Artificer's Handbook

[der_kluge]

Contact me, please.

I emailed you through ENWorld. If you don't get it, drop me a line at curtis.bennett@gmail.com.

 

[Staffan]

I have the pdf of AH. Maybe I could just release it myself.

I've heard lots of good stuff about AH. I'd love to see a PDF of it released (at a reasonable cost, say half that of the printed book).

How would AH work with Eberron's artificer class, which is rather strongly tied to the normal way of making items?

 

[Psion]

How would AH work with Eberron's artificer class, which is rather strongly tied to the normal way of making items?

Well, you can rework the costs and expand the repertoire by some of the expanded enchantment options.

I'm of the school that generic item creation feats are not needed, but you can ditch those fairly easily (I have other ways to deal with the "who the heck would craft rings when there are wondrous items" conundrum -- cost breaks.)

 

[der_kluge]

I've heard lots of good stuff about AH. I'd love to see a PDF of it released (at a reasonable cost, say half that of the printed book).

How would AH work with Eberron's artificer class, which is rather strongly tied to the normal way of making items?

I don't know much about Eberron's Artificer. The AH has its own Artificer PrC, but it's closely tied to the "spell slot item creation system" which is a new way of making magic items - a formula-based approach, as presented in the AH. That is really the core of the book, which provides a quantitative foundation to price pretty much any oddball magic item your pretty little head can conceive of. But there are numerous other chapters which can add value even if you don't use that system. Material components, instability concepts, topics on artifacts and cursed items, a random magic item history generator, a piece-meal armor system, and a bunch of other stuff.

 

[Anabstercorian]

To be honest... Well, der kluge, as long as you're here, I have to say that I was deeply disappointed with the book, if only because the wealth guidelines presented in the DMG become worthless when used with your formulas. When I don't know how much gold a character should have at any given level, there's no way to know how many magical items of power they should have, which means that, ultimately, I'm going to be eyeballing what magical items they get and produce, and eyeballing their cash income based on what magical items they'll be able to make with it, which basically means that the prices produced by your formula mean jack diddly to me. Thus, well, half the book is useless because it renders the whole standard of what a gold piece means useless. So... Bleah. :\

 

[Napftor]

Awesome Curtis, thanks a bunch!! I share your feelings about MEG. I'm still waiting on a promised book that was supposed to be released as a pdf nearly a year ago....

My advice: Keep waiting.

 

[Psion]

To be honest... Well, der kluge, as long as you're here, I have to say that I was deeply disappointed with the book, if only because the wealth guidelines presented in the DMG become worthless when used with your formulas. When I don't know how much gold a character should have at any given level, there's no way to know how many magical items of power they should have, which means that, ultimately, I'm going to be eyeballing what magical items they get and produce, and eyeballing their cash income based on what magical items they'll be able to make with it, which basically means that the prices produced by your formula mean jack diddly to me. Thus, well, half the book is useless because it renders the whole standard of what a gold piece means useless. So... Bleah. :\

You say that as if the values of magic items and wealth in the DMG weren't arbitrary to begin with. At least AH's values are more self-consistent.

 

[Campbell]

To be honest... Well, der kluge, as long as you're here, I have to say that I was deeply disappointed with the book, if only because the wealth guidelines presented in the DMG become worthless when used with your formulas. When I don't know how much gold a character should have at any given level, there's no way to know how many magical items of power they should have, which means that, ultimately, I'm going to be eyeballing what magical items they get and produce, and eyeballing their cash income based on what magical items they'll be able to make with it, which basically means that the prices produced by your formula mean jack diddly to me. Thus, well, half the book is useless because it renders the whole standard of what a gold piece means useless. So... Bleah. :\

I've used the standard wealth guidelines alongside the Artificer's Handbook, and I haven't encountered any issues. Of course, I've never used the DMG's treasure tables.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Nyarlathotep, glad you like it. Here is a link to the errata for the book. I handed it over to MEG a while back, but unfortunately they never did anything with it, so I went ahead and made it available myself, such as it is.

Finally got my reinstall done. Thanks for the link der_kludge!

 

[der_kluge]

To be honest... Well, der kluge, as long as you're here, I have to say that I was deeply disappointed with the book, if only because the wealth guidelines presented in the DMG become worthless when used with your formulas. When I don't know how much gold a character should have at any given level, there's no way to know how many magical items of power they should have, which means that, ultimately, I'm going to be eyeballing what magical items they get and produce, and eyeballing their cash income based on what magical items they'll be able to make with it, which basically means that the prices produced by your formula mean jack diddly to me. Thus, well, half the book is useless because it renders the whole standard of what a gold piece means useless. So... Bleah. :\

You know, I wrote 90% of this book, maybe even 95% of it, or at least rewrote it, and I could name lots of things that I think are wrong with it, but the monetary issues within the formulae would be the absolute last problem I see with it.

I mean, let's explore this. To understand this book, you have to understand some of the philosophy behind the book. Admittedly, if I were to do it over again, I would have expanded the "frank discussion" section at the beginning, but that aside, the book's subtle intent was to lower the overall price of magic items - to keep them from spiraling out of control. See the staff of power example in the first page.

And the DMG costs are specifically "guidelines". That's actually one of my big complaints about D&D in general - the magic item prices really kind of have to be followed fairly closely or else all the CRs become out of whack. I think there's even a discussion about it in the first few pages. That, if you don't give out as much treasure as you normally do, the CRs of monsters become totally unrealistic. A party against a 5/magic creature is nigh impossible to defeat if no one has a magic weapon, regardless of what the CR of the creature says. So, all that stuff has to be taken into consideration.

I guess what I'm saying is that while I understand your complaint, I find it to be rather weak, since the gold prices listed in the DMG are more or less arbitrary, and many of those items aren't based on any mathematical reasoning. For kicks, go through and compare magic item prices between the 3.0 DMG and 3.5 DMG and you'll see what I'm talking about. Admittedly, you'd want to simply scale back the "DMG guidelines" to be more in line with AH prices. We could have included a new gold piece by level guideline in the book, but the thought never occurred to me.

Thanks for your comments.