I can see we have several passionate wizard-players here.
I still think that item creation requires a balance in money. Most items in the DMG require wizard spells, rather than cleric or druid ones, and wizard is the class getting bonus feats to take item creation. As I see it, while other casters can make an effort to craft, item crafting in general is the wizard's bailiwick. Thus, to keep him from crafting a zillion items for himself at half-price his money is drained away on his spell selection. Even then (see below) it isn't that much of a drain for a wizard who's crafting a lot of items.
Marshall writes:
IC is balanced with/by itself. Its a self-contained package. With the feat, gp, xp and time requirements you dont need any outside factors to balance against it.
True, but wizards get free feats to fulfill the feat requirement, the xp cost is very low (trust me, when I was considering taking Craft Wondrous Item I went through the entire DMG and calculated xp costs of items. It was negligible.) And the gold is, as I said, at a 1/2 price
discount, hardly a restriction! Time is one of the only really big factors, and even that only applies in certain campaigns.
JLXC writes:
Cleric/Druids as pointed out get all the PHB spells and THEN add in the Cleric Book, Magic of Faerun, and many other sources... and Divine guys gets hundreds if not thousands of spells at the touch of a finger.
Well, if you allow your clerics to add every new spell to their spell lists without restriction, then you're dealing with a whole different balance issue. Wizards are already balanced in the new spell department, because no matter how many new spells come out, they still have to buy each and every one. Clerics and druids getting spells for nothing is a separate, and very real, balance issue. My favorite solution for this is Piratecat's, wherein he requires clerics and druids to "swap out" pre-existing spells if they want access to newer ones. On a related note, anyone taking new spells (non-core, even splatbook spells,) is going to be hurt in the Item Creation department, because the items in the DMG have pre-reqs based on core spells.
Anyways... playing a Wizard and spending BUCKS on getting a Scroll THEN 200 gp per level and time to just get a single spell is essentially limiting a Wizard in our game to "Sorceror" like spell selection. "Your 7th level Wizard can try to get some cool magic items like the other character or spend... 150 GP plus 400 GP to buy and scroll another 2nd level spell!
Okay, let's use this example to illustrate my earlier point. Say your wizard spends the 550gp to buy a spell. Say that it's
Cat's Grace. Now he decides to craft himself a pair of
Gloves of Dexterity +2. He spends another 2,000gp, plus 160xp, and four days of work. His final cost is 2,550gp, plus 160xp and four days labor. Compare this to the fighter, who must pay 4,000gp for the same item. This savings only gets better as the wizard levels up, because the increasing XP gap between levels means that he can craft until the cows come home, and he'll still most likely only be a level behind his companions, but have a pile of magic items to make up for that single lost level. Nice deal. Cut out the scribing costs, (and scribing time, which is another balancing factor here,) and the wizard's bonuses get even better.
Extrapolating from this, a mid- to high-level wizard who's invested in crafting feats can have the same amount of magic items as his companions, several more spells than the sorcerer, and
still have money in his pocket. But as I said before, this entire argument rests on a wizard who's doing a lot of crafting. If a wizard chose not to craft at all, and spent his free feats on metamagic, for instance, the whole formula puts him at a disadvantage because he's still paying for his spells, but not making any money back through a savings on magic items.
