Magic of Faerun: A case study

[bekeleven]

Magic of Faerun is a deeply weird book.

Magic of Faerun was published in 2001, relatively early in 3.0’s lifecycle, although of course it draws heavily on the 3 core rulebooks and the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. So this is a situation where Sean K. Reynolds, Duane Maxwell, and Angel McCoy are just figuring things out. The wild west of D&D.

At first I intended to do an exhaustive list of “thing they should’ve known better, even then.” But I had to narrow my scope a bit in such a dense text. Instead, I’ve presented ten oddities found only in a single chapter: The chapter on magic items.

Presented approximately in the order they appear in the chapter.

1. The Proof is in the Pricing
If you use the random item generation tables in this book, you can roll +11-equivalent armors quite easily, even with only 1 ASA, since this has one Armor Special Ability worth +6: Proof Against Transmutation (in case you’re a fighter that needs immunity to Enlarge Person). The only saving grace here is that it has to be a major magic item – Not because you can’t roll “immunity to the best school of magic” as a medium item, but because medium armors can only have a +4 bonus.

2. The Dark Side… And the Light
The chapter’s first actual content – its first ASA – is Blueshine, which makes your armor 1) never tarnish, 2) Immune to acid and rust, and 3) give +5 circumstance to hide. Its third is Everbright, which makes your armor 1) Never tarnish, 2) Immune to acid and rust, and 3) give Acid Resist 5. The difference is that in one you buff your armor until it’s shiny and in the other you do the opposite, I guess. Were these supposed to be in the same book? On the same page? They’re both worth +1. I kind of want armor with both.

That was a short one so I’ll throw in a bonus: 2.5. Priced by Price

Ever wonder where constant-costed WSA and ASA prices come from? To read an excerpt: “Some armor abilities carry a fixed surcharge rather than being priced as an increase in the effective item bonus (as is the standard in the Dungeon Master’s Guide).”

Which abilities were the first to implement this fascinating new rule? Was it spellblade, now famously worth 6k? No, +1 bonus. Was it Blueshine, now worth 1.5k? No, also +1 bonus. Quick-loading? +2 bonus.

No. There’s 1 WSA and 1 ASA that cost a standard amount of gold. For armor we have Strength, the ability to add a +2 or +4 enhancement to Strength for a cool twice the price of the default items. For weapons, we have Jumping, which gives…. Constant feather fall and +30 to jump every other round while wielded. That’ll set you back 13,750 GP. Welcome to the new age.

3. The Upsell
A +1 cold, fire, and lightning resistance full plate would go for 101650 in the 3.0 DMG, which (for context) also contains the language: “Many magic garments are made to be easily adjustable, or they adjust themselves magically to the wearer. As a rule, size should not keep overweight characters, characters of various genders, or characters of various kinds from using items.”

Many of the specific weapons and armors in this book are just stock items with some flavor text. For instance, the Blingdenstone Warpick is just a +1 Corrosive Heavy Pick that costs what you’d assume that would cost. But not so of the Storm Armor of the Earth’s Children. It’s a +1 cold, fire, and lightning resistance full plate that only resizes to fit dwarves, gnomes, and halflings.

That ability adds 10K to the price.

It’s not worth its own entry, but there’s a later item (Scimitar of the Fool) that adds 685GP to its price in order to give the wielder -3 morale penalty to will saves.

4. The +6 +0
One of this book’s specific weapons is the Arrow of Biting. It’s an arrow that deals a 1D10 Con/1D10 Con injury poison on a successful hit.

I should also note that it’s sold only individually, and while it’s manufactured as a magical item (Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Poison, CL7) it has no enhancement bonus. Its price, 1457 GP, is 1/50th of 72,850. Fifty +6 arrows would cost 72,350 GP.* This one-use, DC16 poison is worth more than a +1 Flaming Shocking Frost Corrosive Distance arrow.

Ironically, I like the implication. The ability to skip the +1 when making a magical item would unlock so much better, cheaper stuff for my characters. A shame this remains an effective rules break rather than a new standard.

Oh, and if you’re willing to drop that saving throw two points – just two points, from 16 to 14 – you can buy an arrow with the Venomous quality, which can cast a DC14 Poison spell on its target when it hits. Poison’s damage? 1D10/1D10 Con. Venomous’s Price? +1. These items are on the same page.

5. Just Flip It
This book has plenty of randomness. By which I mean, it has spells that roll D8s to determine random directions or the color of a prismatic ray, it rolls D%s to help roll for treasure, and so on. The book gives readers tools to determine things it doesn’t specify.

The item “Dagger of Chaos,” found on page 142, is a +5 dagger with some interesting properties. Specifically,

If it successfully strikes a creature and inflicts damage, the wielder randomly assumes a new shape as if someone had successfully cast polymorph other on him. To determine the shape assumed, flip to a random page in the Monster Manual and select a creature whose form can be assumed with polymorph other.
You know… just flip to a random page. This has so many issues, but just to name a few:

Items alone on a page have twice the chance of being selected as monsters 2 to a page
Many pages have 0 monsters. Others have monster statblocks, but their headings are on a different page. Do both pages count?
Players will naturally flip towards the center of the book. (Which at least helps alleviate the issue that the first and final pages have no monsters on them.)
Anyway, you get the point. It’s a mess.

6. Mix ‘n’ Match
The Gauntlets of the Valorous are +3 Gauntlets for the price of, wait for it, +3 Gauntlets. Except that you can throw on a sizeable GP infusion to make the pair generate a command-word SLA, most of them once per day.

Oh yeah, I said “Pair.” The weapons description includes the line, “Usually only one gauntlet of a pair is found” as well as “When both gauntlets of a matching pair are worn together, they have one of the following additional command-activated abilities, depending upon the pair:”

So… A few comments here.

