Our campaign is closing in on the point where magical research is becoming a viable option (decent level + some actual downtime) and I was looking into how much XP could be possibly available. After having a quick look though, it seems that once you hit level 9 when you can actually personally make non-scroll/potion items, it's nearly impossible to gain any experience from doing so.
Outside of some weapons (notably spear/warhammer/dagger and the like) it's exceedingly difficult to gain any XP from Item Creation. As noted in the example in the book, the only reason that the mage gained any XP was because an additional 15,000gp (5000gp of which was pointless). If you attempt to create any other type of magic item, the only way I can see to actually gain any XP is to basically use the full amount of the base cost of the item in precious additional items.
I.e. Gauntlets of Giant Strength - 100,000gp base price, 400 days to create. Effectively 14 months to create (13.3333) and you can double the base cost with precious items for a total of 200,000gp (+100,000gp of components) means that you have effectively 14,285gp a month worth of research which at level 9 means you gain 2285xp a month for 31,990xp total (at level 10 you gain no more XP at all). Now this doesn't sound *too* bad until you realise you could just buy said Gauntlets for the 200,000gp you paid for the base (and you will likely find it within the 14 months assuming you have access to a Tier 1 city), and then you just spend the 100,000gp you paid into components into a stronghold to gain 50,000xp.
I understand that you don't want mages to just sit at home and craft all day, everyday and that straight out removing the threshold would cause other problems, but to me it just feels that the current threshold values are off with regards to creating magic items.
Rememeber that even low-level mages can perform magic crafting if they're working as assistants; At low levels, even making a lowly 500 gp scroll can produce a nice chunck of experience.
An interesting consequence of this is that the rare professinal alchemists who actually achieve results will tend to gain levels; Presumably, their study of natural magic leads to the insights and understanding required to cast spells...
WIth regards to low-level mages, you don't actually gain as much as you think. Firstly you need to have a formula/example item which cuts the cost in half (note, you should *always* buy a formula if you can find it). Then you only gain 50% of the XP from that too. So at level 1 on top of your abysmal Magic Research roll (which likely greatly increases costs) you're only gaining a mere 112xp per potion crafted. Sure you're likely staying even assuming you have a good enough int/workshop, but it's hardly comparable to even a single adventure or likely even a half decent mercantile venture.
I suppose there is something if you have a higher level mage who can 'power level' a lower level mage/cleric/caster. Making fairly expensive quick items and just eating costs and perhaps increasing chances with precious items.
With regards to Magic Research not falling under the threshold rule, Alex stated that in another thread, however it was quickly pointed out to him that he was directly contradicting what he'd written in the rules. He said that he needed to go check whether he messed up his intent or whether that was right, but unfortunately never replied again to that area.
haha, i had forgotten that i was the one who pointed out that the magic research without the XP threshold is kind of hinky.
I haven't done the math, but re-reading some of the statements, the problem seems to be that once you get to magical research projects that takes more than a month, suddenly the advantage of taking on bigger projects is undercut by the fact that you have to divide the total value by the time it takes. While a project that takes 2 weeks is probably a better value project than one that takes 1 week, a project that takes 5 weeks is MUCH worse than a project that takes 3.5 weeks.
To that end, I would recommend coming up with a longer divisor period than 1 month, or possibly get rid of it entirely, all while maintaining the XP threshold. This means a lengthy project that will take 5 months is going to be a bigger payoff than 5 projects that take 1 month each, but this should be offset by the relative increased difficulty of doing bigger projects.
Oddly related, but I'd done a bit of research on the conversation some time back about the predeliction of magic swords - as it turns out, it's a lot more advantageous to the mage to make two hammers +1 in the same time it takes them to make a sword +1. (as it turns out, there's a lot of magical swords because anybody who matters can use a sword, until such time as there's a firm declaration of what type of sword it is)
The advanced research of crossbreeds/constructs/necromancy/arcanogenesis can be strung along a bit farther, I think maybe up to 10th level, as far as getting over the GP threshold goes.
It may be interesting to look into what it would mean if the magical research and the domain income were *combined* to overcome the threshold - given that mages may have weaker domains in general (?) that might make up some of the difference.
I had never considered the possibility of a mage's magical research "stacking" with their domain income. I guess in theory it allows the mage to reach a higher level with a smaller domain, but in practice I suspect it will either turn into a "win more" where mages have more efficient uses of their gold than fighters, or into a "why would i ever do this?" if the use of gp is better spent on domain securing actions.
This is really one of those things where we'd need a high level campaign with heavy use of the domain rules to really get a feel for how it shakes out, but most of the ongoing campaigns I've seen reported here (which I admittadly don't read religiously) don't seem too focused on domain play.
I thought that the reason that mages don't "win more" then fighters and the rest is that for most things it's almost always better to simply buy the item and then spend whatever you were planning to spend on components on simply improving your Stronghold. It costs the same and you get more XP out of it then the mage does.
