Jack Simth
First Post
Optimizers do avoid overlapping abilities. Part of optimization is where you start. The person starting the game by building a 10th level character? He's not going to need to play a race with Darkvision if he's planning on picking up this item. The person starting the game with a 1st level character might, true. But then, he might also just shrug at the first three or four levels of inconvenience, borrow a Darkvision spell off the Wizard until he can get the item, or arrange things so that the light source isn't where he is (Dancing Lights is a cantrip, and is nearly perfect to UMD off a scroll for this purpose; likewise, a rock with Light on it can be tossed into the middle of the room; a Darkness spell can be placed on a movable object, is blocked by a covering that blocks light, and... provides Shadowy Illumination (enough to Hide!) inside it's radius... and the shadowy illumination so provided ignores most sources of Darkvision and Low-Light vision). You don't have to have darkvision as a low-level sneak. You just need to get a little creative on how to work around not having it.
Or it might not be the rogue that wants it - a Cleric with the Trickery domain gets Hide as a class skill (as does the Ranger, Monk, Bard, and a couple other classes). Scouting dungeons with no inherent light sources is not the only use for stealth, and lots of dungeon and dungeon-like areas you'll want to scout will have their own light sources for the convenience of their inhabitants.
You're targetting an extremely small number of character concepts with this argument, not considering someone who is trying to make effective use for it. You appear to be primarily targeting people who don't optimize - which, as WotC and the 3.5 Wizard and Cleric classes have shown, is a fairly bad idea in terms of game balance (the Core Wizard matches up well against a Core Fighter, provided the Wizard exclusively uses direct-damage evocations as his method of incapacitating opponents; the Core Cleric is reasonably balanced with a Core Fighter provided the Cleric plays as a heal-bot, and ignores all those nifty buff, debuff, combat control, and save-or-lose spells available to the Cleric; either requires the Fighter has a modicum of skill with his character build).
Of course nobody would cry if you removed it. Direct damage isn't really the most effective method of getting rid of things, and so defense against direct damage isn't generally particularly worthwhile. But it's still there, so when I'm checking the value of the item, I include it in the listing of costs.
And you completely ignore that the Ring of Evasion, also a class ability, is 25k... and Evasion is easier to get than Hide in Plain Sight (ignoring the Ring, it's 2 class level, rather than the minimum of 8 for a non-item Hide in Plain Sight), and the limitless-use version of the collar grants Hide in Plain Sight for less than the cost of a Ring of Evasion.Ok, if you were trying to prove a point that you should NEVER use the table to figure out item value, well done. I get it.
The first step on the "estimating magic item gold-piece values" in the DMG is "compare to existing items" - and Hide in Plain Sight is more likely to make a lot of campaigns almost trivial than is evasion (especially when it comes packaged with bonuses to both Hide and Move Silently, and doesn't interfere with simple methods of getting more bonuses to Hide and Move Silently).
Deset Gled started off by comparing Hide in Plain Sight to Invisibility (and with a build to make use of Hide in Plain Sight, it's nearly as good in many ways, and better in many; See Invisibility and True Sight don't help against actual use of the Hide skill, for instance). His (?) is a reasonable approach, at least to start.
... and Wings of Flying went from 5,500 gp to 54,000 gp. Costs "Standard" items (Armor +'s, weapon +'s, wand costs, scroll costs, and so on) didn't change (which have some of the larger impact on a character's equipment and wealth). Some things even went down in price - the Immovable Rod, for instance, dropped from 7,500 to 5,000.
I don't think it's fair to assume that the 3.0 -> 3.5 price changes were overractions. Nor do I think it's fair to go by the Magic Item Compendium's judgements on costs considering that Core material gets more playtesting.
So we both agree, at a minimum, that the item is underpriced, it's more a question of what magnitude. Eh, good enough.
Funny how when playing with a "stronger characters" variant, something becomes less bad - you'd almost think that means that the original something was stronger than it should have been to begin with....