The cheapest item on the list is Telekinesis (Violent Thrust), 2/D, Touch at +20K. So to get +3 Gauntlets that can TK someone twice per day, you are now out over seventy six thousand gold (remember that these each come with an 18,302 GP base cost).
I have to assemble these myself? And they only work with their “pair?” So I could have two Gauntlets of the Valorous: Flame Blade and they still wouldn’t work together because my neighbor somehow connected his goddamn iphone to my shower speaker again, MATT?
Who priced these out? For context, the cheapest item is touch-attack TK 2/Day, then we see various options like touch-attack Polymorph Other (26k), Heal (I assume touch, although it doesn’t say that for some reason?) for 48K, and I’ll skip straight to the ending: The most expensive option on the list is 3/Day Shocking Grasp for 66,000 goldaroos. Look, I get that three is more than one, but maybe don’t make people shell out one hundred and sixty-eight thousand gold to cast a first-level spell 3 times per day. (Or 84 thousand and an epic quest to marry it to its partner.)
There is, shockingly (get it? You don’t get it), a saving grace. While the item description makes it clear that every gauntlet comes with exactly one of these abilities, they’re priced on the random drop table as "18,302 (Minimum value.)" and can be found at a reasonable rate in both medium and major item drops. This means that even if you’re selling your NPC trash for half price, the minimum you’re getting is 19,151: Higher than the price it represented on the roll. The book offers no table or odds to randomly determine which gauntlet you find (a totally unfamiliar issue), but if we assume that each option is equally likely, the average sell price for a single found Gauntlet of the Valorous is 31,951 GP. So there’s your answer. These items weren’t meant to be used.


7. One of a Kind
A simple one. The specific magic weapon Namarra is a +2 keen longsword that has mysterious carvings, floats in water, and glows pale mauve. “This weapon is old, with no tales that date its creation or relate themselves to before Namarra was forged.” Players can craft them starting level 10.

This isn’t the only instance (get it? You don’t get it) of this in a sourcebook. It’s not even the only example in this book: One Thousand Broken Dreams is the same. But this is definitely one of the more egregious due to its mythical status and ease of recreation.

8. Potion of Infertility

This potion renders the character drinking it sterile for one month. It has no effect on offspring already conceived.
Caster Level: 2nd; Prerequisites: Brew Potion; Market Price: 150 gp.
All right, I’ll bite. Why is this the only reference to birth control in all of D&D? Is it unique, or should sheepskin condoms be in the PHB? Is the only birth control in all of D&D something that costs 4x the annual wage of a commoner? I mean, I guess that would explain why there are always more commoners…

9. How much do these guys hate locks, though
I’ve always been of the opinion that the whole “let’s give rogues something to do” of trapfinding was a design mistake. There are traps and locks and whatever when the rogue’s there, we remove them when the rogue misses a session. I think the smaller and smaller emphasis on such mechanics as the edition wore on suggests that designers agree with my distaste – or at least, that there’s very little design space in the whole one-player minigame.

But here we have a book published in 2001 that include four different items – A ring, a rod, a staff, and a harp – that can cast knock. All of them can cast it multiple times a day. Were they just really on the ball about this, or is Magic of Faerun an outlier?

10. The Miraculous Flower
Sometimes I understand what’s going on with the issues, especially balance issues, in books like these. Other times I suspect I’ve stumbled upon something so obvious it’ll get fixed in errata. Then the errata comes out and nothing changes.

One of the Staves in the book is called the Staff of Miracles. It does regular staff stuff – 50 charges and whatnot – and can cast the following three spells at CL15:

Heal – 1 charge
Holy Aura – 2 charges
Rosemantle – 2 charges

I’d wager that you recognized two of those spells. For those wondering, Rosemantle is a first-level spell. I looked up the 3.5 version of the spell, and after a few minutes of confusion flipped through Magic of Faerun itself to get the 3.0 version, just to get the complete picture. To my shock, they’re… well, they’re the same thing. Here it is in Magic of Faerun, just a few chapters back:

Duration: 1 round/level
You cause the target to glow with a soft, faint, rosy radiance equal to candlelight. This glow protects the target against effects that work by directly causing pain (such as Nybor’s gentle reminder), nausea, and fear effects by granting a +1 sacred bonus per caster level (up to +10) on saving throws against those spells and effects. The target also becomes temporarily immune to poison (as the delay poison spell). This spell only suppresses these effects, not negates them, so the effects resume when this spell expires.
My search didn’t end there. I checked the errata. I checked the 3.5 update. This confounded me. But alas, while Rosemantle had multiple mentions in those documents, none of them made it a better spell, and none of them dealt with its use in this staff.

And when my search ended in such a dead end, I just kept looking, because it would be more fun to share with nine friends.

Conclusion
After I narrowed my scope down to a single 44-page chapter, I found all of these in the first 13. Hopefully this makes my point about Magic of Faerun, because this was weirdly stressful to compile? I'm not sure why that is, but I don't plan on continuing it.

*Let’s not rag just on Magic of Faerun here. The price of 50 Arrows is 2.5 GP. The price of making an arrow masterwork is 6 GP (300/50) according to the PHB/SRD. Yet the PHB (like two sentences later) and DMG in both 3.0 and 3.5 list 50 masterwork arrows as costing 350 GP. I don’t know who’s wrong here, but the DMG and half of the PHB are wrong. That’s who’s wrong. It’s 302.5 GP for 50 masterwork arrows. I’m right and everybody’s just going to have to deal with that.

[JyP]

I guess it's all about expectations there. What is the aim of Magic of Faerun ?

1) expand on the DMG by proposing more options for generic med-fan games ?
2) try to personnalize DMG material by including some fluff so everybody knows these magic items definitely are from the Forgotten Realms ?

With this question in mind, you rightly checked that MoF is not technically sound compared to the DMG - but I think it was not the objective there. The objective is to have a Forgotten Realms flavor on top of generic magic items.

Are Blueshine and Everbright armors part of the same culture, created in the same era and in the same realm of Faerun ? I am sure both kinds of armors were already known by some players and DMs by earlier AD&D books and novels.

