Complete Tome items and Wish Economy
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:59 pm
Contents:
Intro
Basic Item Rules
Weapons and Armor
Wondrous Items
Potions, Scrolls, Staffs & Wands
Utility Items
Obtaining Tome Magic Items
Introduction
Whilst the various Tomes released contain a complete new combat system, feat system and plenty of classes, the fact that the Book of Gears was never released means that the suggested magic item system is sketchy at best. There's the bones of a good system, however it is definitely incomplete and requires a lot of house ruling to use in an actual game. In addition, there are a number of problems with the existing magic item system that don't get fixed, the most glaring being consumables. Kaelik's errata takes these concepts and makes something more concrete out of them, however item creation and ability lists are still missing.
I've been working on hammering out a system for our campaign that uses Kaelik's work as a base and expands it and I thought I'd post the results here to get some feedback. I used parts of the systems suggested by Frank, Kaelik and Surgo, and some text has been carried over. If anyone is unhappy about this let me know and I'll rewrite those sections. My goal is to fix the problems I still see with the Tome / Wish economy magic item system and those inherited from the base system. The major issues I see at the moment are:
The scroll hole - The intention of the original scroll rules was... well, I have no idea what they were smoking to be perfectly honest. Allowing characters to cast spells above their level is just not good, and removing spell slot limits is even worse. This is obviously a major concern as it is broken in multiple areas by the RAW, and the Wish economy only makes things worse.
Consumables - Related to the scroll problem, consumables being cheap, easy to use and with no restrictions means that characters can consistently act as if they were higher level than they are. The current rules encourage using consumables as fast and as often as possible, and stacking as many together as possible, which is something to look at. This is related to the Wish Economy due to the implication that you get massive amounts of consumables when entering it. Caster level 20 potions are something that falls under 15,000gp, so say hello to all day buffs.
Crafting sucks - Only casters can make magic items, yet it's rogues and warriors that need magic items. Making a level appropriate cloak at level 6 takes a few days, whereas at level 16 it takes a few months. Crafting high level items lets you turn gold into Wish Economy goods. These are problems that need to be resolved.
Rules incomplete - In order to actually use these rules, the MC needs to know how they are going to fit into the game - rules for trading in the Wish economy, full lists of powers, how to obtain them and random treasure tables. So these will be needed.
Firstly I'm going to spell out a couple of tweaks to spellcasting that I think are needed to curb the power of spell effect items. The magic items will work without these tweaks, however they help to reduce some of the problems listed above. The primary goals are going to be making sure item effects are level appropriate, fixing consumables and limiting abuse whilst providing plenty of options.
Wish and Consumables
The first thing to look at is the source of a lot of the problems - Wish and consumables. Because consumables get around the supposed item power limitations of Wish (the gp restriction) they break the implied balance of the Wish Economy - that you only get things out of Wish that are useful at lower levels. Now, Kaelik took Frank's advice about item pricing and assigned costs per item tier rather than per item, and that's fine. However, at the point you are assigning item prices to determine whether they come out above or below the Wish limit a simpler option presents itself. Rather than setting item prices to line up with the Wish limit, simply change the wording of Wish to hardcode that limit in. Why not change the Create Magic Item option of Wish to read:
A character can wish for any Lesser magic item.
This means you can define items you don't want to become trivial to obtain as Medium items, regardless of cost. This allows us to define scrolls and other consumables as Wish Economy items depending on their power level rather than their cost. Effectively, this revision sets a universal limit to the levels of power that can be contained in items created from nothing by magic. Now, I can appreciate that this is a fairly major change but it's the easiest way to resolve a lot of the problems that the Wish economy produces with regards to consumables, so that's what I'll be assuming. If you want to stick with the original wording that's fine, but you'll have to deal with the profliferation of some types of consumables past level 11.
XP costs
The Tomes recommend you get rid of xp costs, but certain spells need some kind of limit. Where a spell has an xp cost listed, it instead has an additional material cost equal to 5x the xp cost value in gp. This material cost must be paid in Wish Economy goods.
Buff stacking
Even with the above change, characters still gain as many 3rd level potions and scrolls as they want once they hit mid levels. Currently this means that everyone in the Wish Economy gets up and drinks Caster Level 20 potions of Mage Armor, Darkvision, Protection from Arrows, Nondetection, Water Breathing and Endure Elements for breakfast, to enjoy the all day goodness these spells provide. Once things actually look like happening the potions of Heroism, Flight, Protection from Energy and Blur come out. And that's just from the PHB, once you add the Spell Compendium into the mix it gets even crazier. This cavalcade of buffs makes tracking bonuses a nightmare, and rewards those that trawl the spell list for more buffs to load into potions. To combat this I propose the following rule:
A character may only be under the effects of a number of spell levels of [Harmless] spells equal to their character level. Equipment attuned to a character counts as that character for this calculation. Additional spells cast upon them fail as if they had failed to penetrate spell resistance.
