[3.5] Stacking charged magic items

[Choco]

According to RAW you can keep adding effects to magic items for 1.5 times the price that a magic item in the same body slot with that same effect would cost. Now I am away from my books and all SRD sites (that I know of) are blocked here, so please forgive me if it is explicitely stated in RAW somewhere, but is there anything stopping you from stacking the same effect multiple times?

I know a cloak of charisma +6 and charisma +6 would be useless since the bonuses don't stack, but for x/day magic items this should be doable, so by RAW could I create a belt of battle and healing and healing and healing and healing... etc.? I am assuming that if possible each stacking of healing would have it's own seperate charges, but that is definitely acceptable.

[JeenLeen]

I can see it both ways. I think it would depend on how the DM chooses to see it, which would be in part whether the DM thinks this is rules abuse.


It could be that each 'healing' grants the belt the ability to heal 3/day. NOT give it another +3 uses of heal/day. If the belt already has that power, giving it to it again adds nothing.
I don't recall any at the moment, but I think I've read of special abilities from classes/PrC that act like that. Maybe the difference between adding +1d6 to sneak attack and granting a 1d6 sneak attack? For some reason that comes to mind.

However, the way you state it also makes sense. You have pools of healings, each usable 3/day, just as if you had multiple Belts of Healing.

[Ashiel]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean exactly, but I'll take a shot in the dark on trying to answer you anyway. :smalltongue:

To my knowledge there's nothing that's stopping you from making a magic item and stacking the same effect on it. The biggest problem you'd have with this is most things worth stacking don't actually stack. As your example pointed out, +3 charisma / +3 charisma is just a waste of money, since the bonuses don't stack. However, spells with x/day charges or plain charges do.

Put another way, you could in fact make a belt of healing that works as two belts of healing. It would be more costly, but it saves you the effort of swapping the belts around, so it's probably convenient in combat. IIRC, you would price it by adding the cost of both belts together then multiplying that by 1.5. Here's a bit of SRD text for you. :smallsmile:


Multiple Different Abilities
Abilities such as an attack roll bonus or saving throw bonus and a spell-like function are not similar, and their values are simply added together to determine the cost. For items that do take up a space on a character’s body each additional power not only has no discount but instead has a 50% increase in price.

Now in the case of items that have similar abilities (such as different powers drawing from the same source), you'll actually get a bit of a discount. For example, if you made an item that has 5 charges per day and casts fireball, then you add another spell effect that is the same cost or cheaper but draws on the same charges, you get a 25% discount on the 2nd power, then a 50% discount on each additional power. Note the abilities have to be the same cost or cheaper. You can't try to get a more costly power cheaper this way.


Multiple Similar Abilities
For items with multiple similar abilities that don’t take up space on a character’s body use the following formula: Calculate the price of the single most costly ability, then add 75% of the value of the next most costly ability, plus one-half the value of any other abilities.

Now let's put this into practice.
Let's say we have a wand of fireball, and we want to turn it into a wand of fireball and a wand of lightning bolt, and we want 50 charges for each. In this case, we add the cost of the fireball wand to the lightning bolt wand, and craft as normal, because this item doesn't use up a body slot.

Now let's say we want a helmet that grants a +1 charisma and throws out a fireball spell 1/day with a command word. We'd start with the fireball (5,400gp), then move to the charisma bonus (1000gp), then multiply it by 1.5, for a total of 9,600gp.

Now we want to make a wand that casts fireball, lightning bolt, and haste from the same charges. We'll keep them all at 5th caster level for sake of demonstration. We take the first spell and find it costs 11,250gp. Then we add the 2nd spell (25% discount) for 8437.5gp (we'll round to 8500), then the 3rd spell (50% discount) for 5625gp. You now have a wand with 50 charges that can interchangeably cast three different spells for 25,375gp. Since this is such a big investment, I would advise giving it 5/day charges (costs the same as 50 charges ever) since it's kind of unique.

Any of that help?