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

Thinking the Unthinkable: Class-free, Level-free D&D?

A disclaimer. I really don't think this will fly.  Not that it's impossible to write such a system for an FRPG, RuneQuest did it, Warhammer kind of did it, GURPS Fantasy (and others) certainly did it. So you can certainly write coherent and successful FRPG systems that don't have character classes and don't have levels.  However, would they be D&D? If you think of D&D, what do you think of? If you're of a certain age, you might think of the satanic panic. Or the cartoon show. But typically you think of a party with a fighter type, a thief type (now reframed as a rogue), a divine caster type and an arcane caster type. If you're a bit less informed you go fighter, thief, cleric and wizard, a bit more informed you might say something like well it could be paladin, monk, druid and sorcerer instead, but you still think of those four roles. If you've played 5e, you might erase the cleric for a bard or a second combat character, and call them by their subcl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hybrid (soft-hard) Magic in 6e (optional rule)

Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy author and teacher of writing, described two core magic systems in fantasy. The first is a hard system, in which there are clear rules. The characters do x and y is the result. Magic is essentially a kind of science or engineering, even if they don't understand it that way, and it achieves basically predictable results. The second is soft, where magic works in mysterious way and no one (possibly not even the magicians, certainly not everyone else) is entirely sure what's going on to achieve it, nor necessarily quite what the outcome will be. He says some other things too, about what the effect of this in your storytelling, which are quite interesting, but not entirely relevant here. If you'd like to read more, there's a  wiki link .  In broad terms, something like the Dresden Files or most of Sanderson's own stories use Hard Magic because it's predictable while Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones use soft magic because it's mys...
Post a Comment
Read more

Society and Law 'n' Order

D&D promulgates a fairly modern, liberal democratic attitude to its laws, usually on top of an idealised Western European quasi-Feudal society.  To say the two don't match is an understatement. Without doing a deep dive, you might like to consider how recently your country abolished slavery, and also made it illegal. The two are not synonymous - in the UK, slavery was abolished in 1833, but it wasn't actually made illegal until 2010. If someone owned slaves and came to the UK they were ok for 177 years... but now they face up to 14 years in prison. You might also like to look at the pattern of emancipation, that is giving people the right to vote. For example, in 1780 you had to own property (which didn't automatically mean you were a man, but inheritance laws and property laws made it very hard to be a woman and own property) worth £10 (£1,807 in today's money) but  before you think this is not a huge bar to voting, it should also be noted the electorate was actual...
Post a Comment
Read more