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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7188523" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, we will have to agree to disagree then.   That's "Mother May I", which is about the least accessible rules you can have.   We're talking about a set of rules that is deliberately obscure and outside the control of the player.   In order for rules to be accessible, the player has to understand what propositions lead to what results, have some rough idea of the difficulty of a proposition before it is made, and have confidence that they can succeed because the rules tell them that they can.   That's why 3e's magic item creation rules are accessible.  They are transparent.  They are clear.   And they involve resources that are fully in the control of the player.In the case of the one sample we are given, the process is not only opaque to the player, it has multiple levels of opacity, and multiple unknowable possibilities of failure.Moreover, your conversation is against the provided rules and guidelines. Page 116, DMG:  "A properly run campaign will be relatively stringent with respect to the number of available magic items, so your players will sooner or later express a desire to manufacture their own. Do not tell them how this is to be accomplished!" - emphasis originalYou conversation is not how it is supposed to happen.   The actual conversation would be something like this:Player: DM, what do I need to do to make a ring of spell turning.DM: You don't know.Player: Ok... err.. how do I find out?DM: You don't know. Player: Could I find someone that might know?DM: You could certainly try.Player: How would I go about doing that?DM: You don't know.Player: *thinking hard*  Well, there must be some university or center of learning somewhere.  Have I ever heard of such things before, and do I have some idea where one might be located?DM: Actually, yes...It's easy when you have clear familiarity with the contents of the DMG and experience in D&D to figure that you need to find a sage to answer a question, but that the expert hireling rules are also not accessible.  The process of finding the mechanism for creating a particular ring of spell storing could take more than a year of game time, even if you have some idea how to navigate the environment created by the rules.  Multiple sages might need to be hired to learn each of the exacting answers involving.   Finding such sages might take months of game time, and the research involved might take months more.  Once the recipes to each of the special inks, special quills, and to the final construction itself are known, months more might pass collecting the rare ingredients and finding the master artisans that can create the pieces of the commissioned work.   Then weeks more may pass attempting to scribe the scroll, which, if it is a five spell scroll for the most desirable sort of ring may require multiple attempts to create an a perfect and unblemished work.  The weeks more may pass crafting the final enchantment, which may fail utterly at the last moment, ruining the work, and even if it doesn't will leave the character drained for yet weeks more.  And none of this will be obvious to the player embarking on the project from the start, nor is it even obvious that the player has only a 5% chance of losing a point of constitution since this information itself is buried inaccessibly in the DMG rather than found in the PH.Certainly, but I'd been playing about 12 years before anyone ever reached a level of understanding of the system sufficient to be conscious that they were making that choice and be able to explain to themselves why they were doing it.  When I say that I was skipping the rules on training in order to facilitate a certain style of play, that's hindsight talking.  I could not have explained so clearly why I was doing it at the time, and probably would have appealed to some notion of 'realism' or some other sort of red herring, resulting in a lengthy argument with anyone that disagreed.   In 1983 or 1988, no one I had met would have suggested that you shouldn't play the way Gygax was suggesting was the right way to play, and if anyone quibbled with the rules, it wasn't over concepts like creating a different style of play.   It wasn't until the early 2000's, that I even fully understood Gygax's table and why some of his advice that had hitherto seemed to me to be a bit wrong or a bit overly harsh, was actually very functional for his assumptions about what being a DM was like, or that my version of D&D had to be different than his because it's fundamental assumptions were different.</blockquote>

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