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This thread might be better-suited for one of the rules or homebrew boards, but I know this board is full of people who'll be interested and who'll have good opinions to offer. :)
I came up with 5 or 6 different items this time around, and I came across some interesting issues in my pricing attempts. I think Superstar-oriented items naturally lean towards difficult pricing, since they're deliberately aiming to differentiate themselves from existing spells and effects. Now, I know that ultimately, you can always ballpark the price if you need to. But some of these seemed general enough to merit discussion - general enough to become questions of "how does doing this to an effect affect its value in the game," rather than "how powerful is my particular item in relation to all the others."
So, I'd love to hear what people think about the questions I post here, and I'd love to see if other people have interesting questions in a similar vein.
Thanks, all!
Let's talk about raising the save DC of an item's effect on foes.
Magic items produce spells or spell-like effects. For a saving throw against a spell or spell-like effect from a magic item, the DC is 10 + the level of the spell or effect + the ability modifier of the minimum ability score needed to cast that level of spell.
There's a great difficulty with creating wondrous items with save DCs: they seem to scale very poorly. An item whose effects allow a save DC always takes the minimal DC possible for a spell of that level - which is obviously far, far lower than the typical DC that effect would have if an in-game spellcaster were to use it. The obvious fix is to use Heighten Spell to raise the effect level, like the eyes of charming do in order to get charm person with a DC of 16 rather than 11.
The problem is, this raises the price by a fantastic amount. A DC 11 charm person in a can would cost 1*1*2K = 2000 gp; but Heightened to 4th level for the DC 16 brings the price up to 4*7*2K=56,000. So raising the DC by 5 has cost us upwards of 50,000 gp. And that's a problem - because, instead of taking an item for 2-3 level characters and making it work a little more than 40% of the time, we've just rocketed its price up to the extent that it's completely unavailable until 8th-9th level at earliest, by which point our desired DC of 16 is already well on its way to becoming rusty and unhelpful. Another interesting side-effect is that these eyes of charming are obviously substantially inferior to a SIAC using charm monster instead of charm person, which would apparently cost precisely the same.
I'm not suggesting that raising DC should be cheap - I know there's an explicit attempt to limit magic items' powers, in order to prevent characters from being able to buy their favorite level-appropriate spells and abilities à la carte. But it seems to me that the Heighten Spell option is going too far in the other direction - adopting the worst-case maximum price, which far overshoots its value. I ran into this issue with a whole bunch of my item attempts, both this year and last (I have an unfortunate fondness for mind-affecting mischief...).
What might be a better way to price raising an effect's DC? Would you price the eyes of charming any differently than the core rulebook has it?
Let's talk about limited uses of versatile spells.
Some spells have a wide range of possible uses; some items use such spells in highly specific ways. For example, an item that summons shadow creatures could be cool, but a shadow conjuration SIAC which can only use the spell for summonings would be far inferior both to a shadow conjuration SIAC without that restriction, and to a summon monster IV SIAC. So, we've got an effect that clearly requires a 4-th level spell, but as a specific application of that spell it's obviously not as valuable as the spell itself.
I ran into this issue in my own submission, which made use of telekinesis to pull off a particular combat maneuver from afar. One might say that Eric Hindley's shadow falconer's glove from Superstar '11 could be priced very precisely as compared a single telekinetic combat maneuver.
How, then, does this kind of limitation affect an effect's cost? Does this seem like taking the spell down a level or two - the converse of the guideline "a spell combining effects of several other spells must be of a higher level than the component spells"? Would you subtract a percentage of the cost - and if so, what percentage? Please feel free to use the summonings-only shadow conjuration or the single-maneuver telekinesis as examples.
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Let's talk about raising the save DC of an item's effect on foes.
Too low DCs were one of the problems I had with my item. I knew about the eyes of charming but chose not to raise the DCs with Heighten Spell because didn't want to make the item too expensive. So, I also want to know if there are good ways to tackle this problem, other than not using spells that allow saves.
I've always had difficulty with items that are based on a spell, but only one facet or limitation.
For example:
Self cleaning chamber pot. Based on prestidigitation, but only one of many uses and only on itself. A Prestidigitation at will item could be used on anything, plus the heat/cold/flavor/small trinkete creation uses.
Or
Cloak of the raven: Allows one to transform into a raven (per beast shape II) at will, but only a raven. Not any of the multitude of other creatures.
How do you price that?
Oh, hey, folks. I usually play within the RPG Superstar forums, but this one's understandably been shifted over here.
So just to provide some context: These are questions I had when writing items for the Superstar contest; for this reason, I'm much more concerned with "correct" pricing than I would be for a home game of my own.
I'm happy to hear thoughts by any and all.