Amulet of negative energy protection--help me price this!

[Pielorinho]

As part of our treasure in last night's session, we found a couple of really nice emeralds. Coupled with my druid's item creation feats and the fact that we got heavily dinged by negative energy during the session, I was thinking it'd be kinda cool to make amulets that could protect, to some degree, against negative energy.

My first attempt at pricing this for my 15th-level character, however, was dismaying: at 5x9x2000x2 (fifth-level druid spell times ninth level times continuous spell times minute/level duration), it'd be 180,000 gp for the item. Uh, no thanks!

Fortunately, I'd originally been thinking of something simpler: my original conception was an amulet that would protect you from nine level-drains before burning out entirely.

How should such an item be priced?

Daniel

 

[Infiniti2000]

Death ward 1/day is a +1 armor enhancement in Complete Divine/BoXD (forget which). Death ward is not cheap, especially for a druid. As a charged item, I'm not sure. I suppose SLxCLx50xUses would be a good place to start. Use the 1.5 modifier for the heck of it and you get SLxCLx75xUses, or 3375/use, or 30,375 total.

Any of this rambling help?

 

[Thanee]

I'd estimate that protecting from energy drain is about a 3rd level effect, that protects for minutes.

A continuous item is about equal to 50 charges, at least you need 50 times any costly components and such, so I would put continuous as 50 for calculations.

3x5x2,000x9x2/50 = 10,800 gp (or half as much, if you remove the x2 multiplier for the duration)

Bye
Thanee

 

[Infiniti2000]

Or, you could take the scarab of protection as a base.

 

[Pielorinho]

Infiniti, excellent! I KNEW there was some item with a similar effect, but I spent about fifteen minutes going through the magic items, and I couldn't remember what it was.

So, 38,000 would be a very high cap (since I'm not talking about SR 20). Thanee's calculation looks pretty good to me (since I'm not talking about protecting against negative energy attacks except for level drain). I might see if my DM will accept that.

Infiniti, in your first post, I'm not sure I follow your math.

Daniel

 

[Infiniti2000]

Spell Level = 5
Caster Level = 9
Per Use Charge = 50
Per Use Surchage = +50% due to being more useful and nonstandard slot/charged item than potion

5x9x(50x1.5)=3375

That's the absolutely maximum upper bound IMO. Since you don't care about everything that death ward can do, subtract some reasonable but sizeable portion. Say, 40%.

That gives us a value of 2025 per use, or 18,225 total. That deflects any ONE energy drain attack, no matter how many levels in that particular attack. For example, if you get hit by a vampire twice, once with a critical, then you still only use up 2 charges.

If you want it to be 1 energy drained level / charge, then it should be dropped, probably in half or so.

 

[Pielorinho]

Spell Level = 5
Caster Level = 9
Per Use Charge = 50
Per Use Surchage = +50% due to being more useful and nonstandard slot/charged item than potion

5x9x(50x1.5)=3375

That's the absolutely maximum upper bound IMO. Since you don't care about everything that death ward can do, subtract some reasonable but sizeable portion. Say, 40%.

That gives us a value of 2025 per use, or 18,225 total. That deflects any ONE energy drain attack, no matter how many levels in that particular attack. For example, if you get hit by a vampire twice, once with a critical, then you still only use up 2 charges.

If you want it to be 1 energy drained level / charge, then it should be dropped, probably in half or so.

Ah, that makes sense. I do wonder, thoug, whether the 40% drop is sufficient. Generally, when you face one energy-drain attack, you face several at once: the vampire attacks you multiple times, or there are multiple wraiths, or whatnot. A single "charge" of death ward protects from at least one encounter's worth of attacks, as it lasts for 9 minutes. This amulet would protect only from a single attack per charge.

Daniel

 

[Infiniti2000]

Ah, that makes sense. I do wonder, thoug, whether the 40% drop is sufficient. Generally, when you face one energy-drain attack, you face several at once: the vampire attacks you multiple times, or there are multiple wraiths, or whatnot. A single "charge" of death ward protects from at least one encounter's worth of attacks, as it lasts for 9 minutes. This amulet would protect only from a single attack per charge.

Perhaps, but practically speaking you will not use up all 9 charges in one encounter. In fact, I'd say you'd use up at most 1 or 2. Maybe 18K is too high, so I would consider rounding it down to 15,463.

Seriously, though, I think we're bringing it into the ballpark. At this point the price can be tweaked some more depending on the comfort level of the DM/players and the campaign. If this were my campaign, I'd be amenable to dropping it lower, probably to around 12K or so. The reason why is because I use the interpretation on restoration that it dispels all negative levels. That weakens energy drain with respect to the alternative, and thus makes items like this a little weaker. On the other hand, I don't use a lot of level-draining stuff (enervation is banned), so this item will last longer than in another possible campaign. That raises the price a little bit from just 10K.

I would then see what your (the player's) thoughts on that are and listen to counterarguments. Fwiw, my player's are far more worried about things like harm and so have invested in not one but two wands of death ward (CL 7 of course, the first wand was taken from one of the PC's dead bodies--my wife's druid as a matter of fact after she was targeted by a rod-quickened greater dispel magic + DC 29 destruction).

 

[moritheil]

Ah, that makes sense. I do wonder, thoug, whether the 40% drop is sufficient. Generally, when you face one energy-drain attack, you face several at once: the vampire attacks you multiple times, or there are multiple wraiths, or whatnot. A single "charge" of death ward protects from at least one encounter's worth of attacks, as it lasts for 9 minutes. This amulet would protect only from a single attack per charge.

Daniel

My answer to that would be to allow it to activate automatically - with the first negative energy attack, the charge is expended and now death ward is up at the caster level. Come to think of it, that is how one of the death ward armors works.

It's interesting that people seem to think that protecting from level drain is only 60% of the utility of death ward - personally, I'd be inclined to peg it at closer to 90%, as negative levels are by far the most dangerous, most debilitating, and most common problem one can have with negative energy (assuming your DM doesn't repeatedly build liches or corpsecrafters.)

 

[Infiniti2000]

It's interesting that people seem to think that protecting from level drain is only 60% of the utility of death ward - personally, I'd be inclined to peg it at closer to 90%, as negative levels are by far the most dangerous, most debilitating, and most common problem one can have with negative energy (assuming your DM doesn't repeatedly build liches or corpsecrafters.)

We're not talking about level drain. We're talking about negative levels. Actual level drain will be extraordinarily rare.

A negative level has relatively little impact compared to the loss of 150 hit points. Then again, a critical hit from a vampire has a much higher impact than a mere 1 negative level.

Also, there are more negative energy effects than just inflict wounds/harm and energy drain attacks. As one example, waves of exhaustion.