How much time do your players spend making magic?

[cvrinn]

In our present campaign a couple of the players would love to do some item creation, but the DM has killed that idea from the outset. He decided that he wanted a low magic Greyhawk campaign and made all item creation feats cost 1/5 the base price in XP instead of 1/25. None of us have wanted to blow so much XP for items. He might as well have just banned the feats to begin with.

In our other campaigns, some scrolls and small magic items have been made, but usually we are not given the time to create them. Those of us who like playing casters would love to be given the extra time, however.

 

[MerakSpielman]

They spent some time making items IMC, but to be honest all they really did was leave the NPC party cleric behind for a week (making scrolls and potions) while they went and cleared out a dungeon.

 

[painandgreed]

Depends on the game and the interests of the players. These days things get to a point and then we drop to administrative time where characters just say " I spend two weeks doing...". Some people's characters just sit around or do some minor role playing with NPCs but this time rarely even takes an entire game.

In one 1E campaing I had with a large party of elves who were all multiclassed "Magic User/Something", there was incredible amounts of time spent researching spells and such. They learned spells, researched spells and made magic items using house rules. Years of game time would go by doing this for them to venture out and try out all their new spells on some mission or another. Their queen sent them on the GDQ series and gave them two years to start. I thought I was just being quaint and elven-like in giving them that long but they actually spent two years getting ready and develping spells and stuff so that guards had to escort their characters outside the gates of the city so they'd take that first step. They went off and got through the G series and the first two D modules till they found the mind-flayer city I stuck in another vault on the map. Their money was good and the mind-flayers were willing to train so they sat there researching more spells and stuff for another two years of game time before they set out on D3. Once in the Vault of the Drow they spent a few weeks invloved in feuding drow families, fighting assassins and a second meeting with the lich from D2 who wanted his treasure back before going on to the Q module. Once finsihed there they went back to the city and once again spent years of game time researching spells. Overall they spent about 80% of game time researching new spells of their own design and making magic items and possibly a quarter of real time. We all enjoyed it and I had at least one player tell me it was his favorite campaign of all time.