Are "Nolzur's Marvelous Pigments" as powerful as i think???

[Kerilstrasz]

First of all..


NOLZUR'S MARVELOUS PIGMENTS
Wondrous item, very rare

Typically found in 1d4 pots inside a fine wooden box with a brush (weighing 1 pound in total),
these pigments allow you to create three-dimensional objects by painting them in two dimensions.
The paint flows from the brush to form the desired object as you concentrate on its image.
Each pot of paint is sufficient to cover 1,000 square feet of a surface,
which lets you create inanimate objects or terrain features-such as a door, a pit, flowers, trees,
cells, rooms, or weapons- that are up to 10,000 cubic feet.
It takes 10 minutes to cover 100 square feet.
When you complete the painting, the object or terrain feature depicted becomes a real, nonmagical object.
Thus, painting a door on a wall creates an actual door that can be opened to whatever is beyond.
Painting a pit on a floor creates a real pit, and its depth counts against the total area of objects you create.
Nothing created by the pigments can have a value greater than 25 gp.
If you paint an object of greater value (such as a diamond or a pile of gold), the object looks authentic,
but close inspection reveals it is made from paste, bone, or some other worthless material.
If you paint a form of energy such as fire or lightning, the energy appears but dissipates as soon as you
complete the painting, doing no harm to anything.

As we use the Sane's Magical Prices, 3rd party source, this item costs 200g.

Am i right to assume that just 1 pot of these would fetch us ANY mundane item that a group may need?
From ladders & ropes, tents & boats, to weapons, barrels filled with water/oil/alcohol & food.
As long as it costs less than 25gold, one can just draw it and have it.
It says nothing about duration so I assume it is permanent.

One may also start drawing longswords until the pot is empty & sell them or equip an army,
breaking the game in the process..
How about piles of 24 gold coins each? in 1000 square feet you can draw hundreds of these,
quickly getting your money back & get a very very nice profit...

As per description, the item doubles as other spells as well, with only restriction a players imagination.
You can draw doors, maybe even keys for hard doors, assuming you studied the lock.
It would be like having the entire "up to 25g" market in a pot..

How about parts for objects cost vastly more than 25g? Like a zeppelin!

What am i missing?
Why isn't this a must/banned item?

[Capac Amaru]

I'd DM fiat that the items thus created have a quality level based on the difficulty of the depiction, and a related skill or tool proficiency roll.

A poorly depicted object might break, fall apart, or have other side effects.

Magic can do a lot... but can it really judge the value of created items vs the local economy? Is it tied to an initial 'price list' from when and where the spell was cast? Maybe it should be called Nolzur's Local Market Value Estimator

[noob]

First of all..


NOLZUR'S MARVELOUS PIGMENTS
Wondrous item, very rare

Typically found in 1d4 pots inside a fine wooden box with a brush (weighing 1 pound in total),
these pigments allow you to create three-dimensional objects by painting them in two dimensions.
The paint flows from the brush to form the desired object as you concentrate on its image.
Each pot of paint is sufficient to cover 1,000 square feet of a surface,
which lets you create inanimate objects or terrain features-such as a door, a pit, flowers, trees,
cells, rooms, or weapons- that are up to 10,000 cubic feet.
It takes 10 minutes to cover 100 square feet.
When you complete the painting, the object or terrain feature depicted becomes a real, nonmagical object.
Thus, painting a door on a wall creates an actual door that can be opened to whatever is beyond.
Painting a pit on a floor creates a real pit, and its depth counts against the total area of objects you create.
Nothing created by the pigments can have a value greater than 25 gp.
If you paint an object of greater value (such as a diamond or a pile of gold), the object looks authentic,
but close inspection reveals it is made from paste, bone, or some other worthless material.
If you paint a form of energy such as fire or lightning, the energy appears but dissipates as soon as you
complete the painting, doing no harm to anything.

As we use the Sane's Magical Prices, 3rd party source, this item costs 200g.

Am i right to assume that just 1 pot of these would fetch us ANY mundane item that a group may need?
From ladders & ropes, tents & boats, to weapons, barrels filled with water/oil/alcohol & food.
As long as it costs less than 25gold, one can just draw it and have it.
It says nothing about duration so I assume it is permanent.

One may also start drawing longswords until the pot is empty & sell them or equip an army,
breaking the game in the process..
How about piles of 24 gold coins each? in 1000 square feet you can draw hundreds of these,
quickly getting your money back & get a very very nice profit...

As per description, the item doubles as other spells as well, with only restriction a players imagination.
You can draw doors, maybe even keys for hard doors, assuming you studied the lock.
It would be like having the entire "up to 25g" market in a pot..

How about parts for objects cost vastly more than 25g? Like a zeppelin!

