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FaerieKnight79 said:
How is costing XP kinder then having to go on a quest (which the party was likely to do anyway)?
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In 1e, and probably 2e, the enchant an item spell only produced permanent items if followed up with permanency, draining a point of Constitution. If you're thinking that's not too bad, prior to 3e there was no way to counter ability drain other than a wish, and even a wish would only raise an ability score by .1.
 
2nd edition magic item crafting didn't use Permanency, as I recall. Or an "Enchant item" spell. Instead, it was an "off camera" time consuming (and resource consuming) task wizards could do. Crafting basic things like a +1 weapon or armor just basically required time and funds. More powerful stuff, the GM was encouraged to have the wizard have to personally go out and gather the rare and dangerous to acquire materials. As I recall, one example was a Ring of Feather Falling (or maybe it was flight) requiring the wizard to pluck a pinion feather from a still living griffin laying in it's mountain nest for use in crafting the item. But the player guide made zero mention of crafting magic items even being an option.

Surviving gathering the materials could be a bitch and a half, and just the research into what you'd need could take months in-game.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Yes, in theory that's how it works. In practice however, it meant that casters almost never bothered with crafting feats after reading the rules for item crafting. Which in turn made classes like Artificer who are entirely centered around magic item crafting all but useless.
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I seem to recall that Artificers had access to some feats to greatly reduce the XP cost as well as time and resources required. I think that was in 3.5ed.
 
Assembler Maniac said:
Wizard should have made them by the dozen, told people that's how the spell worked, but took a few weeks to apply the spells properly for each batch, and sold them each for about 6x the material cost. Selling the instructions is a horrible idea.
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That requires ongoing work, so less free time to do other things and is an ongoing hassle. Selling the recipe still makes bank, and you don't have the hassle of spending unending hours making the blasted things.
 
Eewec said:
That requires ongoing work, so less free time to do other things and is an ongoing hassle. Selling the recipe still makes bank, and you don't have the hassle of spending unending hours making the blasted things.
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You know, I'm beginning to think people have lost the ability to comprehend what they're reading. You're not first one to get the wrong idea.

If it takes a few hours to do a dozen rings, and you tell people it took three weeks because you had to layer spells properly, how is that taking an inordinately long amount of time to make up the rings in the first place? People will think you NEED a long time to make 'em, but that doesn't mean you actually DO need that much time.

Selling the instructions yields a one time gold qty. Selling the rings monthly yields gold forever.

I'm truly not seein a drawback here.
 
Assembler Maniac said:
If it takes a few hours to do a dozen rings, and you tell people it took three weeks because you had to layer spells properly, how is that taking an inordinately long amount of time to make up the rings in the first place? People will think you NEED a long time to make 'em, but that doesn't mean you actually DO need that much time.
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The problem is that each magic ring actually does takes a few days if not weeks to make genuinely. This is not a magepunk setting where magic is dirt cheap and commonplace. Enchanting a sixth level spell into a ring is tough work, nevermind modifying the spell to behave differently from its standard casting to be more subtle.
 
Assembler Maniac said:
Selling the instructions yields a one time gold qty. Selling the rings monthly yields gold forever.
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They never said he didn't sell more rings. Just that he made a fortune selling the instructions.

If a decade of toil will net you 10 million gold, a quick transaction will net you one million gold, and you can live comfortably on 100,000 gold, why not make bank quickly and retire while young enough to enjoy it?
 
Jacen1 said:
They never said he didn't sell more rings. Just that he made a fortune selling the instructions.

If a decade of toil will net you 10 million gold, a quick transaction will net you one million gold, and you can live comfortably on 100,000 gold, why not make bank quickly and retire while young enough to enjoy it?
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And going back to what I said about ongoing work... it's ongoing work. Large lump sum now for the recipe and make more for any ring I bother to make as extra, or having to find the resources and making the rings or finding appropriate rings to take an enchantment and then enchanting them etc etc and of course finding buyers or being somewhere that people can come to you to buy one which means staying in one place or having contact details out in the public arena... lots of work when selling the recipe means someone else gets to do the boring bits now the recipe has been created and proven. As I can still craft them if I need them for myself or someone I want to have one I see no issue selling it. Now I can move on and do the interesting stuff instead of the drudge work and I have some nice money to lubricate things with that doesn't require more work.

