3.x - How Many Are There Challenge

[unseenmage]

How many craftable magic items are there printed?
How many arent explicitly printed but can be extrapolated?
(pre epic)

How many craftable non-magic items are there printed?
Same follow up Q as for the above magic items?

How many feats are there?
How many total prerequisites for those feats?
(including epic)

How many planes?
How many planar traits?

All first party sources allowed plus both Dr and Du magazines and WotC archived web content.

Oh and 'infinite' is not an acceptable answer because it is an incorrect answer.

EDIT: Detailed explanation (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=24005323&postcount=8) for why I'm asking.

[Mike Miller]

Why would you do this? Now this will nag at me until I waste my time counting!

[AvatarVecna]

How many arent explicitly printed but can be extrapolated? (pre epic)

I feel interested in the answer to this one, but I'm curious whether or not we need to show our work. and I doubt "infinite" is gonna be accepted just cuz the only limit on the number of "+X to Profession: Y" items is the human imagination's ability to think up new silly jobs that are somehow legitimate in the D&D universe.

[MisterKaws]

I feel interested in the answer to this one, but I'm curious whether or not we need to show our work. and I doubt "infinite" is gonna be accepted just cuz the only limit on the number of "+X to Profession: Y" items is the human imagination's ability to think up new silly jobs that are somehow legitimate in the D&D universe.

Somewhere out there, someone made a Masterpiece Kazoo.

[unseenmage]

Why would you do this? Now this will nag at me until I waste my time counting!

Because I'm pretty sure my TO charafter in Flap's game can make one of everything. But I'm not sure enough to ask them to hand wave it.

And it's also an interesting question.
It does perhaps need further subdivided to be useful/answerable though.

Are there more than 1 million mundane weapons? 1 billion?

I would have to go through and tally up each individual weapon, weapon+material, weapon+modification, weapon+material+modification, etc, etc.

I'm hoping someone better at eyeballing this stuff with informed opinion or educated guess can tackle it more reasonably.

[Venger]

Are there more than 1 million mundane weapons? 1 billion?
Absolutely not.


I would have to go through and tally up each individual weapon, weapon+material, weapon+modification, weapon+material+modification, etc, etc.
No, you don't. You could, but it's not really a productive use or your time or the best way to solve the problem. Let's set aside the fact that you're treating weapon enhancements as separate weapons for now.


I'm hoping someone better at eyeballing this stuff with informed opinion or educated guess can tackle it more reasonably.
While there exists a definite answer to this question, it would be tedious to get it exactly by reading every book and counting all the weapons. So we can approach it like a fermi problem.

There are 73 weapons in the PHB.

There are 68 splats aside from the phb.


They don't each have that many. Some have a lot, like oriental adventures, but there are plenty of books with no new weapons at all, like the spell compendium.

Let's pick one with an average number. Top of my head, sandstorm has some weapons in there. More than just 2 or 3, but it's not a weapon-heavy book the way AEG is, for example.

sandstorm has 18 weapons in it. that sounds about right. let's say 25% of the books don't have any weapons, and the others average out to having 18.

That leaves us with 51 books with 18 weapons in them each. That's 918. Add that to the original 73, and that gives us 991.

Let's take a step back. Does that number make sense?

Well, while you only ever use about 5 weapons, given the endless variations on light/medium/heavy elven sword of foo, the zillion weapons from oriental adventures no one ever uses, and variations on core weapons like stormwrack's cutlass, that might be a touch on the high side, but it sounds about right as far as order of magnitude goes. There are probably between 700 and 800 weapons in D&D 3.x.

[AvatarVecna]

I'm hoping someone better at eyeballing this stuff with informed opinion or educated guess can tackle it more reasonably.

The good news: that you're only looking for a good estimate means calculating possible magic items is gonna be a lot easier for me. The bad news: now I won't be able to resist doing it. Fortunately, the method I'm looking at does make it a lot simpler to figure out. It won't be exact by any metric, but when the calculations you're doing are more concerned with the number of digits than the exact numbers filling those digits, the difference between 10^20 and 10^50 is still approximately "way too many digits for you to craft, probably".

Of course, part of the answer is gonna kinda depend on what you think counts as "different". Since my example below is concerned with skill items, think about whether an item giving "+10 Appraise" is that different from an item giving "+11 Appraise", whether an item giving "+10 Appraise, required 10 Appraise ranks" is that different from an item giving "+10 Appraise, requires 11 Appraise ranks". If you don't consider them that different, then this gets much easier on your end. But if they count as different, and you're just trying to figure out the maximum number of items there are that could be considered different from each other, well...

