Jon Tweet - Magic Item Creation

[Geoff Watson]

IME the XP cost of item creation is unimportant. The amount of XP is small compared to the GP or time requirements, and you'll get it back after one encounter anyway.

If the crafters are making items at cost for the entire group (no gp profit to make up for the XP) then that could be problem; they'd be a level lower some of the time without anything to make up for it.

Geoff.

 

[Spatula]

Level 12 characters are hardly fragile snowflakes. I'm more concerned about level 2 and 3 characters.

How is a 2nd level item-crafter falling behind the party in levels? A 1st level scroll costs 1 xp to make.

 

[hong]

If you want characters not to create magic items all the time, then why not just... say it. "You can only create N items per level", or something like that. Saves an awful lot of beating about the bush.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I personally like the XP cost for item creation. I actually use it to explain why PCs can't just go into market and buy magic items in my game. There are few enough spellcasters to begin with, and they have to essentially give up some of their soul to imbue an item with magic. Why, then, would they mass produce items to sell to complete strangers?

Uh, why would they need to make more? If your history includes thousands of years of magic use by civilization, there should be enough of the more commonly needed sorts of items floating around that it's not too much of problem to find one of what you want for sale by someone.

In a city, of course.

Of course, your magic items are likely going to look like a mishmash of artistic and cultural styles, but since when have adventurers wanted to look "cool" rather than stay alive?

 

[Delta]

I don't understand why spending XP on magic item creation is a bad idea.

I was just going to say the same thing.

I guess maybe now it's because that's not how 4E does it?

 

[Delta]

It's a crappy system that works well only if 1) you don't actually use it or 2) you're not the poor sucker roped into taking Craft Wondrous Items for the party.

My group actually used it. I played a cleric with Craft Wondrous Item. I thought the XP costs were surprisingly cheap, and over time my cleric was the highest level PC in the party. No one at my table ever thought the XP cost was crappy.

 

[Brian Gibbons]

I don't understand why spending XP on magic item creation is a bad idea.

For a start, it shatters the idea that the amount of equipment you have should be dependent primarily on your level.

Take a party who has all reached 11th level (55k xp, 66k gp worth of equipment), except that one party member has been taking all of his treasure shares as gold and then crafting equipment on the side, so he actually only has 49,720 xp (about halfway between 10th and 11th level), but 132,000 gp worth of equipment (what a character midway between 13th and 14th level should have).

Is this a balance problem? Probably. Giving up half of a level to double your magic items seems problematic. It's even worse if you don't want to run a Magic Mart sort of campaign, so the other PCs are limited to what they manage to come across, whereas the crafter-PC gets to cherry-pick the exact items that fit his character.

Want to use a variant that other PCs can spend the xp if the item is being made for them? Great, that takes care of the issue of some PCs falling behind the others in level, but now everyone in the group effectively has more equipment than they should for their level.

It gets even worse in every-PC-for-himself type of situations, such as in RPGA campaigns. There, you have the 10th level crafter-PC (with 13th+ level worth of equipment) side-by-side with 10th level PCs with the expected level of equipment.

Can a GM stop this? Sure, easily. All you have to do is cut down on the down time, use a non-standard treasure distribution system, add special requirements to creation or otherwise generally admit that using the rules as written doesn't work.

The 3e magic item creation system was a step up from previous systems, but that says more about the previous systems than it does about 3e.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Of course for those folks that don't mind using third party products, you can always go with the Artificer's Handbook and simply skip the whole XP cost issue entirely. A review of it can be found here: http://www.enworld.org/reviews.php?do=review&reviewid=2010760

As for whether the XP cost is a good or bad idea... *shrug* as with everything, it's kinda personal choice I think. Tweet makes it pretty clear that their design was catering to the low magic crowd in terms of rules. Then again, I've never really been a fan of the whole "it's Rules As Written only!!!" crowd, and never had a problem with doing my own thing.

 

[Christian]

Huh? Lower level PCs get more XP? They way I play it, and the way it reads in the DMG, you calculate the total XP based upon average party level, then divide that number evenly among the party members.

The original 3rd Edition DMG? Yes, that's correct. It got changed in 3.5 ...

To determine the XP award for an encounter, follow these steps:
1. Determine each character's level.
2. For each monster defeated, determine that single monster's Challenge Rating.
3. Use Table 6-2: Experience Point Awards (Single Monster) to cross-reference one character's level with the Challenge Rating for each defeated monster to find the base XP award.
4. Divide the base XP award by the number of characters in the party ...
6. Repeat the process for each character ...

Example: ... The 3rd-level character earns 600 XP for each CR 2 monster and 900 XP for the CR 3 monster. That's 2,100 XP, and dividing by 5 (the number of characters in the party) yields an experience award of 420 XP. The 4th-level characters each earn 400 XP ... and the 5th-level character earns 350 XP ...

So a small lag in XP can eventually be overcome in 3.5.

 

[Brazeku]

Man, what if an entire party of clerics and wizards all make items, all lose experience, thus effectively reducing the CR that a DM can send against them, while at the same time increasing their overall character wealth to stupid levels? What if they keep doing it?

The key to controlling magic item creation is to control access to components, and to have a good DM-player relation, with reasonable expectations and an appropriate level of permissiveness.