Spell researcher/dungeon diver/Magic Adventurer/whatever being forced to be shopkeeper and stock maker.... ugg. Maybe when they've got old and want to retire, but until then I can't think of anything more soul crushing.

Yes, I work in retail...
 
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In addition, any mage who knows anything about crafting magic items of any sort would also know that the wizard in question had been lying through their teeth about what was involved. If the ring was invented during the era that 2nd edition chronicles, then wizards who delved into item crafting would know that making each ring is a perilous endeavor as you have to know what exotic materials you need, and then get an adventuring group together to ideally help you survive going to get said exotic materials.

For a Star Ring, maybe it requires ore from a fallen star (meteorite), a vial of blood from a djinn taken in the elemental plane of fire, and a shard harvested from an ice elemental in the elemental plane of ice. Oh, and the hair of a celestial, willingly given, for good measure. If so, the wizard in question might have been more then happy to go through such extremes to protect his girlfriend. But would he be willing to do so over and over again to make dozens of Star Rings? Maybe not, in which case selling the instructions is safer (for the wizard) and more profitable.

Assembler Maniac said:
If it takes a few hours to do a dozen rings, and you tell people it took three weeks because you had to layer spells properly, how is that taking an inordinately long amount of time to make up the rings in the first place? People will think you NEED a long time to make 'em, but that doesn't mean you actually DO need that much time.
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I think you are missing a critical piece of information. It's not "a few hours to do a dozen rings". It's maybe "three days to two weeks for each ring". And that is if you didn't have to do anything excessively dangerous to get the materials to make each and every ring. One sec, I'll check the actual 3.5 crafting rules real quick. You're not making a dozen rings at once over 4 or 5 hours. You are making a dozen rings one at a time over however many days it takes (depending on complexity) per ring. So if it takes only 3 days each, to make a dozen such rings it's literally taking you 36 days of doing likely nothing but eating, sleeping for 8 hours, and working on the ring for 8 hours a day. Because you also had to re-memorize the spells you're casting every day while making the ring.

I just checked the rules, in 3.5 it takes one day per 1,000 GP base cost of the ring to craft it. So, let's break down how much in 3.5 the Star Ring would cost to make.

*Armor bonus is 1,000 gp squared per bonus, so a +2 bonus is 4,000 gold. Minimum of level 4 to get this armor bonus, will require the Mage Armor spell.
*Save bonus is again 1,000 gp squared per bonus, so a +2 bonus to all saves is (2x3)x(1,000x2), or 6,000 gold. Minimum of level 4 for a +2 bonus each save, 3 saves being improved. Need the Resistance spell, which I believe is a 0 level spell.
*The heat and cold resistance is a Continuous Endure Elements effect, which is a 1st level spell. So that's 2,000xCaster Level. If the creator is a level 4 wizard then this effect will cost 8,000 gold. This cost WILL scale with your wizard's level, so the higher your level the more expensive this is to add.

So total base cost is 4,000+6,000+8,000 gold, or 18,000 gold. This means one single Star Ring takes eighteen days to craft. Crafting the ring only would cost you 9,000 gold. But you use the base cost to determine how long it takes to craft. So for 18 days you are spending 3 hours studying to re-memorize Mage Armor, Resistance, and Endure Elements. You're spending 8 hours working on the ring. You CAN NOT spend more then 8 hours a day working on the ring, or you'll be forced to start from scratch. Equally you can't work on more then one ring at a time. You're sleeping for 8 hours. Leaving you with 5 hours to do other things each day.

The XP cost for making each ring looks to be 50 xp for every 5 GP. So 180,000 spent to make the ring. So, uhm... Yikes. Don't think that's something anyone's gonna be crafting more then one of at a time. And definitely not at level 4. I suspect the ring was invented before the rules of magic changed to basically require the wizard to pour bits of themself into every magic item made.

