Bracers

[Ragmon]

I think the 1.5 is multiplied against the cost of the second item, not the sum of costs for both items?

"If the item is one that occupies a specific place on a character’s body the cost of adding any additional ability to that item increases by 50%. For example, if a character adds the power to confer invisibility to her ring of protection +2, the cost of adding this ability is the same as for creating a ring of invisibility multiplied by 1.5."

So to which cost do you add the +50%? The lower cost or higher cost?

 

[the Jester]

So to which cost do you add the +50%? The lower cost or higher cost?

I would always go with the higher cost item.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I think the 1.5 is multiplied against the cost of the second item, not the sum of costs for both items?

"If the item is one that occupies a specific place on a character’s body the cost of adding any additional ability to that item increases by 50%. For example, if a character adds the power to confer invisibility to her ring of protection +2, the cost of adding this ability is the same as for creating a ring of invisibility multiplied by 1.5."

If you have bracers of armour +3 (9,000gp) and add bracers of murder (8,000gp) to that it would cost 21,000gp ((9,000 + (8,000 x 1.5)). If you start with bracers of murder and add bracers of armor then the cost is 21,500 (8,000 + (9,000 x 1.5)). Same combination of stuff resulting in same item but potentially two different prices? That's either a badly written rule or there's more to it than that.

 

[emanresu]

either way those are some great bracers for a 10th Beguiler/rogue!

as a side note/question: Am I the only one who thinks charging exp pts to make items is really stupid. OH I could understand it costing a temp CON pt, to represent the cost of breathing magical life into a item. The charge of experience points is really not thought out well, IMO.

If a 5th level "magic item maker" were to settle down, open a business of "magical items 4sale", get married, have a few offspring, all in a quiet flower garden of a town...If he does nothing else but brew his potions, make his items, he would be negative experience points and out of business, divorced and homeless. That is, unless this item maker was in secret, a ninja, he wouldn't be gaining experience points sitting in a laboratory making potions, hed be loosing them. Well he may gain some exp pts but the exp pt cost of every item he makes would create a negative sum, overshadowing what little he gained. This once famous item maker will find himself all the way back to 1st level, having lost all the feats he had gained at higher level.

is it just me? or am I a dummy and missing something

eman

 

[rgard]

If you have bracers of armour +3 (9,000gp) and add bracers of murder (8,000gp) to that it would cost 21,000gp ((9,000 + (8,000 x 1.5)). If you start with bracers of murder and add bracers of armor then the cost is 21,500 (8,000 + (9,000 x 1.5)). Same combination of stuff resulting in same item but potentially two different prices? That's either a badly written rule or there's more to it than that.

I wondered the same thing. I'd go with the 1.5 multiplied by the cost of the item being added. The SRD quote was for adding a different magic something/property to an already existing magical item.

 

[rgard]

either way those are some great bracers for a 10th Beguiler/rogue!

as a side note/question: Am I the only one who thinks charging exp pts to make items is really stupid. OH I could understand it costing a temp CON pt, to represent the cost of breathing magical life into a item. The charge of experience points is really not thought out well, IMO.

If a 5th level "magic item maker" were to settle down, open a business of "magical items 4sale", get married, have a few offspring, all in a quiet flower garden of a town...If he does nothing else but brew his potions, make his items, he would be negative experience points and out of business, divorced and homeless. That is, unless this item maker was in secret, a ninja, he wouldn't be gaining experience points sitting in a laboratory making potions, hed be loosing them. Well he may gain some exp pts but the exp pt cost of every item he makes would create a negative sum, overshadowing what little he gained. This once famous item maker will find himself all the way back to 1st level, having lost all the feats he had gained at higher level.

is it just me? or am I a dummy and missing something

eman

I think "negative experience points and out of business, divorced and homeless" is the intended deterrent to somebody sitting safely at home getting rich making magic items.

 

[sheadunne]

So to which cost do you add the +50%? The lower cost or higher cost?

This was answered in my earlier post. It is the lower cost item as quoted from the Magic Item Compendium.

 

[delericho]

as a side note/question: Am I the only one who thinks charging exp pts to make items is really stupid. OH I could understand it costing a temp CON pt, to represent the cost of breathing magical life into a item. The charge of experience points is really not thought out well, IMO.

That's a very common complaint. Indeed, so common is it that both D&D 4e and Pathfinder dropped that concept. Personally, I wasn't too bothered by it... up until the point where I wanted to drop XP entirely and instead have the PCs level every 3 sessions.

If a 5th level "magic item maker" were to settle down, open a business of "magical items 4sale", get married, have a few offspring, all in a quiet flower garden of a town...If he does nothing else but brew his potions, make his items, he would be negative experience points...

You're not allowed to spend XP to craft items (or cast spells) that would put you below the minimum XP required for your level. So that "magic item maker" would need to find some way to gain XP or his career would be very short-lived.

Frankly, though, that's a feature, not a bug.

 

[KerlanRayne]

If you use MIC rules it may cost 17,000 gp total. There is a rule in there, though it may be an optional rule, that standard stat boosters and armor boosters are not subject to the increased cost.

 

[Celebrim]

That's a very common complaint. Indeed, so common is it that both D&D 4e and Pathfinder dropped that concept. Personally, I wasn't too bothered by it... up until the point where I wanted to drop XP entirely and instead have the PCs level every 3 sessions.

I thought it was an amazingly insightful innovation.

In 1e and 2e, there systems hesitated to ever let players gain access to permanent magical abilities whether as spells or magic items. Any spell or item which had a duration which never expired threatened to become a force multiplier. As a result, in practice the creation of enduring magic was almost entirely the province of NPCs, who - on the basis of the unique magical effects that abounded in Gygaxian D&D - could do just about anything. PC's by contrast paid enormous costs for even the most simple magical creations.

The XP trade for permanent effects provided a natural limitation on how many permanent effects you could make while still providing theoretical complete access to anything that the player could imagine.

Frankly, if I was going to drop either the gold cost or the XP cost, I'd drop the cost in gold. I think it's a mistake to tie assumptions of wealth too heavily to level. It essentially is dictating the style and content of the game being run too heavily. But XP in some form is theoretically universal (unless you house rule it away, in which case, deal with your own consequences) and available XP is inherently tied to level without in any fashion dictating the content of play (because XP exists mainly in the metagame, unlike gold which exists entirely in play).

If you want to reduce the burden of XP costs, I think that the best methodology is figure out what you are willing to substitute for XP to reduce or eliminate direct payment - ritual sacrifices of specific magical beings, rare components, rare days of power, exotic locations of power, etc. This moves you back in the direction of 1e, where control of access amounts to DM story control, but at least doesn't force you to run an in game commodity (gold) as a metagame construct.