How to make magic items more common?

[Pluribus]

Originally Posted by Kromm

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.

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.

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

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.