EDIT:
Sorry for the Wall of Info. I fell into Research and Lecture mode. It happens.

EDIT 2:
Double checked XP costs, cause that didn't sound right. it's 1/25th of the base cost in XP. So for a star ring it's 720 xp to craft one ring. Much more reasonable. But still not something a level 4 wizard would want to do too often. Damn SRD with it's confusing layout of info.
 
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When we did actual Item crafting in our 2e game, we applied the lab rules from Ars Magica 2e for the making of the magic item. We also got XP for making the item, because that's a thing Wizard's normally do. It was kind of kludged together, because Ars Magica and D&D 2e were worlds apart. It's easier to do with D&D 3.5e and up, because the ability modifiers easy match up with ArsM's range of ability scores (-5 to +5).

Really common, low power items, we had at a week for the first time, and then days for any more (because you're working from your lab notes). These would be the common items. Uncommon items would be a month, followed by a week. Rare items took a season, then a month, and legendary items took years to enchant.

You'd take Spellcraft / Arcana + Int Bonus + bonuses for the material and shape vs. the combined level of the effects.
So your 1st Potion of Healing (Cure Lt. Wounds / Cure Wounds I) would take you a week to make your first batch. Your second batch would take a day. Likewise, a Sword +1. More complicated items would accumulate points from your total that exceeded the level of effects. And you got XP for doing things.

This is what I kinda used when Naurelin made the Ring of Polymorph Self for Greg. That and she had a skilled assistant in the (controversial) form of a skilled Alchemist. She had the lab notes, so she accumulated points based on In bonus plus proficiency in spellcraft plus modifiers for materials and form, vs. the spell's level (4) + modifiers for how many times a day and other modifiers. Once Naurelin and Ed got started, it took a week (Uncommon Item).

Making something like Excalibur would be a lifetime's work; hunting down legendary(!) materials, a legendary(!) smith to forger the blade, and using your legendary(!) enchanting skills to make the Legendary(!!!!) Sword... and then die as some watery tart gives it to someone from Cornwall...

(Note that the Ars Magica Laboratory are simple and rather robust, but would take far too much space and probably violate copyright to explain in detail here...)
 
Really, when you look at it, the rules are difficult for game-play reasons. If it's easy, then everyone in the party is loaded up with magic items from the get-go. So you make it hard, to explain why TIM THE ENCHANTER isn't available for three months of game time (while the actual player is in Lower Slobbovia for a year or more on some contract ...), and to also make sure that you aren't having characters running around wearing twenty rings (assuming they're using their toes as well and you're ignoring the 'one ring per hand/foot' rule.

It's going into your own worlds where you can change that. What to make it easy? Remove the XP hit. (Which was a way to make the players THINK about whether they really needed that Wondrous Thing of Thingness.) I still maintain that Wands of Wonder are screw-ups by enchanters, since it's probably named less for it doing wondrous things and more for the "I wonder what it'll do this time?" tendency.
 
Kinsfire said:
Really, when you look at it, the rules are difficult for game-play reasons. If it's easy, then everyone in the party is loaded up with magic items from the get-go. So you make it hard, to explain why TIM THE ENCHANTER isn't available for three months of game time (while the actual player is in Lower Slobbovia for a year or more on some contract ...), and to also make sure that you aren't having characters running around wearing twenty rings (assuming they're using their toes as well and you're ignoring the 'one ring per hand/foot' rule.

It's going into your own worlds where you can change that. What to make it easy? Remove the XP hit. (Which was a way to make the players THINK about whether they really needed that Wondrous Thing of Thingness.) I still maintain that Wands of Wonder are screw-ups by enchanters, since it's probably named less for it doing wondrous things and more for the "I wonder what it'll do this time?" tendency.
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But at the same time, there are world building implications too. If few to no player character adventurers (who are the highly visible minority) are willing to mess with magic item crafting for various (sensible) reasons, this would imply that adventurers in general don't bother with it. This in turn may suggest that magic users in general don't bother as well. Thus magic item crafting might be a lost art in the setting. Suddenly that +1 dagger the party found in a dungeon is of higher significance and importance then it normally might be, because nobody knows how to make them anymore.
 
