Eric Finley
First Post
Personally, I kinda find that equating "money = magic items" is jarring to the in-character part of things. I suspect many of you would agree. Many of our PCs aren't acquisitive, greedy, or power-seeking types who would go out and scrape up treasure in order to custom-order magic items; that's just not how their minds work. Even the greedy ones are greedy as a character point – they'd often prefer to keep the wealth, rather than spend it on magic swords. However, the 4e ruleset is carefully balanced so that statistically you'll end up with about this much power worth of magic items, at any given point in your career... meaning that the loot rules are part of the balance equation. And that balance equation is what makes plug-and-slot-encounter-building possible, which in turn is what makes DMing so incredibly easy in this edition compared to previous ones.
I think I can reconcile the two, though. I recently introduced a house rule in our campaign which divorces the "item balance" and "loot is cool" rules from one another. It's an extension and generalization of the excellent "Item levels as treasure" rules from the Adventurer's Vault.
It's called Item Experience Points – IXP. It works like this.
1) Magic items don't have a monetary worth. Nobody sells them, nobody buys them - it just doesn't happen, are you mad? Those are precious! On those rare occasions when it does occur, the prices could be anything. The math of the gp>items economy is preserved, however. We just disconnect that economy from actual money, so that actual money becomes fodder for RP, for cool in-game things like horses or rent or travel costs, or lifestyles (cf. Shadowrun), and so forth. When, occasionally, a DM does want to reconnect the two (for an auction scene or something, where gold will in fact equate to items), this ruleset will allow them to do so; it just splits it up when we don't want that.
2) When we hand out treasure, we'll hand out gold pieces and silver pieces and so forth. And, separately, we'll hand out IXP. IXP are an intangible, game-balance-related commodity, which is not transferred along with gold and gems. Until the end of an adventure, IXP are just handed to the party, as a pool; the one exception is when the DM states that the IXP are being directly awarded to / invested in a specific item. Item values from the books aren't in gold pieces; they're in IXP.
3) The total IXP from an adventure will be equal to the Dungeon Master's Guide's very specific guidelines on adventure loot. The DMG supplies a very handy entry, right near the top of a set of parcels: "Total Monetary Treasure" (for a given level). That's the IXP. That, plus the magic items listed in the parcels underneath, constitute the appropriate enchantment-treasure for roughly a level's worth of adventuring. Any considerations in a module which call for gold given or received (unless they're trivial mundanities) also do the same thing to IXP... so it's still important to search for hidden treasure, because sitting there alongside the visible treasure is "invisible treasure" measured in IXPs.
...In short, everywhere that a module or handbook or the magic item list says "gold pieces"... substitute IXP instead.
Note also that if there's a cool side bit that is not greed-based, it too can award IXP, in exactly the same vein as finding hidden treasure. Discovering the high priest's dirty secret as a cultist may not be necessary to the adventure, but the DM can assign it an IXP worth anyway – this way it's exactly as important-but-not-vital as finding secret loot.
4) Monetary treasure is not controlled by those DMG loot guidelines anymore. It's completely at the DM's discretion. (If you don't have a good feel for how much shiny you want to give out, giving out money and IXP in equal amounts at the same time is easy and will work perfectly fine.) Money and gems exist for the "shiny!" factor and for roleplaying considerations / expenses of life / mundane goods, and nothing else.
5) When you create, enchant, or story-upgrade a magic item, you do so by spending IXP on it. Not gold, although gold may be required if you're getting it from an NPC (typically equal to their ritual materials cost, which is 10% of the item's value, plus another 10-40% of the item's IXP value as labor and profit). If you do not have enough IXP for an item, then regardless of your wealth the enchantment process will not work (or the ritualist simply won't try, knowing that what you want is too difficult for whatever arcane reason). Or it won't yet be upgraded, or the story event will happen but the actual statistical upgrade will have to wait a bit, or whatever.
If you're doing this during an adventure, this is often best done by event-triggered stuff like "Oh, and as I pull my sword out of the black dragon's heart it should totally start to drip acid and do acid damage. Cool!" In those cases, you use IXP from the pool. The DM'll tell you if you're getting too ambitious with this; see the item level guidelines further on in this list. (In general, the more control you get over what the item does, the less above your level it can be.)
