A Better Way to Craft Wondrous Items
Monday, October 27, 2008 at 03:31PM You can deny a gift much easier than you can take one away...
That little pearl has probably been offered up in pithier ways by clever(er) people, but it's a truth I believe in, reinforced by years of play. In game terms, it's a huge part of why losing a character to poor rolling, losing levels to a vampire's slam, or losing experience to create a magic item in 3X all suck so badly. Let's talk about the latter, and about ways to improve it.
World of Warcraft does a few things well, and I think they've hit on something really enjoyable with their enchantment profession--you disenchant magic items and use the resulting magical byproducts like ingredients in a recipe to make other items. It's straight-forward and offers the simplest system we can adopt if we want to create magic items without losing those precious experience points.
How would it work?
The only metric we have across all types of magic items in Dungeons and Dragons is their gold piece value, so let's start there. For simplicity and balance, let's say that you have to offer up a similar gold piece value of magic items in some kind of disenchantment process--let's steal 4E's excellent ritual idea and apply it here--and use the resulting magical essences, whatever they may be, to fuel those item creation feats we like so much. A successful ritual could result in different qualities of magical essence based on the skills of the characters involved, and a base gp value of 1/2 merchant price could be applied to all disenchants. The result? We get cool materials to make what we really want, rather than being at the DMs fickle mercies.
I could be crazy, but...
We could even take it a step further and allow characters without item creation feats to use raw magical essences to make magical items of their own (the Use Magic Device skill could be repurposed for this). We could offer non-spellcasters the ability to enter this mysterious, rewarding realm with new feats and new uses for old skills. Finally, this opens up a lot of great possibilities for treasure--magical essence could come in dust form, gem form, or bar form, each having different strengths and specific uses for different types of items.
And we'd finally have a use for all those magic items that tend to clutter up our bags of holding at middle and higher levels.
Do you know of any rules like this? Got any ideas of your own? Please, share.
3E, Game Design, Magic Items 
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Reader Comments (8)
This system, virtually the same as you describe it, is present in the 4e D&D PHB. Check out the Disenchant and Enchant item rituals. You can disenchant items for residuum, and use that residuum to enchant other items.
Seriously?
Hm. Well, chalk one up for 4E (and a -2 ignorance penalty to me for not noticing those rituals before). I had completely missed them! :D
Rituals in 4E are quite possibly my favourite new addition, and I raved about them shortly after release back in June. It's just too bad I didn't read them all.
Thanks, Patriarch.
Don't know if it's worth commenting on something that seemed so open-and-shut, but I'm wondering about balance.
In a 3.x world, I was under the impression that the XP cost was a relied-upon factor to magic item creation. It might just be there to be a 2nd barrier to players selling their own items, though.
With that in mind, however, I wonder if removing the XP cost entirely is needed. Instead, this magic essence you get from disenchanting items could have specific properties attached to it that would negate the XP costs under specific conditions.
Example: You disenchant a +1 Flaming glaive. The essence you get would be worth 4,000gp and have the enhancement and flaming properties. While you can use this essence as a cost component for any magic item, if you enchant/enhance a weapon with a + on it, or enchant/enhance a weapon with the flaming quality, there is no XP cost (regardless of what + the new weapon will actually be).
This has the draw-back of being a the whim of a fickle DM, but affords the players the customization that they want. i.e., who uses glaives anyway - turn that into a longsword for the paladin. And if you make a +1 flaming longsword, it's free of charge (since you disenchant for 1/2 value and create using 1/2 value). If you enhance a +7 longsword to a +9 of flaming, then you pay the difference minus 4,000gp (and no xp cost at all).
You could broaden the range of this benefit to (using the example above) count towards any enhancement bonus increases and to deal with any fire-based effect (resistance, flaming burst weapons, and other neat fire-based toys).
There's no such thing as open and shut if you're offering something new to the discussion, Patrick. :)
Whatever the spirit behind the design of the XP cost in 3X, I've found that it cripples the efforts of budding magic-crafters, scaring them away from even taking those feats, rather than acting as another satisfying hurdle to leap over on your way to greater power.
Should you have to work towards becoming more powerful? Sure! Should you have to lag behind your peers in level(s) so you can have permanent darkvision? Maybe, but I'd really rather not, and I think that's the point.
With that in mind, I think your idea is a stable middle-ground to stand on. I also think you're carrying some hidden benefits along with your idea--it should encourage more player interaction and ingenuity when it comes to making magic items, as even the power-gaming fighter without any item-creation feats will take a keen interest in items he normally wouldn't look twice at.
As for fickle DMs, well, no rule ever really addresses them (us).
Thanks for chiming in, Patrick. I think you're on to something good here.
I had a few ideas along these lines, but I like yours (taking the magical energy out of other magic items to offset at least some of the cost) too. Here were my points (worst to best, in my opinion):
* Give extra experience points to characters who create magic items.
* Allow experience points to be drained from willing volunteers in addition to the magic item creator.
* Require a very limited substance to create magic items in you game world.
* Temporarily drain another aspect of a character’s energy when creating a magic item.
More: Alternatives to Magic Item Creation Experience Point Cost
Heya, Joe.
Your first idea would be a difficult sell, and harkens back to previous editions with unsual class differences and restrictions. I agree with you in that it's the weakest idea of the bunch.
It's a common houserule in my games that characters other than the crafter can share the XP burden. Naturally, I think this idea is awesome. ;) It puts more power in the hands of the PCs without any balance issues. Good things.
I like the spirit behind your third idea, but be careful that you aren't stopping your PCs from using their abilities. I know I'd be disappointed if I took soem item creation feats, only to learn that they can only rarely be used when I have a particular reagent, for example.
Again, I like what you're going for here, but I can see problems like forced downtime and difficulty balancing "drained' powers hamstringing your efforts.
Thanks for the feedback and new ideas, Joe!
I kind of went the other way, considering the dis- and re-enchantment of magical devices. I figured that if I grabbed a passing spirit, and forced it into servitude in a magical device, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the device would get a save V disenchantment? The disenchanetr gets one too, against the device. What about a spirit that had gone insane in the interim? Some magical items have lain around undisturbed for decades, centuries, or oh crap- millenia! If the disenchanter fails their saving throw, the spirit gets to run rampant all over the one that released it. Oh Boy, the fun that has been had by the few that have crossed _that_ line! I never thought that anything such as this would be as easy as the new system would seem to allow.
thread resurrection again!!
Ah yes, the idea that the magic item (intelligent, or spirit-bound in your case) would defend itself. I like it. My 3.5 FR group recently implemented a similar idea. It makes sense. In a world where any shmo with a few dollars and some time can go out and master a ritual to drain the "life" force from a self-aware creature, well, you can be sure that those creatures would have a problem with it.
There are potential social implications for being a disenchanter, as well. Consider those who have come to cherish their intelligent magic items... to them a disenchantment process may be akin to murder. Not really questions I would want to have blanket my campaign world, but certainly fine fodder for a prestige class, NPC, or adventure or two.
Thanks for the thought-food, and once more for stopping by.