Silly RAW Question: Spending XP now for XP-cost events in character's history?

[Mouseferatu]

It is ludicrous, to me, to "charge" a character for something that happened as part of the backstory if there's no mechanical advantage as compared to the other PCs.

And no, meeting prerequisites for prestige classes, when the specific prerequisites in question exist primarily for flavor, doesn't qualify, IMO.

If someone wants to begin a game with a better magic item than the other PCs, or with some other concrete advantage, sure, it's fair to charge them. But when someone wants to create a magic item that they no longer have, so they can get into a PrC? Honestly, I think charging them for creating that magic item is not only not appropriate, it's actually penalizing the character.

The rules of the game world are designed to simulate the reality of the campaign. Anything that happened before the campaign, ergo, does not need to be simulated by a strict application of the mechanics. Is it really an advantage (as compared to the other PCs) for her to start being able to take this PrC? I'd say no, not really, since they can take PrCs too. Therefore, it shouldn't cost her functional XP.

And again, let's remember that any expenditure she made has likely been more than equaled by the extra XP she'd have gotten for being behind her companions. Why is it fair to take the expenditure into account, but not the extra gains?

Honestly, and no offense intended to any of those here who disagree with me, I don't think I'd really want to play in a campaign with a DM who charged for this sort of thing. If there's no true mechanical advantage, there should be no mechanical payment.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I do things exactly as Hypersmurf does them, down to allowing an XP buffer" when I start players at higher than 1st level. (I typically allow 25-50 XP per level.)

I'm not sure why people think that requiring players to spend XP is unreasonable. If an item-crafting wizard, starting at 15th level, built a staff and paid half the GP base value, wouldn't you expect him to pay the XP cost out of his starting XP?

How is this different?

If the DM in question is being unreasonable, it's only in not permitting a reasonable XP buffer ... but one that applies to all the PCs, not just one. And those who wish to spend from it may do so.

 

[Arkhandus]

Technically, the reason a character should start with less XP due to creating magic items earlier, is that the character could then start with twice as many magic items as would normally be possible. Making a magic item costs half as much in GP as it costs to buy it, normally, so if the DM allots each 15th-level character with, say, 100,000 GP for example, the wizard character with Scribe Scroll, Craft Wondrous Item, Craft Magic Arms & Armor, and Forge Ring could start himself out with actually 200,000 GP worth of magic items by making them all himself. He could even start the rest of the party out with such an overload of magic items, at their request using their GP.

The only balancing factor to account for this is that it costs XP as well to make magic items. So that 15th-level Wizard may try to outfit himself and maybe the rest of his party with gads of magic items, but he'll start at a lower level than them because he'll have spent XP on making all those gads of magic items for half the normal GP value. Thus, why the Rules As Written are worded that way.

When it comes to having magic items in the character's backstory, I would say it's fine to ignore their XP and GP cost if the character never sold/traded them for any kind of profit. If they sold their magic items at only their GP cost (very unlikely given the XP cost, and it wouldn't be any way to make a living either, they'd have to have been doing something else most of the time to afford their living expenses), then it would be fine IMO to ignore their GP and XP cost. Otherwise however, they'd be getting something for nothing (unless, I suppose, whatever profit they made before was taken away by theft or disaster) and cheating the DM's guidelines If the character scribed a scroll before and used it for something other than profit, like a Scroll of Magic Missile expended in battle, I wouldn't bother deducting the GP and XP cost since they didn't get anything out of it (after all, starting GP for high-level characters doesn't account for expendible items they used in battle and such for no monetary gain). However, the stuff in this paragraph are not the RAW.

 

[Timeboxer]

I'm not sure why people think that requiring players to spend XP is unreasonable. If an item-crafting wizard, starting at 15th level, built a staff and paid half the GP base value, wouldn't you expect him to pay the XP cost out of his starting XP?

How is this different?

Because your wizard still owns his staff. My wizard does not, and this is the important difference.

If your wizard's signature item is a self-made Staff of Evocation, and he has built several of them in his history before the game, creating a new one after exhausting each old one, so that his current Staff of Evocation at the beginning of the game has 50 charges and he has some arbitrary amount of useless sticks-nee-staves, would you still make him pay the XP and gp cost for the Staves of Evocation which he created and spent, even though they are of zero value now?

If so, wouldn't it be reasonable to make him pay the gp cost for every single staff if instead of having created them, he bought all of them instead? And at what point do you stop charging the character for what he's done in the past?

 

[Mouseferatu]

I'm not sure why people think that requiring players to spend XP is unreasonable. If an item-crafting wizard, starting at 15th level, built a staff and paid half the GP base value, wouldn't you expect him to pay the XP cost out of his starting XP?

