Changing item creation

[Asteron]

I've long been dissatisfied with the RAW on item creation rules, particularly the time it takes to make or upgrade high level items. The making items isn't that big of a deal, but it is functionally impossible to upgrade an item at higher levels when it is an item that your character uses frequently/relies upon (Weapons/Armor). I want to modify item creation so that you don't have to continually buy a new weapon whenever you want to upgrade something. Also, I'd like to make item creating for PCs viable in campaigns where there is little down time.

My first thought is to decouple the time it takes to make an item from the items market value. I get that more powerful items take longer to make, but using the market value is just a little metagamey for me. It doesn't make sense to base the effort it takes to make something on how much it will eventually be charged (perhaps it should be considered in reverse, but that's not how it's laid out...) However, I don't exactly know where to take this idea. What do I use as a base if not market value?

My second thought was to keep the time based on market value and divide the amount of time it takes by your unmodified caster level (no CL shenanigans to make it quicker that way.) Say a 10th level wizard makes an item that will cost 75k gp, the time it would take to craft it would normally be 75 days. With this rule, the item would take 7.5 days to make (probably a little patronizing to spell it out like that, but I wanted to be sure that I was getting the idea across.)

Any thoughts from the Playground?

[Arael666]

Why not use caster level only? You could use days, weeks, etc per caster level needed to make the item, depending on your idea of "reasonable" time.

And it will also change the borked idead "the more ir costs, the longer it will take to be made" to a more logic "the more powerfull it is, the longer it will take to be made.

[Asteron]

Why not use caster level only? You could use days, weeks, etc per caster level needed to make the item, depending on your idea of "reasonable" time.

And it will also change the borked idead "the more ir costs, the longer it will take to be made" to a more logic "the more powerfull it is, the longer it will take to be made.

That might work.

One of the things I was going for with the second idea is that the better you are at magic, the easier it gets for you to make magic items.