I think the reasoning is that if you're in a tropical jungle you won't really need protection from frostbite, in an arctic waste you won't need to worry about heat exhaustion. An appropriate item only needs to protect from one extreme, and gains little value from doing both. That wouldn't help with high level adventurers going to the Hells but then those hardly need to worry about half the cost of an endure elements item.
Pricing for items (and to a lesser extent abilities) is often off, sometimes quite badly.
If you're running your own home game feel free to make sensible adjustments as a house rule. If you're a player perhaps bring it up with your GM. Otherwise, that's unfortunately just the way it is. There's probably no good reason for it, but that's the way it is.
I just treat it as variance in the magical economy. Some components dont get used or are basically obsolete so they cost more. Like specialty gear. Maybe the systems to make this item have never been advanced and its like churning butter by hand so to speak.
Why is a wand of Cure Moderate Wound 6x the price of a Wand of Cure Light Wounds? Why is a Wand of Cure Serious Wounds 15x the price? Or of course a Wand of Cure Critical Wounds is 28x the price?
You certainly don't get that much extra healing from them.
More powerful magic is more difficult to contain within an item and clearly magical energy systems work on the exponential and not the linear
QUOTE="Reksew_Trebla"]...the magic items I’ve seen that do this don’t seem to have a decreased price.
Yeah, it's dumb. I usually give those items a 1,000gp discount. Except the Boots of the Winterlands. Those things are a steal.
Why is a wand of Cure Moderate Wound 6x the price of a Wand of Cure Light Wounds?More powerful magic is more difficult to contain within an item and clearly magical energy systems work on the exponential and not the linear
Disagree. In this case, the metaphor has no representation within the system. The system has wands priced by spell level. Cure Moderate Wounds heals a little more than double the 1st level version, but invisibility, scorching ray and bull's strength are more than twice as potent as similar lvl1 spells.
The designers had a couple choices; they could price each item independently, depending on the effect (which would be crazy-tedious), scrap the whole concept for another (I assume they couldn't find a better option), make Cure wands fairly priced and a bunch of other spells unbalanced (improved invisibility for the price of four lvl1 wands), or just deal with the fact that there will be some illogical choices, but less than with other options, and that Cure spells specifically matter less than others; once you're out of combat, there's very little difference between one wand of cure critical wounds and four cure light.
Disagree:
Spell level is multiplied by caster level, which has a minimum to reach that spell level. Enhancement bonuses increase by the square.
"Potency" is a metagame concept based on playing a game. The concept of exponentially more energy for diminishing returns is not a new one, and pretty standard in actual nature and physics, it makes sense to apply it to magic as well.
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It both makes sense, and is incredibly stupid at the same time. It makes sense that higher level magic gets exponentially more difficult and expensive to handle. But it also completely reinforces one of the most complained about things in PF1, the fact that the best healing in the game comes from a simple level 1 wand. CLW spam healing exists because...why should anyone ever bother to craft a wand of cure critical, when they can make 28 wands ot cure light for the same price, and get infinitely more healing out of it?
Most healing in modern society is handled by a bandaid, some neosporin, and aspirin for about 20 bucks of materials.
When its worse you go to the urgent care to get stiches for around 300 bucks
when its worse than that you go to the ER for 5 grand
When its worse than that you go into the ICU and come out at a cost of around 200 grand.
Still makes sense
It might "make sense", but that's not why the rules are as they are.
The first-aid to ICU analogy doesn't work here; in Pathfinder, a bandage that's quadruple the size of a regular 1×3 costs 30 times as much. Or, perhaps more concerning, applying 50 doses of antibacterial ointment helps as much as going to the ER, but is a fraction of the cost.
Again, metaphor and system are just not in sync here.
What I do at this point is hand out wands that cure a meaningful amount of hp (so your lvl9 barbarian doesn't need three all to himself), with the caveat that they're not effective in combat (a full round to heal 10hp, two to heal 20, etc).
Same deal as Endure Elements; change it until it feels right.
If I couldn't implement Rule Zero, I'd have never started playing these games in the first place.
I disagree, but I won't get into a political debate in here about the idiocy of the US Healthcare system.
Ok, lets take the american monetized system out.
bandaids and neosporin = clw... you can find most anyone who can do it, its common
Stitches: needs someone who's had some actual first aid training, still fairly common, not too hard to find anywhere
ER visit: The people helping you have undergone significant training. There aren't that many of them in any area really, especially when you consider population.
ICU visit: You're taken care of by someone who's spent 20% of their career simply TRAINING to be able to do what they're doing, as well as an entire team of people. There aren't a lot of ICU beds out there, they take a lot of resources to put together and cost a lot to run, whether the US health system or others subsidized by the govt.
Bandaids are CLW, CCW and breath of life is an icu visit.
So endure elements protects you from temperature, both cold and hot, but if it only does one or the other, you are getting exactly half the benefits, yet the magic items I’ve seen that do this don’t seem to have a decreased price.
It’s not like fire shield except it gives you only the option of either warm or chill shield, where you get the full benefits of the option you get, but not the benefits of choosing which one you get, where the discount pricing would be debatable on how much it should be. You are getting exactly half the benefits on the hot or cold endure elements, so there is no debate on how it should be discounted. Yet again, it isn’t discounted.
Am I missing something here?
I think it's a holdover from 3.5. I believe the intent for Endure Elements is that the caster chose hot or cold at the time of casting. I think this because of the wording for the 3.5 spell Protection from Elements:
As endure elements, but protection from elements grants temporary invulnerability to the selected energy type.
As written, however, the spell Endure Elements doesn't say that you have to choose when casting, but I believe it was the designers' intent. With that assumption, any magic item based on Endure Elements would have to be only keyed to hot or cold, because the caster would have hypothetically chosen one or the other when casting the spell as part of the item creation process.
In those terms in Pathfinder...you could cure almost anything with a box of band-aids and a tube of neosporin, saving yourself huge amounts of money and effort. So why would you ever even consider going to an ICU?
Because the dragon isn't going to wait for you to finish applying bandaids and neosporin to the person it just bit.
The dragon doesn't care about you going to the ICU, either. Not usually, anyway. In-combat healing is usually a sucker's bet.
As I said above, it's not a good analogy at all.
And as far as how in-game potency relates to actual physical laws, while it may be coincidentally true, I seriously doubt the designers went "alright, everyone. Now remember, when we're calculating how much pirate treasure a supersoaker full of spell juice costs, we have to make sure that the formula in some way mimics natural laws."
For every argument someone could make that it makes sense "in-game", there's another to support that it doesn't.
Sometimes, the system and the metaphor work in wonderful harmony. Hit points, attack rolls and actual life-or-death combat comes to mind. But other times, rules are rules because...rules. And while that's d not ideal, it's certainly understandable; until someone can show me a system where the rules and the metaphor are blended so seemlessly as to be perfect, I'll find it in my heart to forgive systems for having the odd rule here or there that doesn't quite mesh.