Weapons, Armor, and Augmentation Crystals reworked

[Firechanter]

Hey folks,

I want to make the beatsticks a bit more flexible for my PF1 setting, so I thought I'd take a page out of the MIC and whip up an Augmentation Crystal mechanic and also change the way weapon and armour upgrades are priced. Please review these ideas and let me know what you think.

Weapons and Armour

The cost for adding enhancement bonuses ("Enhancement") and all other properties ("Properties") is calculated separately, i.e. the bonus costs for Enhancement and Properties do not stack. The sum of any Property bonuses must never exceed the item's Enhancement bonus, and neither category may exceed +5 total bonus.

B Enhance Prop. Maxed Convtl.
+1 2000 2000 4000 8000
+2 8000 8000 16000 32000
+3 18000 18000 36000 72000
+4 32000 32000 64000 128000
+5 50000 50000 100000 200000

For instance, a weapon with a +3 Enhancement bonus and +2 bonus worth of Properties will cost 18000+8000 = 26.000GP (plus the base price of the Masterwork weapon and special material).
A full-blown +5 Enhancement weapon with +5 worth of Properties caps out at 100.000GP.

My intention is to let the players get more bang for the buck out of their WBL. Basically I'm cutting weapon/armour cost in half. You might see the limitation of having to advance the Enhancement bonus first as a drawback, but keep in mind this is for Pathfinder, where the bonus can't be boosted with GMW/MV as efficiently as in 3.5.

Weapon and Armour Augmentation Crystals

These special crystals are imbued with Properties that can normally be added to magic weapons or armour by inserting them into specially crafted sockets.
Embedding or removing a crystal into or from a socket takes one Move Action each.
As opposed to MIC rules, weapons do not have an inherent socket for free. In exchange, you can add multiple sockets to a weapon. (Same for armour.)

Note: Adding the same property twice in any way - be it by multiple crystals or using a crystal with a permanently enhanced item - does not produce stacking effects.

Crystal Socket
A weapon can be fitted with one or more sockets which can hold one Augmentation Crystal each. These sockets come in two varieties and price tags, Lesser (+1 bonus) and Greater (+2 bonus). A Greater socket can hold a Lesser gem.
A Lesser Socket can at a later point be upgraded to a Greater one, provided the total bonus equivalent does not exceed +5.

Main Question: Pricing
Basically I want to find a fair and balanced pricing scheme for sockets and crystals. As written above, my thinking is that sockets should be calculated as regular bonus properties, and crystals have a fixed price:

Lesser Crystals can possess any property with a +1 bonus cost. Market price: 4000GP
Greater Crystals can possess any properties with a total bonus cost of +2. Market price: 8000GP.

These price tags are up for discussion, though. I think 4k and 8k should be the upper limit though, since you've already paid the escalating price for the socket(s). So maybe it would be more fair to price them at 2k and 4k, respectively? After all, any crystal you're not currently using is just dead weight.

The entire approach differs from the MIC one basically in 2 things: one, you embue regular weapon/armor properties into the crystals, and two, you can have more than one socket per item.
For instance, you could have a +3 weapon with a +1 and a +2 socket. You encounter a Devil? Slap on Holy and Evil Outsiderbane crystals. A bunch of Slaads? There's an Axiomatic crystal for that. An incorporeal undead? Lucky we brought our Ghost Touch crystal! You get the idea.

Alternatively, I might ditch the sockets-as-properties and go the MIC route: every weapon and armour has exactly one socket, which does not count against any enhancements or properties.
However, this approach makes the pricing of the property crystals even more relevant.

Your thoughts?^^

[NigelWalmsley]

To be honest, I just don't see the appeal of tracking weapon sockets in D&D. The point of it in Diablo or WoW or whatever is so that you can get marginal effectiveness increases for grinding dungeons a bunch, but in D&D you don't do that. I think if the problem you're trying to solve is "non-casters don't have enough stuff to do", you'd be better off addressing that directly. You could honestly just let people prepare weapon qualities every day like they were spells and that would be totally fine.