One way I Get around the whole 'item glut' thing is to make the items that they get 'in dungeon' initially flawed or have some other kind of damage or missing detail; the magic sword needs a new handgrip, a focus stone needs replacing, or maybe it needs to be recharged before it can be used.

- for example, on Ryvens adventure sheet she has Four items:

'Amulet of Translation' - Translates all spoken Words within 20 feet into one the wearer can understand.
'Ring of Cantraps' - Does exactly what is says; grants the wearer the ability's to cast 'Cantrap'
'Lens of Revealing' - Reveals hidden text upon any map, scroll or book
'Dragons-Queens Ring of Unlimited Wish' - allows the casting of the spell 'Unlimited Wish' once per charge

However, of the four, only one starts out fully usable - the Lens. Both the amulet and ring of Cantraps, even though they are fairly common, need their focus stones replaced before they will work. Meanwhile, the Ring of Unlimited Wish is completely depleted; While it Can hold upto 5 charges, and will self-charge, it will take 10 years to charge it's first charge, and for all subsequent ones that will be increased by an additional ten years for each existing charge.

J knows i'm gonna be OP when i get going, so i've got a lot of problems initally - those are just some of what he's done to nerf me starting out.
 
But really, what the GM is suppose to do is currate dungeon loot. Sure, the treasure chart might say there's 1d8 magical gee whatzits in the loot. And you CAN roll randomly for what they are. But as a GM you should be deciding what they are based on the campaign and maintaining balance. Maybe you're planning the campaign to head into a desert a few adventures down the line, so in one dungeon you include a water skein which can (on command) fill with fresh water 8 times a day. Or the party's light on magic weapons, and you know they'll be starting to face things that require magic to hurt, so you start sprinkling the occasional +1 or +2 weapon or armor. The more powerful stuff is specifically seeded based on the needs of the adventure. Why does the troll chieften Utgar the Unclean have a +5 Holy Defender in his treasury? Okay, maybe that's what the treasure chart decided is in the loot when you randomly rolled things up. But this is a level 4 adventure, do you really want to hand the party's paladin a +5 Holy Defender just like that?
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Suddenly that +1 dagger the party found in a dungeon is of higher significance and importance then it normally might be, because nobody knows how to make them anymore.
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With one of my DMs, we knew to NEVER pick up a magic item. Why? They were uncommon (not the descriptor from the magic items list, but real world meaning), and good ones were passed down through family members ad infinitum. If you found an item while questing? It WAS crocked in some way, such as a Sap of Slipperiness, or a +1 sword that lowered your DEX. So items got left behind, which drove him crazy in one campaign, because he intended us to pick up the All Important Item, but had trained us otherwise ...

I miss him. He was a great roleplayer, and thought through so much of things when he ran, but ... well, when he drpped the ball, he dropped the ball HARD. (Lost him back in September to heart surgery. Pretty sure he knew he wasn't going to make it out alive, because his last online post quoted the Hartnell Docotr Who's last words. Read or listen to that speech and you'll know why I think that.)
 
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Kinsfire said:
With one of my DMs, we knew to NEVER pick up a magic item. Why? They were uncommon (not the descriptor from the magic items list, but real world meaning), and good ones were passed down through family members ad infinitum. If you found an item while questing? It WAS crocked in some way, such as a Sap of Slipperiness, or a +1 sword that lowered your DEX. So items got left behind, which drove him crazy in one campaign, because he intended us to pick up the All Important Item, but had trained us otherwise ...
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That sort of mentality doesn't acknowledge that sometimes the family treasure passed down from generation to generation gets lost because the current holder died an ignoble death to a slime or goblin. Not every magic item found out in the wild will be Cursed in some way, because adventurers prize magic items (for good reason). And all too often, adventurers end up biting off more then they can chew. Badguys also prize magic items, so adventurers are likely to find them while dealing with a Big Bad who collected a few for use in their plans.
 
