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What Magic Would Be Most Realistically Most Impactful?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7643386" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Half a years pay is as [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] has pointed out equivalent to the cost of the car. If a day's wage for an unskilled laborer is about 1 g.p. then 200 g.p. is roughly the equivalent of $10,000 in modern terms. That's an expensive piece of clothing. Certainly the wealthy would pay for that sort of comfort, and you could probably make a living making tunics for knights to keep themselves cool or warm in their armor but would the impact to the ordinary person by in fact that great? Or to put it a different way, is the garment so much better for an ordinary person that they'd decide to purchase one over the cost of enduring the elements by mundane means and wearing much cheaper clothing that is still suited to the environment.</p><p></p><p>For one thing, I have a hard time imagining that a piece of cloth if worn daily, and worked in under conditions of manual labor, and washed regularly would survive to be passed down to your descendants. And again, we are back to what does magic do and how does it work. If in fact merely making cloth magic made it immune to ordinary wear and tear, that would be a much bigger impact I think than even the fact that his magical cloth made you cool or warm at need, especially considering the historical cost of cloth before powered mechanical looms. Bandits stole clothes from their victims in historical times because the clothes were some of the most valuable portable goods that could be procured. </p><p></p><p>Mending doesn't work on magical clothes, and though the game doesn't model ordinary wear and tear on magic items, realistically I think they are going to occur unless you flat out state that it doesn't. I would not expect a garment meant for hard labor to survive use for more than a few years, and then the question becomes did possession of that garment costing half a year of labor in those few years increase your productivity by half a years worth of labor? Maybe, but such garments while impactful are by no means certainly common. </p><p></p><p>But you are right to try to exploit the magic item construction system in 3.5. It's not balanced and in particular it is very much not balanced at all with respect to making short duration effects persistent or long duration effects daily. In fact, in large part for the very reasons we are discussing here - potential economic impact - I use different numbers and sometimes different systems than the raw for figuring out what arbitrary items should cost. </p><p></p><p>And for me the big one that needs discussing in terms of its impact in an item is perhaps the most broken spell in the game: "Create Water".</p><p></p><p>(PS: As I said, I use a different system so I'm not that familiar with the RAW, but as best as I can tell the cheapest you can get on 1 1st level charge/day item for 3.5e is 360 g.p., which is closer to a year's wages.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7643386, member: 4937"] Half a years pay is as [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] has pointed out equivalent to the cost of the car. If a day's wage for an unskilled laborer is about 1 g.p. then 200 g.p. is roughly the equivalent of $10,000 in modern terms. That's an expensive piece of clothing. Certainly the wealthy would pay for that sort of comfort, and you could probably make a living making tunics for knights to keep themselves cool or warm in their armor but would the impact to the ordinary person by in fact that great? Or to put it a different way, is the garment so much better for an ordinary person that they'd decide to purchase one over the cost of enduring the elements by mundane means and wearing much cheaper clothing that is still suited to the environment. For one thing, I have a hard time imagining that a piece of cloth if worn daily, and worked in under conditions of manual labor, and washed regularly would survive to be passed down to your descendants. And again, we are back to what does magic do and how does it work. If in fact merely making cloth magic made it immune to ordinary wear and tear, that would be a much bigger impact I think than even the fact that his magical cloth made you cool or warm at need, especially considering the historical cost of cloth before powered mechanical looms. Bandits stole clothes from their victims in historical times because the clothes were some of the most valuable portable goods that could be procured. Mending doesn't work on magical clothes, and though the game doesn't model ordinary wear and tear on magic items, realistically I think they are going to occur unless you flat out state that it doesn't. I would not expect a garment meant for hard labor to survive use for more than a few years, and then the question becomes did possession of that garment costing half a year of labor in those few years increase your productivity by half a years worth of labor? Maybe, but such garments while impactful are by no means certainly common. But you are right to try to exploit the magic item construction system in 3.5. It's not balanced and in particular it is very much not balanced at all with respect to making short duration effects persistent or long duration effects daily. In fact, in large part for the very reasons we are discussing here - potential economic impact - I use different numbers and sometimes different systems than the raw for figuring out what arbitrary items should cost. And for me the big one that needs discussing in terms of its impact in an item is perhaps the most broken spell in the game: "Create Water". (PS: As I said, I use a different system so I'm not that familiar with the RAW, but as best as I can tell the cheapest you can get on 1 1st level charge/day item for 3.5e is 360 g.p., which is closer to a year's wages.) [/QUOTE]
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