Is it better to have generic magic armors which adjust to anyone or magic armors tailored for certain people and cultures ?

For me it's all about fluff :smallwink:

[Blackhawk748]

I guess it's all about expectations there. What is the aim of Magic of Faerun ?

1) expand on the DMG by proposing more options for generic med-fan games ?
2) try to personnalize DMG material by including some fluff so everybody knows these magic items definitely are from the Forgotten Realms ?

With this question in mind, you rightly checked that MoF is not technically sound compared to the DMG - but I think it was not the objective there. The objective is to have a Forgotten Realms flavor on top of generic magic items.

Are Blueshine and Everbright armors part of the same culture, created in the same era and in the same realm of Faerun ? I am sure both kinds of armors were already known by some players and DMs by earlier AD&D books and novels.

Is it better to have generic magic armors which adjust to anyone or magic armors tailored for certain people and cultures ?

For me it's all about fluff :smallwink:

I think what can't be denied though is that the prices are kinda out of whack. The Gauntlets and Arrow in particular are pretty egregious and the Staff isn't much better.

The fluff is fine, I just feel like this needed an editor with the DMG open to have gone over this

[gijoemike]

This can all easily be explained.


When Wizard of the Coast wrote D&D 3.5... they didn't have the foggiest clue what was going on. Evidence I present to you.

Druid and Fighter are in the same book. The druid can replace the entire concept of fighter by using one spontaneous spell.
The spell Wish and Miracle are print in the core book. Game breaking shenanigans ensue.
The core monk. So underpowered it is nearly impossible to play.
They specifically built trap options into the game. More on this in a bit.

They tested playing the game with 10 encounters (mostly combat) per day. The wizard used their crossbow most encounters. The druid only used wildshape for scouting purposes. Clerics were expected to use 1/2 of spells and actions in combat to heal.

WotC are the makers of Magic: The Gathering. In M:tg system mastery is extremely important. That mindset was carried over into D&D 3.0, perhaps not even on purpose but it was a pattern the developers and testers had seen dozens of times prior and resulted in heavy bias. There was a very early discussion with the developers about how Toughness was meant for elven wizards who didn't take a toad. That isn't in the books anywhere. Trap options existed in early D&D just like terrible or overpriced cards exist in M:tg.

So, having contradicting rules and wild prices is very much par for the course. As WotC learned how to actually play the game the power and abilities of classes and feats printed later are much better. People call this power creep. It is, but it is also a correction from the extreme lowball of balance and power presented in those early books. See the book of 9 swords. People really complain about this book. I have always had the opinion that the classes presented were replacements for monk, fighter, and paladin as those base classes are so crap and devoid of actual abilities that WotC realized they couldn't be saved. This was after dozens of ACL and dead levels were printed.

[Khedrac]

Druid and Fighter are in the same book. The druid can replace the entire concept of fighter by using one spontaneous spell.
You are confusing the summon nature's ally spells with the animal companion. I am currently playing a summon-focussed Spirit Shaman in a 6th level party (and the arcansit is a death master) and half the time the party melee kill the opposition before I complete the cast...

Also, if he spellcasters in the opposition tell their fighter-types "if you see someone casting a spell for long enough for you to hit them, make them your priority target then the druid will only get to if they cast before the fight starts.

Summon spells are great for when you need extra front-liners, but they don't replace the need for someone to act as a speed bump beore the spells are cast.

[Fizban]

Prepare for disagreement: This is the kind of analysis I like to see- however, much like Saintheart's 3rd party review thread, you've missed some context and easily found answers. Though some of them were not as easy as expected and others stray quickly into arguing about how the game is supposed to be played.


(in case you’re a fighter that needs immunity to Enlarge Person).
3.0 Enlarge Person wasn't nothing, but it also wasn't important, because it wasn't Enlarge Person. It was Enlarge, which increased size by up to 50%, and the only mechanical benefit was +1 Str at caster level 4. That's it. The more important something supposedly is, like Enlarge Person, the more important it is to know whether that was because of the original spell, or an update buff.

I would say that the bigger problem is if it only says spells of the Transmutation school, that fails to work on the Su abilities that adventurers are actually afraid of. But then, Polymorph Other was effectively a 4th level kill at the time, so the spells were more threatening.


The chapter’s first actual content – its first ASA – is Blueshine, which makes your armor 1) never tarnish, 2) Immune to acid and rust, and 3) give +5 circumstance to hide. Its third is Everbright, which makes your armor 1) Never tarnish, 2) Immune to acid and rust, and 3) give Acid Resist 5. The difference is that in one you buff your armor until it’s shiny and in the other you do the opposite, I guess. Were these supposed to be in the same book? On the same page? They’re both worth +1. I kind of want armor with both.
I suppose you don't approve of Fire/Frost/Shock either then? Yeah, they're different flavors of the same ability. +5 Hide vs Resist Acid 5 is two completely different main abilities to choose from. I would expect these were written before the flat-cost powers were added, or with the consideration that Rust Monsters and Oozes are a real threat that ought to have a scaling bonus cost to fight- and this is when Energy Resistance was a bonus cost, and stuff like Bane still is.


There’s 1 WSA and 1 ASA that cost a standard amount of gold. For armor we have Strength, the ability to add a +2 or +4 enhancement to Strength for a cool twice the price of the default items. For weapons, we have Jumping, which gives…. Constant feather fall and +30 to jump every other round while wielded. That’ll set you back 13,750 GP. Welcome to the new age.
The target here should be not that doubling the price of the added strength bonus is bad (because x2 for being effectively slotless is plenty intuitive), but that the 3.0 DMG pricing sidebar was far more generous, giving only a 10% increase for cramming an extra "different" (simultaneously active) ability. However, in Tome and Blood (which has some stuff sourced from FR), they increase this to a full x2. In 3.5 it becomes +50%. Following that: a Ring of Feather Fall x2 is 4,4k and Jumping x2 is 4k, so that's 8.4k. But wait- this is also a case of them using their own rules. While the 3.0 DMG has a constant Ring of Jumping at 2k, the magic item pricing says it should be skill bonus^2*20gp, which is 18,000gp. Cut that in half for being usable every other round, add it to a doubled Ring of Feather Fall, and that would be 13.4k.

