It costs thousands of gold to enchant a weapon with a +1

>it costs thousands of gold to enchant a weapon with a +1
>but buying an entire new weapon with stats equivalent to your current one but +1 is only like a hundred gold

Why is this allowed

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Because D&D is fucking stupid. If you stopped playing it you'd have less to complain about.

Because:
1) The +1 enchantment beats damage resistance
2) The +1 enchantment opens up the possibility of further enhancements
3) The +1 enchantment opens up the possibility of lesser augment crystals (whereas the masterwork quality only allows least augment crystals)

>it costs thousands of milliseconds of people's attention to make a shitpost
>but explaining what the fuck you're on about is only like a hundred characters

Making your shoddily forged sword into a +1 is harder, more time and resource consuming than re-forging your sword into a superior make. There's usually way more iron and blacksmiths in the world than there are enchanters and whatever esoteric ingredients they need.

It's just economics at the end of the day.

This, but also because masterwork is only + to hit while +1 boosts damage as well

Pretty much this. Once again first reply is best reply.

It's easier to buy a Porsche than to turn a Nissan into one.

Because you're looking at magic items like their market value should be a stable, solid, or known thing.

Your warrior shouldn't find his magic sword because he bought it at Swords R Us. He should find some unusually designed or strangely pristine sword thrust through the ribcage of an ancient skeletal warrior, its hands still clutching the blade and its rusted armor seemingly pierced as easily as so much cloth, and when he pulls it out the skeleton shrieks a final time before falling apart. There should be a story in and of itself why the sword is there and what imbued it with magic, even if the character never hears it, never pieces the tale together, though your party should likely be rewarded for digging into whatever clues you leave behind and figuring it out on their own.

>magic items can be bought, sold, and exchanged as if they were as common as food and general goods.
Why is this allowed?

Magic weapons don't break, moron. There's probably market saturation.

youtube.com/watch?v=lW17rr20tGY
Fortunately, businessmen are not also wizards.

I'll take a trillion world-destroying liches over a single profiteer.

Because D&D 3.5/PF's magic item economy is fucking retarded and one of the worst parts of the game. 4e's isn't any better. Try playing 5e, where magic items are special again and you can't just buy a new sword or upgrade your existing one by going to the local Magic Market.

Because some of us don't like stagnant settings where magic exists, yet nobody takes advantage of it.

In a setting where anyone with half a brain can become a wizard if they study, and the immediate benefits of such are magic that creates food, water, light, and a number of other useful things it makes no sense why no one wouldn't do so.

This is how Artificers and Magewrights come about.

Basically, there will come a time in any world when magic WILL be industrialized, and this will result in magic items becoming more common, because people will develop cheaper and more efficient techniques to do so.

This is also what makes Eberron pretty great.

Go back to Venezuela, commie. The reason light bulbs burn out while ancient handmade ones don't is that they burn at many times the candlepower, are thinner, radiate less heat, and provide less of a fire hazard if they are broken by accident. Go look at some of the centennial bulbs, they have gigantic filiments in them that are red hot, yet they give off pathetic light. They never gave off good light--at the most it was a tenth of modern bulbs and now it's barely enough to justify continued use. This is to say nothing of the fact that LED lights with 25x the lifespan of bulbs have existed for years and haven't taken off.

Planned obsolescence does exist--but in competitive markets it exists because back when they built things to last, people STILL got new ones every few years. Overbuilding non-military hardware is a waste of development space and money.

This. You don't get a magic weapon to improve your ability to hit things. You get a magic weapon to slay magical beasts and fiends who laugh at your non-magic weapon, no matter how masterfully crafted it is.

If there's market saturation that should bring the prices down?

Underrated

To each their own there, i prefer a lower magic setting where amazing wizards are the stuff of legend and artifacts arent just mass produced for sale.

The problem though lies in a system like 3.5 or 4e where magic item markets are the default and you cant function without them. The option to do a low magic setting is nearly impossible without gimping the players. A system where magic market isnt the default allows for settings like Eberron to exist while allowing the rest of us to be happy. Its basically a winwin situation in that regard.

wow m9

u totally rekt'ed him and refuted the video

xD

>This is to say nothing of the fact that LED lights with 25x the lifespan of bulbs have existed for years and haven't taken off.

They've become very economical to manufacture, and in fact have helped eliminate filament bulbs from the market completely.

People were just initially skeptical of 10 dollar light bulbs, now they are relatively cheap.

>In a setting where anyone with half a brain can become a wizard if they study, and the immediate benefits of such are magic that creates food, water, light, and a number of other useful things it makes no sense why no one wouldn't do so.

Obviously the current mages make sure that only a few actually learn to control the total numbers around. You can study to become a lawyer, it doesn't mean you'll get to be one.

What is it with morons who like to play roleplaying games? They're too stupid to actually understand what the rule books say, yet insist on playing anyway, often with massively wrong and empty headed ideas about how things work.

Masterwork is not enchanting. A +1 sword is a magical weapon that adds to hit and damage bonuses to attacks. It also allows you to damage creatures who have damage resistance against normal weaponry (which is quite a few creatures actually).

Masterwork weaponry is merely very well crafted, being excellently balanced such that when you attack with it it gives a +1 to hit bonus. It still counts as a normal weapon, and thus cannot bypass any form of DR or such things.

The magic sword could be an ungainly and weird thing that looks like a rusted piece of shit but will still outperform the masterwork sword. Whereas the masterwork sword, though a most magnificent looking weapon that feels like an extension of your arm, bounces harmlessly off the dragon's hide, quickly dooming you and your compatriots to a most unpleasant death.

