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So I've been playing around with magic items, and I think that the real issue with the costs of spell trigger/spell completion items stems from changes to the Use Magic Device skill.
In 3.0/3.5, few classes had UMD as a class skill. This meant that only the rogue and bard (from core) could actually hope to have a decent UMD skill. Any other class had to pay double the number of skill points, and was limited to a total number of ranks equal to half the UMD class limits. As a result, UMD remained quite closed to the other classes, and access to scrolls, wands, and staves was quite limited. Potions had plenty of utility because they went around this restriction.
In PF, anyone can have UMD as a class skill--if not by expanded skill choices, by a trait. Furthermore, you always pay 1-for-1 for skill ranks, which means that a high-level fighter can have a similar UMD as a high-level bard, Charisma being the main source of difference.
The upshot of this is that having a potion cost 3.33 wand charges is no longer a great economy. It's fine if you'll have to expend an average of 3.33 wand charges in order to get the wand to work (if you're able to get the wand to work at all), but if you're able to operate the wand even 50% of the time, you're getting far more utility out of the wand than a single potion, no matter what.
The effect of skill changes to Use Magic Device is precisely why the economy of potions, scrolls, and wands has broken down. The value of the potion is greatly reduced when the ability to coax a wand to life is common, instead of rare.
So... should UMD even be a skill? Does it serve a true thematic purpose? Or should it be a class feature?
(I'm not even going to touch elixirs yet--which really should be potions, too.)
Most people never considered potions a great buy, even in 3.5. My groups would normally pool their money to buy a want of cure light wounds. The only other times potions were purchased was if we thought they might be need for a specific occasion.
The rogue, bard, and sorcerer are normally the ones to use UMD now according to what I have seen on the boards. Nothing has really changed except the sorcerer has a skill it should have always had anyway.
if you feel this is a problem I thinknit is one thatbexists soley I'n your group. if you look atvthe boards the impression I get is ALOT of players dump charisma and don't bother with umd.
this can also vary from different games within thecsame group. my last game one Pc had mud, we just started rise of the rune lords and 3 Pc do. it's hardly a problem I've never seen anyonectskevthe trait to get as a class skill.
Reasons potions are viable.
1. Action economy.
1a. After each use, anyone who needs to use both hands in combat is going to have to either drop the wand (leaving it vulnerable to AoE attacks) or use an additional move action to stow it. A potion is worthless after use, so it can simply be dropped with no worries.
1b. Some spells take more than a standard action to cast. You don't want to spend 3 rounds on lesser restoration when a potion will let you do it in one standard action (or, since you're including the use of traits, one move action with Accelerated Drinker). Heck, with accelerated drinker you can drink a potion of enlarge person, quick draw your weapon, and then swing it at your higher size in the same turn. Compare this to using an entire turn to use a wand, then spending a move action to stow it, and then quickdrawing and getting a single attack on the NEXT turn. That's a whole turn lost.
1c. Success rates affect action economy. If you're trying to use a wand in battle, but you fail the first time, you essentially just wasted a round doing nothing.
2. Skill economy. You have to put max ranks in UMD to have a decent chance of using a wand. A fighter doesn't have the spare skill points for that.
3. Uses. You don't always need 50 uses of a spell. For rare utility spells (like touch of the sea or the like), potions are more economical because you're not actually going to use the whole wand.
Wands are great for out-of-combat stuff that gets used a lot. CLW is a good one. Silent image can be used to good effect. But if you're using a wand out of battle, then anyone in the party can use it, and it's likely that at least one person in the party can use the wand without UMD anyway.
Reasons potions are viable.
1. Action economy.
1a. After each use, anyone who needs to use both hands in combat is going to have to either drop the wand (leaving it vulnerable to AoE attacks) or use an additional move action to stow it. A potion is worthless after use, so it can simply be dropped with no worries.
1b. Some spells take more than a standard action to cast. You don't want to spend 3 rounds on lesser restoration when a potion will let you do it in one standard action (or, since you're including the use of traits, one move action with Accelerated Drinker). Heck, with accelerated drinker you can drink a potion of enlarge person, quick draw your weapon, and then swing it at your higher size in the same turn. Compare this to using an entire turn to use a wand, then spending a move action to stow it, and then quickdrawing and getting a single attack on the NEXT turn. That's a whole turn lost.
1c. Success rates affect action economy. If you're trying to use a wand in battle, but you fail the first time, you essentially just wasted a round doing nothing.
2. Skill economy. You have to put max ranks in UMD to have a decent chance of using a wand. A fighter doesn't have the spare skill points for that.
3. Uses. You don't always need 50 uses of a spell. For rare utility spells (like touch of the sea or the like), potions are more economical because you're not actually going to use the whole wand.