Alright, I couldn't find an exact match, but it's close. 13,750 is a number that comes up in calculations (1/4 of 55k, also 10% more than 12.5k, probably some others), but none of those came up here. The pricing clearly didn't use that path, and that path was half ignoring the guidelines anyway (see also: Tome and Blood examples), but however they got there this is a plausible 3.0 price I think.


But not so of the Storm Armor of the Earth’s Children. It’s a +1 cold, fire, and lightning resistance full plate that only resizes to fit dwarves, gnomes, and halflings.

That ability adds 10K to the price.
I mean, safety restrictions *should* cost more, rather than making your personalized armor cheaper, but yeah that's probably off.

Except the 3.0 version would hav been compared to 3.0 Energy Resistance, which are valued at +3 each, so that's actually +10 armor. +10 armor is 100k for the magic, so that racial restriction is actually getting a full 50% discount, which is disgusting.


It’s not worth its own entry, but there’s a later item (Scimitar of the Fool) that adds 685GP to its price in order to give the wielder -3 morale penalty to will saves.
Cursed items often ought to be more expensive, yes, even if they're not marked as cursed.


One of this book’s specific weapons is the Arrow of Biting. It’s an arrow that deals a 1D10 Con/1D10 Con injury poison on a successful hit.

I should also note that it’s sold only individually, and while it’s manufactured as a magical item (Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Poison, CL7) it has no enhancement bonus. Its price, 1457 GP, is 1/50th of 72,850. Fifty +6 arrows would cost 72,350 GP.* This one-use, DC16 poison is worth more than a +1 Flaming Shocking Frost Corrosive Distance arrow.
That's because it's obviously a Potion of Poison, price of 1,400gp at 4th level. It's using the Cleric rather than Druid level, but it's perfectly standard formula. I'm pretty sure a lot of items used Clr/Sor/Wiz prices over Druid at the time.

Or they could have legitimately been valuing it at an effective +5 cost (leaving out the base +1 because it's not important), comparing to something like Vorpal: an "potential kill on every hit" effect, as the Poison spell seems to be valued quite highly by some writers. Because it uh, kinda is just a lucky roll or two away from killing on every hit, same as Vorpal.

Oh, and if you’re willing to drop that saving throw two points – just two points, from 16 to 14 – you can buy an arrow with the Venomous quality, which can cast a DC14 Poison spell on its target when it hits. Poison’s damage? 1D10/1D10 Con. Venomous’s Price? +1. These items are on the same page.
The Venomous quality which is usable 1/day and thus is obviously written for permanent weapons? Yes, it does say projectile, but it's also a ranged weapon property and ranged weapons usually fire projectiles. This reads to me more like someone else edited it and added that clarification without checking with the original writer or the other items, without realizing their clarification simply led to a different misconception. When you add in the other designers and editors there's 12 more people in there- and that's how most of the books are. I'd bet that quite a few few sacred cows were generated by one hand not knowing the other (particularly in books where they flat-out admit it of course).


5. Just Flip It. . . It’s a mess.
If anything I'd be contrary and say it's better than usual. Instead of a table of forms that is obviously and quickly evaluated, it's a random page. How good it it? Who knows, who's going to be bothered to analyze the odds? That's what dumb chaos stuff is supposed to be like. Oh no, there's no monster on the page- then don't roll the range of pages that has no monsters, or roll again, or say that it failed. Oh no, there's two monsters- then the DM picks one, or flips a coin, or mashes them together. These are not difficult rulings. It works just fine for what it wants to be: a dumb chaos gimmick for people that like dumb chaos stuff.


Oh yeah, I said “Pair.” The weapons description includes the line, “Usually only one gauntlet of a pair is found” as well as “When both gauntlets of a matching pair are worn together, they have one of the following additional command-activated abilities, depending upon the pair:”
Yeah, because wondrous gauntlets are supposed to be pairs. Eventually people decided they could ignore the pair rule and just say that their cool single gauntlet item occupies the whole slot for glove purposes, but not yet.


The cheapest item on the list is Telekinesis (Violent Thrust), 2/D, Touch at +20K. So to get +3 Gauntlets that can TK someone twice per day, you are now out over seventy six thousand gold (remember that these each come with an 18,302 GP base cost).
If you don't want a pair of +3 gauntlets, don't buy a pair of +3 gauntlets. This was not the age when designers would throw on giant piles of free or discount bonuses, you usually pay for everything you get. MiC is the book where you get a pair of +1 gauntlets for free because someone slashed the price of a mere damage item down to nothing.

And you might actually be over-paying, because the cost is +20k, on top of the pair of 18k gauntlets. That's almost 60, not over 70k. I would expect a one-time cost added to the pair for determining the market price of the pair, not per gauntlet. The entry at the end still being for a single +3 gauntlet may suggest otherwise, but the other reading is perfectly plausible, especially if doubling them makes things seem more absurd.

I have to assemble these myself? And they only work with their “pair?” So I could have two Gauntlets of the Valorous: Flame Blade and they still wouldn’t work together because my neighbor somehow connected his goddamn iphone to my shower speaker again, MATT?
That's an argument that they shouldn't be on the random tables, not that they're priced wrong. But the phrase "matching pair" in this context obviously means two gauntlets with the same ability, not the one true designated buddy. Now you're just being obtuse.