You *can* make stuff more efficiently after the first version of the item, and with actually killing the monsters rather than purchasing components, but frankly Fighters could easily raise an army and crush beastmen villages, Thieves just rake the money in to make up for the fact that they are playing a thief ><, Clerics do...clericky things and anyone can hire a level 1 Venturer as a henchman (or hench of a hench) and go on a Mercantile Venture.
I'm also pretty sure the most efficient use of gold is hiring mercenaries and going raiding villages until you either find the magic item you're looking for or can just sell off enough stuff to buy the damn thing outright :P
one of the challenges with systems like these is you don't want any one option to be so much obviously better or worse than the others, because savvy players will just never choose to do anything but the good ones, and the world will feel more small.
Unfortunately I just don't have enough experience running high level campaigns to say for sure which are the good and bad ones. I guess that means none of them are "obvious" but I have been hornswaggled by a band of optimizing players in the past.
I used this houserule: magic item creation/magic research gives xp based on the value of the finished item minus the XP threshold. The result is that the more powerfull the mage the more powerfull magic items it wants to do to gain xp. Instead of focusing on low risk fast construction items. It worked, an mages never got big advantage as merchantile ventures, thieves guilds and raiding gave similar xp and gold. The only class that became overpower by this were the dwarven machinists, as they didnt need magical components for their automatas.
I think the idea that you simply remove the division of months might be a good one. It means that there is an experience benefit to not ignoring everything that goes over a single month worth of time.
The problem at the moment is that I think the best idea for 'making' magic items of the longer versions is to simply make the things that take a lot shorter to make and then sell those to make the money you need for thing you actually want.
I haven’t done the math, but re-reading some of the statements, the problem seems to be that once you get to magical research projects that takes more than a month, suddenly the advantage of taking on bigger projects is undercut by the fact that you have to divide the total value by the time it takes. While a project that takes 2 weeks is probably a better value project than one that takes 1 week, a project that takes 5 weeks is MUCH worse than a project that takes 3.5 weeks.
To that end, I would recommend coming up with a longer divisor period than 1 month, or possibly get rid of it entirely, all while maintaining the XP threshold. This means a lengthy project that will take 5 months is going to be a bigger payoff than 5 projects that take 1 month each, but this should be offset by the relative increased difficulty of doing bigger projects.
I feel like a shorter measurement interval would work too; your XP threshold per day is your XP threshold over 28 or 30 or so, and then you track the total number of workdays a project took. Gets weird when it starts interacting with actual domain income, but that’s already weird. Switching to a longer time period makes the breakpoints rarer, but worse when they do happen; doesn’t really solve the problem.
I've been mulling this over and doing a bit of math. I do think the rules-as-written need to be updated.
As suggested above, the most straightforward is that experience is earned at the completion of a magical research project. The experience earned is equal to the base cost of the item, less the character's GP Threshold.
I would NOT allow the cost of precious materials used to impact the XP earned in this case.
[quote="Alex"]
I would NOT allow the cost of precious materials used to impact the XP earned in this case.
[/quote]
An interesting thing about the precious materials rules is that there's no mechanical reason to use precious materials on any magic item whose base cost is less than 10,000 gp - which means that +1 weapons and armour are presumably more likely to be unornamented, and therefore more likely to be overlooked by players. I'm not sure how and if that's important, but it's interesting.
This post made me want to go take the magic items by cost table, create a percentage weighting for “what percentage of potential maximum beneficial precious materials were used” and use that weighting to create a table for the generation of specific items with specific precious materials.
(For example “a flame tongue sword with a ruby-encrusted handle” or “a flame tongue sword made by a very sarcastic wizard with sapphires everywhere” instead of “a flame tongue sword”.)
The easiest way to do it would probably be to multiply out the percentages and end up with a d10,000 table or something that each magic item would appear on multiple times, instead of having the nested sub-tables, since if all you want is a simple table that tells you your item with no fuss it already exists.
[quote="Aryxymaraki"]
This post made me want to go take the magic items by cost table, create a percentage weighting for "what percentage of potential maximum beneficial precious materials were used" and use that weighting to create a table for the generation of specific items with specific precious materials. (For example "a flame tongue sword with a ruby-encrusted handle" or "a flame tongue sword made by a very sarcastic wizard with sapphires everywhere" instead of "a flame tongue sword".) The easiest way to do it would probably be to multiply out the percentages and end up with a d10,000 table or something that each magic item would appear on multiple times, instead of having the nested sub-tables, since if all you want is a simple table that tells you your item with no fuss it already exists.
[/quote]
Honestly, I've just been flipping a coin to see if something's ornamented; On heads, the item gets the maximum amount of ornamentation it would benefit from; On a tails, no precious materials were used in its creation at all. It's not the most granular system, but I like to think it reinforces the idea of wealth being highly concentrated.