Skip to main content

The Magic Item Market

In 5e, magic items are handled in a rather weird fashion, with Xanathar's offering a bolt on market system for magic items and the scaling for items being distinctly odd. This system also offered attunement for items, with limited slots and, seriously weird crafting rules. 5e also brought a change from the highest limits being +5 bonuses to the highest limit being +3 bonuses.
Compare that to 3e/3.5e (hereafter 3e). In both of these feats offered PCs a tool to create magic items for themselves, although it would mostly be NPCs, and every item had a carefully calculated price. 
What I'm proposing is that 6e brings through, with suitable changes, is a version of those 3e crafting rules from the start. If you want a +3 Holy Avenger, that will have a price, and that price will determine how long it takes to craft.
However, I'm going to take a couple of things from 5e. 
  1. I have no problem with the top end bonus being limited to +3. You can, as you will know if you're familiar with 3e, craft things with a higher functional bonus than that, but the actual bonus is still limited, you'd get +3 and Holy (which is worth an extra +2, so you'd calculate the time and cost as if making a +5 weapon.
  2. I'm going to keep the idea of attuning items, although I'm going to tweak it. In 3e, a +3 weapon, armour or shield cost 9,000 gp. I'm not saying that's what it will cost in 6e, but it's a good working number. Anything that costs 9,000 gp or more will need to be attuned. Anything less, you're good.
  3. 5e introduced the concept of low, normal or high magic campaigns. I'm going to kind of keep that, but by a different route. In a low magic campaign you only have one attunement slot, medium three, high five. For further fun, GMs can opt to limit non-attunement items too, to say 3x the number of attunement slots you have, although I don't have a mechanism for that fully fleshed out. This would be an optional rule. Those numbers are not hard and fast, maybe 2, 4, 6 slots works better, or 2, 3, 5 but something like that.
In 5e, they introduce a tyranny of the hard cap 20 to your stats, then they proceed to break it with barbarians at level 20, the magic tomes that raise your stats and your max stat and a few other things. 6e will go back to 3e on this, assuming we're looking like a traditional D&D game. Take your +2, +4 and +6 items to any stat and no limit. ASIs might still be limited to 20, but with magic you can get up to 26. Of course, the +4 (16k) and +6 (36k) items require an attunement slot, so you still have to pick and choose. 

In the crazy world of Fudge D&D stat boosts become far less powerful, although increasing your max stat pool is still nice, but they probably become +1, +2 and +3 items and far less expensive. Otherwise a lot of this looks the same, although weapons might have bonuses to hit or bonuses to recovery time or both. Fun.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A farewell to races

Since the days of AD&D you've had race and class that you can choose. Way back before that, for old fogeys like me that remember it, Elf and Dwarf were essentially a character class you chose to play. I think what 5e does with race is interesting, although I'm going to propose some changes, but first up, I'm going to change the name. They're not races, they're species. And I'm going to call them that. If a bunch of White Supremacists lose their knickers over this, tough. I'm going to look, in at least some species, at more interesting things to do with sex and gender too. Sexual dimorphism isn't the only rule on the planet, just because it's the most common. And in a fantasy world, Trimorphism, asexual reproduction and more should be out there I think. Gender fluidity - we see this in various fish and amphibians for example should be there too. Some will say that's just window dressing, but to communities where that matters, having it built...
Post a Comment
Read more

Skill Points, Level 0 and RP aids (like sex aids, but more PG)

I outlined in  this post  that I was leaning towards to a skill points system. Im brief, I outlined the idea that you'd get a fixed number of points + Int modifier for free spend, and then your Initiative modifier for a more restricted spend. Your free spend points can go on skills, tools, vehicles, languages, weapons or spells, your restricted spend ones generally must go on weapons or spells. Your skills, tools, vehicles, weapons and spells (and I guess for completeness it should apply to languages) would have five tiers of skill, giving you a +1 to +5 bonus. Expertise for a few classes (or via feats) would let you extend that, possibly at high as +10, certainly to +7.5 (which would round to +8). A couple of things need to be shaken down fully here. If we have the current 18 skills, and you can get 21 raises, and we say you get 3 points, + Int mod + another mod, that could be 63+30+24+120=237 points to spend on skills, but only 90 points worth. Of course a chunk will be rest...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thinking the Unthinkable: Fudge D&D 6e

Before we start, let me just say again, this is not what I really expect 6e to look like. I'm expecting a system with stats, rounds, d20 rolls, levels and so on. Most of the rest of what I'm going to write will centre around a system that looks like that. But what if... That's what this post will focus on, and sections of future posts will look back at this. Making your Rolls I've touched on this before, but all rolls will use 4dF. These are fudge die, essentially d3, but labelled +, 0 or -. You add a modifier and try to beat your target number TN. Thus far this is the same as d20+modifiers to beat the DC. Because we're really messing things up here, we're going to have strong successes, moderate successes, weak successes and failures. You do three bits of maths per roll, you take your modifier as a base, get +1 to it for each + you roll, if that beats the TN, one "success", if the modifier without plusses makes it, that's another, if the modifier ...
Post a Comment
Read more