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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3395163" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem with 'case by case' basis is that it is no more likely to solve the problem than any other thing.  Wands were priced cheaply by design to deal with the fact that otherwise low to midlevel spell casters would spend - as they often did in prior editions - a great many rounds doing nothing and watching the action from the back row.  If you make wands more expensive, what then?  Have you really solved the problem or just rearranged people’s priorities?  Are we to be eternally tweaking the price list so as to be continually shifting around what the most optimal selection of items is for a particular wealth level?  Because that's all you are going to do if you treat this as purely an economic problem.  So long as magic items are simple functional commodities and treated that way by design that is all they are going to be and all the price tweaking in the world won't deal with that.  Heward's Handy Haversack would be a sought after item at twice or three or five times its book price.  Changing the price would just change the priorities.So the real question becomes, what do you really want to do away with?  Tweaking the price of a wand of cure light wounds up won't change its utility or desirability.  If you tweak it to the point of inefficiency, or tweak something else's price down to the point it is a bargain, then people will just switch to some new bargain.  Is trading wands of cure light wounds for wands of cure moderate wounds really all that worth it?There are at least two good reasons for not wanting ad hoc prices. First, ad hoc prices pretty much break the crafting system.  If you take the crafting system back to fiat, in practice you might as well not have it.  The only way to retain the crafting system in a functional form is to list a crafting price for every spell ever created or introduced.  That's way more trouble than its worth barring a new edition, and its more trouble than I'd like to go to if there isn't going to be a new edition (which if the next one is as bad as 3.5 I'll largely ignore anyway).  I like players being able to make and design thier own tools.  I like it as both a DM and as a player, because I like PC's and NPC's on a level playing field, I like to as a player to use my creativity, and I like to see players use thier creativity.  It has good aesthetics.  A system is aesthetically pleasing.  Secondly, there is no reason to suppose that ad hoc prices are going to be any better than those produced by a system.  There will still be comparitive bargins.  There will still be things more efficient than other things, and the utility of and attractiveness boosts to attributes and to commonly used rolls will not go away.  Players will always want to rely more on things that are 'always effective' rather than things which are situational (and which a bad DM may metagame) regardless of price.  Balance is not going to be achieved.  It never has in any price list or point buy in the hobbies history, so why expect it now?  So we will ugly up the system for no good purpose.We are fighting a phantasm here.  It's a creation of the default setting, most people aren't really unhappy with it anyway, and the spectre has been raised pretty much solely for the purpose of selling books.I disbelieve.</blockquote>

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