I'm playing an arcane caster and would like to have a glove made that allows me to cast Spectral Hand for three minutes a day, usable in 1 min. increments. I believe the formula for such an item is Spell Level x Caster Level x 2,000gp. This, however, gives you a price of 12,000pg, which is way too high. So there's a rule that says if an item has less than 50 charges you divide 5 by the number of charges, 3 in this case, and then divide the price (12,000) by that number. So, 12,000 divided by 1.6 is 7,500. Again, this is way too high for such an item. There's an item called the Glove of Bony Power not dissimilar from the one I'm making, but it has an additional property and only costs 5,400gp. So, then I started to think, maybe what I think of as "a charge" isn't correct. If you think of a charge as a caster of a given level casting a spell one time, then that means I would divide 5 by 1 (instead of three) which gives me 5. So the formula would be 2 x 3 x 2,000 = 12,000pg/5 = 2,400gp. This seems much closer to the expected price.
My question is, would you guys have gotten to this point faster by using the rules given? That is to say, am I completely missing something in the RAW, or did this really require me re-imagining the friggn definition of a charge to get the correct pricing?
Largely agree. You want 3 castings of Spectral Hand a day. That's 7,500gp, or 6,750gp if you go with a command word.
I feel like the duration really shouldn't be grounds for a discount, here. I mean, spectral hand is a spell meant for combat, where the difference between 10 and 30 rounds isn't really much of anything.
It *might* prevent you from those situations where you're pre-buffing just outside the door to the next area, but that's about it.
And as stated above, this item is almost definitely better than a wand of spectral hand, so the price should reflect that.
The gloves you mentioned effectively allow you to cast 2 lvl2 spells 1/day at CL3. And that costs 5,400gp.
So I think the cost of a 3/day, lvl2 spell CL3 command word activated item is the best fit at 6,480gp. If you really wanted the effect to only last a minute, I could see the item going down 500-1000gp in price--it should still cost at least a little more than a wand of spectral hand.
Agreed, obviously. Custom-anything is the purview of the GM. The rules of magic item creation, as clearly stated by RAW, are not actually hard-and-fast rules. Merely suggestions.
Creating magic items is an art.
To answer the last question in your post (since I realized that I hadn't actually done that), no. Your second interpretation isn't what I'd go off of at all. A "charge" is as you thought originally.
I'm normally extremely generous with magic items abilities and what they effectively cost (I enjoy stories best told at lower levels, but don't want my player's entire magic item supply to consist of a few +1's and a wand of cure light wounds), but 2,400gp for this item is way too cheap for me.
I guess if 6480 is correct, then I might as well just make it 3/day rather than 3 mins a day as it doesn't seem to change the pricing.
Well, there aren't rules for changing the duration of an effect like that. As I said, I'd consider reducing the price by 500-1,000gp if the duration was 1min, but that's about it, for reasons stated above.