I would, except that I wouldn't have him pay only half value.

As I said, the amount of starting gear/money is an abstraction, not a specific accounting. So far as I'm concerned, the item-creating wizard starts with the same amount of magic equipment as anyone else. Whether he "paid" full price for it, or actually got it for half and also paid XP, is pure flavor if it happened before the campaign begins.

Now, if someone really wanted to start with more money and fewer XP, I might allow it--but it's not our default.

 

[Dog Moon]

Learning

I don't know if your DM would allow this or not, but in our group, we have a homebrewn feat called Learning. Basically, it gives you 10% extra XP, but you cannot level off of it. So this feat is good for creating items and whatnot. So, assuming the feat is taken at first level and you have 105,000XP, your character would have 10,500XP to spend on magical items. This percent can be increased or decreased depending on how people want it, of course. This covers only the problem of needing XP and not anything else done previously, of course.

 

[Timeboxer]

Thus, why the Rules As Written are worded that way.

I don't entirely buy that the Rules As Written are necessarily saying what you suggest. The term is "Wealth" -- this is not actual gp that can be spent, but the worth of one's personal finances which is measured in gp. The worth of a scroll which you have created is its market price, measured in gp.

But it also says that you can create a magic item by paying the requisite XP and gp cost. Which is fine. The worth of a scroll which you have created is its creation cost, measured in XP and gp.

So it appears that there are two ways to price a magic item which you have created -- purely in terms of gp, or in terms of XP and gp. There is no reason to think that you must necessarily pay the XP route ("can use," not "must"), and it makes sense that one might be able to value it in purely monetary terms (because Wealth isn't actual liquid assets). It is also both reasonable and, I think, taken as given that what you're paying for is an item (or effect, I suppose) which is currently in your possession (or active).

Is this up to GM interpretation? Certainly. But I am not convinced that being able to pay the Wealth rather than the XP is unreasonable, nor that the XP route is the only method dictated by the RAW, nor that you must pay for an item which you don't even have.

When it comes to having magic items in the character's backstory, I would say it's fine to ignore their XP and GP cost if the character never sold/traded them for any kind of profit.

I don't even see any reason why this needs to apply, though it could if the GM allowed it. But selling magic items for a living wouldn't necessarily cost you XP and give you gp; rather, such an action would constitute your current Wealth, which you have invested in magic items and so on. So it's not like you're making a profit. And as such, there's no reason why there should be an XP cost.

 

[Zodar]

I don't have my DMG with me right now, so bear with me
This came up last Sunday in our game, so I'm kinda sure on this. I remember reading something about characters with item creation feats that start at a higher level only having to pay 75% of the market value for magical equipment.

i.e. A newly created 15th level wizard with the craft wondrous item feat only pays 6000 gp for a headband of intellect + 2 (instead of 8000 gp) when buying this item. AFAIK There is no xp cost mentioned.

This effectively means that any character with the right amount of item creation feats can spend up to 125% of his starting wealth on magic items - without having to pay the xp.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

I'm sorry Amy, I also agree with your DM. When creating high-level characters, you assign an XP total earned, and that's that. Creating magic items deducts from that. It's unfair to the other players for you to get the free use of xp in the way you're arguing for.

Were I the DM, I'd give the entire party +100xp, to allow you to have your PrC at the proper level, and at the same time be fair to the other players. But you'd certainly have to pay the XP cost of any items you'd crafted, regardless of whether or not you still had/used them. Even if it's as little as 1 xp.

 

[Timeboxer]

But you'd certainly have to pay the XP cost of any items you'd crafted, regardless of whether or not you still had/used them. Even if it's as little as 1 xp.

Would you then say that any high-level PC created in your game who has item creation feats and doesn't pay such a cost has, essentially, never created a magic item? Because that, to me, is an unreasonable claim.

I would pick on the Artificer here, but she has a Craft Reserve, so let's imagine some kind of Prestige Class that's centered around item creation -- you don't have to have created an item to enter it, but you must possess an item creation feat. Someone creates a wizard that starts with the current XP that you give. Obviously, she must have done some item creation at some point -- else how would the class make sense for the character? But exactly how much XP are you going to charge for these undefined items which have been created?

I also fail to understand how it's a free use of XP -- if you like, I can assign a gp cost to it and pay that cost in terms of Wealth.

I also have yet to see anyone explain why XP and gp are somehow substantially different in terms of being affected by back history. Scribing scrolls is almost part and parcel with being a wizard -- that's why you get the feat for free. It's not like you're going to calculate room and board for every single character since birth and deduct it from their Wealth, and neither should you do the same with XP. You spend money and earn it back; similarly, you can spend XP and earn it back (see previous posts on this subject), so that it all evens out by the end.