D&D 5E [+] Design & Development: Magic Item Pricing

This is an introductory post to gauge general interest.

First off, read this blast from the past:
http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20070302a

I yearn for the days when you could have a serious, positive discussion about magic item creation and pricing mechanisms (and when the designers were actively interested in pursuing these subjects). If you agree, please let me know in this thread.

Do note this thread is meant as a "plus thread"*.

The goal is to create support for a 5th edition campaign where characters can visit magic shoppes to spend their hard-earned gold on magic items, where prices reflect how useful the magic effects are to adventurers (utility-based pricing).

• One basic assumption of this plus thread is that the rarity-based system in the DMG is essentially unworkable and useless (if you genuinely wonder why, let's discuss that in another thread).
• Another is that making a system that is workable and useful is far from easy, and emphatically not trivial (if you genuinely wonder why, let's discuss that in another thread).
• A third is that it would be of great use if there was a ready-made system so every DM didn't have to invent the wheel from scratch.

In other words, I invite you to participate if you're ready to hop on the train, if you already know why you want to do this.

Sure there's the "sane magic item" compendium. But not only is it pretty much the only serious effort I've seen and studied up close, it's unofficial, and - sorry to say it - pretty much flawed, since it assumes too much of a d20 campaign rather than what practical experience has taught us is a 5E campaign. I welcome discussions around specifics here, since that's what the thread is about.

But before we start thinking about specifics (which I intend to do in a second thread once I trust EN World's ability to discuss this topic constructively), we need to agree on a few fundamentals. I am assuming the campaign is running an official hardcover campaign or similar adventure. Not only because that's the only common ground we can have (except AL play), but also because narrows our scope enough to make any effort fruitful. I am telling you this because if all you run is homebrew campaigns which deviate significantly from official adventures, you might not find this thread useful for your purposes.

In short: if your campaign focus on social interaction and where combat is a last-resort conflict resolution only, as opposed to being featured front and center pretty much every play session, I wish you good luck - but you don't really need the price lists we're creating there...

Specifically, in my opinion a system like the one I want to create is useful because:
- official adventures feature world-ending threats more often than not. If you're on a ticking clock, you don't want to take a month off to build an orphanage or whatever. In short, no downtime is assumed, so we need a way to spend gold during "uptime"
- buying magic items is assumed to be fun! It allows the player a much appreciated extra layer of character building or "crunch".
- spending time on downtime is assumed to be a secondary, optional, activity. Some plots don't have time for downtime. Some groups simply don't care for it. Just like every edition before it, 5th edition should support players that just want to spend their gold on something truly useful for them in their capacity as heroes and adventurers and then go straight to the next dungeon if that's what they want.
- the combat pillar is assumed to be dominant. Full stop. (Again, I don't want to derail into explaining or defending why, so I made this thread a "plus thread". The focus here is that you're onboard with this, and feature a similar campaign in your home game.
- it sets some common limits on what is available and what isn't available in our assumed campaign.
a) For instance, few if any official adventures are "low magic". Quite the contrary, most official adventures have the heroes swimming in gold and items! This means that our discussion will not stick to the "party line" (If you want to argue "magic items are completely optional and if you decide to include them you're on your own" you need to do that in another thread!)
b) Looking through WotC modules, I make the observation NPCs are very seldom equipped with any magic items (unless major villains and/or encountered at double-digit levels). By this I mean, prices need to reflect that you can't bathe in scrolls, potions and +1 swords until much later, when you're mid or even high level. In short: everything about a d20-based take needs to be fundamentally recalibrated.
c) 5E works fundamentally different than 3E. Two quick examples: Simply having a magic weapon turns all the "resistance to non-magical damage" abilities into irrelevant fluff. Spellcasters have access to MUCH fewer spell slots, and a 3E approach to scrolls simply doesn't work - it would short-circuit this very deliberate limitation on casters. (In short: scrolls can't be as cheap as Sane suggests, and the very fact a sword is magical needs to be reflected in the price even if not a +1 item) I'm sure there's more.
d) just because the characters find a magic shoppe does not necessarily mean they're free to cherry pick from the complete DMG catalogue of items! As the Dungeon Master, you're free to stock your shoppes as you please, and set any price you want. The point here is to create a basic list which you should be confident won't break your campaign if used as-is.

Consider this thread also a test of how well this "plus thread" thing works in practice. If moderation cannot keep it clean there's not much point of discussing these issues on EN World at all, and since pretty much every previous discussion on these issues have gone down the toilet, I would dearly like to know if this topic is effectively allowed around here before I start discussing specific implementations. To be very clear: I am not a moderator; nothing I say is official.