Okay, so I'm using items giving skill bonuses as my example. Let's say that I vaguely recall from my chargen experience that there's 19 total knowledge skills in 3.0/3.5; I dunno exactly how many other skills there are, but everything else (besides craft/perform/profession specialties) probably brings the number close-ish to 50? And adding in those specialties probably brings the number close-ish to 100. That seems like a reasonable guess at the total number of different skills there could be in this game, so let's go with that. So, an item that gives bonuses to X skills can't give more than roundown([2000/X]^0.5) to each skill. For each array of bonuses, there will be (100!)/([100-X]!) possible skill combinations at those particular bonuses. For a very easy example of that, if you're trying to figure out the number of items there should be that give bonuses to three different skills, the maximum you could get is maybe +25/+25/+25. So you could get anything from +1/+1/+1 to +25/+25/+25, so that's 25^3 possible bonus combinations...but there's 100 skills, so there's 100 possibilities for the first skill, 99 remaining possibilities for the second, and 98 remaining possibilities for the third. 100x99x98 is the same as 100! divided by 97!.

But, after we cross the middle number of skills (50/51), the factorial will start reversing because now you're counting possibilities that exclude - that is to say, if you have an item giving some kind of bonus to all 100 skills, there's only one possible combination of 100 skills, but if you're making an item giving bonuses to 99 skills, there's 100 possibilities (since it's "which of these 100 do I leave off?"), and then for 98 skills "which of these 100, and then which of the remaining 99, do I leave off?". Both 50 and 51 can have a max of +6/+6/+6/etc..., so they end up being "6^50" and "6^51" multiplied by "100!/50!".

This gets a bit simpler if we think of all the possible items giving bonuses to 51 skills as "1 possibility", because then we can measure the others in fractions of that. 50 skills is 1/6, 49 skills is 1/300 or so, and it just gets fewer and fewer total possibilities from there the fewer skills the item has. Then 52 skills is 1/8, 53 skills is 1/64 or so, 54 skills 1/512 or so, and so the more skills you get, the less they matter. So that means that 50 skills (about 1/6), 51 skills (1), and 52 skills (about 1/8) basically account for most possibilities, which means 51 skills accounts for about 75% of all possibilities. so 4/3 times "6^51" times "100!/50!" (or approximately 2 x 10133) should be the total number of possible combinations of various skills at various bonuses you could possibly squeeze into an item for 200k, and is thus the maximum number of HA YOU THOUGHT I WAS DONE IT'S ACTUALLY WAY WORSE THAN THAT.

So, skill/alignment/class restrictions technically lower the market price rather than just the crafting price, and thus they allow for more significant items for the increase to effective maximum market price. And they can be combined in a few different ways. So the above calculations need to be redone for each the new base prices, which are then multiplied by the total possibilities for the restrictions that can lead to that base price, and then all of them have to be added together. Fortunately, we can actually skip most of these, because the only one that really matters in terms of getting a good estimate is the option where we have all three restrictions, since that's simultaneously the lowest price (and thus, the most base possibilities in the item skill/bonus combos), but also the most possible combinations in terms of the actual restrictions, and those combined mean that the other numbers are so insignificantly puny in comparison that it'd be like counting all the atoms in the universe, but forgetting to count the atoms in a single planet - to even call it a rounding error is extreme hyperbole in its favor.