Wands are great for out-of-combat stuff that gets used a lot. CLW is a good one. Silent image can be used to good effect. But if you're using a wand out of battle, then anyone in the party can use it, and it's likely that at least one person in the party can use the wand without UMD anyway.
1. If I need the spell a limited number of times it might get potioned, but more than likely I am going with a scroll. If I need it a lot I get the wand. There are not enough spells, that are cost efficient as a potion, to make potions viable as whole.
2. Fighter don't generally have to deal with enough spells to bother with UMD so it does not matter. That is what the other classes are for.
3. For those low usage spells you use a potion or scroll, preferably a scroll unless it is for the fighter or someone else that is not expected to reliably be able to use magic(including UMD).
Nobody is saying potions are never useful, but they do collect a lot of dust in many people's campaigns.
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Off the top of my head, I can think of two potions that assist the action economy: Enlarge Person and Mending, mainly because of casting times. Since Enlarge Person has a 1 round casting time, the potion makes it faster and it can be carried and used by the tank just fine. An Oil of Mending is much more circumstancial, but it would allow a sundered weapon or armor to be restored in the middle of combat, potentially.
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Anyone considering potions to not be worth of buying never played in a setting where druids die with their magic, clerics and paladins heal only the agonizing to keep the magic from being consumed from an asleep god in vain, and full spellcasting classes are either not playable or subject to strong reactions from the public. :D
We were never as much happy as when an alchemist NPC joined us and gave us our 3-4 daily potions.
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Why i like potions
1) I do not need to be near the caster to use it. Groups get separated.
2) It can wake the caster up if he's knocked out/incapacitated/poisoned. If i'm the fighter i can't rummage the wand off his soon to be corpse and get him back on his feet
3) If i'm the wizard and the rogue wants to go invisible mid fight, he can spend his own damn action. I'm busy putting a mushroom cloud over the battlefield.
4) My alchemist stocks up one of every potion he can get his hands on... and memorizes almost nothing but alchemical allocation for second level. Look, i'm a spontaneous caster that knows 15 second level spells!
What I've seen is that the only potions that get use are CLW and CMW. They are used for emergencies when the healer isn't nearby. They are also used to stabilize the healer when a UMD check is not working on the wand, or someone is bleeding to death.
I think one problem with your analysis is that you are comparing potions to wands. You should be comparing potions to scrolls. You cannot make a wand with just one charge of a spell. Wands are the magic item equivalent to buying scrolls in bulk.
Wand 15 x spell level x caster level x charges
Scroll 25 x spell level x caster level
Potion 50 x spell level x caster level
Command Word Activated(1/day) 360 x spell level x caster level
A potion is a good idea for certain things. My group uses healing potions a lot because it is a good idea for every player who cannot use a wand to carry a few for emergiencies.
As a PC I use potions for a lot of things. Typically emergency things, or to arm myself with expanded options. Oils are an exceptionally useful thing for this. A few oils of align weapon for good or evil can be a useful and cheap potion for the days when you're suddenly beset by demons or fallen angels. Meanehile, an oil of magic weapon is a flat 50 gp for 10 rounds of +1 enhancement, which might not seem like a big deal, but if you encounter a CR 3 shadow or a monster with DR/magic, you'll be happy you had it.
Likewise, a lot of good buffs come in potions. Mage armor (1 hour), enlarge person (10 rounds), longstrider (1 hour), and even hide from undead (10 minutes) are excellent options. A potion of stabilize (25 gp) means you don't need to roll Heal checks to risk your buddy dying at -12 at low levels.
However, potions and oils are even better for NPCs. Most NPCs cannot afford a +1 sword, but every NPC can afford an oil of magic weapon, potion of enlarge person, expeditious retreat, disguise self, or pass without trace. All excellent options. An oil applied to a longbow can allow low level NPCs to pierce stuff like Protection From Arrows (DR 10/magic). A caster level 15 potion of greater magic weapon is a great thing for a big-bad to use on his favorite weapon if he knows he's going to be fighting that day (15 hours of +5 weapon for 2,250 gp).
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That aside, I tend to prefer partially charged wands on most characters who can use them without UMD checks. At about 15 gp/charge, used 1st level wands are excellent for out of combat uses. As others mentioned, a wand of cure light wounds has upwards to about 250 Hp worth of average healing, which is a great fallback once your cleric runs out of channel energy. Also it's a good party investment that allows bards, rangers, paladins, druids, and clerics to quickly and easily heal the party between fights (and honestly at 15 gp per charge, most 4 person parties can phony up the 93 gp each to get a half-charged wand).