Who priced these out? For context, the cheapest item is touch-attack TK 2/Day, then we see various options like touch-attack Polymorph Other (26k), Heal (I assume touch, although it doesn’t say that for some reason?) for 48K, and I’ll skip straight to the ending: The most expensive option on the list is 3/Day Shocking Grasp for 66,000 goldaroos. Look, I get that three is more than one, but maybe don’t make people shell out one hundred and sixty-eight thousand gold to cast a first-level spell 3 times per day. (Or 84 thousand and an epic quest to marry it to its partner.)
Violent Thrust is close to a calculation, 5th level spell 2/day: 36k (getting a near 50% discount for only one TK option). But yeah, the prices are weird. My best guess is that they're taken from other items, but though it looked similar it's not the intelligent item ability tables. It's entirely possible that the numbers on this pricing table got scrambled, and one should also remember that Heal was just full hp flat-out at the time, But I'll admit, I was expecting to find some easy answers here and I didn't either. It might be possible to chop them up into some sort of formula with some effort.


So there’s your answer. These items weren’t meant to be used.
Not sure if joke: if joke, haha, if not, again being deliberately obtuse. Reading a bad entry and concluding that the writer messed up, reasonable. Ascribing next level malice or nihilistic intent, not so much.


A simple one. The specific magic weapon Namarra is a +2 keen longsword that has mysterious carvings, floats in water, and glows pale mauve. “This weapon is old, with no tales that date its creation or relate themselves to before Namarra was forged.” Players can craft them starting level 10.
No, players can craft an item that is functionally identical, as you acknowledge yourself with the word "recreation." Putting zomg rare ancient blah blah on random tables is the sort of thing that should be reserved for fully written adventures where it only determines when rather than if the players find them, but as you've noted yes, they like making fluffy descriptions for generic weapons and making tables of them. I suppose at the time they found random item tables with fluffy descriptions worth making, which if your game does assume random item tables, is a way to insert random fluff hooks.


8. Potion of Infertility

All right, I’ll bite. Why is this the only reference to birth control in all of D&D? Is it unique, or should sheepskin condoms be in the PHB? Is the only birth control in all of D&D something that costs 4x the annual wage of a commoner? I mean, I guess that would explain why there are always more commoners…
It's not. The main FRCS book has completely mundane birth control herbs, for both male and female, and Book of Vile Darkness has infertility on its list of expanded curses.


9. How much do these guys hate locks, though
I’ve always been of the opinion that the whole “let’s give rogues something to do” of trapfinding was a design mistake. There are traps and locks and whatever when the rogue’s there, we remove them when the rogue misses a session. I think the smaller and smaller emphasis on such mechanics as the edition wore on suggests that designers agree with my distaste – or at least, that there’s very little design space in the whole one-player minigame.

But here we have a book published in 2001 that include four different items – A ring, a rod, a staff, and a harp – that can cast knock. All of them can cast it multiple times a day. Were they just really on the ball about this, or is Magic of Faerun an outlier?
Trapfinding isn't there to give rogues something to do, the rogue is there so the DM can use deadly traps without wiping the party (and so people can play roguish types), at least by the time of 3.x. Why a bunch of Knock items? People love absolute effects and role destruction. Of course a book mostly focused on magic will have items highlighting those sorts of spells- gotta let the Wizard do everything, right? The rogue is also the most obvious place to cut and replace with a second arcanist (quite possibly a bard), at which point the "rogue" can't do their job anymore, enter more magic items.


10. The Miraculous Flower
Sometimes I understand what’s going on with the issues, especially balance issues, in books like these. Other times I suspect I’ve stumbled upon something so obvious it’ll get fixed in errata. Then the errata comes out and nothing changes.

One of the Staves in the book is called the Staff of Miracles. . . .
I’d wager that you recognized two of those spells. For those wondering, Rosemantle is a first-level spell. I looked up the 3.5 version of the spell, and after a few minutes of confusion flipped through Magic of Faerun itself to get the 3.0 version, just to get the complete picture. To my shock, they’re… well, they’re the same thing. Here it is in Magic of Faerun, just a few chapters back:

My search didn’t end there. I checked the errata. I checked the 3.5 update. This confounded me. But alas, while Rosemantle had multiple mentions in those documents, none of them made it a better spell, and none of them dealt with its use in this staff.
Lower level spell at 2 charges does come up sometimes, though not usually at such a gap. The bigger issue is that the staff is priced entirely wrong to begin with. I'm not getting any combination of Heal and Holy Aura that doesn't come out over the given price. Which means that it's impossible to attempt to calculate the level of whatever spell or version of Rosemantle the staff may have been based on.


Conclusion
After I narrowed my scope down to a single 44-page chapter, I found all of these in the first 13. Hopefully this makes my point about Magic of Faerun, because this was weirdly stressful to compile? I'm not sure why that is, but I don't plan on continuing it.
Yup. Shockingly enough, people that blindly adhere to published material are not in fact keeping to well-written rules most of the time, but are instead taking a mish-mash of the efforts of a dozen writers and editors per book which when analyzed often fall apart in multiple places because such chaos is always going to have tons of missed problems. That people do so while claiming to know all the problems with the game and yet not recognizing the obvious falibility of people behind them and their role in being complicit, is a sad irony.

[bekeleven]

Fizban, a lot of our not seeing eye-to-eye here is due to differing goals. My goal in making this thread was to go, haha, these game designers sure made a bunch of silly (or, as I say in the post, weird decisions when making this game. And it feels to me like you agree more than you disagree with that.

As JyP points out, many of these oddities make sense if you view these items as pieces in their own economies. My position is that they're jamming that round peg straight through the square hole, resulting in potentially poor, potentially just odd play experiences.

You (I assume) agree on point 1, with the exception of disagreeing whether my parenthetical aside was any funny. You agree that having Venomous and the Arrow of Biting just paragraphs away from each other on the same page is silly, although you still had a bone to pick with me... I don't want to put words in your mouth, but, you disagreed with me blaming the writer and not the editor? I'm an editor. If you want to blame somebody, I am beyond comfortable blaming the editor.

