Crafting Magic Items

Just One More Thing Before I Go... (Part IV)

In an online game called Urban Dead, which I used to play a lot and still occasionally check in on, searching for items is important. Certain items are only found in certain kinds of locations. You can choose to search in one type of location for a very specific but valuable item, and each search costs you 1 of your 50 action points for the day. Or, if you have the right skills, you can choose to make that item yourself for 20 action points.

That's interesting -- it almost feels as though it came out of 3rd Edition D&D's "take 20" rule. But it got me thinking about D&D item creation. Since I started playing 3rd Edition ten years ago, I've been a little disappointed that characters with item creation feats never made interesting items. They made the simple, straightforward ones: +1 keen swords, potions of cure light wounds, wands of magic missile, etc. Now, I suppose it's fortunate that those are exactly the items the system handles best, but I don't think that's necessarily a causal relationship.

Creating Items

What if item creation had a random element to it? What if you sat down to make a ring and you had a decision point: You either make a random ring or, with more effort, you choose the ring to make. (Effort is likely measured and balanced by cost in gp and XP here, but those specifics are secondary.)

Offering such a choice is likely unbalancing, because how do you price a random ring? If you figure the average, or perhaps the mean, of all ring prices, the creator is going to get seriously screwed sometimes and outrageously rewarded in others. So you'd have to group rings in categories by similar power (cost). That way, the character crafting it would get treated a little inequitably on occasion, but sometimes he'd get a bit lucky. It would balance out.

And of course, with more effort, he could always get exactly what he wanted.

Building such a randomized element right into the system allows you to elaborate and add funky cursed or malfunctioning items, weird item side effects, unexpected and mysterious benefits, catastrophic failures (they make for good adventure seeds and monster back stories), and so on. It could be really interesting.

Of course, putting the system together would be a huge amount of work. All the item charts would need to be subdivided into groupings of similar power levels, just for starters: Weak rings, Modest rings, and Strong rings, or something like that. And each type of item would need such subdivisions, not just rings. Another challenge would be figuring out a way to stick in new items without redoing the charts each time you buy a new supplement and find an item you like.

Choosing Items

Another cool benefit, however, would be that startup characters would be more interesting. "Startup characters" are what I call it when you start a character at higher than 1st level. Usually, the DM will say, "Make up 6th-level characters, and buy whatever you want for 13,000 gp." Invariably, those characters are dull, dull, dull, because they have the most efficient array of bonus items they can afford and that's about it. With this alternate system in place, however, the DM can say, "Choose three items from the Weak categories, and then roll twice on any two Modest tables." That gives you a far greater chance of getting an item that a player wouldn't have necessarily chosen but turns out to be pretty fun.

This is why, as a DM, equipping NPCs is fun and easy. You give them about what's right -- you don't have to be exact--and you freely hand out some of the weirder items, because it's fun for the players to find such things. I've known a few people -- most of them, sadly, game designers -- who believe that, because players always choose the +1 ring of protection over something weird, like a ring of water walking, the game should only include items like the ring of protection. The odd items should go away. This would be a titanic shame, if you ask me. Weird items are flavorful and fun, and they keep things interesting. Occasionally, they even save a PC's bacon.

Pricing Items

Take this alternate system just one step further, and you can do away with pricing magic items altogether. Instead, just group an item into one of the categories for its type (realistically, there would need to be more than three categories -- probably more like six or even ten). Each category would have an associated price for selling items, but that's the only time you'd even need to worry about pricing. Otherwise, you'd just use the categories. You wouldn't say, "A 6th-level character should have 13,000 gp worth of stuff," you'd say, "A 6th-level character should have seven Weak items, three Weak and two Modest items, or one Weak item and one Strong item." Or however it worked out.

In the long run, this system could make things not only simpler but also more interesting. It lacks the precision of the current system, but that's often a false precision anyway. The magic item pricing system has always been (and was always intended to be) an inexact an art rather than the exact science people seem to consider it.

Mostly, though, I just like the idea of a characters making magic rings but never knowing exactly what they're going to get. That sounds like fun.

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