Crafting Magic Items Cost

[Stuvius]

Hi Playground,

My gaming group is soon to start a new campaign and we have run into a question concerning the cost of crafting magic items. While we understand that there is typically a XP cost involved, we have elected to utilize event-based leveling on this campaign and so will not be awarding XP. Can anyone direct me to, or recommend a way to convert the XP cost of crafting into GP cost? Or is there a better method all together? Any advice would be appreciated.

[Xervous]

1 XP = 5 GP is a RAW precedent of equivalent value if you want to go that way.

[noob]

Other option: loosing a level just after this event you are at half the XP needed to gain the next level and so you have xp to craft magic items.
now the tricky thing is to manage to convince your team to go down a level and go down a level too(OOTS).

[Jeraa]

Or you can do what Pathfinder does and just drop the XP cost entirely, and don't replace it with anything.

[Xervous]

Or you can do what Pathfinder does and just drop the XP cost entirely, and don't replace it with anything.

So long as the GM is managing downtime in a reasonable manner crafting isn't likely to get out of hand. The player is devoting feat(s) and time (which is quantified as a resource) to the crafting after all.

[Sagetim]

So long as the GM is managing downtime in a reasonable manner crafting isn't likely to get out of hand. The player is devoting feat(s) and time (which is quantified as a resource) to the crafting after all.

I'm seconding this. It sounds like the campaign has a set timeline for it's progression of events, so I would doubt the players would have time to really abuse their crafting abilities during the campaign itself. Even if you remove the xp costs entirely (I don't like the idea of crafting costing xp anyway). For some examples:

a cloak of charisma +6 would still cost the person making it 18,000 gold in resources to craft (maybe less if they've sunk even more feats into crafting, but even at it's cheapest with multiple feat stacking it's only going to get to 9,000 gold, which is still a Lot of money). In the DMG, you can find rules for limits on how much someone can buy in a city at any given time. Even with 9,000 gold as the cost, you're going to need to do your shopping for those materials in a metropolis sized city, or multiple shopping trips through less than metropolis sized cities. That's before you even start crafting it. When you do start crafting it, it's going to still take you 36 days to make it, maybe as low as 27 days (with more feat investment). So 27 days of crafting, in addition to the shopping trip time is probably going to come out to about a month just to get this one item done. If they do it for the party, great, they have found a way to efficiently invest in increasing the prowess of the party by getting a strong magic item for cheaper than buying it outright. If they are making the item to sell...they need a market to sell it To. Which means they have to find a customer capable of shelling over something like 30k of gold pieces in value. There's no guarantee that they can find a buyer, and even if they do, the buyer is going to try and haggle them or pay them in something other than gold pieces (which is where the players may wind up getting fleeced, if they don't have someone with decent diplomacy and appraise to counter haggle).

So, if the player has invested in Craft Wondrous Item, Exceptional Artisan, and Magical Artisan (Craft Wondrous Item) they can bring the cost to create an item down to 50% of the normal cost (so, 1/4th of the base price). That's assuming that they can even take both Exceptional Artisan and Magical Artisan, which are feats from different campaign settings. It's also assuming that these feats stack. Exceptional Artisan lowers the gp cost for all crafting feats by 25%, while Magical Artisan is specific for each crafting feat and lowers all costs to 75%.

In any case, if the players are trying to sell a magic item that powerful they could attract unwanted attention from people who would try to steal it, get fleeced by a con artist who trades them worthless glass 'gems' because no one has an appraise skill to tell the difference between those and real gems, could just get out haggled to the point that the trade goods they get in exchange aren't worth their effort to try and liquidate, and so on. Hell, that's assuming they can even sell the cloak for it's full value. The DMG tends to assume that players aren't capable of having a merchant's license and thus cannot sell items for anything more than half their value. Which would mean that they would have to have at least one of the feats mentioned above to make Any kind of profit on crafting magic items and selling them due to npcs being *******s to them.