6) Division of IXP at the end of the adventure is purely equal. Any magic items you gained during the adventure count toward your share. For example, if a party of 3 PCs received one item worth 1000 IXP, one item worth 300 IXP, and then 1700 IXP in their pool, that's 3000 IXP total. So the guy with the 1000 IXP item gets no loose IXP, he's got his share already; the guy with the 300 IXP item gets 700 of the pool, and the third guy (who got no items) gets 1000 IXP for himself. Once it's divided up, you can have a personal pool of IXP hanging around loose, or you can invest it in one or more of your items.
7) You can invest as many IXP as you like, into any object you like. It need not even exist yet - "a cool cloak for me" is as valid a recipient as "my +1 sword." The requirement for it to become enchanted, or improve its enchantment, is that it now has enough IXP to equal the cost of its new item level. When it improves it does not lose its accumulated IXP, you add on to what was already there. Once the object has enough IXP, it is eligible for enchantment or upgrade. In general, there are three ways this will happen:
8) The other element of the careful balancing is in item levels.
Note that the artificer feats and paragon benefits in the Eberron Player's Guide which allow you to exceed your level with magic item creation should still work just fine, and alter these rules of thumb appropriately. This is one of the benefits to your party of having an artificer.
9) For rituals, I chose to let those remain money-based, instead of IXP-based. In other words, do not mentally find-and-replace "gp worth of components" with IXP. The one exception being the rituals of creation, which make magic items or potions and so forth - those will be assigned a less substantial components cost (I'm using 10% of the IXP cost), but the real cost is the item's value in IXP, and is paid by the item's owner, not by the ritualist. Ditto Raise Dead - it should have a real cost associated, not just a flavour cost - it costs 500gp in diamonds and 500 IXP (paid by the recipient; this is waived if the death was done as a plot point).
Tentatively, Alchemy is purely money-based, even though it makes things similar to potions; I think this is a fair trade for it being so much more limited in scope than ritual magic. Certain alchemy recipes (such as if your DM allows you to alchemically replicate a potion) may have IXP costs associated at the DM's discretion.
This makes ritual magic possible to access without cutting into peoples' magic item budgets, yet keeps rituals limited by the secondary currency (real money). Yes, this will allow much more free use of most rituals; in my opinion this is a good thing, I never liked the fact that ritualists were burning "magic item credit" toward things which are, especially at low levels, generally mostly cosmetic or RP-based. The DM may choose to disallow certain rituals because of this, or alter their component costs, or assign them an IXP cost as well. (Note that things like Fool's Gold become much less of an issue here, though... multiplying gold but not IXP means that Fool's Gold is mostly only good for what it was supposed to be used for, deceit.)
10) There is no such thing as residuum. Anytime a ritual or event would provide residuum, it provides IXP instead, either to the item's owner (in the case of Disenchant Magic Item or a rust monster or the like) or to the party's pool. It has no in-character existence. Characters are unable to consciously perceive the existence, or lack thereof, of IXP.
11) In our campaign, where we trade off GMs, the GM's PC simply receives IXP equal to the shares everybody else received, during the adventure they ran. Their share should not come out of the total, but it should instead be equal to the rest.
12) If an item is awarded but nobody in the party actually wants it, then nobody counts its IXP toward their share. It becomes purely a mundane bargaining chip or possible tribute/bribe/tithe, and no PC can access its enchanted item stats until they do choose to pay for it with IXP. If it is sold / lost / traded and no longer available to be invested in, 20% of its value goes back into the IXP pool, just as if it had been explicitly disenchanted..
I think I can reconcile the two, though. I recently introduced a house rule in our campaign which divorces the "item balance" and "loot is cool" rules from one another. It's an extension and generalization of the excellent "Item levels as treasure" rules from the Adventurer's Vault.
It's called Item Experience Points – IXP. It works like this.
