| koalabob |
I've never really dealt with players making their own magic items, but my current group has a player who is making all new items and I'm doing my best to keep ahead of him and would like any offered help.
So, at the moment he's created a Bracer of Shields that with a command word mimics the wizard spell Shield cast as a 1st level caster. I figured out fairly easy this would cost 1800 (1CL x 1 spell level x1800) and 900 to make. I was a little uncertain how many charges per day this provided, one way it seemed to have 5/day another seemed to imply it was unlimited. I decided to be nice and just go with unlimited, especially since he'll have to use a standard action every minute to have it up. Not overpowering imo.
But I know he's thinking of eventually upgrading it to where it's continuous and that's where we're running into disagreements. He was thinking of just tacking on the continuous duration cost modifier (x2 since it's 1 minute/lvl duration) and came up with a total cost of 3600 gp, with it only being 1800 gp to make. Now that seems insanely cheap to me to have permanent +4AC force shield bonus that also absorbs all magic missiles.
So, I looked at some of the magic item creation rules for AC values and thought I'd use that, but noticed there was no value for AC(shield). But, looking at the Ring of Force Shield which gives a very similar affect I came up with the following formula:
(AC Bonus)^2 x 2125
Plugging in the AC value of the shield spell I came up with 34000 gp. But that only takes into account the AC part of the Shield so I went ahead and tacked on the continuous cost for the Shield spell (3600) to account for the magic missile portion. With that in mind:
Item Cost: 37600
Cost to Create: 18800
Does that seem even remotely right? It's more than twice the cost of Bracers of Armor (+4) but it does provide a force shield AC (so works against incorporeal touch attacks) and immunity to magic missile.
Any and all comments, suggestions, correction of my math appreciated.