Cost of Magic Weapons and Their Enhancement Bonus

[RubberChickin]

So up until lately I though I understood the pricing of magic weapons pretty well. A +1 weapon was 2k, +2 weapons was 8k ect.. However I got into a debate when another pc decided to add flaming to his +1 scimitar for 2k. It was my understanding that a +1 flaming weapon would have an enhancement bonus of + 2 and therefore should cost 8k and he should be paying 6k instead of 2k. Could anyone provide some clarification on how enhancement bonuses stack and the pricing associated with them? If you could back up any statements with page quotes that would be nice. Thank you.

[Tigercat]

A weapon to be enchanted with a special ability like flaming or in my case, Keen, must be at least a +1 magic weapon. The special ability costs the next step up in magic weapon enhancement; in this case its a +2 enhancement bonus which costs 6000gp.

[Mike Mistele]

You are correct.

When adding enhancements to a weapon, you look at the new total "enhancement" that the upgraded weapon would have, and you pay the incremental cost for this.

So, a +1 weapon has a total effective enhancement level of +1 (value 2K, plus the cost of the masterwork weapon). A +1 flaming weapon has a total effective enhancement level of +2 (+1 enhancement to attack and damage rolls, and "flaming", which is effectively a +1 bonus for pricing the weapon), for a value of 8K. To upgrade from +1 to +1 flaming costs an incremental 6K.

Another way to think about it is this: if one were to outright purchase the new item, rather than upgrade an existing item, what would it cost? A +1 longsword costs 2315 gp, and a +1 flaming longsword costs 8315 gp; to upgrade from the former to the latter, you pay the incremental cost.

If it's not intuitive to your friend, point this out: since actual enhancement bonuses to weapons can't go above +5 (i.e., there's no such thing as a +6 weapon), then why does the chart in the CRB go to +10? It's because, between enhancement bonuses and other types of upgrades, one can easily create a weapon with a total "effective" bonus (from the standpoint of the relative power of the weapon) which goes beyond +5.