1) Magic items don't have a monetary worth. Nobody sells them, nobody buys them - it just doesn't happen, are you mad? Those are precious! On those rare occasions when it does occur, the prices could be anything. The math of the gp>items economy is preserved, however. We just disconnect that economy from actual money, so that actual money becomes fodder for RP, for cool in-game things like horses or rent or travel costs, or lifestyles (cf. Shadowrun), and so forth. When, occasionally, a DM does want to reconnect the two (for an auction scene or something, where gold will in fact equate to items), this ruleset will allow them to do so; it just splits it up when we don't want that.
2) When we hand out treasure, we'll hand out gold pieces and silver pieces and so forth. And, separately, we'll hand out IXP. IXP are an intangible, game-balance-related commodity, which is not transferred along with gold and gems. Until the end of an adventure, IXP are just handed to the party, as a pool; the one exception is when the DM states that the IXP are being directly awarded to / invested in a specific item. Item values from the books aren't in gold pieces; they're in IXP.
3) The total IXP from an adventure will be equal to the Dungeon Master's Guide's very specific guidelines on adventure loot. The DMG supplies a very handy entry, right near the top of a set of parcels: "Total Monetary Treasure" (for a given level). That's the IXP. That, plus the magic items listed in the parcels underneath, constitute the appropriate enchantment-treasure for roughly a level's worth of adventuring. Any considerations in a module which call for gold given or received (unless they're trivial mundanities) also do the same thing to IXP... so it's still important to search for hidden treasure, because sitting there alongside the visible treasure is "invisible treasure" measured in IXPs.
...In short, everywhere that a module or handbook or the magic item list says "gold pieces"... substitute IXP instead.
Note also that if there's a cool side bit that is not greed-based, it too can award IXP, in exactly the same vein as finding hidden treasure. Discovering the high priest's dirty secret as a cultist may not be necessary to the adventure, but the DM can assign it an IXP worth anyway – this way it's exactly as important-but-not-vital as finding secret loot.
4) Monetary treasure is not controlled by those DMG loot guidelines anymore. It's completely at the DM's discretion. (If you don't have a good feel for how much shiny you want to give out, giving out money and IXP in equal amounts at the same time is easy and will work perfectly fine.) Money and gems exist for the "shiny!" factor and for roleplaying considerations / expenses of life / mundane goods, and nothing else.
5) When you create, enchant, or story-upgrade a magic item, you do so by spending IXP on it. Not gold, although gold may be required if you're getting it from an NPC (typically equal to their ritual materials cost, which is 10% of the item's value, plus another 10-40% of the item's IXP value as labor and profit). If you do not have enough IXP for an item, then regardless of your wealth the enchantment process will not work (or the ritualist simply won't try, knowing that what you want is too difficult for whatever arcane reason). Or it won't yet be upgraded, or the story event will happen but the actual statistical upgrade will have to wait a bit, or whatever.
If you're doing this during an adventure, this is often best done by event-triggered stuff like "Oh, and as I pull my sword out of the black dragon's heart it should totally start to drip acid and do acid damage. Cool!" In those cases, you use IXP from the pool. The DM'll tell you if you're getting too ambitious with this; see the item level guidelines further on in this list. (In general, the more control you get over what the item does, the less above your level it can be.)
6) Division of IXP at the end of the adventure is purely equal. Any magic items you gained during the adventure count toward your share. For example, if a party of 3 PCs received one item worth 1000 IXP, one item worth 300 IXP, and then 1700 IXP in their pool, that's 3000 IXP total. So the guy with the 1000 IXP item gets no loose IXP, he's got his share already; the guy with the 300 IXP item gets 700 of the pool, and the third guy (who got no items) gets 1000 IXP for himself. Once it's divided up, you can have a personal pool of IXP hanging around loose, or you can invest it in one or more of your items.
7) You can invest as many IXP as you like, into any object you like. It need not even exist yet - "a cool cloak for me" is as valid a recipient as "my +1 sword." The requirement for it to become enchanted, or improve its enchantment, is that it now has enough IXP to equal the cost of its new item level. When it improves it does not lose its accumulated IXP, you add on to what was already there. Once the object has enough IXP, it is eligible for enchantment or upgrade. In general, there are three ways this will happen:
- The DM will give you treasure of that type, as an actual found object. This is usually best for when the player was investing in "a cool cloak" and the like, but the DM might also decide to shatter your magic sword but, nearby / soon / recently, he'll have you find one that's better.
