p146 or Power-Ups 4 p9).
What happens if I enchant an Armor-Piercing sword for my ST 12 buddy (swing damage 1d6+3 cut), and he later gains another point of ST (changing his swing damage to 2d6 cut), and therefore changing the base cost of the "virtual innate attack"? Does the sword stop working for him? Does it limit his ST to 12 while he wields it? Do the bonuses from the sword somehow only apply to
some of his strength? Does it work just fine, and for marginally cheaper than it would have been to enchant a sword for someone with ST 13 in the first place?
The last one seems the simplest, but what if his ST was raised to 17 instead (swing damage 3d6 cut)? That would represent a pretty significant discount, and seems rather unfair to warriors with naturally high ST. In that case, I'm tempted to just pick a default "reference ST" for enchanted weapons, and just price them based on that. If so, what would an appropriate reference ST be? 10? 20? The "minimum ST" value for that particular weapon on the table?
For that matter, what should the gadget limitation on a sword even be? The Breakable part seems like a simple function of SM and DR, and the Can Be Stolen part clearly belongs at the 30/15% level, but what about the fact that the bonuses granted by the advantage only apply to attacks
made with the sword itself? Intuition tells me that that's already baked in to the Melee Attack limitation and the gadget limitations above (and thus worth no extra points), but I could maybe see it as being a -5% nuisance effect or accessibility modifier.