Advice for an item pricing

[DarthLang]

I am creating a new wondrous item for my current campaign and I wanted a second opinion before bringing up pricing with my gm. I essentially wanted to make an Effortless Emblem, an armor version of effortless lace. I am essentially taking the Effortless Armor spell at 5th caster level possible and putting it into an emblem I can affix to my armor. This would allow full movement in any armor and a reduction of the armor check penalty by 2. Once it is affixed it cannot be removed so I would need to buy another if I decide to upgrade. I was thinking about pricing it around 4000gp. What do you all think?

[_Ozy_]

Well, it's a constant effect so by the formula it would be:

SL * CL * 2000 * duration factor (x2 for 1/min level spell)

That's:

2 * 5 * 2000 * 2 = 40,000 which is quite a bit higher than your initial cost.

Another way of looking at it is that you're effectively adding ~ +10 to your movement, and giving yourself +2 to a bunch of skills

That's kind of like adding boots of striding and springing to a circlet of persuasion, which would be:

5500 + 4500 * (4/9) * 1.5 = 8500

The 4/9 is because you're getting a +2 bonus instead of +3, the * 1.5 is because you're effectively adding multiple abilities.

Also, you're adding this to armor, so maybe tack on another factor of 1.5 since you don't have to take up a separate slot, so figure ~12k or so. Maybe 8-10k since it's not quite as good as boots of striding and springing. In any case, 4k is probably a bit low.

[skizzerz]

By the price chart, a slotless item which provides continual effortless armor at CL 5 would cost 80,000 gp (spell level 2 x caster level 5 x 2,000 gp x 2 for a 1 minute/level duration x 2 for slotless). The crafting cost would therefore be 40,000 gp. However, this does not factor any of the myriad vulnerabilities of the item (only attaches to one armor, permanently fails if removed or against sunder and dispel effects).

I feel a more fair comparison is the cost of making mithral armor, since effortless armor roughly matches what that material does. The highest cost of making something mithral is 9,000 gp for heavy armor, so I would price it somewhere around that number.

Note that I would require Craft Magic Arms and Armor to create the emblem, not Craft Wondrous Item.

(and ninja'd... yes I did spend an hour typing this reply up, I got distracted :P)

[DarthLang]

What about the item that I compared this created item to, the effortless lace. Doing a little calculation it would come to around 90,000 gp.

15 (caster level of the item) * 3 (level of the spell) * 2000 gp * 2 (slotless) /2 (1 day duration.) = 90,000 gp

Yet it is a puny 2500 gp last time I checked. I don't know why the cost is so radically different but there you go. Developers WHY?!?

[_Ozy_]

Because for many items the standard formula is way, way off. Plus, it's not actually duplicating the effects of a spell, so you wouldn't use the formula anyways.

Shrink item does exactly none of what effortless lace does, whereas your item pretty much duplicates a spell effect.

However, as you should note, both of our responses relied on putting together values from existing magic items to come up with a more reasonable estimate rather than relying on the formula pricing.

[DarthLang]

So what you are saying is that I should add a completely fluff spell that doesn't really do what the enhancement does. :P Thanks for the help guys. I run this past my gm.

[_Ozy_]

DarthLang wrote:

So what you are saying is that I should add a completely fluff spell that doesn't really do what the enhancement does. :P Thanks for the help guys. I run this past my gm.

Well, since you are actually duplicating the effect of a spell, you may as well use that spell as the requirement for crafting at CL5. That said, I wouldn't use that effortless armor with the formula for pricing, but rather shoot for 8-10k based on the reasoning in the above posts.

[taks]

Because that caster level doesn't change the price in that case, it merely sets the crafting DC which in turn sets the dispel DC.