Pricing various item modifiers


Homebrew and House Rules


I'm trying to stat up an item and I keep getting stuck trying to decide how to handle of couple of the specific but less common details in pricing it. I'd prefer to work out some general pricing for each of the details rather than just a good price for the item as a whole though.

First, the item in question is a pair of weapons. Part of it won't work unless you weild both of them. I feel this is worth some discount but I'm not sure how much. One one hand it doesn't seem like a huge drawback because you'd almost always just keep using them as a pair. On the other hand, it forces you to use up your off hand to get the full benefit. While it's not directly applicable to this item, making a general decision here is further complicated by the differences between, for example, the enhancement bonus going up (obviously this should count once for each weapon) vs. some extra abilities that apply as a whole rather than for each weapon (which probably shouldn't count twice). I'm also somewhat curious about item sets more generally, but that's probably a can of worms better opened in a separate thread.

Second, the item grants a specific subset of the beast shape II spell, but it grants part of it all the time and part of it once per day. I'm also trying to decide if and how to divide up the duration. While I think it's fair to do so, I do agree with someone that said dividing a 7 minute duration into 7 one minute uses is worth more than dividing 7 rounds into 7 one round uses, but the latter is not worth anything according to several existing items. On the other hand, dividing 7 minutes into 70 rounds doesn't sound like a great idea for several reasons.

BTW, if you want some specifics to work with, the items are a pair of +1 tekko-kagi. While wearing both, you gain low-light vision, scent and grab on attacks made with these. For 7 minutes per day (division still to be decided) you can transform into a Large bear gaining +4 strength and natural armor and -2 dex as per the spell. Again though, I want to apply both of these details to other items independently, so I'm not looking just for a price for this one pair of items.


So, my first pass at pricing these.

For the pair of items, I'm tempted to use the slotless modifier in reverse but I think that's too much of a discount. (That'd be divide by 2 instead of multiply by 2.) That might be just barely OK if you had some items that took up 2 body slots, but even then it might be a bit much. Instead, maybe half that discount, so a 25% discount instead of a 50% discount.

For plus-equivalents and things that apply to both weapons equally, I think you'd just take the difference between the two weapons individually and the two together and apply the discount to that difference. For other abilities, you'd just pay for the ability once and apply the discount to that.

For the beast shape spell, I'm not so sure. I think that allowing some of the minor properties of a uses per day spell to be continuous shouldn't be worth too much, but I'm not sure what to count as a minor property. Maybe it'd be best to take a weighted average of the two prices, but that's a bit more math than most people would want to deal with. Maybe there's a way to extrapolate something simpler from the duration multipliers.

For the duration, I'm still torn. I don't much like leaving it in one 7 minute block, but I'm not sure which division option would be the most fun to play.


(No one has any suggestions, questions or comments?)

Let's see. What would a pair of +1 daggers that became +2 daggers if you wield both of them be worth? Well, two +1 daggers are worth 4,604 gp. Two +2 daggers are worth 16,604 gp. The difference is 12,000 gp. So applying a 25% discount to the difference would give a final price of 13,604 gp. That doesn't sound too bad to me, but what about yall?

An extreme case: a pair of MW daggers that were revealed to be +5 flaming burst daggers when wielded together. That'd be 604 gp for the daggers and 196,604 gp for the +5 flaming burst daggers, so the price would be 147,604 gp. That's a pretty big savings for agreeing to use the two together, but a major penalty if you don't.

So, for my current high-magic game, this would be fine. But I want to try and come up with a price other people would also accept, so is 147,604 gp a fair price to yall?

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