This rule limits characters to 2 level appropriate buffs, or some combination of smaller ones. It also means that potions no longer stack infinitely with cast buffs, and should limit the amount of bookkeeping needed in high level games.
Inherent bonuses
Inherent bonuses are supposed to be rare, something that players aspire to and slowly accumulate, but that's not currently how it works. With Wish providing a stacking bonus it is trivial for any character with access to Planar Binding to gain a +5 bonus to all stats pretty quickly. The Tome solution is to give everyone the bonus, which at least is fair I guess, but giving every character +5 to all stats at level 11 isn't something I'm happy with. Plus, I always thought reading books to up your stats was kind of lame. Cuddling up with a magical copy of How to Make Friends and Influence people isn't very heroic, and who's writing all these books only to not read them and have them turn up as treasure anyway? Finally, overlapping bonuses means that getting a smaller bonus early on seems a waste when it's overwritten later on. So we're going to add the following rules:
Inherent bonuses never stack, even from multiple wishes, only overwrite a smaller bonus. If an inherent bonus is applied to a stat that already has a smaller inherent bonus, you may reassign the smaller bonus to another stat. For example, Elothar currently has a +2 inherent bonus to Strength. He manages to obtain some Essence of Hope which he can use to gain a +4 inherent bonus to any stat. He decides to apply this to his Strength. As he already has a +2 inherent bonus, he can reassign this to another stat. He decides to apply this bonus to his Dexterity. He now has a +4 inherent bonus to Strength and a +2 inherent bonus to Dexterity. The DM explains that after ingesting the essence the interaction of the powerful magics has the unforeseen consequence of increases his physical awareness in addition to enhancing his strength.
This means that entering the Wish economy gives at most a +1 inherent bonus to your stats, however in order to raise this you will need to find sources of higher bonuses. Sources of these bonuses that make more sense will be given later.
Intro
Basic Item Rules
Weapons and Armor
Wondrous Items
Potions, Scrolls, Staffs & Wands
Utility Items
Obtaining Tome Magic Items
Introduction
Whilst the various Tomes released contain a complete new combat system, feat system and plenty of classes, the fact that the Book of Gears was never released means that the suggested magic item system is sketchy at best. There's the bones of a good system, however it is definitely incomplete and requires a lot of house ruling to use in an actual game. In addition, there are a number of problems with the existing magic item system that don't get fixed, the most glaring being consumables. Kaelik's errata takes these concepts and makes something more concrete out of them, however item creation and ability lists are still missing.
I've been working on hammering out a system for our campaign that uses Kaelik's work as a base and expands it and I thought I'd post the results here to get some feedback. I used parts of the systems suggested by Frank, Kaelik and Surgo, and some text has been carried over. If anyone is unhappy about this let me know and I'll rewrite those sections. My goal is to fix the problems I still see with the Tome / Wish economy magic item system and those inherited from the base system. The major issues I see at the moment are:
The scroll hole - The intention of the original scroll rules was... well, I have no idea what they were smoking to be perfectly honest. Allowing characters to cast spells above their level is just not good, and removing spell slot limits is even worse. This is obviously a major concern as it is broken in multiple areas by the RAW, and the Wish economy only makes things worse.
Consumables - Related to the scroll problem, consumables being cheap, easy to use and with no restrictions means that characters can consistently act as if they were higher level than they are. The current rules encourage using consumables as fast and as often as possible, and stacking as many together as possible, which is something to look at. This is related to the Wish Economy due to the implication that you get massive amounts of consumables when entering it. Caster level 20 potions are something that falls under 15,000gp, so say hello to all day buffs.
Crafting sucks - Only casters can make magic items, yet it's rogues and warriors that need magic items. Making a level appropriate cloak at level 6 takes a few days, whereas at level 16 it takes a few months. Crafting high level items lets you turn gold into Wish Economy goods. These are problems that need to be resolved.
Rules incomplete - In order to actually use these rules, the MC needs to know how they are going to fit into the game - rules for trading in the Wish economy, full lists of powers, how to obtain them and random treasure tables. So these will be needed.
