Would reducing spellscribing costs break anything?

[Marshall]

Thank You, Shard.

 

[Petrosian]

What Marshall said, exact quote...

"By the actual rules a pile of 4500gp changes into the appropriate MI. "

What Shard said...

"And that is what marshal has been saying not your exagerated version of his comments where poof in a dungeon it turns to a magic item and the gold disapears."

Yeah, ok, i see that... uh huh... ok...

moving right along...

Well thats certainly a quote i did not recall... although i personally would treat the undefined travelling far from home as workable within the locale price limits...

or maybe they meant that if home were a one horse stable of a village and you had travelled far from it to greyhawk then you would need to go home to get the 25k of arcane materials to make the +5 sword?

nahhhh...

YMMV...

of course this still leaves scribing materials up for PURCHASE limits even if you assume that special circumstances never occur.

anyway, thanks shard.. a statement dealing directly with accessability is cool and to the point, unspecified materials does not make it available.

 

[Rel]

I think that this issue of there being materials that are used for the creation of magic items is very important to consistency (a favorite theme of mine).

In my campaign, you can buy Scroll Ink. It is the stuff that is used to scribe spells into spellbooks and to create magical Scrolls. You can buy it in almost any decent sized town from the local alchemist*. If you want to be scribing scrolls or copying spells into your spellbook "in the field", you had better have bought some of that ink.

Because it is a comodity that can be bought and sold, I can also give it as treasure. Same goes for Potion ingredients or the necessary components of wands or crafted items. I have several times said to the Druid in my campaign, "You believe that the herbs growing along this stream would make good Potion ingredients." He would spend X hours of game time gathering the herbs and I would tell him, "It turns out that these herbs will contribute 100GP toward any potions you want to make with them."

Now I don't require "Power Components" for every magic item. If they are in town and want to just spend the money to craft a wand, they don't have to scrounge up a Phoenix Feather for it. But if they want to be able to craft items as they travel, they need to purchase supplies in advance or find them as they go.


*I also allow characters with high Alchemy skill to create their own ink if they want. Of course, this requires the purchase of the proper ingredients (which you will lose if you fail the check). If they want to go one step further, they can use Wilderness Lore to find the proper ingredients as well. All of this takes a lot of time, of course, as well as the investment of skill points into the appropriate skills.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I decided to chuck all of that and build a system that seems fair regardless of how the wizard chose to play his character and that was consistent for all spells the wizard gets. As I mentioned before, I haven't had anyone play a wizard yet (it's only our first 3E campaign) but my players have made it clear that it isn't because they think my rules are too hard or too easy. I would still want to see my house rules playtested before I recommend them too highly, but if they don't work for some reason, I think I'd try to tweak them rather than go back to the rules given in the PH.

From previous conversations on this topic, I know that a lot of other people are not as bothered about this consistency issue as I am. I guess we all have our little peeves about the system.

You certainly have my moral support.

I do agree with you the present rules do not quite make sense. But they certainly an improvement over my experiences with 1e/2e. They are very usable albeit annoyingly inconsistent.

I recommend you use the standard wealth guidelines for PCs and use 25%-30% of that number as the amount that would normally be spent on spells. That will give you a rough rule of thumb on how many spell levels a given Wizard "should" have.

 

[Cloudgatherer]

See, you wouldn't have any of these problems if you only have sorcerers in your game.

Currently, the party I'm DMing only has a cleric and bard as spellcasters. No heavy arcane artillery. So I don't have to worry about this at all really.

I still stick to my argument of "I see no difference between normal ink used in literature and ink used in spellbooks." I'd imagine "ink is ink" and wizard would use the "good" ink, but to the tune of 200 GP/page? I don't think so.