As we all know, the vast majority of the time the optimal advancement for a character's weapon is to get it up to +5 before really considering any special abilities. There are a few such as bane, keen, holy, and furious that are generally considered useful, but aside from that the majority are considered a waste for what they cost. And the reason for that is having the price for a special ability be a +bonus equivalent means the ability - which is static - effectively costs more the more powerful the weapon becomes.
Because I think weapon special abilities are cool and would like to see less player reluctance to them in my game, I'm considering going through all of them and changing them all into static cost modifiers. Since there actually are several abilities which are static costs there's certainly a precedent.
Before I go through the trouble of doing this, can anyone think of any immediate dangers to this? The one I can think of is that if abilities are too cheap players can just stack a ton of abilities on a single weapon, but if they're too expensive no one will want them which defeats the purpose of making the change. To stop that I'm thinking of leaving the +bonus equivalent in place to count toward the +10 maximum a weapon can have, but make the actual cost/price a static number.
What do you guys think?
Keep in mind that many of the enhancements are designed in mind that having them comes at the opportunity cost of an enhancement bonus. That's why bane gives you a +2.
How about this: drop WBL entirely, and only use it as a reference point. Base your magic items the way it was done in earlier editions and simply tell them, "you find a + 2 flaming sword" instead of allowing them to buy / optimize every item in the game. After all, the game world exists without the PCs, and thus not every resource in the world is just sitting there waiting for them to walk in and command everyone to drop what they are doing to make custom equipment.
Once I took out WBL in my campaign suddenly discovering a magic item meant something special again, and the players were excited to get their hands on such items. Now such a change does not happen in a vacuum and you have to consider how you want to handle monster encounters where they require specific items to hit them. There are some options for this in PF Unchained and Ultimate Combat / Magic which basically add certain bonuses to characters as they level, or you can just adjust the monsters to have vulnerabilities to more mundane attacks (which is what I actually did).
I price the flat enhancement and the bonus enhancement separately.
So if you have a +2/+2 weapon it costs the equivalent of a +2 twice. This makes it worth it to always get the bonus enhancements on your weapon, but keeps them scaling in price range.
It does bring down to price of weapons decently, but I'm ok with it. Also if you want the max weapon to be approximately the same value, allow enhancements to go up to +5/+7.
If you think +1 is too much for Flaming (as it is) then just change it to +0.5 or something like that, and maybe +0.7 for shocking, and so on. Your calculator has an exponential button if you don't feel like doing it in your head.
@Beopere - That's an interesting idea, I'm going to think about it.
@Lazlo - Actually, I've already switched to Automatic Bonus Progression for my campaign, so I've cut the rewards they get down. Now that I think about it, I may just change it so that they don't have to spend their pluses to activate powers.
@Trekkie - Not sure I understand what you mean. Most characters don't get a +10 weapon very late into their adventuring careers, like level 18+.