AnonymousPepper
2015-02-24, 04:56 PM
So I can't help but notice just how absolutely nuts the cost of buying SR is in 3.5/Pathfinder. According to the pricing guidelines, it's 10k per point of SR above SR12. And by nature of being SR, it stacks with absolutely nothing else to boot.
That doesn't scale properly with level at all. 200kGP for SR33 for a level 20 character's actually a pretty good price point; that's sufficient SR to negate a similarly-leveled caster with some CL boosts around ballpark 50% of the time, albeit only on SR:Yes spells, and you're posing problems with beneficial spells too if your DM is bothering with that (depends on how tight to the rules you're playing). Which is somewhere approximating fair in terms of price tag.
But at low levels, it's dumb as all get-out. At its base, SR13 costs 10kGP and eats up 3.3x the wealth by level of a third-level character, who would be protected 50% of the time and from SR:Yes spells only (and there's a decent amount of very basic SR:No spells at that level, too). At SR19, that's 70kGP and somewhere in the ballpark of 1.5x her WBL for the same result. The first level at which you can even buy something using WBL (remember, nothing over 25% of WBL!) that grants a 50% chance versus SR:Yes is at level 19, where an SR29 item runs you 170k, which is just barely under a fourth of the 685k WBL. If you were to craft it yourself, without the benefit of 3.5 cost reducers, the earliest it can be afforded is level 16, where SR26 accounts for 22% of your WBL.
This is clearly skewed out of all proportion and worth reexamination. I feel as though this is something that needs to be properly scaled, not a flat cost as it goes up, else such things are mostly worthless.
I would propose that the SR33=200k upper-limit pre-epic price point is perfectly serviceable. What, then, would be a good scaling formula to make it more appropriate at lower levels?
That doesn't scale properly with level at all. 200kGP for SR33 for a level 20 character's actually a pretty good price point; that's sufficient SR to negate a similarly-leveled caster with some CL boosts around ballpark 50% of the time, albeit only on SR:Yes spells, and you're posing problems with beneficial spells too if your DM is bothering with that (depends on how tight to the rules you're playing). Which is somewhere approximating fair in terms of price tag.
But at low levels, it's dumb as all get-out. At its base, SR13 costs 10kGP and eats up 3.3x the wealth by level of a third-level character, who would be protected 50% of the time and from SR:Yes spells only (and there's a decent amount of very basic SR:No spells at that level, too). At SR19, that's 70kGP and somewhere in the ballpark of 1.5x her WBL for the same result. The first level at which you can even buy something using WBL (remember, nothing over 25% of WBL!) that grants a 50% chance versus SR:Yes is at level 19, where an SR29 item runs you 170k, which is just barely under a fourth of the 685k WBL. If you were to craft it yourself, without the benefit of 3.5 cost reducers, the earliest it can be afforded is level 16, where SR26 accounts for 22% of your WBL.
This is clearly skewed out of all proportion and worth reexamination. I feel as though this is something that needs to be properly scaled, not a flat cost as it goes up, else such things are mostly worthless.
I would propose that the SR33=200k upper-limit pre-epic price point is perfectly serviceable. What, then, would be a good scaling formula to make it more appropriate at lower levels?