I don't quite understand your comparing everbright and blueshine to elemental abilities, because elemental types aren't 2/3rds redundant (given the relative mechanical effect they're less, but by ability count it's 2/3, and even by word count it's close). It would be like if you opened the DMG to the very first magical items, and the first one you read - the first-listed ASA- gave immunity to death effects, negative levels, and critical hits, then the third listed ASA gave immunity to death effects, negative levels, and a +2 luck bonus to armor class for the same price. Sure the third listed abilities are going to come up more often than the first two, but it sure is weird that we're 1.5 pages into this chapter and so far 66% of the listed abilities give immunity to negative levels. Don't tell any lazy statisticians. :smallbiggrin:

And 2.5 was just a comment about how a now-ubiquitous mechanic was seemingly concepted because of two largely forgettable abilities that aren't at the price point or the use case for somebody to even want them on their weapons when they can get them elsewhere more easily. I mean, they're not terrible, especially before we had ease-of-use item combination. But I don't want to be able to jump only when I'm holding my sword, and the ring of jumping is right there. These will only be found in random drops or, I guess, meet the fate of all constant-priced special abilities: added to weapons by epic characters with nothing better to do. "What if I'm hit with a Disjunction and all my items break except for my sword? With these, I'll still be able to jump to safety!"

Point 3 is again commenting on these items as game pieces. No (or almost no) player will want to spend 10k gold to make their full-plate harder for someone else to use. If somebody else is using your full-plate, it's either because (1) you wanted to sell it - and this will be harder to sell despite costing more, (2) you died - in which case your party/next character's probably selling it, or (3) It was stolen... In which case, you weren't wearing it at the time, and since the thief probably didn't want to stick around in the bathhouse locker room for 4 + 1D4+1 minutes (less with a squire), they're not going to be trying it on themselves to make sure it fits them first! It's just a downside! You could've had 400 scrolls of burning hands for that money! Or most of a folding boat!

The Scimitar of the Fool is similar, except that its downside is more clearly communicated by having a minus sign. Its description is, "These weapons are popular with tyrants who don’t entirely trust their guards." And if that's not the funniest thing to you I don't know what to say. People that don't trust their guards... spend more money... to give their guards a minus to will saves! Maybe they should just Feeblemind them while they're at it. And of course, like the armor, this is 0% going to be a weapon that players will seek out for any reason, and 100% be a weapon they end up with due to its appearance on a drop table, or because they fought the tyrant that thought making them would be a good idea (hopefully with enchantments). At which point, if measuring by WBL, they have 3k of unusable, possibly unsellable item instead of 2,315 GP of reasonable vendor trash. God help them if they use it themselves after finding it in a low-level treasure pile, although since this book doesn't roll specific weapons as minor treasures, the players should have better options by then. And worst comes to worst, maybe they'll find a suit of +11 armor to balance it out :smalltongue:

Our failure to see eye-to-eye on the gauntlets is similar. You're viewing them as being interesting items that exist in the world. I am viewing an item that almost no player will go out of their way to craft or buy, which instead appears when a DM rolls a medium or major magic item, flips to them, and it says "Oh, the entry's titled gauntlets? Yeah, no sister, that's gauntlet." You might be right about some of my pricing being off, but I'd be more convinced if the drop table listed it as costing 9,151 GP. You're saying I should be arguing that these items shouldn't be on the random drop tables. I am! If a player seeks out an item that casts shocking grasp 3/D, they can choose to spend 84, 168, or 500 thousand gold for all I care. I did not title the section "Mix 'n' match" because I was concerned that players would buy a matching pair and be unsatisfied. (But, to be clear... I would be, these look pretty bad. Except maybe the Polymorph Other one, that's a hell of a spell to be the second-cheapest.)

the Rosemantle staff manages a beautiful double, in that it makes no sense as a game item or as a flavor item. (And, as you pointed out, it doesn't work with the staff formula. I hadn't checked.) Now, it doesn't manage a perfect triple - it's still sort of a useful item, because it casts heal 50 times and heal is good. But boy, it sure makes no sense on any level that this baby charges you 1.5k for a heal and 3k for a first-level spell that makes you give off 5 feet of shadowy illumination, give you a a save bonus against a tiny subset of effects, and temporarily prevents you from being even more poisoned. Like... You know what heal heals?

And yes. I know that these sins are not the fault of any particular person. I'm not trying to lay them at anybody's feet. I'm trying to have a laugh at how silly, and frequently worse, a game would be if somebody accepted this book as gospel and tried to incorporate its wildly variable content in the most feasible way.

When I become Character Builder Bek, I get aggressively into the weeds. Grease myself up, and just climb right on into them weeds, looking for powerful things, undercosted things, or things that synergize with whatever concept. My brain does the translating. I don't even see the fluff. (https://youtu.be/sx3UqqiBdUI?t=40) All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.

Perhaps that's why, when I hit one more speed bump than usual in this book (this book is located on a particularly weedy road), I took a step back and went, say, what have I been reading this whole time? And the fact that I'd been just ignoring the ridiculousness of all of these items was one of those mug-droppingly (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlowMotionDrop) dramatic moments. And then my brain threw a parse error and I started laughing.

Hopefully this thread makes some like-minded people laugh as well.

[Fizban]

Fizban, a lot of our not seeing eye-to-eye here is due to differing goals. My goal in making this thread was to go, haha, these game designers sure made a bunch of silly (or, as I say in the post, weird decisions when making this game. And it feels to me like you agree more than you disagree with that.
Oh sure I agree that plenty of stuff is borked- my goal I suppose, base as it is, was simply to point out things that I thought you missed. I read a lol look at this dumb published thing and sometimes go, "Aha, but wait! I know why that is/some bit of context which is clearly being ignored!"


You (I assume) agree on point 1, with the exception of disagreeing whether my parenthetical aside was any funny.
If by agree you mean that it's probably overpriced/under-useful, yeah. The aside is funny if you're on board, the delivery perfectly effective- but since 3.5 Enlarge Person is one of the massive changes (and fundamental blunders in my opinion) in 3.5, I do find it rather misleading.