Agreed, but by and large in that campaign, if there was a lose item just sitting there? Ignore it for your own safety. Clutched in a hand of a corpse/skeleton? Maybe you can trust it. MAYBE.

He eventually learned to cut back on some of that tendency.
 
Kinsfire said:
Agreed, but by and large in that campaign, if there was a lose item just sitting there? Ignore it for your own safety. Clutched in a hand of a corpse/skeleton? Maybe you can trust it. MAYBE.

He eventually learned to cut back on some of that tendency.
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My typical stance is that magic item creation is rare, and how to make some of the more powerful items is likely lost knowledge. Any time I start up a new campaign, I sit down to determine just how many Decks of Many Things and certain other items there actually are in the world. Because I can't imagine anyone made that many of them, or passed on how to make the damn things. Maybe create a handful of unique Artifacts for the campaign to scatter around. They may or may not ever actually come into play, but I'll make them and scatter them around the world.

Other then that, my usual stance is that anything beyond a vanilla +2 weapon or armor is rare, at best. Vanilla +3 through +5 is more common, but anything with additional effects is probably going to be rare.

EDIT:
And that stance comes from just how infrequently players do engage in crafting systems. Magic item crafting (and thus magic items in general) tend to be more common in a Pathfinder campaign, because the more forgiving crafting rules mean I see most adventuring parties with at least one magic crafter. Hell, I've BEEN the magic crafter in one Pathfinder 1e group, despite not playing a caster.
 
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People obviously ignored the small box at the bottom of page 285 in the 3.5 DMG.

After calculating the final cost, you can apply reductions to the cost; this shortens crafting time, lowers EXP costs... and makes it harder to steal the object and use it.

10% reduction for required skill: must have 5 ranks in Bowyer, for example.
30% for a specific race.
30% for a specific class.

So, the party mage looks at the Ranger and they work out what he wants. Make it for an Elven Ranger with 8 ranks of X skill, and at a minimum, you get 30% off the cost, and cut crafting time, if the GM rules that you can't stack the reductions.

If the GM wants more crafting though, they'll allow them to stack, at least one time. That allows for the cost to be low enough to outfit the party with items that they can actually use, rather than depending on random luck in hunting down items.
 
The beginning and end of many players investigation into D&D 3.5's magic item crafting is "It costs XP? HELL NO!" At which point they notice wizards can craft spells too, and that doesn't cost XP. So they try making the most overpowered and broken spell the GM will let them get away with. Such as one player who pitched a 2nd level spell that was a swift action to cast, only required a verbal component, and did 18d8 damage split evenly between fire, cold, and electrical damage with no save or to-hit roll. Plus 3d8 extra damage per additional level beyond 3. No cap to the damage, of course. Oh, and it could be either a Single Target or Fireball style AoE (without friendly fire risk), determined at time of memorizing it.

Obviously I rejected the spell.

EDIT:
At least, that's been my experiences.
 
It should be noted that many of my prior DMs (and, to be fair, myself as well) were of the "you got to suck it to get it" school of thought when it came to things like magic armor or weapons; if you were facing a humanoid monster and the loot table indicated they had a magic item they could use, you better believe they would use it.

That said, the very first magic weapon found in the only D&D 3.0 campaign I ran I decided to be nice and made a sort of lesser artifact, made with flux created by grinding a scute from the Tarrasque and who's handle was wrapped in leather harvested from the same (only temporarily slain, it turned out) monster. It had a +2 base enchantment, but it would accept further enchantment with no exp cost, though only hold said enchantment for a decade before the added spellwork faded. It was intended to ease the players into the crafting system.

Pity they never got into enchantment or researched the blade...
 
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First weapon my players got was a blast rod, (Magic of Eberron) that had already had three of its eight charges used, but were able to get it recharged after they had used it up for a nominal cost, (Saving the person's life) this was followed by a wand of force missiles that had only half its charges
 
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