So! With 100 skills and a possible requirement of up to 23 20 ranks each, that's 2000 possible Skill Requirements (I mean, unless there's precedent for requiring multiple skills but ehhhhhhh). For alignment, there's 2^9 possible "yes-no" combinations of whether an alignment is allowed or not, and the only ones that wouldn't qualify as alignment restrictions are "all yes" and "all no", so (2^9)-2 makes for 510 500 possible Alignment requirements. Finally, base classes, let's see, not counting variants...12 player's handbook...5 NPC classes and the witch in the DMG...3 each from the 4 main complete books...3 generic classes in UA...I think 5 from Expanded Psionics...I think 5 from Dragon Compendium...and that's 43. Let's assume I missed a few along the way or from some magazine and call it 50 base classes. Do class requirements specify level, generally? I can't recall any examples, but even if they do, that changes it from 50 to 1000, and what's a couple zeroes between friends? 1000 possible Class Requirements (assuming no precedent for requiring multiple classes but ehhhhhhhhh). So 2000x500x1000 makes 1 billion possible restrictions on an item requiring all three. But how many possibilities can be squeezed into the 2E133 with that extra money? Surprisingly very little from the previous formula actually changes - 51 skills is still about 75% of the total possibilities, and the factorials haven't changed, but now instead of 6^51 it's 11^51 and that's a pretty significant difference for our purposes. But there's actually one more thing we need to account for: how many mechanically-different items could you build these bonuses into? Well, probably one for each slot, including slotless, but then you get to weapons and armor. There's maybe a bit less 500 total armors and weapons scattered across 3.5, and maybe 20 different materials you could make those armors/weapons out of? so adding that in, let's say that "an item giving those bonuses, to those skills, with those restrictions" has 1000 more possibilities in "an item".

"4/3" times "10^12" times "11^51" times "100!/50!" is approximately 5 x 10158. That's an approximate estimate of the number of different possible skill items you could make that were different from each other by extrapolating out the rules for making items that give skill bonuses. It gets even worse if you decide they count as similar enough abilities to get the Similar Abilities discount. It gets even worse if you start extrapolating items that give feats (A&EG rules), or at-will/charged/command word/use-activated/continuous spell functions, or give straight bonuses to existing stats, or items that combine those four kinds of items in various ways.

[unseenmage]

The process being used to potentially craft so much is cumulative use of fast time and time stop.
This is for an actual TO game.


- Genesis allowed to make unworked raw materials including special weapon and armor materials.
- Genesis can mix and match planar traits and even planar features, like mirror plane duplication or temporal energy plane winds, as we see fit.
- Genesis fast time where 1 round = 1 day.
- Time Stop makes the above so 1 round = 39 years.
- Shapechange -> Zodar -> Wish -> Zodar again -> Wish again -> repeat
- Wish can only make non permanent magic items; am using it to spam useful Craft Contingent Spells and make Mindraped Ice Assassins of high OP, high level crafters.
- Wish and True Creation can generate the materials Genesis cannot.
- Wish can create psionics.
- Wish can put its created Craft Contingent Spells on other creatures via line of effect.
- Simulacrums/Ice Assassins are allowed to be modified so long as it doesnt require recalculating their ECL or CR via templates or class levels.
- Though Int Magic Items are Constructs Simulacrum cannot make them.
- I'm limiting myself to non epic items until we gain the four levels needed to put us into epic.


During the first week of the first year of downtime a construct spends a week casting the first fast time Genesis.

She has 16 hrs a day to Wish up Simulacrums and put Craft Contingent Shapechange on them.
That's 33,482 Sims in the first week. Before fast time.

Each of whom uses their Craft Contingent Shapechange to IntraplanarTelepathic Bond, Plane Shift, then Genesis repeating the process. The first week's Sims always going off to make more fast time demiplanes.

Sims made during subsequent castings of Genesis are the actual crafter Sims. Dvati who take shifts casting or crafting or wishing as needed. The free twin always focusing on survival and health and recreation when there's time.

The exact details for weaving in Mirror Plane duplicates and either Temporal Accelleration or Time Stop elude me at present though the above assumes at least the time stop is being employed.

I think 'cumulative' is the right word to describe this progression.

The Sims (using that to refer to Ice Assassins and Simulacrum equally) by the way are either Warforged or Dvati. For harsh environments and tireless tasks, warforged. For everything else, Dvati. That way one twin can focus on slice of life stuff while the other performs duties, and they trade off.

Before the game starts we have 2 years of downtime during which no WBL or Craft xp increasing/farming shenanigans are allowed.
After though I'll be generating both at tremendous rates.

Those two years will be dedicated to generating every mundane item I can think of. Enemchanted construct bodies, weapons, armors, kits, and clothing and vehicles and strongholds and traps and alchemical, and poisons, and ... you get the idea. At least every printed mundane item I think is possible.

Now that the game has started every real time round nets us more and more magic item, construct, and intelligent magic item manufacture. Not to mention portals; there's an Underdark variant that let's me move nonliving materials.

I'm not entirely sure how big the first demiplane gets in 2 real years of downtime. Or of how many subsequent demiplanes there are.
Am especially curious how many new magic items can be generated at once in a single real time sux second round.