Firstly I'm going to spell out a couple of tweaks to spellcasting that I think are needed to curb the power of spell effect items. The magic items will work without these tweaks, however they help to reduce some of the problems listed above. The primary goals are going to be making sure item effects are level appropriate, fixing consumables and limiting abuse whilst providing plenty of options.
Wish and Consumables
The first thing to look at is the source of a lot of the problems - Wish and consumables. Because consumables get around the supposed item power limitations of Wish (the gp restriction) they break the implied balance of the Wish Economy - that you only get things out of Wish that are useful at lower levels. Now, Kaelik took Frank's advice about item pricing and assigned costs per item tier rather than per item, and that's fine. However, at the point you are assigning item prices to determine whether they come out above or below the Wish limit a simpler option presents itself. Rather than setting item prices to line up with the Wish limit, simply change the wording of Wish to hardcode that limit in. Why not change the Create Magic Item option of Wish to read:
A character can wish for any Lesser magic item.
This means you can define items you don't want to become trivial to obtain as Medium items, regardless of cost. This allows us to define scrolls and other consumables as Wish Economy items depending on their power level rather than their cost. Effectively, this revision sets a universal limit to the levels of power that can be contained in items created from nothing by magic. Now, I can appreciate that this is a fairly major change but it's the easiest way to resolve a lot of the problems that the Wish economy produces with regards to consumables, so that's what I'll be assuming. If you want to stick with the original wording that's fine, but you'll have to deal with the profliferation of some types of consumables past level 11.
XP costs
The Tomes recommend you get rid of xp costs, but certain spells need some kind of limit. Where a spell has an xp cost listed, it instead has an additional material cost equal to 5x the xp cost value in gp. This material cost must be paid in Wish Economy goods.
Buff stacking
Even with the above change, characters still gain as many 3rd level potions and scrolls as they want once they hit mid levels. Currently this means that everyone in the Wish Economy gets up and drinks Caster Level 20 potions of Mage Armor, Darkvision, Protection from Arrows, Nondetection, Water Breathing and Endure Elements for breakfast, to enjoy the all day goodness these spells provide. Once things actually look like happening the potions of Heroism, Flight, Protection from Energy and Blur come out. And that's just from the PHB, once you add the Spell Compendium into the mix it gets even crazier. This cavalcade of buffs makes tracking bonuses a nightmare, and rewards those that trawl the spell list for more buffs to load into potions. To combat this I propose the following rule:
A character may only be under the effects of a number of spell levels of [Harmless] spells equal to their character level. Equipment attuned to a character counts as that character for this calculation. Additional spells cast upon them fail as if they had failed to penetrate spell resistance.
This rule limits characters to 2 level appropriate buffs, or some combination of smaller ones. It also means that potions no longer stack infinitely with cast buffs, and should limit the amount of bookkeeping needed in high level games.
Inherent bonuses
Inherent bonuses are supposed to be rare, something that players aspire to and slowly accumulate, but that's not currently how it works. With Wish providing a stacking bonus it is trivial for any character with access to Planar Binding to gain a +5 bonus to all stats pretty quickly. The Tome solution is to give everyone the bonus, which at least is fair I guess, but giving every character +5 to all stats at level 11 isn't something I'm happy with. Plus, I always thought reading books to up your stats was kind of lame. Cuddling up with a magical copy of How to Make Friends and Influence people isn't very heroic, and who's writing all these books only to not read them and have them turn up as treasure anyway? Finally, overlapping bonuses means that getting a smaller bonus early on seems a waste when it's overwritten later on. So we're going to add the following rules:
Inherent bonuses never stack, even from multiple wishes, only overwrite a smaller bonus. If an inherent bonus is applied to a stat that already has a smaller inherent bonus, you may reassign the smaller bonus to another stat. For example, Elothar currently has a +2 inherent bonus to Strength. He manages to obtain some Essence of Hope which he can use to gain a +4 inherent bonus to any stat. He decides to apply this to his Strength. As he already has a +2 inherent bonus, he can reassign this to another stat. He decides to apply this bonus to his Dexterity. He now has a +4 inherent bonus to Strength and a +2 inherent bonus to Dexterity. The DM explains that after ingesting the essence the interaction of the powerful magics has the unforeseen consequence of increases his physical awareness in addition to enhancing his strength.
This means that entering the Wish economy gives at most a +1 inherent bonus to your stats, however in order to raise this you will need to find sources of higher bonuses. Sources of these bonuses that make more sense will be given later.