Balancing rituals in 3.5/PF

[JoshuaZ]

In my 3.5/PF campaign I'm trying to reduce somewhat the Christmas-Tree effect with lots of magic items (although I think what I'm doing is likely too little, too late). One thing I'm thinking of doing is having rituals which give permanent benefit with alchemical substances required for the ritual at close to the same cost as making the equivalent wondrous item. The thought is that they would function just like the slotless variant of an item with the usual Pathfinder rule that a slotless version costs twice as much as the regular version. They'd have the slight downside of not being able to be sold, but have the advantage that they can't be taken away when one is captive. Is there any massive balance issues obvious abuse here?

I'm going to restrict it to a few specific rituals for certain specific items, mainly fairly low-level items costing no more than a 3000 or so gp.

[Helcack]

If you are limiting it, then I see no way this could be abusable unless you let it be.

[JoshuaZ]

If you are limiting it, then I see no way this could be abusable unless you let it be.

Ok. Let me rephrase then: What limits are necessary to prevent this from being too abuseable?

[lsfreak]

I'm unsure how big the difference between 3.5 and PF are in terms of items, but something you may want to look at is this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134805) over in Homebrew. It replaces part of a character's wealth with points gained on levelup to cover the core items that most builds require, such as the 2/4/6 ability items, resistance bonuses to saves, the various items that give deflection/natural/etc armor bonuses, and so on, plus a few of the basic items used to boost class abilities (pearls of power, metamagic rods).

[Epsilon Rose]

I can see two immediate problems with this. The first is that if they get hit with a dispel your player's are going to be in a great deal of trouble. The second is that if they can't sell their upgrades and all of their upgrades cost double the normal variant, they're going to drop off the back of WLB rather quickly.
Unfortunately, neither of those factors really get balanced out by the fact that the items can't be taken away normally (but see dispel). After all, they really shouldn't get taken captive that often.

Of course, both of those things are fixable. You could make dispelling only suppress the enchantments, give them much more wealth and let them cannibalize old enchantments to partially pay for new ones, but I'm not sure it's really worth it.

Out of curiosity, what effects were you thinking of allowing this for?

[JoshuaZ]

I can see two immediate problems with this. The first is that if they get hit with a dispel your player's are going to be in a great deal of trouble. The second is that if they can't sell their upgrades and all of their upgrades cost double the normal variant, they're going to drop off the back of WLB rather quickly.
Unfortunately, neither of those factors really get balanced out by the fact that the items can't be taken away normally (but see dispel). After all, they really shouldn't get taken captive that often.

Of course, both of those things are fixable. You could make dispelling only suppress the enchantments, give them much more wealth and let them cannibalize old enchantments to partially pay for new ones, but I'm not sure it's really worth it.


Out of curiosity, what effects were you thinking of allowing this for?

The first thing I was thinking of doing this for was for Deathwatch Eyes (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/e-g/eyes-deathwatch) (partially because if I do introduce this, it will get introduced to the PCs as a thing by a certain NPC who this is thematically appropriate for). I was also thinking of having one that duplicates a cloak of resistance, partially because it is such a common item, and the passive nature of the ability makes it potentially have interesting fluff.

The point about dispelling is a good one. The suppression thing is one solution. Another option might be to restrict to objects that duplicate spells and have the rituals be treated as instantaneous and grant spell-like abilities. The point about lack of resale potentially damaging WBL is a good one, and I don't know how to handle that.

[Epsilon Rose]

The first thing I was thinking of doing this for was for Deathwatch Eyes (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/e-g/eyes-deathwatch) (partially because if I do introduce this, it will get introduced to the PCs as a thing by a certain NPC who this is thematically appropriate for). I was also thinking of having one that duplicates a cloak of resistance, partially because it is such a common item, and the passive nature of the ability makes it potentially have interesting fluff.

The point about dispelling is a good one. The suppression thing is one solution. Another option might be to restrict to objects that duplicate spells and have the rituals be treated as instantaneous and grant spell-like abilities. The point about lack of resale potentially damaging WBL is a good one, and I don't know how to handle that.

There are two ways you could get around the resale issue. The first is to make the enchantments actual slotless items, possibly charms that get added to a necklace or bracelet. The thing is, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of heroes going through rituals to make themselves intrinsically better, especially if the enchantments they get are the basic and fairly boring passive buff types. You could allow a sort of resale, while still keeping the intrinsic nature of the enchantments, by allowing the players to apply the cost of their old enchantments to their new ones (of course, this comes with the stipulation that they lose their old enchantments).

Unfortunately, the real problem is 2x-2y>x-y. Or, in other words, they'll still be paying more to upgrade your slotless items than they would for the normal versions, even with resale, and, thus, still end-up falling behind WBL. The solution for that is to either give them more wealth (which isn't really a good idea if they want to spend it on something else) or to give them a discount on these things, possibly even making them cheaper then the normal versions. I actually favor the second solution for two reasons. The first is that you want them to take this option and are limiting what enchantments can be gotten in this way, so you might as well let them get the enchantments. The second is that the discounts can be made contingent to their relationships with various npcs, which can be a nice reward for role playing.