Zinovia
Explorer
Point the first:
I'm not happy with the item creation ritual as presented in the PH. It seems too easy to just throw some money into generic ritual materials and make whatever the heck you have money (and levels) for. I realize it says you can enchant a normal item, and not just create something out of thin air. The quality or cost of the normal item is not specified however.
Picking up a rusty broadsword and enchanting it to +1 isn't going to get you anything good though. Maybe it will be enchanted until such time as it falls to pieces. Maybe the ritual won't work at all. My inclination is to have the same kind of "masterwork item" pre-requisites that we had in 3.5. You can only enchant masterwork items. So if you want to make a magic staff, you can't lop a branch off the nearest ash tree and enchant it.
It's true there aren't rules for masterwork items per se, but that's something I can add pretty easily. My question is whether it's reasonable to have even more rare and expensive materials as part of the components cost. Gathering strange items like dragon hide, basilisk claws, or rare leaves from the elven forest has always been classic adventuring fodder. I realize this is drastically going to limit the frequency of item creation, but it's not something I want them doing casually in the first place.
Point the second:
Resizing magic armor - is one use of the ritual enough to change armor from one size category to any other? The book seems to imply that it is. That raises some economic questions about taking small armor of rare materials, enlarging it, and then smelting it down for the metal value. Like most economics in D&D, it's pretty silly, and I guess I can just turn a blind eye to that. I still am tempted to require a component cost for resizing armor, despite the book saying otherwise. Even making Tenser's floating disk costs you 10g in materials, and resizing a suit of armor seems a lot trickier than that.
Point the third:
So if you can use the ritual to drastically resize magic armor, can it be used to reshape a magic weapon? Is there some game-breaking reason to disallow that usage? I would restrict it to weapons in the same weapon group (light blades, heavy blades, mace, axe, etc.). So if that were possible, you could turn the magic longsword you found into a magic scimitar for your 2-blade ranger. Is the game trying to balance around comparative rarity of unusual weapons? Traditionally that's been the drawback to selecting a weird weapon to specialize in - you just aren't likely to find as many magic ones in the course of adventuring. On a casual look, I'm tempted to allow the changes to specific type, while not allowing group changes. Will that unbalance the game by making rare weapons too common?
I'm not happy with the item creation ritual as presented in the PH. It seems too easy to just throw some money into generic ritual materials and make whatever the heck you have money (and levels) for. I realize it says you can enchant a normal item, and not just create something out of thin air. The quality or cost of the normal item is not specified however.
Picking up a rusty broadsword and enchanting it to +1 isn't going to get you anything good though. Maybe it will be enchanted until such time as it falls to pieces. Maybe the ritual won't work at all. My inclination is to have the same kind of "masterwork item" pre-requisites that we had in 3.5. You can only enchant masterwork items. So if you want to make a magic staff, you can't lop a branch off the nearest ash tree and enchant it.
It's true there aren't rules for masterwork items per se, but that's something I can add pretty easily. My question is whether it's reasonable to have even more rare and expensive materials as part of the components cost. Gathering strange items like dragon hide, basilisk claws, or rare leaves from the elven forest has always been classic adventuring fodder. I realize this is drastically going to limit the frequency of item creation, but it's not something I want them doing casually in the first place.
Point the second:
Resizing magic armor - is one use of the ritual enough to change armor from one size category to any other? The book seems to imply that it is. That raises some economic questions about taking small armor of rare materials, enlarging it, and then smelting it down for the metal value. Like most economics in D&D, it's pretty silly, and I guess I can just turn a blind eye to that. I still am tempted to require a component cost for resizing armor, despite the book saying otherwise. Even making Tenser's floating disk costs you 10g in materials, and resizing a suit of armor seems a lot trickier than that.
Point the third:
So if you can use the ritual to drastically resize magic armor, can it be used to reshape a magic weapon? Is there some game-breaking reason to disallow that usage? I would restrict it to weapons in the same weapon group (light blades, heavy blades, mace, axe, etc.). So if that were possible, you could turn the magic longsword you found into a magic scimitar for your 2-blade ranger. Is the game trying to balance around comparative rarity of unusual weapons? Traditionally that's been the drawback to selecting a weird weapon to specialize in - you just aren't likely to find as many magic ones in the course of adventuring. On a casual look, I'm tempted to allow the changes to specific type, while not allowing group changes. Will that unbalance the game by making rare weapons too common?
