Magic Item creation no longer requires experience points to be spent.
Magic Items with a caster level up to 6th take 1 day to create, caster level 7th to 12th take 2 days, and caster level 13th or higher take 3 days. Creating a Staff of Power no longer takes 7 months.
Magic Items require Materia. Materia consists of alchemical reagents, mystic salves, rare herbs, sanctified incense, and so on. Materia has a gold piece value and to create an item you must spend half it's gold piece value in Materia.
Materia can have a type. This type can be anything. As a rule of thumb Materia that is brought or obtained from deconstructing magic items has no type, but Materia acquired from monsters or the environment does. The type of Materia causes it's value to double or even triple for the purpose of creating magic items. For example, Materia (Blood of a Red Dragon) would have triple value for creating a flaming sword.
Magic Items can be deconstructed and give 25% of their gold value in Materia. Deconstruction takes an hour to perform.
Slain enemies can have Materia harvested from them by characters with a magic item creation feat. This Materia has a type. This process takes a minute and must be performed within an hour of death or the Materia dissipates. It usually involves collecting some piece of the creature. For every 50 experience points the creature is worth you get 1 point of Materia. For this reason you should use Level-Independent Experience Point Rewards as noted in the Unearthed Arcana. If you are not using this there is a simple conversion at the end of this post.
Materia can be found as treasure in various places. It should be placed in special places. For example, in an ancient torture chamber you mind find stones infused with suffering as a form of Materia.
Table 5-2 on page 137 of the DMG should be used to limit how much Materia is available for purchase.
Optional: Spells that require a costly component such as pearls or diamond dust, can instead require Materia. Spells that cost experience can instead cost Materia with 1 point of experience turning into 25 points of Materia cost.
Balance Effects: This gives players much more access to magic items. It also gives them a much wider array of items to choose from. It also increases the value of any found magic item as found items will often be turned into other items.
CR / Materia
1 / 6
2 / 12
3 / 18
4 / 24
5 / 36
6 / 48
7 / 72
8 / 96
9 / 144
10 / 192
11 / 280
12 / 380
13 / 580
14 / 760
15 / 1,160
16 / 1,540
17 / 2,400
18 / 3,000
19 / 4,600
20/ 6,200
2 comments:
In general I like the idea of a crafting system which removes XP as a cost for crafting items. While I understand the point was to control the amount and level of magic items characters could introduce into the game, I always felt it made items too expensive and thus made crafting the purview of situations where certain items (or items in general) were not available.
While I think the idea of Materia can be a workable alternative, I do note a couple of issues with how you have presented it here.
First, you talk of gaining Materia in terms of points, but in using it you talk in terms of Gold Piece Equivalent (GPE). In addition to this inconsistency, you do not provide a conversion factor or guidelines for creating a campaign specific conversion factor. I think converting adds an unnecessary complication to this system and would advise sticking to one or the other, preferably GPE.
You may also want to limit which enemies provide Materia, or you will likely get a ghoulish campaign where the party spends every after-battle stringing their opponents up to harvest their body parts.
Indeed, your idea of Materia appearing in places might actually work better for this than harvesting body parts. Places with great elemental affinity (ex. a red dragon's den, a beach by a great ocean, the middle of an untamed wilderness, the site of a great tragedy, etc.) could develop small amounts of very valuable Materia over time. It would explain why, for instance, a tribe of Kobolds living on the edges of a great forest might have a small supply of wood-aligned Materia in their village, having found it or traded for it with those deeper into the woods.
On the topic of harvesting Materia, I think that if you are going to let it be used as an alternative to spell components, limiting who can harvest it is a bad idea. It forces people who have no intention of crafting to take crafting feats just to make sure they can get access to these materials. You can see some of this dynamic in our current game where nobody has identify on their spell lists and the amount of annoyance this has caused us at times. I would say make a slightly higher level difficulty search check.
Also, I think that limiting 'reclaiming' Materia from an item to a GPE of 25% of the item's cost will not create as much value as you seem to think from your post. Let's say you have a 1000 GP item. Assuming general market availability of Materia, which makes more sense: getting 250 GP of Materia by reclaiming it and destroying the item, or selling the item for 500 GP and buying 500 GP of Materia?
Wayne
Call me wacky, but I think crafting a Staff of Power should take more than a long weekend.
I'd rather see Craft Magic Item I/II/III let you craft 1000/4000/10000 gp worth of items per day (adjust values to your liking), with no limit on the number that can be crafted per day.
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