You agree that having Venomous and the Arrow of Biting just paragraphs away from each other on the same page is silly, although you still had a bone to pick with me... I don't want to put words in your mouth, but, you disagreed with me blaming the writer and not the editor? I'm an editor. If you want to blame somebody, I am beyond comfortable blaming the editor.
Nope, I see no problem with Venomous and Arrow of Biting right next to each other- my bone to pick is just that I immediately did/would have expected you to run the numbers on Poison and realize one is a potion and one is a daily weapon property. I've got no problem with having a problem with both, I can accept them as different even if someone else would rather keep it simple, and obviously I agree they screwed up in the editing even if they wanted both.


I don't quite understand your comparing everbright and blueshine to elemental abilities, because elemental types aren't 2/3rds redundant (given the relative mechanical effect they're less, but by ability count it's 2/3, and even by word count it's close). It would be like if you opened the DMG to the very first magical items, and the first one you read - the first-listed ASA- gave immunity to death effects, negative levels, and critical hits, then the third listed ASA gave immunity to death effects, negative levels, and a +2 luck bonus to armor class for the same price. Sure the third listed abilities are going to come up more often than the first two, but it sure is weird that we're 1.5 pages into this chapter and so far 66% of the listed abilities give immunity to negative levels. Don't tell any lazy statisticians. :smallbiggrin:
The energy damage traits have so little variation they could be a single entry though, the same way this could be a single anti-rust entry. It's a little weird to have two separate anti-rust abilities, but with the book apparently doing similar stuff on multiple occasions it seems they had an intent there.


And 2.5 was just a comment about how a now-ubiquitous mechanic was seemingly concepted because of two largely forgettable abilities that aren't at the price point or the use case for somebody to even want them on their weapons when they can get them elsewhere more easily. I mean, they're not terrible, especially before we had ease-of-use item combination. But I don't want to be able to jump only when I'm holding my sword, and the ring of jumping is right there.
I doubt those abilities were what initiated the concept- actually I wouldn't be surprised if by that point there were other flat-costed abilities such as the changes made to energy resistance already in testing (or "testing"), if not already available in some random web article. I'll agree the sword of jumping is fairly silly and not something I'd take, but then again, isn't there a Winged shield in the DMG? And as I said, I actually prefer the higher price of the sword ability since it's not clearly violating their own continuous skill bonus pricing.


Point 3 is again commenting on these items as game pieces. No (or almost no) player will want to spend 10k gold to make their full-plate harder for someone else to use. If somebody else is using your full-plate, it's either because (1) you wanted to sell it - and this will be harder to sell despite costing more, (2) you died - in which case your party/next character's probably selling it, or (3) It was stolen... In which case, you weren't wearing it at the time, and since the thief probably didn't want to stick around in the bathhouse locker room for 4 + 1D4+1 minutes (less with a squire), they're not going to be trying it on themselves to make sure it fits them first! It's just a downside! You could've had 400 scrolls of burning hands for that money! Or most of a folding boat!
I should admit I completely failed to notice you'd already used the 3.0 pricing there, so there was no need to restate that. But the farce of "restrictions" that are actually benefits that also give discounts is something I think should be addressed whenever it comes up. And while I wouldn't neccesarily pay extra to prevent my armor from being worn by someone else, I would *definitely* consider it for an offensive item. And when they eventually publish things that let you teleport your armor onto your body from storage *only if nobody else has worn it*, it's definitely a bit of insurance.


The Scimitar of the Fool is similar, except that its downside is more clearly communicated by having a minus sign. Its description is, "These weapons are popular with tyrants who don’t entirely trust their guards." And if that's not the funniest thing to you I don't know what to say. People that don't trust their guards... spend more money... to give their guards a minus to will saves! Maybe they should just Feeblemind them while they're at it. And of course, like the armor, this is 0% going to be a weapon that players will seek out for any reason, and 100% be a weapon they end up with due to its appearance on a drop table, or because they fought the tyrant that thought making them would be a good idea (hopefully with enchantments).
Fair enough, that fluff is pretty dumb. If you're going to give your people cursed items to ensure loyalty, this is one of the lamest.


At which point, if measuring by WBL, they have 3k of unusable, possibly unsellable item instead of 2,315 GP of reasonable vendor trash. God help them if they use it themselves after finding it in a low-level treasure pile, although since this book doesn't roll specific weapons as minor treasures, the players should have better options by then. And worst comes to worst, maybe they'll find a suit of +11 armor to balance it out :smalltongue:
If word-of-god says tyrants like using them then I'd say they're pretty explicitly saleable :smallcool:


Our failure to see eye-to-eye on the gauntlets is similar. You're viewing them as being interesting items that exist in the world. I am viewing an item that almost no player will go out of their way to craft or buy, which instead appears when a DM rolls a medium or major magic item, flips to them, and it says "Oh, the entry's titled gauntlets? Yeah, no sister, that's gauntlet." You might be right about some of my pricing being off, but I'd be more convinced if the drop table listed it as costing 9,151 GP. You're saying I should be arguing that these items shouldn't be on the random drop tables. I am! If a player seeks out an item that casts shocking grasp 3/D, they can choose to spend 84, 168, or 500 thousand gold for all I care. I did not title the section "Mix 'n' match" because I was concerned that players would buy a matching pair and be unsatisfied. (But, to be clear... I would be, these look pretty bad. Except maybe the Polymorph Other one, that's a hell of a spell to be the second-cheapest.)
If anything I've ended up coming off as too defensive there- I really expected to find an easy calculation that would at least salvage someone's idea of a good and interesting item, but no. They're inconsistent, generally way overpriced, and require a pair of base weapons no one actually wants- just straight up bad items. I stand by my default stance that whoever wrote them did so in good faith vs your joke, but I do agree they're terrible by almost any measure.


