"Awesome" level bonuses and Magic Item economy

[vic20]

I'm running a couple of 4E campaigns right now, both using an "Awesome Bonus" variant. At each level a +1 bonus is given to one of five categories (damage, to hit, AC, other defenses, d6 on crit). This group is cycled six times, and at level 30, characters will have +6 in each.

With these elements baked into the very limbs of the heroes, they are removed from a magic item's stat block, and items are defined by their remaining properties. When items don't have scalar properties (only increasing enhancement and bonus d6 on crits) the higher level versions simply don't exist.

I'm thinking with the weapons being strictly defined by these extra properties, I should be adjusting the "cost" of these items. Any thoughts on how much would be appropriate?

Thanks.

 

[Ltheb Silverfrond]

Well, I sort of do this in my campaine (I just allow the bonuses on the item to 'scale' with the character's level) and, honestly, you don't really need to adjust the prices at all. (That seems like a lot of effort for little gain anyway)

Reasoning:
Look at the cost and level of a vanilla +1 sword. Now look at a +1 Frost Sword. Notice the frost sword advances in power a little slower? That's because if they had the same advancement, who wouldn't pick the frost weapon? Since you are giving that free +1 worth of bonuses to the PCs without cost, they are essentially 'buying' new at-will/encounter/daily powers.
Since the more powerful item abilities advance slower and cost more for the same "plus", the price need not be changed at all. (If anything, it should go up, since some items will become more powerful by offering both a better to hit or AC bonus along with their standard array of neat powers)

In short: Its probably not worth the time to re-analyze the costs of every item out there, or to even worry about it 'on the fly'. Keeping the costs the same still makes the more powerful items cost more.

 

[keterys]

I'm actually guessing you could increase the level of a lot of items - since they'd be a lot more special if they could autoscale.

 

[EldritchFire]

I'm actually guessing you could increase the level of a lot of items - since they'd be a lot more special if they could autoscale.

But since all items are balanced with eachother (I don't want to get into a debate on if they are or not), there is no need to adjust the level.

If all weapons "auto-scale," they are still balanced with each other. If some auto-scaled, and some didn't, then we'd have to reevaluate item level.

We don't need to put more work into fixing what's not broken.

-EF

 

[keterys]

Well, not exactly. You might want to because otherwise you're losing most of the spots on your chart for giving out items.

You also might want to because a Flaming weapon is 5th and a Vicious Weapon is 2nd... and at +2 they're still 3 levels apart, but if they both turn into +2 at 6th, then the disparity is removed. This is especially true at later levels. This drastically encourages the higher end weapons over the lower (assuming they're correctly placed initially... there are exceptions)