This may have already been talked about somewhere, but how are people able to find tomes for sale?
For instance a +5 Tome of Understanding costs your character 137k on the market, but for your wizard to craft it he must cough up 131,250 and a wish spell, which adds in another 25k in diamond dust. Am I doing this wrong or missing something here?
Who in their right mind would spend 156,250 gold and four months of their life to craft something, just to turn around and sell it for 137k
1: Some rich person commissioned them, but some were stolen.
2: Some kid inherited more than they could use.
3: Someone needed the money more, and they were already made.
The 131,250gp cost already includes the material component for the wish spells - five of them. 5 x 25k gp.
In fact the material component of the wish spells represents the lion's share of the cost of this item, and the reason why there is so little difference between the full price and the crafting price.
It's a pity they didn't separate the two costs in terms of days spent crafting. As things stand, it appears to require 138 days to craft this book, when in fact 125k of the price is material components, and the one-use book itself costs only 12,500gp above and beyond those material components. Which would suggest a 13-day crafting window.
This said, stat-raising books are extremely overpowered, so the prohibitively high cost is supposed to be the limiting factor on their availability.
Since it's ridiculous that the manufacturing price would be greater than the crafting price, I guess that the costs for the Wish/Mirackle are already included in the manufacture costs indicated, that would explain why those costs are definitely more than half the selling price, which in itself is abnormal.
see the probelm was that normaly when you ignore a requirment for an itme by adding +5 to the dc its no big deal. here a big part of the cost is the added cost to casting wish. if they only added wish to the list without adding it's cost some1 might jsut say: "well i cant cast wish il ljsut increase the dc by +5 and make the item without it..and it's expencive cost"
For that id earge GMs not to include the added cost of 25k gp per wish to the base price of the tome for calculating the time it takes to craft.
if your GM insist to not ignore it, i think your more then intiteled to make your next character a follower of Droskar. pick fortunate trait grab a Droskar's Guiding Ring and craft the tomes for half the price (3/4 of the time) and half the time. for added bonus skip the wish spell and just add +5 to the dc...
Pfffft!
You can't seriously be suggesting that you can craft tomes of stat bonus without paying the 25K gold for casting each wish contained therein.
Any DM allowing this deserves what he gets.
Actually, I think Zza Ni may be saying exactly that, since skipping they wish spell would certainly imply skipping the component cost of that spell.
Not at my table.
The component cost isn't because you are casting the spell during creation. It is because the item duplicates a spell with a component cost.
In addition, some items cast or replicate spells with costly material components. For these items, the market price equals the base price plus an extra price for the spell component costs. The cost to create these items is the magic supplies cost plus the costs for the components. Descriptions of these items include an entry that gives the total cost of creating the item.
So even if you ignore the prerequisites when crafting, as the item still duplicates a spell, the component cost is still required.
If the component cost was based on casting the spell during creation, the books would be much more expensive. At a minimum of 13 days crafting time for the +5 version, you would need to cast wish 13 times, for a total cost of 325,000gp just for the wish spell material component. You don't pay that, so the component cost is not because you cast those spells during creation. (You don't actually cast those spells - they are just expended.)