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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 3830966" data-attributes="member: 3586">From his gleemax blog:<a href="http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/BlogPost.aspx?blogpostid=2032&pagemode=2&blogid=2076" target="_blank">http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/BlogPost.aspx?blogpostid=2032&pagemode=2&blogid=2076</a>Here’s a question that a fan recently raised to me.Q. Why does it cost XP to create magic items in D&D 3.X?A. The XP-cost rule is one of the most successful bad rules in 3.X. It’s bad enough that a good house rule is often better. I used a house rule in my 3.X campaign. Spellcasters got “build points” they could use to create items, sort of like an artificer’s craft reserve in Eberron. The XP-cost rule was successful because its two main purposes. First, it explained how magic items are made. Second, it kept magic item creation to a minimum.One goal of 3.0 was to describe an internally consistent world, with minimal explicit differences between PCs and NPCs. If NPCs could make magic items, we had to describe, at least in theory, how a PC could do so. And our policy was not to wave our hands and say that it’s up to the DM, so we had to spell it out.For magic items, I wanted to err on the side of a system that would make it too rare for PCs to make magic items instead of too common. Even if PCs never made any magic items, the game would still work. But if we’d accidentally made it too easy to make magic items, that could have really hurt campaigns.For the sake of the world’s believability, we needed a way for PCs to make magic items. For the sake of campaign economy, we needed a system that would keep PC-made items rare. The XP-cost system did both.XP seemed like the right cost because it’s permanent and personal. Using time as a limiting factor is a problem because “off stage” time is arbitrary. Other RPGs had permanent costs for magic item creation. RuneQuest had a character sacrifice points from their “spirit” attribute, called Power. Adventures in Fantasy, a quirky, colorful RPG by Dave Arneson, had a magic item cost points measured against a wizard’s lifetime limit. In D&D, XP is permanent but replaceable, so I picked it as the resource expended to make magic items.The main problem with magic item creation is the same problem with magic item buying: scrolls and potions are so useful that it makes sense to crowd your character sheet with lots of them, and they become a pain to track.Jon Tweet's Gleemax page: <a href="http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/DisplayProfile.aspx?blogid=2076&userid=10562" target="_blank">http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/DisplayProfile.aspx?blogid=2076&userid=10562</a></blockquote>

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