[3.x/PF] World design, crafting magic items, magic level

[Phelix-Mu]

In regards to crafting items through the editions of D&D into Pathfinder. This person was responding to a question I had about the elimination of xp costs for crafting magic items in PF.



In terms of world design, crafting now makes sense. People can feasibly produce magic items without silliness ("oh yeah I need to fill my goblin murder-quota before I make another +1 sword"), houseruling, or extensive hand-waving. You know, in earlier editions, crafting actually gave you xp, because you were accomplishing something. It just doesn't make sense that plying your trade makes you worse at it. And it certainly isn't fair for a character to be penalized for smithing gear. Forging epic weapons is standard fare in fantasy and deserves support.

Alright, so I do agree with the general sentiment. However, I have noticed that, especially with the rise artificer as a pretty interesting and useful class concept, the general ability of even fairly low-level npcs to produce magic items in some abundance is pretty profound.

In particular, the elimination of experience costs, or any spell level reqs as in older editions, now means that anyone can pump out items at a standard 30% profit margin, crazy profitable compared to just about any other profession. Now, market for such items may be limited, but an abundance of supply just means that price of magic items will decrease over time. The effect is less noticeable with very powerful items, but +1 longswords stand to become standard fair among town guardsmen, given time.

So, from a setting perspective, how do we make crafting items friendly to players (the experience cost was hardly prohibitive before, but became a problem as the campaign went on and crafters are routinely behind everyone else) without gradually inflating the amount of magic in the world via cheap magic items? I want magic items to remain cool, special, and valuable, and reducing it to a matter of bookkeeping means that a functional world economy will move in the direction of Eberron and other high-magic worlds.

I appreciate that this is a pretty non-pc oriented view I am espousing, but I consider it a disservice to make feats, abilities, and optional rules available to my players if said rules will eventually warp the nature of the campaign world and ruin the nature of play. Item sweatshops and necro-powered diamond mine wish machines are kind of a problem, IMO, and I want to use a version of the rules that won't necessitate me swinging the banhammer or excessive DM fiat later on, when it's the players' turn to exploit the rules.

[Squirrel_Dude]

Possible changes to Pathfinder's rules:

Increase the caster level required to make wondrous items or magic armor/weapons etc. Increase the DC to make a magical item to 10+(2*Caster Level Required). This would make the DC to create the most expensive wondrous item in the core rulebook have a DC 44 spellcrft check, as opposed to a DC 22.

Increase the time it takes to make a magical item. Make it so that DC to accelerate the work isn't a strait +5 but a +1/1000 G in the items base price.

Make it so that players can waste resources when making magical items if they fail to make the crafting DC. Have them make multiple spellcraft checks.


*I wouldn't do all of these in conjunction with each other.

[zlefin]

Tough question.
One way would be to reduce the difference between the cost to make an item and the sale price. This would make the profit of items much less; and would mean making items is more about getting what you want in a world without a magic-mart.

One way i've considered using in some campaigns; which is sadly VERY pc-unfriendly; is to have magic items use the normal craft rules, just with higher DCs (say +2-5 to dc per +1 bonus). Given how the craft rules are, this would mean items tend to take a long time to make; and it would jsutify them being costing so much (as well as often being of elven and dwarven manufacture for higher level ones, as a long lifespan helps finish).

[ArcturusV]

Well, you always have the methods suggested in older editions, as the guy was alluding to.

Aka: Riddle Crafting

Where you are required to do some weird, outside the normal bounds of logic, thing to craft an item. I do remember this from back in the day, and having to go on insane quests just to be able to make myself a magical item. Particularly if the DM was a real twisted sort that could come up with some insane riddles. And some could. I can vaguely recall one where I had to travel to the polar ice caps of a world to start a toad breeding program as a single step to make an item... But it's been so long that most of the particulars are forgotten now.

Never played with Artificers so I don't know how they break the rules open. They're Eberron right? Never played that. And in my campaigns I always had a strict "only one setting book" ideal to stop some OP cherry picking builds. Eberron was never that book because I never had it. So I can't really speak on how to limit it's impact.

But I think the way to go, would be with world limitations in general. The simplest thing would be requiring a magic item to use some sort of special material(s). Then make sure said material couldn't just be Created. Part of this can be taken from say, the Replicators and Special Materials problem in Prime Directive D20.

Which basically says the way Replicators work is on such a level that on the molecular level things are so uniform that they are "unnatural". And this state generally is not sustainable, and also easily identifiable to an expert under examination (Replicate Gold, and anyone who examines it closely will notice that it's structure is far too uniform and devoid of natural deviations).

So require Material(s). Make it so they can't just be "Created" due to the above phenomenon. Requires players to go on minor quests for it, or at least find merchants dealing with it, probably at massively inflated prices because it IS so hard to get and so rare.

It's a simple idea. But not necessarily a bad one.

[Phelix-Mu]

Hmm, some good ideas.

@Squirrel Dude: The first thing I did was raise the CL requirement for Craft Wondrous Item and Craft Magic Arms and Armour, as they are ludicrously low. I don't have a problem so much with consumables, since having those be pretty common is less problematic, since they come and go; created value of the potion vanishes when consumed. Am also considering increasing the CL requirement to make a weapon with a certain enhancement bonus.