the Rosemantle staff manages a beautiful double, in that it makes no sense as a game item or as a flavor item. (And, as you pointed out, it doesn't work with the staff formula. I hadn't checked.) Now, it doesn't manage a perfect triple - it's still sort of a useful item, because it casts heal 50 times and heal is good. But boy, it sure makes no sense on any level that this baby charges you 1.5k for a heal and 3k for a first-level spell that makes you give off 5 feet of shadowy illumination, give you a a save bonus against a tiny subset of effects, and temporarily prevents you from being even more poisoned. Like... You know what heal heals?
I'd like to say that the main guess should be that Rosemantle was originally a much higher level spell- in fact, its Delay Poison Effect means it should be a minimum of 2nd level, and with that sort of save bonus I'd kick it up to 3rd at least (high niche bonus is still high bonus). There's more text to support it being an intentional inclusion, but I feel like the better answer based on the fluff is that Rosemantle isn't supposed to be on that staff at all: it's a Lathander Cleric only spell, with no mention of them in the staff description. Maybe they meant some other R spell like Resurrection, a staff of which could surely claim a title of "miracles," but that makes the price even more wrong of course. There just isn't enough data to guess at what they were actually going for, which I find more annoying than funny.


I'm trying to have a laugh at how silly, and frequently worse, a game would be if somebody accepted this book as gospel and tried to incorporate its wildly variable content in the most feasible way.
Indeed. But the problem is that it's. . . not really a laughing matter? I spent some two years slugging it out off and on with certain posters that are no longer here, who did that very thing (among other things). It's still a prevalent mindset, if not a majority in number (though that seems likely) then still a huge portion of posting content. There's a thread on the front page right now calling for "practical optimizers" to represent against the RAW gospel which you're having a laugh at, because they (like I have been) are tired of seeing people ask for usable answers and get max-power RAW responses. There are pinned RAW answer threads, people run RAW contests, and people run RAW games. Even threads that try to preface themselves with "I really don't care about RAW," get hit with RAW arguments.

It's silly, extremely so, yes. But when I laugh it's a bitter laugh. Do I take DnD too seriously? Maybe, usually in good ways when I'm not fighting on the internet, but however well or ill-advised such pursuits were in the past, they still happened. This is the longest stretch I've been back on the forum in years, and it's mostly because I'm spending so much of my time *off* the forum, working on my tweaks and brew doc, that I'm always in DnD mode so I feel like checking up here (rather than getting burnt out on the same old problems).

And rather than just laughing at things not making sense, I prefer to try to figure out why they don't make sense, so I can fix/advise about them. Too many "hey let's laugh at X being the best at everything/bad/broken/etc" threads are just bash-fests breeding more problems for down the line. Unless this is a stealth-attempt at showcasing some examples of why people should consider not being RAW-only, but it doesn't sound like it.

And then my brain threw a parse error and I started laughing.
Getting so far in the tank that you forget to watch where you're going can be funny, yeah.

[Blackhawk748]

I've always viewed these as more cautionary tales about things to avoid or double check when making a game.

Make sure you fluff and mechanics line up.
Double check your pricing.
Don't make stupid items unless it's explicitly stated to be that way on purpose

[Efrate]

Githyanki crafter's guild in full evidence on this one. The staff is particularly odd. The fact that heal cures poison and costs 1 charge vs. a bunch of minor stuff and delay poison using 2.

Did heal cure poison in 3.0 or was it just heal all but 1d4 of your HP? I forget. I know I used harm plus quicken inflict moderate wounds to one shot stuff. Dragons and at least one god.

[Lilapop]

I think the idea behind the scimitar of the fool is villains who recruit their forces through mindcontrol abilities that need to be refreshed regularly, or who loyalty-check their forces with regular mindreading. If your basic guards are muggles and you don't tell them the standard issue gear makes them weaker to such stuffs, and the enemy casters are just Jozan and Mialee spamming cure serious wounds (on Tordek, because he can't step out of the trap's acid fog while his stupid dwarven defender thing is active) and fireball... this might actually be a sensible investment.

[Time Troll]

Well, there was a lot going on for this book.


1. 3E was new. So they did not really understand it.

2. WotC simply put has never had a game rule content editor. At best they hired a "normal" editor.

3. The content creators play a wildly radical different game then just about anyone else. Plus it's a wacky 2E style way that really does not fit with the 3E rules. And they oddly assume everyone will play the game just likr they do AND even think everyone uses their 2E style house rules(without knowing what they are).

4. The book, like most typical corporate RPG books was a "rush". Some boss saying "25 pages by Friday or no pay!". So...you know, toss together what you can. I'll bet this happened to that dagger of chaos: no time to write a table out so just type "open the MM and pick a page".

5. Converting 2E Realms stuff is hard...even more so if you don't know the rules and are in a rush. The Staff of Miracles is from 2E and was published way back in 91. The 2E description of the staff is five paragraphs and they had to cut that down to two lines of text.

In 2E Rosemantle was not even a function of the staff (oh, and 2E Rosemantle was Cleric 1 the spell re-
cipient moves and functions with the same freedom a ring of free action
grants and is temporarily released from any negative modifiers or activity
restrictions due to naturally or magically induced pain, nausea, fear, or
venom effects. (The effects of venom are suspended by the spell, but not
negated or lessened in any way.)

In 2E it gave a +4 to all saves, heal, deaths door(stabilize a dying creature) and limited wish(0nce every 66 days).

Somehow that became : Heal,Holy aura and Rosemantle


6. This book is a hard victim of the Crunch vs Fluff conflict. See way back when...WotC only wanted Crunch: "random pages of Crunch Crap anyone can use in any game so we can make MoRe MoNeY!" But the FR fan writers wanted to do 2E Style 3E books: tons and tons and tons of Lore. Magic of Fareun sneaks in bits of Lore, but roughly 99% of it is cut from the book.


End result...it's a mess. Many D&D, and more FR books are....