Advice for experience to magic items.

[AerousThrune]

For reasons that aren't important I'm going to have an NPC that will trade XP for magic items and HP for services like identify. I'm wondering if anyone has an idea for what XP should be worth. I was thinking a 1 to 10 with 1 XP being worth 10 GP. And before anyone gets upset this will be entirely optional, it'll just be a way to get magic items easier. So has anyone made, or seen a system like this, and if so what were your thoughts on the system and any problems you noticed.

[Toofey]

If you want to do this your ratio is way off, there's already thousands more XP per level than the cost of any item that has a cost in the book. at the values you're giving up the players are probably getting way more bang for their buck if GP/XP >1. Your player is going to need to be trading away a tangible amount of XP for this to be a trade off, which I would estimate would translate at 15-20% of a level, but I would come around that way, your basic block of value on the XP side needs to feel like you're giving up something useful.

[AerousThrune]

If you want to do this your ratio is way off, there's already thousands more XP per level than the cost of any item that has a cost in the book. at the values you're giving up the players are probably getting way more bang for their buck if GP/XP >1. Your player is going to need to be trading away a tangible amount of XP for this to be a trade off, which I would estimate would translate at 15-20% of a level, but I would come around that way, your basic block of value on the XP side needs to feel like you're giving up something useful.
Yeah that does sound more appropriate. I was really more worried about overcharging, But if I instead charge a percentage of experience points based on rarity it makes it something that is worth doing but also something they won't spam, so 15% for common items, 20% for uncommon and 30% for rare and no more than once per level. And common items can be bought from 5th onwards uncommon from 8 onwards and rare from 12th onwards, this would prevent them from using small XP amounts early on for a huge boost. What are your thoughts on that?

[MoiMagnus]

I would rather use "taking ransom curses" (that I would create for the occasion) than expending XP, but that's because I particularly hate:
1) Having the count XP
2) The possibility of my players having different level
So I was really happy that 5e did not have any way of losing/expending XP.
(And I'm monitoring level up, using XP only as a guideline for campaign design, but never giving XP to players)

[Vogie]

It also depends on the rest of the setting.

Is this on top of the normal amount of gold that they'd be getting in encounters?
Is there a way to transfer to excess gold back into XP?


Or are you doing some sort of other style of loot system:

A Dark-Souls-y world where XP & Gold are blended into a single currency?
A Path-of-Exile- or MMORPG-esque world where you aren't always getting currency as a reward? (Yay, more wolf pelts)

[AerousThrune]

It also depends on the rest of the setting.

Is this on top of the normal amount of gold that they'd be getting in encounters?
Is there a way to transfer to excess gold back into XP?


Or are you doing some sort of other style of loot system:

A Dark-Souls-y world where XP & Gold are blended into a single currency?
A Path-of-Exile- or MMORPG-esque world where you aren't always getting currency as a reward? (Yay, more wolf pelts)

The idea is that they won't always be able to get what they want from a magic shop as thats rolled but from this guy they can get anything except artifacts. Again this would be entirely optional, it would also be a way for them to get custom items. I'm not worried about the setting, or the strength of the items, I'm just trying to get a decent system for this.

[tieren]

I like the concept, and I think the basic guidelines you laid out in the third post are fine.

I would definitely RP it though as they are literally trading away a part of their soul for these items (horcrux style) and make it a little creepy, maybe even give them a level of exhaustion at the time of the trade until the next long rest.

So even if the players just see it as an XP merchant, the characters shouldn't be terribly eager to keep running back and further diminishing their remaining soul.

I'd probably make it pretty clear the merchant is some mid level fiend or devil

[AerousThrune]

I like the concept, and I think the basic guidelines you laid out in the third post are fine.

I would definitely RP it though as they are literally trading away a part of their soul for these items (horcrux style) and make it a little creepy, maybe even give them a level of exhaustion at the time of the trade until the next long rest.

So even if the players just see it as an XP merchant, the characters shouldn't be terribly eager to keep running back and further diminishing their remaining soul.

I'd probably make it pretty clear the merchant is some mid level fiend or devil

The merchant is actually an Aetherborn from plane-shift Kaladesh who's basically trading their life-force for items he makes, because an Aetherborn only lives five years if they're lucky, and he plans to live forever. Also he's smart enough to have modified the "dark gift" to function this way.