Both suggested adding some kind of crafting check. While I am loathe to increase crafting times, since they are extremely onerous at high levels and I am fond of campaign plots that have a countdown/timer component, the crafting check mechanism sounds useful. A failure chance and wasted materials definitely avoids the money in->profit out aspect of magic crafting that I wanted to avoid.

I am mixed about how much I want artificers to exist in my world. On the one hand, they make item production much simpler, contributing to the problem, particularly with the artisan feats, several of which will probably get banned or significantly limited. On the other hand, artificers can dismantle items that aren't useful, taking existing items out of the magic item supply, which might help the problem.

[Slipperychicken]

You could go with the D&D economy of 1gp constituting 10 days of untrained labor or ~1 day of skilled professional work. This makes all but the cheapest magic items prohibitively expensive. One Everlasting Rations (350gp) constitutes practically a year's earnings to such a professional.

While magic items might be available to well-financed entities like the government or private security forces, it's unlikely to produce Tippyverse level shenanigans due to the sheer cost involved.

[avr]

Way back when, there was a series in White Dwarf called Eye of Newt which gave some very specific components required to create each item in the AD&D DMG. I think this is the riddle crafting ArcturusV mentioned. I don't recommend it, it is both a huge hassle and prone to making some random item very common. Amusing though.

Better would be to make magic item creation dependent on some limited but renewable resource which is the same for all items. The dust from dragon eggshells perhaps, or souls/spirits (animals for consumables, sentient for major items?).

[Crustypeanut]

Well, a 1st level Commoner (with 13 wisdom/intelligence, lets say), skill focus in his chosen Profession/Craft, and a rank in it, would have a +8 to the skill. Considering the rules for making money on a weekly basis using Profession/Craft, and lets say he's taking a 10, that would be 9 gp per week for a 1st Level Commoner. (Its 1/2 his check per week in gp)

With 52 weeks in a year, that would be 468 gp a year. With that kind of income, all but the cheapest of magic items are extremely expensive - even a simple Potion of Cure Light Wounds would be 1/9th of his yearly income.

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Now, lets say we have a 1st level NPC Alchemist with 17 Intelligence (Human/Half-Orc/Half-Elf/Elf for the +2 Int, with a 15 starting Int) with Skill Focus (Alchemy). This would be a +11 to Craft (Alchemy). Taking a 10, this would be 10.5 gp per week, or 546 gp per year. Now, if we instead have him making money using Brew Potion (Which he gets at level 1 for free), he can make Potions of Cure Light Wounds for 25gp, at one a day. If he is able to sell these for full value (50 gp), he would make 175 gp per week, or 9100 gp per year, provided all of those potions sell and if he works every week in the year.

As a 1st level NPC, this is pretty damn good, and even if he only gets to spend a third of that after things like taxes and expenses, it means that most minor magic items are available to him, although it would still be a fairly hefty purchase.

Most other NPCs, even heroic NPCs, won't be making that much, though. I'd say the second best would be Spellcasters with the Scribe Scroll feat, and they'd be making half that at best. (And scrolls are in less demand, one would assume)

Now, why you don't see NPCs running around with magic items after years of hard work is questionable, but I'm assuming either they have more expenses than I'm assuming, or they just like to blow it on things like expensive food, lodging, etc. Perhaps they aren't able to sell it at a full price, either, or they're not spending 52 weeks a year crafting.

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I play Pathfinder exclusively nowadays, and personally I still prefer the system over 3.5's system of spending experience points to make items. Spells, I can understand better, but items I never liked spending Exp on.

[foolofsound]

Remember also that each magic item requires a noticeable amount of valuable materials and reagents (in other words, have a crafting cost). Even on simple items like +1 swords, your local wizard/blacksmith would be expending over 1100 gold per weapon; far more than any but the richest cities could afford to equip their rank-and-file soldiers and guards with, and this is assuming that said wizard is working at cost.

You also have to think about opportunity cost. If a baron is given the choice to equip his 25 guardsmen with +1 swords (almost 29000 gold), or hire an additional 25 guards for the next decade (less than 19000 gold), which gives him more value for his money? Alternatively, according to RAW, he could hire a 20th level Warrior for a decade for about the same money, if he really needed concentrated competence.

Basically, there aren't really such things as "cheap" magic items for the vast majority of people, and even when magic items are in their price range, they aren't usually the cost efficient solution.

[Slipperychicken]

Now, lets say we have a 1st level NPC Alchemist with 17 Intelligence (Human/Half-Orc/Half-Elf/Elf for the +2 Int, with a 15 starting Int) with Skill Focus (Alchemy). This would be a +11 to Craft (Alchemy). Taking a 10, this would be 10.5 gp per week, or 546 gp per year. Now, if we instead have him making money using Brew Potion (Which he gets at level 1 for free), he can make Potions of Cure Light Wounds for 25gp, at one a day. If he is able to sell these for full value (50 gp), he would make 175 gp per week, or 9100 gp per year, provided all of those potions sell and if he works every week in the year.


Specialist Wizard1 with same Int (17) sells spellcasting services (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/goods-and-services/hirelings-servants-services). He sells 3 1st level spells each day at CL1, netting him 30gp. Add to this however many cantrips people will pay for, as he may cast them at will. I imagine Prestidigitation will be quite popular.

Before cantrips, 210 per week, 10920 per year. If we assume he can sell, on average, 3 cantrips per day at normal price, then 35/day, 315/week, 16380/year.