DMs: How available do you make magic items? And what about the craft feats?

[Mark Chance]

Buying Magic Items?

It is possible subject to economic limits of the community as per the DMG. But, caveat emptor. My players go out of their way to establish friendly contacts with key NPCs, especially those affiliated with churches. It is always prudent to buy from someone you know and trust.

Also, supply of premade items is always limited, and PCs may have to order desired items. This could run into the main obstacles to making magic items (mentioned below).

So far, the buying of items has been largely limited to potions and scrolls. IIRC, the party bought a wand of cure light wounds as well.

Selling Magic Items?

Again, it is possible subject to economic limits of the community and existing demand. Also, again, caution is in order. It is cheaper to steal an item than buy it, and PCs who carelessly advertise they have item X for sale may become targets for thieves. So, IMC, the players prefer to deal with established NPC connections.

Making Magic Items?

No problems at all with this. I encourage it. So far, the PCs have limited themselves to a couple of rigorous bouts of Scribe Scroll. The main obstacles to making items in my game would be:

1. Limited access to raw materials depending on community size and location. IOW, good luck finding what you need to craft a +3 longsword while residing in a hamlet.

2. Time, especially at the current stage of the campaign, which has the PCs moving rapidly from key objective to key objective.

 

[Mark Chance]

Edited: Freaky double post.

 

[Petrosian]

Sort of but no. By saying at the start of a campaign that item creation feats are off limits for whatever reason I take away the need to upset the player who turns round and says that he wants to make a +3 Longsword (for example) when I say that "no, I don't want you to make that" and he says "Why"?

In my experience, the most useful tool, and the most often unavailed tool, is time. I see people mentioning the gold and XP cost a lot and rarely mentioning the time.

A +3 longsword for a 9th level character is 18 days to create. Thats 18 days doing nothing else of significance and hoping that for those three weeks the forces of evil take a vacation too.

Now, in a lot of the novels and stories i have read, 3 weeks of safe, unmolested time for our heroes is not something common, is not something routinely assured of.

If your game is a vibrant evolving world with a plot and a storyline that flows where the NPCs are doing things as well as the PCs, then the powerful items are not going to be a PC item creation issue.

IMG, once in a while the PCs get significant amounts of safe, reliable, time off and indeed in those times they often seek to enchant some more potent items. Those typically come after the resolution of a long serious stage of the campaign.

Most of the time, there simply is not time to devote more than a day or so at a sitting to "time off". During those periods, smaller items such as some low level wands or potions are made when possible.

I did play in a game once where after the last monster was slain in dungeon a then unlimited amouynts of time elapsed off line before we met monster 1 of dungeon b... and in those games the item feats were taken by everyone who could. In that game, without saying so, the Gm had removed the time requirement by making it unimportant. That shoved the value of those feats thru the roof.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I originally posted this over at the Rat Bastard DM Club boards, but I think it's pretty germaine to the this discussion, so I'll repost it here. This is basically how I'm handling magic item purchasing/making in my world, with some potential modifications still to be made.

I'm getting ready to start work on creating a new campaign world, using some of my current world as material. There are dozens of things that I would do differently in my world if I were to remake it, and now I'm going to.

The motto here is: The most important element of everything is whether it promotes adventure and gaming fun.

Along those lines, I've been wanting to do something to make item creation a little more "RP" related rather than just "buy it off the rack."

There are two things I've done/thought about doing:

Making it tougher to find a buyer for an item - I make a Gather Info check for the PC to locate a buyer for any given item, DC 10+1/1,000gp value. Each check represent 1d6-3 days worth of canvassing likely spots. The presumption is that that is in a big city. No matter what you roll, you'll never sell that Vorpal Blade in the 400 person village. I've considered also allowing a Knowledge: Arcana roll of the same DC to substitute, figuring that some buyers may be easier found through arcane contacts.

Specific expensive magic items are almost never found for sale. You may want to buy a Thundering Mace +2, but you may have to settle for the +1 flaming flail instead, if you MUST buy a magic weapon. Small stuff (1,000 gp or less) can be found from time to time.

Making it less than automatic to MAKE an item - I'm thinking of making Wizards research formulae for specific items. A Knowledge Arcana roll (DC 10+1/1,000gp value again) to figure out the formula for an item. Boots of Elvenkind? That's pretty easy. Vorpal Blade? That's a little tougher. Probably not going to find that at the local hedge mage's component shop.

One thing I'm considering implementing for my next campaign world (which I'm just beginning) is a series of Magical Academies that specialize in certain magical "themes" (not schools). For example, an Academy dedicated to travellers may specialize in making boots of speed. They'll treat that formula like a Guild Secret - and that will make it more difficult to figure out the formula for that item, as the Academy will protect those trade secrets.

In essence, I want to channel the item creation rules so that they open up avenues of roleplay and adventure rather than sit there on their own. It will help me keep consistent with how I adjudicate such things.

 

[Tidus4444]

The party will almost always get a magic item they want. I usually have an arcane guild somewhere in every city. They go there, and commision whatever item they may want. Of course, they may have to pay extra for a scroll that the wizard will copy into his spellbook, so he can craft the item. And the PCs will have to wait around while he crafts it.

 

[Ravellion]

Because I want to restrict item creation. Whats the point of me placing magical treasure in an adventure for the party to find if they can make their own? None. I may as well not bother and just let them decide what they should have. Thats unacceptable for several reasons, most importantly game balance.

Game setting? Sure. Game Balance? heck no.

I once tried, early in 3e, to have a low magic world. The only thing I changed was the availability of Magic items, and flavour stuff (people being scared of wizards, and there were fewer of them around, and less high magic flavour monsters: mostly humanoids instead). There were very few magic items, and I raised the costs of them all to 200% of their original value.