What am i missing?
Why isn't this a must/banned item?
first there is no such thing as a cost for magic items in first party: magic items are given out by the gm.
secondly: you already can carry a lot of items and buying non magical items normally should not be too hard.(sure buying drugs or other illegal things is not trivial(you need to find a black market or something like that) but buying a tent or a torch is rather easy and food is obtainable nearly everywhere)
so what you get from that magical item is mostly ease of access of those things while in a dungeon.
And if you were allowed to build a zeppelin with that it means that zeppelins existed in the first place and so you could have bought one.
basically adventurers have gigatons of gold with which they have no clue what to do because in the base game it is not assured that you are allowed to buy magic items so usually buying anything non magical is doable: adventurers at high level have so much gold and riches that it would make sense for them to buy an entire kingdom.
If someone have those pigments that person would probably not sell it and become more and more paranoid and worried about getting his fabulous pigments stolen and would hire tons of guards.

[LudicSavant]

What am i missing?

Not much, really. It's one of the reasons I don't agree with the Sane Magic Item Prices list.

[Kerilstrasz]

I'd DM fiat that the items thus created have a quality level based on the difficulty of the depiction, and a related skill or tool proficiency roll.

A poorly depicted object might break, fall apart, or have other side effects.


Although nowhere the description a skill check is asked, one could hire a painter for a day to draw a pot-full of gold coins to excellency, and pay him 100g.

[TheUser]

My group doing ToA has made amazing use of the item.

It's essentially allows a party to be prepared with items you need, and it lasts for a VERY long time.

They've been using it for traps, replacing destroyed armor, you name it.

The more creative the players the more powerful it becomes.

[LudicSavant]

What am i missing?
Why isn't this a must/banned item?

Well, it's not a "must/banned" item because most people aren't using a homebrew that wrongly values the item at only 200gp.

The DMG price is more in the range of 50,000gp.

[Kerilstrasz]

OK..
thank you all, i see what is wrong here.

Ill have a talk with my DM before doing anything.. weird.

Thnx again!

Close the thread.

[Keravath]

My group doing ToA has made amazing use of the item.

It's essentially allows a party to be prepared with items you need, and it lasts for a VERY long time.

They've been using it for traps, replacing destroyed armor, you name it.

The more creative the players the more powerful it becomes.

I agree.

Our party in ToA also has these and they are incredibly useful since not only can they paint items you want they can also paint out items or places you DON'T want. You can paint a 10'x10'x10' pit at the cost of 100 sq ft of pigment. You paint the picture of the pit and it becomes real.

Painting things out can be more useful than adding them.

We've painted in doors where there weren't any. We've painted in tunnels. We've created a ladder when we needed it. We've painted a hole in the side of chests or other objects we need to get inside. Locked doors can be picked by the thief and if not we just paint a hole in the door or a smaller door that we can open. We've painted hand and foot holds on a wall along with a rope to make it easier to scale.

Basically, the pigments are an incredibly flexible tool whose only limits are the imaginations of the players and to some extent DM tolerance.

As for requiring skill checks ... the magic item description has no indication that such would be required. RAW you don't need a skill check. A DM in a homebrew game is free to rule however they wish though.

In terms of functioning, the way I tend to envisage it, the person painting is imagining what they want to produce and the MAGICAL pigments create it ... if they can't draw it as well as they can imagine it ... the magic fills in the gaps. This conforms to RAW but there are likely many different ways to imagine it functioning.

[Dalebert]

You could paint and sell things. A.L. passed a rule for A.L. play that you can't sell anything. But even in A.L., you can paint multiple 25gp diamonds and use them to make diamond dust for spell components and so forth. Some spells require a single high-value diamond and it's no good for those obviously. It's still a banquet of delicious food as needed when in the jungles of Chult or the Underdark. It's arrows when you run out. It's 5 silver sling bullets for the werewolf multiplied by however many rounds you have time to paint and per sq ft of paint you are willing to use. It's whatever obscure mundane item you need but couldn't possibly have anticipated needing for a particular context. It's a quiet 1 foot hole formed in an impenetrable door in one round automatically that will allow a familiar to get through for scouting or to get line of sight for a spell for Misty Step or to target a bunch of surprised enemies with Fireball or Mass Suggestion who don't expect spells to come at them before the door even opens, a door which might trigger a trap when it opens or ring a bell or just be squeaky. If you are willing to blow through a trivial amount of it, say 250 sq feet, in Tomb of Horrors, you can form 1 ft around by 10 ft deep tunnels with each sq foot, painting them all over to find all the secret passageways and one-way doors and so on.

It's one of my favorite items in the game. I have DM rewarded it to some characters who failed to obtain it on their own. It actually became somewhat easy to get in A.L.

[HappyDaze]

I've seen it used to create dead bodies to duplicate someone that the group was hiding. Weirdly, if they would have had a bounty > 25gp on them, it might not have worked...

[noob]

I've seen it used to create dead bodies to duplicate someone that the group was hiding. Weirdly, if they would have had a bounty > 25gp on them, it might not have worked...

Unless the dead bodies were copies with the memories of the persons and that they could have been resurrected they would not have the same value as the bounty since the bounty is on the person not on "things that looks like the person"

[RedMage125]

I think that the pigments are one if the most underrated, valuable, and underestimated items in the DMG. It's basically Looney Toons paint.

Love the stories from people using them in ToA.