Cost of magic items you create (SOLVED!!)

[Ridley's Cohort]

Potentially, every single item you make can define the style of your character. Also, in my games, when you sell loot, you get half price, but when you sell items that you create, that's not loot, so you sell it at full price or at an adjusted price, but at least you gain a profit, unless the shop you try to sell it to already has 57 +1 longswords and that's what you're tyring to sell.

AHA!

There is a very important detail here. In my book a created item sells the same as loot, 50% of market price. So you usually cannot gain any money by creating items except those you sell to a few select friends, and that is a limited market.

I can see why wealth can potentially explode if item creation is not keep in control.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

When you take XP into account, a PC spellcaster is paying 70% of the cost. So he doesn't get twice the $, he gets 1.428571 times the value. Plus he spent a feat. (And wasted time making said item, while the rest of his party was gaining XP - note: varies by campaign.) And now he will be forever behind the rest of his party in terms of his level. That's a pretty hefty cost that cannot be directly be calculated in terms of money.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Ridley's Cohort, do you believe a chart or table should be used at all for a baseline of character wealth? Not to knock the offending PCs down or Monty Haul the poor players, but just as a guideline for DMs?

I think the guidelines are helpful in order to maintain the usefulness of the CR system. That is the main purpose of the chart.

The CR system works pretty well with standard wealth, 28 point buy, a mix of character classes in the party (including a wiz/sor and cleric), reasonable teamwork, and a variety in numbers and type of encounters on an adventuring day. That is what the game was playtested for.

Deviate from the wealth guidelines and there are predictable effects on the adventure.

PCs too poor? They won't have staying power against CRs at their level or above because their best magic will get drained quickly. PCs too rich? Beware of encounters that can easily be defeated by magic, e.g. an entirely invisible flying party can play havoc with some types of encounters and adventures.

While the DM may choose to actively manage the wealth level of the PCs, it is by no means necessary to do so.

 

[Cougar]

Ok, that I do agree with. As I previously posted however, it is unfortuantely difficult to judge character wealth if you include currency (in whatever form) along with items.

I agree fully that a item creater has sacrificed a good deal to make his items, but in the spirit of the table one price is the best way to judge overall power by wealth (in this case items). The XP and level chart is already used to determine power of XP and levels. It is easy to see if a PC is below baseline with XP.

My contention, as it has been all along, is that to accurately gauge the power of the PCs items you must use the same price for all of them, whether found, purchased or made. If this is totally seperate from a currency table, then you are on the right track.

 

[Gaiden]

I fail to see how there is any debate on this issue. The table in the DMG is total character wealth. That wealth is assumed to have accumulated over that character's adventuring career.

If you would like to be perfectly fair about things you do two things. You determine how much of that wealth would be in actual gp's and how much in magical items. This can be done according to the table under awards where percentages are given for valualbes according to CR.

Then, the magical items would be determined at random and the gp, valuables could be used as the character most likely would have used them in his/her career. So if the character has item creation feats s/he can spend the requisite amount of gp and XP to have created an item.

The magical items determined at random can be bartered or sold depending on the world and DM. (One would also want to include costs for identifying these items taken from the total GP.) This additional money would be added to the original total and could be used as desired.

Thus items made cost what it costs to make them, and items bought cost what it costs to buy them.

Ruling that a an item that costs let's say 2000 gp as its market price 2000 gp when the character wants to make the item makes absolutely no sense. It simply penalizes the character who wants to make items to have proportionally less starting wealth than another character of similar level without that feat.

The cost to create the 2000 gp item is 1000 gps and the character would have therefore spent 1000 gps when creating it, not 2000. Why should the character with an item creation feat start off with less money than any other character? Again, simply makes no sense.

 

[kreynolds]

Well, Sean K. Reynolds just explained this to me quite nicely, and the first solid explanation of how this works I might add.

1) Items you create are half cost to your wealth, and you do in fact use Table 5-1 on page 145 of the DMG to establish baselines for character wealth. It's a rough guideline, but fairly accurate. Therefore, if you make the item, it counts against your wealth at half value.

2) If you make an item and give it to someone, it counts against the other person's wealth at full market value.

So, this finally makes sense to me. I didn't mean to seem so thick headed, but quite frankly, nobody here on this entire site has been able to give me a complete explanation. Everyone here seems to sort of know how these rules work, but not why. However, many people here are still way off on the purpose of the character wealth limits. Now that I understand how this works, I have one suggestion. Use that table.

The thing that finally cleared this up was that Sean gave a clear cut example of two different casters. The first cleric purchased all of his items, while the second cleric made a couple of potions for herself. He illustrated quite clearly that because she spent the XP for the items, her casting ability was more limited. The two clerics still balanced out in the end because the second cleric had more items (the potions). You can find that example in the first link.

Here are the two posts from Sean that cleared it up for me...
Thread 1
Thread 2

Thanks to everyone that participated.

P.S. The part that shocks me is that a couple of the rules gurus avoided this thread like the plague. Makes me wonder how few people actually know how and why these rules work the way they do.

 

[kreynolds]

Ok, that I do agree with. As I previously posted however, it is unfortuantely difficult to judge character wealth if you include currency (in whatever form) along with items.

I agree. Currency is by no means an effective defensive, nor an effective weapon against a Balor.

This is one of the reasons that I don't have a problem allowing my players to have close or equal to the maximum wealth allowed by Table 5-1, as it is easier to plan for encounters. Also, they tend to keep a little wealth in reserve for some spending cash, and if they ever get in a pinch, well, they can just sell an item or something.

I think low magic campaigns are a hassle since you have to go and muck with all the encounters to match them towards your really weak players. After all, if your players only have +1 weapons, they have no business taking on high CR monsters or high level encounters of any kind unless you first adjust them and bring said encounters down to the party's level.

 

[kreynolds]

By the way, I also understand now why the designers are so dead set against allowing an XP discount during item creation for all but the most extreme circumstances, such as being the Magister (MaoF).

By the same token though, shortening creation times a bit, via prestige classes, for example, isn't as big of a deal anymore. Cool.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

My contention, as it has been all along, is that to accurately gauge the power of the PCs items you must use the same price for all of them, whether found, purchased or made. If this is totally seperate from a currency table, then you are on the right track.

True. The actual market price of magical items a character has in hand is the best measure of the power a character gains from magic items.

My real point(s): There are expected deviations within the party from the chart. That spellcasters who create items, wizards in particular, will and should have greater nominal wealth than the chart lists. This is not a problem but a desirable and designed effect of item creation feats.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Thanks for the links, kreynolds.

It is like what I have been saying all along. Except more coherently written...

I think there may be a reason why WotC hired him and not me.