So that's why this is just the introductory thread. I aim to create another when and if this test balloon works.

To that effect, please note again this thread is meant as a "plus thread"*.

Comments? Questions? Or just your unadulterated adulation?

Regards,
Zapp

*) What that means exactly is of course up to the moderators to explain, but since there is no official mention of "plus threads" in the forum rules as far as I'm aware, let me try to explain my personal take: if all you want to say is "don't do it" or "I don't like it" or "top three reasons why you're wrong, Zapp" that's considered off-topic for this thread and will be reported accordingly. In short: If all you want to do is derail a positive constructive discussion on how to implement magic item pricing and creation, you're (hopefully) gonna get banned. Instead, I encourage you to start a thread of your own to discuss, I dunno, the evils of magic item shoppes or, say, how great rarity-based pricing is. Don't post it here, please!

To be very clear: I am not a moderator; nothing I say is official.

Sure, I would be interested.

Two things, though:

CapnZapp said:

Sure there's the "sane magic item" compendium. But not only is it pretty much the only serious effort I've seen and studied up close, it's unofficial...

Click to expand...

Surely that's also an inherent weakness in anything we come up with here, for exactly the same reasons?

c) 5E works fundamentally different than 3E. Two quick examples: Simply having a magic weapon turns all the "resistance to non-magical damage" abilities into irrelevant fluff.

Click to expand...

Note that in 3.5e (but not 3.0e) Damage Resistance was changed along the same lines - the resistance became DR X/magic. So the same consideration applied... though of course the magic weapon costs weren't changed to reflect that new reality.

I am fine with PCs buying magic items, but I don't quite understand your goal with this. Obviously you can put magic shops in your campaign, it doesn't seem like that needs much discussion.

Is it basically that you want help creating a comprehensive price list? I'm skeptical that it is possible to do that in a way that achieves any kind of consensus.

So the goal is to create a viable pricing method for magic items that determines gp cost based on the item's utility to game play, correct?

The first thing you need to do is to determine what factors you want to quantify - bonuses to hit, number of charges, levels of spells usable, special abilities, etc. Then you need to assign a gp value to these factors, along with adjustments due to multiple abilities in a single item, whether it requires attunement, has class/alignment/other restrictions, etc. Then you need a method to combine these values effectively into a total gp cost that appears reasonable to a majority of players.

Since you're making a pricing system, you may as well link in an item creation algorithm as well indicating the price, time, creator-and-material requisites, etc.

If you have a world where people are actively crafting magical items, I assume that not all magical items will be useful to adventurers. The ability to craft magic items however, is not unlimited so people that can craft magic items won't just be cranking out +1 short swords or what have you. The demand for that "magical box of cold storage" that refrigerates food would be quite high for those that could afford it. In the real world, only a small percentage of the population is willing to pay for high end sports cars when all they really need is a Camry. A +1 sword is only marginally better for the vast majority of people than a regular old reasonable quality piece of sharpened steel. Enchanting that sword doesn't add enough value to justify the cost for most people.

Putting aside the GP economy market for a moment (I don't think comparing D&D economy with real world economy buys much), I've always assumed that at mid-to-high levels adventurers are wealthy but not the richest people on the planet. In addition, depending on the campaign they're quite rare.

So if I'm crafting magic items, should I craft that cold box that I know I can sell almost immediately or that +n blade of awesomeness that may sit on my shelf for years waiting for the ever-so-rare rich adventurer to come along?

Will people craft those magic items useful to adventurers? Sure. There's always going to be people willing to service a niche market. There's just no reason to believe there will be any correlation between price and utility as perceived by adventurers versus utility perceived by the population at large.

Which is a long way of saying that I think basing price based on rarity is as logical and works as well as any other method we could come up with.

Is it worth deciding upon a "Standard Party" that we can use to calibrate the actual utility of an item?
Since the utility of an item is fundamentally based upon how useful it would be, and that is a factor of class and character capabilities. (Unique capabilities that a character doesn't have access to otherwise have high utility. Items that do something or only slightly improve something chat a character can already do have less utility. Items that a character can't or won't use due to proficiency, class restrictions, or build have low/no utility.)

Was there a wealth-by-level chart for 5e somewhere? The proportion of a character's total wealth they might be willing to spend would be an important factor for pricing items.

Oofta said:

So if I'm crafting magic items, should I craft that cold box that I know I can sell almost immediately or that +n blade of awesomeness that may sit on my shelf for years waiting for the ever-so-rare rich adventurer to come along?

