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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 7188214" data-attributes="member: 6778044">Yeah, magic item prices have always been a sore point for me. It's like the manufacture of guns is only known to a specific few, and that it takes days, weeks, months, or even years to make one, and might not work, and might hurt or kill you in the process, and requires rare ingredients that you have to go and acquire by adventuring, and oh, it always costs this to make that, and to buy/sell that.If there's anything that has no fixed price, it would be magic items, unless you're in a campaign like Eberron where they are made more frequently.In descriptions of shopping for magic items in the Realms, Ed says that most of the "magic items" for sales are things like love potions, simply household items, and occasionally something of more value, but buyer beware, because as often as not they don't do anything at all. On the other hand, you might find a rare magical helm in the corner of a shop that nobody knows is magical.So "sane" prices might be a reasonable starting point, but as an example, the "recipe" for making ink to scribe a scroll of protection from petrification is in the DMG (1e) and includes giant squid sepia, a basilisk eye, cockatrice feathers, venom from a medusa's snakes, powdered peridot, powdered topaz, holy water, and pumpkin seeds. This is the sort of complexity and difficulty I prefer for making magic items, and the acquisition (and preservation/preparation) of such items makes setting a "usual" price impossible. But the bigger factor in the "crafting" equation for me is always "why aren't they common" and there has to be real, in-world reasons why that is the case. Time and price is insufficient to explain in. In a world where there are powerful wizards and dictators that could simply send armies or slaves, and they would undoubtedly attempt to raise things like basilisks in captivity, scarcity of ingredients is also not enough. The secretive nature of wizards and the need for each crafter to develop their own personal approach, even with the help of others, has a bit of an impact, but ultimately I think there needs to be a risk involved as well. A risk of failure wastes time and money, and that's fine. But there's also the idea of laboratory explosions and such that I want to incorporate. And then figuring out why the Red Wizards of Thay can't just enslave enough wizards to generate an endless supply, which is why there needs to be a personal limitation, and the idea that the process temporarily, and sometimes permanently, weakens the crafter feels right to me.As always, my perspective is from the world-building side. I'm not trying to deliberately make it very difficult for an adventuring wizard (PC) to do, but that the process is time consuming, difficult, and risky for any wizard. So I'm not quite at the "only NPCs with years and years of free time" but it's more on that end of the spectrum. The key is to make sure that you work downtime into the campaign so the PC wizards can do that if they want to.</blockquote>

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