Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Well played!
He wiped you with that one. You stink.
Well played!
Please don't perpetuate the lie that Xanathar supports real magic item pricing or suggest I can use it. It's still all rarity based, which is no substitute for utility.Whether it's good or bad is entirely opinion based. For you and I it's bad, and for [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] it's good. He has rules in Xanthar's for buying magic items now, and if he doesn't like that brand of strawberry ice cream, he has the ingredients for the strawberry ice cream he wants, so he can make his own.
I KNOW you know what I am talking about, so just to show the absurd and insulting nature of this argument:Rarity has always existed. In every edition. Starting from 1e there have never been as many Rods of Lordly Might as there have been +1 swords in any game I've seen or heard of.
Now you're clutching at straws. I won't deign this with a reply.And it's their game. Literally the entire thing is made up by them, so the whole game is "grabbed out of their ass." Why do you have trouble with this part of it and not hit points or armor class?
O'REALLYThere can't be a base price and have a system that works.
You're still not getting it? Now you're even arguing in favor of my argument!It's a rarer tool than +1 swords, and not as rare as +3 swords. The harder it is to make something, the fewer of them there will be. They didn't grab rarity "out of their ass." They grabbed it out of common sense.
Look, [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION], I get what you are looking for, but, frankly, it's just not feasible in the 5e ruleset. It really isn't.
3e and 4e both took their mechanics from how earlier editions of the game were being played. If you played AD&D, you were absolutely dripping in magic items. Either from playing AD&D modules, or using the random treasure charts, AD&D presumed a huge number of magic items in the group. They might not have been powerful items, but, you did have a bunch of them. I mean, all you have to do is look at the 1e paladin who was limited to only ten magic items. 4 weapons, a suit of armor, a shield and 4 more magic items. That was the hard limit for paladins. Yikes! That's about what you'd expect on a 10th or 12th level 3e character in a very high magic campaign.
So, 3e and 4e welded the magic items into the character building rules. You were presumed to use magic items to build your character. The problem is, players being the pragmatists that they were, spent their cash on the Big 6 items and 99.9% of the rest of the magic items in the DMG and other books may well have not existed. It led to cookie cutter characters where, if you listed a character's class and level, you could guess, with a pretty decent degree of accuracy, exactly what items that character had.
5e doesn't do that though. There is zero presumption that your characters will get any magic items. Magic items, like they were in 1e, are a bonus, not simply part of the math. Because they aren't part of the math, you can't then bolt a mathematical system of magic items onto the base system and expect it to work. It won't. It can't.
So, yeah, I know what you want. What you really, really want. But, it's just not feasible under this ruleset. It won't work.
I mean, heck, my current Dragon Heist group of 5 PC's is now 4th level and still has yet to see any magic item more powerful than a scroll of Darkvision. By the end of the module, I don't think they will get a single magic weapon, as far as I remember anyway. OTOH, the module does build in TONS of down time. You can let years pass in the module and it's fine.
Some modules are on tight time lines, but, not all of them.
Re fixing 5e magic item prices, I think the key is to return to the 4e model of x5 per Tier, not x10 per Tier. I am going with base price per permanent item of
Common 200gp
Uncommon 1000gp
Rare 5000gp
Very Rare 25000gp
Legendary 125000gp
With commissioned items x2 and 1 use consumables 1/4 not 1/2.
A few DMG items are mis-tiered but this is overall working well for me. Eg commission a +3 shield from friendly Archmage it is 50.000gp.
One good thing about the Tier system, it is easy to set Tier based on function, eg "all flight items are Rare/Very Rare". That is how 4e did it, "all Flight items are Paragon" "All Planar travel/Teleport items are Epic" - and unlike 4e the 5e GM can easily adjust to fit campaign. So eg flight can be Rare in my Golarion game but Very Rare in my Thule game.