Will people craft those magic items useful to adventurers? Sure. There's always going to be people willing to service a niche market. There's just no reason to believe there will be any correlation between price and utility as perceived by adventurers versus utility perceived by the population at large.

Which is a long way of saying that I think basing price based on rarity is as logical and works as well as any other method we could come up with.

Click to expand...

I believe the intent behind this thread is to assume that adventurers are the only people in the setting who buy magic items.
Furthermore, that even the cost of enchanting an item is directly based upon how useful that item will be to adventurers. (To the point where applying the same enchantment to different weapons or armour may vary the cost of that enchantment by a factor of ten, or even a hundred or more.)

However, I'm not sure how specific we're being about what "adventurers" consist of. Are we assuming 'worst/most potentially OP case scenarios when deciding on prices?

First, what is a "plus thread"? It must be important since it was mentioned six times?

Second, the first few questions to answer are (1) how much treasure is expected to come into the party's hands as it levels? (2) what sort of curve is preferred for pricing? I submit that 3E quadratic curve sucks. 1E's more linear curve works more smoothly.

There are really a few values that can be attached to an item and they are independent of one another. Creation cost, scrap value, utility value, and artistic/notoriety value. One way to make item creation rare in the campaign is to make the creation cost higher than the utility value. Then suddenly, almost no one wants magic items made though they will happily purchase any that get offered for sale at sensible prices.

Utility value is somewhat subjective: how valuable is a +1 sword to a knight-errant compared to a man-at-arms? Some items utility values will be astronomical because the utility cannot be received any other way and the alternative is unthinkable. How much will a parent pay to heal the sick child? How much do they have and can borrow? Most items for the adventurer (or the household) have calculable utility values. Utility values for defences are likely going to be higher than utility values for offensive items because people rate "staying alive" higher than "being effective".

Nagol said:

First, what is a "plus thread"? It must be important since it was mentioned six times?

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It's a concept from some other message boards which the OP defined in teeny leetle letters; it asks us to keep-on-subject in terms of how to design it specifically, rather than backtracking to ask bigger-picture questions. In the OP's own words:

CapnZapp said:

...What that means exactly is of course up to the moderators to explain, but since there is no official mention of "plus threads" in the forum rules as far as I'm aware, let me try to explain my personal take: if all you want to say is "don't do it" or "I don't like it" or "top three reasons why you're wrong, Zapp" that's considered off-topic for this thread and will be reported accordingly. In short: If all you want to do is derail a positive constructive discussion on how to implement magic item pricing and creation, you're (hopefully) gonna get banned. Instead, I encourage you to start a thread of your own to discuss, I dunno, the evils of magic item shoppes or, say, how great rarity-based pricing is. Don't post it here, please!

Click to expand...

I think until we start getting into specifics there won't be enough meat here to really discuss in depth, but I guess we could start by throwing out guiding principles:

• Limited is cheaper than unlimited. That is, potions and scrolls need to be cheaper than permanent items, by a lot. Like, 3e-era 50x pricing differences.
• Specific is cheaper than general. This doesn't mean specific-to-who-can-use-it, though; it means specific in application. Restrictions like "wizard-only to attune" is maybe a 10% discount, because it's a freebie for whoever's crafting the item. Restrictions like "+1d6 damage vs spellcasters", on the other hand, are worth a heftier bonus when compared to a more generic "+1d6 damage" flat.
• Smaller numbers are cheaper than bigger numbers. You'd be surprised (various flying items in 5e...). Effects that are intended for out of combat healing should not trade off particularly well vs effects intended for in-combat healing; we can safely assume the party will use items as they're meant to be used, and so again, that's a very modest price differential most of the time.
• Unlocking new capabilities needs to be expensive. It's a little hard to put a price on, say, invisibility vs flight vs waterbreathing vs spiderclimb vs teleportation. But at a minimum, you're freeing up a spell slot of a certain level, and published adventures make assumptions about which sorts of characters can take which sorts of actions trivially. Flight is a part of that.

I look forward to seeing where this goes.

Was there confirmation on the assumption that pricing reflects only value to adventurers?

Crates that hover, horseshoes that prevent leg injury, and the aforementioned cold box would be infinitely more valuable and present in the world than a (relatively) garbage item like a flame tongue sword or magic staff would be.

That does raise the possibility that the value would then go up, since low demand means they become super rare, but then how easy is it to find one for sale?

Alternately if we just care about players/adventurers, you can just base it on spell level required for the effect, outside of a few weird wondrous items (looking at you Apparatus) most things just simulate a spell with an extended/permanent duration.