Likewise, if allowed to craft our own items, I preferred recharging wands for most common use. The market value for a 5/day wand is equivalent to the market cost of a 50/- wand, according to the item creation rules. So for fairly common stuff I like to get a wand with 1-5 charges per day. This is a good option for spells you plan to cast fairly regularly on your party members or yourself. Stuff like greater magic weapon isn't a bad choice. Other minor spells like knock are also decent options for a 1/day wand.
The biggest problem with potions for most people is they lack convenience, and most of them are pretty expensive past 1st level spells (a 3rd level potion is 750 gp minimum, which is a hard pill to swallow when you're only swallowing it once). Fortunately I use a lot of spells and reset the WBL for my groups to compensate for when they use potions and consumables (as intended), so they see a bit more use.
Another reason most classes don't Brew Potions more often is because potions are limited in their spell levels. This coupled with their large expense (even when crafting them) for a consumable item makes them less appealing. This has always been the case, and Use Magic Device has little to nothing to do with it.
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On a completely unrelated note, if potions were as amazing as they were in Baldur's Gate I and II, everyone would be stumbling over themselves to have some. An oil of speed in BG I & II doubled your speed and doubled your number of attacks per round (holy crap, lemme tell you, a hasted fighter in BG I & II was a walking meat-grinder :P).
Anyway, I'm sleepy, and babbling at this point. ^.^"
The problem with Magic Item costs is their price in regard to everything else.
How many castles can you buy with a +5 sword ?
How many noble titles ?
Depends on the size of the castle, among other things... Are you trading the +5 sword, or promising that it (and the arm that wields it) will be present at future battles?
How many politicians ?
Alive, or skewered? Also, see above.
How many farmer houses ?
How many soups at the inn
Just the house, or also the farm around it? Soups of what size and quality?
That's where the problem is.
(mostly tongue in cheek above)
But seriously, this is at once an excellent point and a silly one. It's an excellent point because it leads to the realization that the "economy" presented as list prices in the rules is really a system of economics For Adventurers Only (regardless of how much it hints at being uniformly applicable). Sadly, the fact that the economy used in the game is an economy that caters to and best represents adventurers and only adventurers is also the reason that this objection is silly.
The *reason* that the economy works the way it does is so that GMs don't have to manage an actual functioning economy (which would tie all of these factors together in a unified GP standard) but can still provide easily-measured rewards to their players. In the absence of PC rewards having a metric to determine their relative value, it becomes hard to determine what sorts of variable rewards are fair, justified, or earned by the PCs. The reason that magical items need to be tied to the value of a backpack in the same metric is because low-level adventurers are expected to have fewer resources than high-level adventurers.
That's what the Adventuring GP system is, a method to uniformly value non-intrinsic resources available to adventurers on their adventures. (By non-intrinsic, I mean resources that are not racial, class abilities, skills, or feats, though at some point there were guidelines for using gold to buy extra skill ranks or feats (not training costs, but actual above-and-beyond class progression feat/skill acquisition).)
In most cases, having a castle, a noble title, a politician, or a farm house is not relevant to an adventurer during his adventures. As far as a regular, average bowl of soup, which probably constitutes 1/3 of a common meal, assuming two common meals per day, the Goods and Services table lists "Food- Meals, common (per day)" as costing 3 sp, or 30 cp, so one bowl of soup costs (1/3) x (1/2) x (30) = 5 cp, on average, by my estimate. Since a +5 weapon costs 50,000 gp for the enchant and (300 + base weapon cost)gp for the unenchanted weapon, the answer to "How many bowls of soup does a +5 Sword buy?" is variable based on the kind of sword and its associated base price.
Assuming a +5 Longsword (Base price 15gp), we can see that the weapon is worth 50,315 gp, or 5,031,500 cp. 5031500/5 = 1006300, so 1,006,300 bowls of average soup. Approximately.
Edit: And honestly, that strikes me as about right for a weapon that can reliably strike at the heart of the most powerful servants of the heavens and hells.
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You have good points too :)
Honestly, my point is not to criticize the prices per se, but more to lament the lack of other options to invest wealth in, RAW.
Why wouldn't it be fun to buy a castle / land / ... ?
After all, you have prices for mercenaries, shouldn't you have prices for all the rest ?
Could you not buy your way into the royal family for a million gps ?
I mostly keep the prices for items as a power guidelines for my PCs, but otherwise I ignore them mostly because of this : not enough options.
You have good points too :)
Honestly, my point is not to criticize the prices per se, but more to lament the lack of other options to invest wealth in, RAW.
Why wouldn't it be fun to buy a castle / land / ... ?
After all, you have prices for mercenaries, shouldn't you have prices for all the rest ?