- You may, in character, have the item enhanced... by a ritualist character, or by an occult or master blacksmith, or by using the Enchant Item ritual yourself, or whatever.
- An event may cause the item to simply become better than it was. Usually this should be attached to some kind of cool in-game event, like the example above with the black dragon. If you can't provide such an event, then wait until you can, and in the meanwhile try to do cool stuff which might result in such a noteworthily awesome event.
8) The other element of the careful balancing is in item levels.
- You should never, under any normal circumstances, receive an item more powerful than your level + 4. And items of level + 4 should only be given out by the DM, according to the standard guidelines - which will result in only one PC getting an item this powerful during each level. In general, expect this to go to you if you're one of the PCs with a large pool of unspent IXPs.
- Items at level + 3 are still potent, the kind of thing of which there are only 2-4 per party. In general the DM should only go here with signature items and cool events, or with distributed hand-picked loot, or with enchantments provided by powerful NPCs well above the party's level - and even they will generally be disinclined to give this much power to someone of your reputation. Enchant Item rituals done by yourselves cannot generate these. You should generally have at most one item of this level or higher.
- Items at level + 2 or level + 1 are more common, but still above the curve. You can't use Enchant Item or player-requested upgrading to acquire these. The DM can allow event-based upgrades or senior NPCs to make items of this level without worrying too overmuch about balance, though. If a character has an item of level + 3 or higher, then at most one level + 1-2 item is appropriate as well; otherwise you can let them have three to four items of this degree.
- Items at your level or below are the easiest category. You can use Enchant Item to make them, can get them from any appropriately-skilled NPC (possibly for a slight markup still), or can describe your own event-based upgrade which gets the item there.
Note that the artificer feats and paragon benefits in the Eberron Player's Guide which allow you to exceed your level with magic item creation should still work just fine, and alter these rules of thumb appropriately. This is one of the benefits to your party of having an artificer.
9) For rituals, I chose to let those remain money-based, instead of IXP-based. In other words, do not mentally find-and-replace "gp worth of components" with IXP. The one exception being the rituals of creation, which make magic items or potions and so forth - those will be assigned a less substantial components cost (I'm using 10% of the IXP cost), but the real cost is the item's value in IXP, and is paid by the item's owner, not by the ritualist. Ditto Raise Dead - it should have a real cost associated, not just a flavour cost - it costs 500gp in diamonds and 500 IXP (paid by the recipient; this is waived if the death was done as a plot point).
Tentatively, Alchemy is purely money-based, even though it makes things similar to potions; I think this is a fair trade for it being so much more limited in scope than ritual magic. Certain alchemy recipes (such as if your DM allows you to alchemically replicate a potion) may have IXP costs associated at the DM's discretion.
This makes ritual magic possible to access without cutting into peoples' magic item budgets, yet keeps rituals limited by the secondary currency (real money). Yes, this will allow much more free use of most rituals; in my opinion this is a good thing, I never liked the fact that ritualists were burning "magic item credit" toward things which are, especially at low levels, generally mostly cosmetic or RP-based. The DM may choose to disallow certain rituals because of this, or alter their component costs, or assign them an IXP cost as well. (Note that things like Fool's Gold become much less of an issue here, though... multiplying gold but not IXP means that Fool's Gold is mostly only good for what it was supposed to be used for, deceit.)
10) There is no such thing as residuum. Anytime a ritual or event would provide residuum, it provides IXP instead, either to the item's owner (in the case of Disenchant Magic Item or a rust monster or the like) or to the party's pool. It has no in-character existence. Characters are unable to consciously perceive the existence, or lack thereof, of IXP.
11) In our campaign, where we trade off GMs, the GM's PC simply receives IXP equal to the shares everybody else received, during the adventure they ran. Their share should not come out of the total, but it should instead be equal to the rest.
12) If an item is awarded but nobody in the party actually wants it, then nobody counts its IXP toward their share. It becomes purely a mundane bargaining chip or possible tribute/bribe/tithe, and no PC can access its enchanted item stats until they do choose to pay for it with IXP. If it is sold / lost / traded and no longer available to be invested in, 20% of its value goes back into the IXP pool, just as if it had been explicitly disenchanted..