4e has inherent bonuses (in the Dark Sun book iirc). You could make the argument that since non-magic healing is more plentiful, and basically all roles can be filled by martials, it's pretty good at low magic campaigns as far as D&D goes.

+1 is unbreakable by mundane means
it pays off in the long run

>Obviously the current mages make sure that only a few actually learn to control the total numbers around. You can study to become a lawyer, it doesn't mean you'll get to be one.

Yeah, but while a lawyer who doesn't get his paper can't actually do anything but give unofficial legal advise to his mom, a wizard student who doesn't get his "official wizard paper" can still cast spells.

In what game are you able to kill skeletons and dragons while magic weapons are still extremely rare and difficult enough to create that they deserve a story?

Unless there's some Witcher RPG I don't know about; I can't think of one.

>If you stopped playing it
Try fucking make anyone play anything else that isnt shitty sci-fi.
Its fucking impossible.

>because people will develop cheaper and more efficient techniques to do so.
But what if you cant?
What if magic is very easy to pinpoint the exact nmeeds but they need really expensive stuff.

>What if magic is very easy to pinpoint the exact nmeeds but they need really expensive stuff.

You can streamline acquiring/creating the really expensive stuff.

Like, say, if magic swords need diamonds? You can improve diamond mining by industrialization.

So, have we run out of stuff to talk about to the point we have to nit pick a system already hated to death in fear of the crippling silence that would break our sanity?

The problem is, D&D 3.X doesn't treat magic items with the reverence that they deserve due to the retarded wealth by level mechanics.

In most other systems/stories, a magic item is powerful, game-breaking, and has some ties to shit that go beyond what the PC understands at the moment they receive it. Excalibur was an awesome fucking sword but its sheathe also allowed King Arthur to be invulnerable to harm and IIRC, he didn't even realize it until much later.

Yet in 3.X, WBL dictates that a character's worth will always be X after they reach a certain threshold. The mystery and reverence is removed because, rather than these weapons being powerful and revered as instruments of destruction/protection, they are instead relegated to "hey cool, a +1 [effect] sword...but I already got this +2 [effect] sword so I might as well just sell it when I get back into town."

No inquiring to its origin, no experimentation with its effect, no weight or importance being attributed to the fact that this blade has an enchantment on it, nope, just another source of gold to be sold and forgotten once you reach town.

And then to add insult to injury, the [effect] isn't even that good when stacked against a spell of similar effect, even cantrips offer more power and versatility and the caster can utilize said effects for free, without having to pay anything for it.

To say nothing on how the mage can just make that shit, or how the Big 6 renders any other magic item you could buy, that do have unique effects, as practically worthless due to not offering any mechanical boost like the Big 6 do.

Overall, just a shit situation all around.

you can still play in forgotten realms even if you use a better rule set.

>In most other systems/stories, a magic item is powerful, game-breaking, and has some ties to shit that go beyond what the PC understands at the moment they receive it.
Again, in what games/systems are you going to be doing exceptional shit, like slaying dragons or bashing in skeletons, but without the aid of magical equipment or mages?

At least until the wizard guild get the wind of it and sends their combined arcane might down his throat.

Games/systems where the designers recognize that magic isn't the only means of being exceptional.

I mean, even in the world of CoC, Cthulhu was driven back into slumber by a ship ramming him hard enough for him to go back to sleep.

Non-magical characters in SR can easily match the power of an adept/mage through the aid of augments and advanced weaponry.

Certain sects of Hunters in WoD are capable of dealing with the supernatural through research and exploitation of their weaknesses.

Among other things.

If there's no way to counter magic as a mundane character, and magic is an option that's available to certain characters, it raises two questions.

1) Why would anyone choose to not use magic if it's that important?
2) If everyone is just going to choose magic anyways, why isn't every option in the game magical in some way?

Because really, I cannot think of any reason why someone wouldn't want to choose to be a mage if it allows them to perform so many more options that actually can change the nature of how you approach and obstacle.

>Non-magical characters in SR can easily match the power of an adept/mage through the aid of augments and advanced weaponry.
So basically only in Sci-Fi or modern/gunz games are you able to do exceptional things without the aid of magic or magic equipment.

i would love to play a fantasy game where you are able to do the traditional things like kill dragons or other monsters, but magic items and equipment are few and far between, and each and every one is important. I don't think there are many that exist or competently explain /why/ magic items are hard to create/find if magic/magic-like abilities are uncommon but not one in a billion.

>So basically only in Sci-Fi or modern/gunz games are you able to do exceptional things without the aid of magic or magic equipment.

You can still be a vanilla human and still contribute to the fight against dragons and the like simply because most supernatural creatures in the world either reside in remote regions or have weaknesses that anyone could exploit.

There's nothing stopping a mundane character from dousing arrows in oil and lighting them just before shooting a troll, or presenting a vampire with a symbol of faith that makes a vampire back away and fuck off somewhere.

Granted, it's a hell of a lot harder and a lot more deadly sure but honestly, there shouldn't be anything to stop a sufficiently sized group of ordinary people from taking down a supernatural threat without using magic as a crutch.

In fact, part of the reason why humanity can even survive in a world with so many threats is due to the fact that we're so numerous and industrious that can invent weapons that are easy to use yet devastating to utilize that allow us to win out due to having enough firepower to either weaken or devastate most threats.

It's even stated in some stories that this is the reason why most supernatural entities don't just wipe out humanity en masse, because the combined force of billions of humans breathing down your neck is a battle that you're just going to lose sooner or later.

That would imply those making these threads still play DnD and are not just fishing for replies.

Price fixing by the adventurers guild to ensure a constant supply of hand-me-down magic items for lower level adventurers.