Could you not buy your way into the royal family for a million gps ?
I mostly keep the prices for items as a power guidelines for my PCs, but otherwise I ignore them mostly because of this : not enough options.
Most groups are not interested in such things on a per game basis so it is not really an issue. If it becomes an issue then the GM can account for it.
Since the only reason for the game economy is to support magic items for the most part, if the items were cheaper they would also give us less money for balance reasons, and you still would not have the money for your castles.
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What I've seen is that the only potions that get use are CLW and CMW. They are used for emergencies when the healer isn't nearby. They are also used to stabilize the healer when a UMD check is not working on the wand, or someone is bleeding to death.
Neutralize Poison. When you need it you need it to work and work fast.
Invisibility, fly: great to have them when the spellcaster isn't nearby of as a fast exit when needed.
The problem, as Charender post evidenced, is the cost. 50x against 25 x of a scroll or 15x of a wand.
As UMD is relatively cheap now you can have several party members capable of using wands, so benefiting from the lower cost, while those that can't benefit from the wands get left in the dust.
Probably it would be the right moment to reduce potion costs to something like 35x.
An alternative would be to buy infusions from an alchemist with the right discovery. They will have a shelf life of only 24 hours (unless I am misreading the rules, I see nothing on the infusion discovery superseding "An extract, once created, remains potent for 1 day before losing its magic"), but the cost will follow the lines of the spellcasting services (Caster level × spell level × 10 gp), not those of a potion.
thinknit thatbexists atvthe thecsame anyonectskevthe
Slow down, man.
So I've been playing around with magic items, and I think that the real issue with the costs of spell trigger/spell completion items stems from changes to the Use Magic Device skill.
In 3.0/3.5, few classes had UMD as a class skill. This meant that only the rogue and bard (from core) could actually hope to have a decent UMD skill. Any other class had to pay double the number of skill points, and was limited to a total number of ranks equal to half the UMD class limits. As a result, UMD remained quite closed to the other classes, and access to scrolls, wands, and staves was quite limited. Potions had plenty of utility because they went around this restriction.
In PF, anyone can have UMD as a class skill--if not by expanded skill choices, by a trait. Furthermore, you always pay 1-for-1 for skill ranks, which means that a high-level fighter can have a similar UMD as a high-level bard, Charisma being the main source of difference.
While it is true that other classes can now have 1 rank/level in UMD, this doesn't mean that they can use any magic item they want reliably. The DCs for some UMD checks are insane. Wands are the easiest item to use with a DC of 20, and a DC of 20 is a "challenging" task. The DCs only go up from there. To use a 20th level scroll, the DC is 40! So even if a 20th level Fighter or whatever had 20 ranks in UMD, he's still going to be unable to use many magic items reliably. And we're talking about a 20th level character, here. For most of the character's life, he'll have a hard time even using wands. Only those with an exceptional Charisma score can make good use out of this skill.
The upshot of this is that having a potion cost 3.33 wand charges is no longer a great economy. It's fine if you'll have to expend an average of 3.33 wand charges in order to get the wand to work (if you're able to get the wand to work at all), but if you're able to operate the wand even 50% of the time, you're getting far more utility out of the wand than a single potion, no matter what.
This has always been the case. I know that at least I and those who play in my group have typically avoided buying potions like the plague, going all the way back to 3.0. We would usually just buy wands of cure light wounds and hand them to the cleric, druid, ranger or UMD expert to heal out of combat. In combat, even potions of cure serious wounds (the very beast healing potion you can ever buy) don't heal enough to justify their enormous cost, and out of combat such things are a tremendous waste of gold.
The effect of skill changes to Use Magic Device is precisely why the economy of potions, scrolls, and wands has broken down. The value of the potion is greatly reduced when the ability to coax a wand to life is common, instead of rare.
IME, nothing has really changed. Wands are, and always have been, the most efficient way of buying spells. But wands can only go up to 4th level, so scrolls always have a use. As someone who has often played wizard characters, I have often made my own scrolls for backup situations. I have always avoided buying potions, high level wands, and other charged items that are, IMO, just not worth the ridiculous price they scale up to.
Really, the only type of magic item for which my attitude has changed in Pathfinder are magic staffs. Since they can be recharged, it's easier for me to justify their cost. Even then, I consider them to be a luxury.
So... should UMD even be a skill? Does it serve a true thematic purpose? Or should it be a class feature?
I wouldn't necessarily mind UMD being a feat or class feature that uses Spellcraft (to activate items) and Bluff (to trick items into thinking you're a different race or alignment). But I don't really mind it being its own skill, either. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
A potion of Gaseous Form is a little expensive but makes a great escape plan at mid levels.