Cost to craft help

[Glinkle]

Hello,

I am relatively new to crafting in 3.5. I believe I have a handle of most item creation costs.

I am playing a artificer and wondering how much it would cost to place a spell into an item for continuous/activated use.

What I am trying to accomplish is I have a regular cloak and want to make it so that when worn and the command word is spoken, I can travel to the ethereal plane.
Similar to cloak of etherealness but for longer than 10 minutes.

I found an equation, Spell level x caster level x 2000 gp x n(below)
If a continuous item has an effect based on a spell with a duration measured in rounds, multiply the cost by 4. If the duration of the spell is 1 minute/level, multiply the cost by 2, and if the duration is 10 minutes/level, multiply the cost by 1.5. If the spell has a 24-hour duration or greater, divide the cost in half


The problem with this is I seem to come up with a bonkers number.
Ethereal Jaunt - Lvl 7 Spell
so 7 * 13 * 2000 *4 = sadface

[LTwerewolf]

Yes, crafting things with higher level spells gets very expensive very quickly. Your formula is correct.

[Glinkle]

Yes, crafting things with higher level spells gets very expensive very quickly. Your formula is correct.

Ah okay then, the cloak of etherealness costs something like 19000gp and the above costs something like 900000.

I understand the difference in the item, 10 minutes vs unlimited. Is there any place I can find where I can put mitigating factors on my item, that would reduce the overall cost then?

I need more than 10 minutes that the cloak of etherealness offers, but could do for about 8 hours, or has a chance to fail on activation and unable to activate again for 24hrs etc.

Are there any crafting templates that do this, where I can mitigate costs??

[LTwerewolf]

7x13=91. 91x2000=182000. 182000x4=728000. 728k for a continuous use item of a 7th level spell that's measured in rounds per level. Note that if you instead do a command word it drops the price down significantly (163,800).
DMG page 282 gives options for reducing the cost by putting limitations on the item, such as requiring an alignment or having a certain skill or class ability.

[Gallowglass]

Bear in mind that, before it talks about the formula, the most important text is:

"The correct way to price an item is by comparing its abilities to similar items (see Magic Item Gold Piece Values), and only if there are no similar items should you use the pricing formulas to determine an approximate price for the item. If you discover a loophole that allows an item to have an ability for a much lower price than is given for a comparable item, the GM should require using the price of the item, as that is the standard cost for such an effect. Most of these loopholes stem from trying to get unlimited uses per day of a spell effect from the "command word" or "use-activated or continuous" lines of Table: Estimating Magic Item Gold Piece Values."

This is there to keep you from building crap like "continuous mage armor" and "continuous true strike" and the like, but it also works the other way.

A cloak of Etherealness costs 27500 to make for 10 minutes of ethereal jaunt.
Your continuous cloak, using the formula is 728,000 gp to make. (yikes)
So work with your DM. If I was DM, I would say "your continuous item costs 4x as much as the cloak of Etherealness" and let you do it for 76,000. That seems fair to me.

[LTwerewolf]

So work with your DM. If I was DM, I would say "your continuous item costs 4x as much as the cloak of Etherealness" and let you do it for 76,000. That seems fair to me.

That would absolutely not be fair, because 10 minutes is very much not the same as all day. If we're doing straight comparisons, there are 1440 minutes in a day. Divide that by the 10 of the ethereal cloak and you get 144. A "fair" price for an all day based on the price of the original is several million gold. Also: srd places cloak of etherealness at 55k.

[Zaq]

The section in the DMG about crafting custom magic items is a set of guidelines, not a set of set-in-stone rules. First, this means that all custom items are subject to GM approval (even more so than everything else in the game), and second, it means that it's as much art as science.

