Sep 12

Sep 12 Breaking Down Permanence and Crafting Magic Items

In past editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there was a spell known as permanency that allowed you to turn specific spells permanent and there were even rules for creating magic items beyond asking your Game Master. What I want to do this week is break down the issues we face when it comes to a permanency spell in 5e, as well as crafting.

Both of these kind of go hand-in-hand. To craft magic items, you need to make things permanent. To make things permanent, we need to understand why making things permanent can make your character over-tuned and powerful. And in a game where wizards are already outshining everyone else, we need to be careful about how we go about it.

Permanency Spell

The permanency spell has appeared throughout multiple editions, and it allowed you to pick from a small list of spells to make ‘permanent’ on either yourself, an object, or another creature. This list of spells were pre-curated by the designers of the game, so you couldn’t make a power word kill spell permanent on yourself (how would that even work?) - but you could make spells like comprehend languages, see invisibility, enlarge, tongues, and others. These are typically more utility focused.

In 3rd edition, you had to be a certain level and expend your hard-earned experience points. Comprehend languages and enlarge cost 500 XP each and required you to be at least 9th level, while see invisibility cost 1,000 XP and you had to be 10th level, and tongues was 1,500 XP and 11th level.

2e was different and required your spellcaster to lose 1 point of Constitution every time they cast a permanent spell. There is no mention of regaining that point in case your ‘permanent’ spell was dispelled, so you had better hope you didn’t fight a stronger wizard than you who wanted to ruin your protections.

Not only did this hard limit you, since you probably weren’t finding that many Constitution score buffing items, but did make it pretty dangerous for your to cast permanency to often compared to 3rd edition. In 3rd, all you had to do was kill a few more kobolds and regain those spent experience points (though, your allies would eventually out-level you and leave you behind if you were too happy to make things permanent).

Creating Magic Items

Now lets look at a different way of making things permanent through the power of crafting. 3rd edition requires you to know what you want to craft, which is fairly obvious, and then we get to the costs. You need to be a specific level, have the correct feat, have half of the magic item’s normal price in raw materials, and expend an amount of experience points equal to 1/25th of the item’s cost in gold pieces. You then must spend 1 day per 1,000 gp of the item’s base price working on the item, and provide any needed spells or materials based on the item you are making.

So a +1 ring of protection costs 2,000 gp, which means you need 1,000 gp in raw materials, it’ll cost you 80 XP, you must spend two days working on it, and you need to be a 5th-level spellcaster and have the forge ring feat. Once the two days pass, you make your item, no check required, and you have a shiny ring of protection that will hopefully protect you from all harm and allow you to live forever.

The major issue you are facing in this edition is that you are spending XP and that you need a TON of feats if you want to create lots of different items. Want to make a fighter a fancy new sword? Well, you better pick up the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat. Oh, want a ring? Pick up Forge Ring. Potions? You need the Brew Potion feat. Your cleric wants a new rod to hit goblins with? Craft Rod feat. Need scrolls? Scribe scroll feat. Then staves need Craft Staff, wands need Craft Wand, and then everything else falls under ‘wondrous item’ which means you need the Craft Wondrous Item feat. Luckily feats are more common in 3rd edition, but still. That’s a lot of feats to just craft magic items.

And my example above isn’t getting into the weird math requirements for figuring out weapon bonuses, rare materials, exceptions to certain rules, and more. Crafting could be complicated.

In 2nd edition, crafting is similar. It required a lot of time, basically two days plus 1d8 days, you needed an expensive item of the finest quality (because magic apparently cares about intricate engravings and finest gems), strange materials and supplies, and the spellcaster must isolate themselves in a lab, can never be more than a foot away during the 3 to 10 days needed to make an item, can’t leave the lab (even with the item because then it’ll be corrupted by other magic), and the spellcaster needs to be able to cast 6th-level spells. After all that, you then have to make a saving throw for the item and hope you succeed, otherwise you have to start the process all over again. And this isn’t even getting into specific item creation requirements or uses, just for the bare-bones enchant an item spell.

The Problems of Permanency and Creating Magic Items

So we’ve talked a bit about what’s been done. Let’s talk a bit about the problem facing us when creating crafting and permanency.

We need a well-defined power scale for magic items. Right now, we have rarities, but that doesn’t really help. Some rare magic items are weaker than uncommon, some legendary weapons aren’t that legendary. We need something that probably scales with the item’s level. Luckily, I’ve created a guide for pricing magic items so we can use that as our baseline. (and while, yes, the Dungeon Master’s Guide provides a quick list of prices based on rarity and 25 gp per 8 hours of work, that’s not helpful - it’s not thought through or a useful system for adventurers)
What level of magic do we have? Previous editions, it was quite easy to determine what the assumed magic level of the world was at by flipping through the Monster Manual and seeing what items monsters were created with. Are rings of protection readily worn by many mobs at level 5 and above? Well that helps us know that those items are available to a lot of people who are serious about adventuring. Since no (common and generic) monsters are given magic items in this edition, and 5th edition just shrugs when it comes to magic item distribution, we are left with Game Masters who all have different assumptions about when people should have magic items. Some may not give a +1 weapon until level 10 while others might grant them at level 1. This means that each person is going to have different levels of magic within their worlds - and thus, that changes how long and how much money must be spent to build a magic item. So some people may find 100 gp to be incredibly expensive, and for someone else, that’s their allowance for the week.
What are the limits of crafting magic items? Should we restrict people to specific rarities of magic items? Can someone craft a holy avenger? what about a wand of lightning bolts? Obviously different power levels but still quite potent for each one. What about can we strengthen or weaken a magic item? Well, that'd be great - but none of this is worked into the system. Because 5th edition doesn't really provide guidance - it makes it difficult to say when it is appropriate to limit a character when it comes to what magic item they can create but perhaps we can use rarity and Proficiency Bonus to help us here.

I think you get it. Crafting magic items and the permanency spell might be difficult to accomplish in 5e. We aren’t really set up for success with the tools we’ve been given.

Things I Want To Avoid

I don’t want to use experience points to power items. One, immediate, problem that I see is that not everyone uses experience points, even though I think people should. Some people are on milestone leveling which means, if we used experience points, they couldn’t use this system without lots of alterations and changes.

After that, I don’t want to impose a penalty like taking away Constitution points away from spellcasters. Though, maybe if it wasn’t permanent, it could be an OK compromise.

Which leaves us with high-level spells, powerful characters, and lots of gold and time. Then we get to the problem that not everyone values gold the same way, but maybe I can do something similar to what I did with my magic item pricing guide. We have variable costs based on how much gold people assign to different items and it’s an easy spreadsheet to adjust to your needs… well, maybe not easy, but it’s doable.

I also like the idea of having a dice roll to determine whether you succeed or not, but I don’t think missing the DC by 1 should mean you outright fail. Instead, I think a success with a consequence might be the best way to go about it, either it takes an extra day, costs extra money, or gains an odd quirk that makes it not quite as useful as one might hope for (which may help give magic items more personality).

Let’s Get Crafting

So next time we chat about crafting, we will diving into how we are going to craft items, what I envision for a permanency spell, and what our trade-offs are going to be. If you thoughts, unspoken downsides, or anything else, feel free to share down below!