RangerWickett said:
Excerpt from the third adventure of the
War of the Burning Sky Campaign Saga -
Shelter from the Storm:
When a rule throws in an arbitrary limitation, I always like to ask, "Why?"
The tattoo needs positive energy to hold onto the magic and infuse it into the tattooed creature. In order to do this, the recipient must be at full hit points, and then receive a cure light wounds spell, or some similar magic that can heal at least 5 points of damage, or some form of channeled positive energy, such as a turning attempt.
I can't tattoo my undead servitors? Why?
Tattoos can only emulate wondrous items and rings.
Why? About the only thing I see a solid reason for excluding is tattoos emulating magical weapons (because such a tattoo could be used with multiple weapons). But you could easily work around that by saying that a tattoo must be tied to a specific type of weapon and doesn't work with magical weapons (the magic of the weapon interferes with the magic of the tattoo).
(Magical armor emulated by a tattoo simply doesn't stack with any armor worn.)
If someone wants to inscribe a tattoo that works like a wand (it has 50 charges and the tattoo fades away as you use up the charges), I don't see any reasons you shouldn't let them.
Tattoos cannot emulate items that do not fill a body slot.
Why not? I could see the logic if you were attempting to make the tattoos permanent and binding as a means of balancing them (I wouldn't agree with that logic, but I could understand it), but since the tattoos aren't permanent and are almost trivial to remove, I don't see any rationale for this rule at all.
RangerWickett said:
Well, I wanted to balance the normal item creation time, without having some ridiculous premise of it taking days and days and days to do a tattoo. I know bad-ass Yakuza tattoos are made over a long period of time, but I figured most PCs would go to the tattoo parlor, get a magic tat in a few hours or less, and then go back to adventuring. In order to require some time investment, I included the positive energy requirement.
I don't see any reason to consider this a "ridiculous premise". A magic sword takes longer to make than a normal sword. Why? Because of the magical rituals which must be carefully and painstakingly performed to create a magical sword. There's no reason a magical tattoo shouldn't have the same requirements.
If you want to ease the time requirement (so that the PC doesn't have to actually sit in the chair for all those days), simply move the rituals to cover the creation of the specific pigments necessary for this specific tattoo. Once that's been completed, the tattoo is inscribed.
When you craft a magic item you possess the proper item creation feat for, instead of making a physical item you can place the magic in a tattoo. The cost to create the item is the same, but inking the tattoo only takes ten minutes for every 1,000 gp of the item’s market value.
This is one reason why I think it would be great if the item creation feats were function-based instead of form-based: You wouldn't need a new feat to do this, you'd just say, "And this time the magic item is a tattoo."
(Reminds me of the Candle Caster from 3.0 (did this ever get a 3.5 upgrade?). Any entire Prestige Class dedicated solely to treating candles just like scrolls. The poster child for the This Prestige Class Shoulda Been A Feat campaign. Hell, it could have just been flavor text.)
The other reason such an approach would be superior is that it would remove the completely lop-sided nature of Craft Wondrous Item -- the all-in-one item creation feat which can more-or-less mimic most of the others.
Anyway, that's a separate rant.
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