[Firechanter]

You could honestly just let people prepare weapon qualities every day like they were spells and that would be totally fine.

That sounds like a pretty radical approach. ^^
The advantage I see with crystals is that you can swap them on the fly. For instance, suppose you encounter an incorporeal Undead, you can remove whatever crystal you're currently using and slide in a Ghost Touch gem. And then after that encounter switch it back to whatever you think will be most useful in the upcoming fights. That's something that daily preps could not emulate (unless you also allowed switching them mid-day, but at that point, it becomes rather arbitrary.

And of course, the core idea is to reduce or eliminate the need for walking armories. Like, in my last game as a player, my char ended up lugging around four or five different weapons, and that was _with_ a Bane Baldric that gave me Bane on the fly for a handful of rounds per day. Without that the golfbag syndrome would have been even worse.

Besides, a nice side effect of having the crystals is that they offer a permanent adventure hook. Of course only _special_ crystals can be augmented that way, which happen to be found in this mostly unknown continent you are exploring... you get the idea. ^^

[NigelWalmsley]

The advantage I see with crystals is that you can swap them on the fly. For instance, suppose you encounter an incorporeal Undead, you can remove whatever crystal you're currently using and slide in a Ghost Touch gem. And then after that encounter switch it back to whatever you think will be most useful in the upcoming fights. That's something that daily preps could not emulate (unless you also allowed switching them mid-day, but at that point, it becomes rather arbitrary.

Not really. You're essentially just proposing that instead of Fighters casting weapon enhancments as prepared spells, they cast them as spontaneous spells. Which, sure, you could also do that.


And of course, the core idea is to reduce or eliminate the need for walking armories. Like, in my last game as a player, my char ended up lugging around four or five different weapons, and that was _with_ a Bane Baldric that gave me Bane on the fly for a handful of rounds per day. Without that the golfbag syndrome would have been even worse.

But a bag of crystals is better? I agree that the way weapons work now is not particularly satisfying from a gameplay or genre emulation perspective. But I don't see how this proposal is better. It's true that in the source material people don't generally have big bags of weapons (except they sometimes do -- the closet full of guns is a trope for a reason). But they also don't have big bags of weapon upgrade crystals. What they have is generally one iconic weapon that is important to them. King Arthur has Excalibur, and it gives him the powers of "invincible" and "ruler of England" (nit-picking about mythological specifics aside). He doesn't trade it in for a magic flaming axe, or swap it from electricity to cold when he goes to fight a dragon. So I think a better solution to your problem is something closer to Weapons of Legacy. Give the Fighter one weapon that's good enough that he doesn't want to swap it around for other stuff every fight.

[Lemmy]

If I may shamelessly promote my own work...

I suggest taking a look at my Custom Weapon Generation System... I've seen it used to play games inspired on Bleach, Monster Hunter and RWBY.

I'm actually really proud of this one...^^

It was designed for Pathfinder RPG 1e, but the weapon mechanics are nearly identical to the ones in 3.5, so it requires only minimal adaptation.

You can allow martial classes to craft/wield weapons that get more Craft Points, and therefore are better and cooler.

You can find it in my signature.

:)

[Tarmor]

I like the ideas.

With the crystals I think simply one socket per weapon/armour is enough, though I do like the idea of paying a set fee to have one added to the weapon - but not at the same price of say a +1 enhancement. I'd go much lower. (Alternatively, an increasing fee to add a second, or third. Max 3)
The full set of crystals available under 3.5 got a bit wild, and I like you idea (and the price) to recreate a +1 or +2 weapon property. That still gives options for variety, and balances costs out.

In my gaming group, I have one player who always wants a couple of crystals (generally weapon ones) while the rest of the group would use one if they found one they liked but don't particularly care.

[aglondier]

Having a lesser socket as a masterwork weapon (or armour) option could work. It would allow lower level characters to have enchanting options below full scale enchantments. Additional sockets and greater sockets would require magical enhancement, advanced materials, and/or a skilled artificer.

Minor crystals could add quirks, or single use/day castings of low level spells, and still be valuable to low level characters.