This made Wizards and Clerics incredibly powerful in comparison to Fighters and Rogues, while actually not reducing the flavour of the world much to low magic. In encounters magic was still very powerful, and easily attainable.

I couldn't really use strange monsters to keep my world's image, and I couldn't give my NPCs cloaks of resistance either, which made saves auto fail. It rose the ego of the Wizard's player through the roof, since he was one of the few wizards in the world. The only thing that would really challenge them would ahve been other magical foes - which would have gone directly against my statement of low magic world.

I eventually let the players destroy a magic surpressing artifact to restore the world to normal magic around level 9-10. Since then, i still sometimes long for the days of 2e Dragonlance (not the modules, but the settign with homebrewn adventures) where we had very little magic indeed. But I know that it will take bit more work* than just saying no to magic item creation.

So in any case, I don't accept your argument: the system is inherently balanced exactly to allow the players an occasional magic item to be crafted by themselves (though they shouldn't become factories), and keeping the system balanced without them having access to magic items (and to a lesser extent, item creation), is harder on the DM to do than it would be by simply granting them these things.

(edit to make sense)

(* Less wealth as well, for starters, and perhaps slower advancement for spellcasters)

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Than it's balanced poorly.

Also, while I commend you on your earlier effort, the fact that you overlooked a few extremely obvious facts (ex: that spellcasting characters become more powerful if all you do is restrict items) doesn't really show that the system can't be adjusted to handle low magic; It only shows that you failed to do so correctly.

 

[Ravellion]

Than it's balanced poorly.

Also, while I commend you on your earlier effort, the fact that you overlooked a few extremely obvious facts (ex: that spellcasting characters become more powerful if all you do is restrict items) doesn't really show that the system can't be adjusted to handle low magic; It only shows that you failed to do so correctly.

Do you often take someone else's idea and run away with it? Isn't that exactly what I said in the last paragraph? It can be done, but taking magic items away imbalances the system, so it takes a lot of work. Sure it can be done! But that just proves my point - removing item creation for balance issues, which you said was your argument, is a contradiction in terms. Doing it for flavour reasons I shall not disagree with.

I am curious to know what do you do to kerb casters then? XP penalties? Saving throw bonusses for the enemies which come out of the blue? Scrap half the spell list? Half of your levels in spell casting classes max? Save DC 5+INT+spell level? I am thinking about such a campaign again since I read Andy Collins' website.

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Do you often take someone else's idea and run away with it?

Only when it's worded in such a way as to make it sound like a futile cause, particularly when the reasons are based entirely on personal mistakes rather than short-sighted decisions by the designers in determining how to balance the game.

I am curious to know what do you do to kerb casters then? XP penalties? Saving throw bonusses for the enemies which come out of the blue? Scrap half the spell list? Half of your levels in spell casting classes max? Save DC 5+INT+spell level? I am thinking about such a campaign again since I read Andy Collins' website.

A spell point system that includes casting fatigue and cost dependant on casting level (i.e., a 1st Level Spell costs 1 Spell point, but casting it at 3rd Level costs more and causes a greater degree of Fatigue). The Fatigue scales to level, such that a Spell Caster is generally free to cast 3-4 Caster Levels below his actual level without much impairment.

And before you ask, the greater capacity for casting low level spells at mid- and high-level is countered by a greater degree of difficulty, time and expense for making magic items that would permit them to do the same thing.

Throw ontop an actual requirement for a library, a laboratory and research time, remove the silly two-free spells a level bit, rewrite sorcery to be similar to wizardry, only focused on genie-lore (ie, elementalism), but with the same requirements, a Mage Born feat required by anyone not starting as a Mage to become one later (to trim-down on those folks that multi-class into it for 1-3 levels), and things start to fall into place rather nicely.

And no, none of this was hard to do; The general outline was worked up over the course of a day (quite a bit lifted from the old Spells & Magic PO book), with the past two years of gaming used to flesh out the details (like library and laboratory expenses) and oil-up the squeaky parts. Has worked wonderfully and pretty much exactly as expected.

 

[Gothmog]

Originally posted by Ravellion:

I am curious to know what do you do to kerb casters then? XP penalties? Saving throw bonusses for the enemies which come out of the blue? Scrap half the spell list? Half of your levels in spell casting classes max? Save DC 5+INT+spell level? I am thinking about such a campaign again since I read Andy Collins' website.

I have been running the same low magic game since 2E and converted it to 3E. I did the following things to keep casters from being too powerful:

1) Spell DCs equal to 10 + spell level + 1/2 caster level. Magic is powerful, and the more powerful the caster, the harder it is to resist.

2) Spellcasters gain access to new levels of spells ever three levels instead of two. So, second level spells become available at 4th level, third level at 7th level, fourth level at 10th level, and fifth level spells at 13th level. Sixth level and above spells are possible, but take 10-100 times longer to cast, multiple casters, and require the permanent loss of ability scores.

3) Magic items cannot be bought at magic shops, and all item creation requires 2 rolls: a knowledge(arcana) roll to learn the proper components needed to make an item, and a craft roll to properly make the items. Also, the PC must know the spells in question to make the item.

4) To compensate for slow spell progression, spellcasters can cast more spells per day, and all casters can spontaneously cast spells, but have to make Spellcraft rolls at DC 10 + 2(spell level +1) for the spell to go off. Also, all characters in my low magic game gain a new feat every odd level to compensate for less magic items.

5) Get rid of spells like teleport, raise dead, resurrection, wind walk, and other "game breaking" spells. Basically, spell effects should be subtle. Those that are flashy (like fireball or magic missile) should have their spell level raised by 1.

Thats all I can think of right now. If anything else comes to mind, I'll post it as well.