When making a custom magic item, you need to compare its effects to existing items and use them as a baseline for pricing. If you end up with something way cheaper or way more powerful than an analogous item, the GM can and should either ban you from crafting that custom item, apply an appropriate nerf, or increase the price to put it in line with what it's actually doing. (The obvious silly example is the "sword of use-activated True Strike" which gives you a fresh True Strike effect on every swing for some ridiculously low price, but there's also the "boots of continuous Expeditious Retreat" that give a way bigger land speed bonus than the Boots of Striding and Springing but have a comparable price. Those are just obvious examples; there are many others.) By the same token, if you end up with something way more expensive or way less powerful than an analogous item, the GM should apply the same logic and either buff your item or reduce the price to make it appropriate, though of course that happens less frequently.

The most important thing is to look at what effects the custom item actually has rather than the formulaic costs of the component spell effects. And of course, since this is a custom item that needs GM approval anyway, you should probably just go straight to your GM and ask them what they would find to be appropriate. I mean, it'll certainly help to have run the baseline numbers first ("here's what the existing Cloak of Etherealness costs, and here's what the baseline formula predicts my new item would cost"), but at that point you need to just have that conversation and figure out if the GM is okay with you having at-will access to the Ethereal Plane at all, and if so, what they want you to pay for the privilege.

You asked about mitigating factors. Mitigating factors do exist (there's a bunch in the sidebar of DMG pg. 282), but I wouldn't recommend using the ones written out in the books, because they tend to be kind of cheesy when you're crafting the item yourself. The sidebar says you can reduce costs by making items that only work for characters with certain skill ranks or a certain class or alignment, but is it really a drawback to specify that the item you're making just happens to require ranks in skills you already possess or levels in a class you already possess? Of course not, so it doesn't make any sense to reduce the cost for basically no downside. If you do want to talk to your GM about mitigating factors, this is where that "art, not science" part comes in; your GM is certainly free to allow you to reduce the cost by putting in a drawback that actually affects you. (I mean, they're also free to use what's in the book and basically give you a discount for no real downside, but by the same token, they're also free to just cut the cost in half because they say so, so I think you get what I'm saying here.) But again, that's a conversation you need to have rather than a formula you can apply in a vacuum.

The long and short of it is to talk to your GM. Have them compare your desired end result to what already exists and price things accordingly.

[Gallowglass]

That would absolutely not be fair, because 10 minutes is very much not the same as all day. If we're doing straight comparisons, there are 1440 minutes in a day. Divide that by the 10 of the ethereal cloak and you get 144. A "fair" price for an all day based on the price of the original is several million gold. Also: srd places cloak of etherealness at 55k.

we are talking about crafting, so i quoted the crafting price (half of the sale price). Sorry you aren't following the discussion we are having.

You should watch how you use the word absolutely. I wasn't doing a straight comparison because that would be pretty dumb in a game like we are playing. A simulationist game where we only really play out a few of those minutes each day.

In my opinion, which I've formed from several other discussions, an "all day" item is roughly equal to a "usable 3xday item" because characters in games tend to live in 3 encounters a day worlds. So if a player wanted to get a cloak of etherealness that was usable all day rather than for 10 minutes (usable in 1 minute chunks all day long) I would say "well I would normally price that at 3x the normal price (given the 3 encounter a day world) but I can see edge cases where this cloak would be additionally useful (long term ethereal travel if they combine with something to let them follow guide points on the ethereal plane... avoiding an encounter without the option of the encounter waiting 10 minutes) so I'm going to make it 4x cost. In real game mechanics, its going to be generally EXACTLY as useful as the normal cloak (bypass some doors, get a few more rounds of damage mitigation than the normal cloak (I don't see many days with more than 10 rounds of combat combined)) with a couple cases where it gives you some new options. If the player starting abusing it "I'm sleeping all night in the ethereal plane so I can't get ambushed while camping!" there are built in ways to handle that abuse "when the party is attacked in the night, your character sleeps through the encounter. Sorry you are bored for the next two hours while we play out this encounter. Also the rest of the party is now pissed at you." "On the fourth day of travel, as you sleep, an ethereal filcher steals all your stuff, or an ethereal maurader attacks you."

That NOT pure math, but I certainly this its FAIR. And that, as I've expressed, is my opinion about it. Your opinion can certainly be different, but there is nothing absolute about it.