Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Alchemy Made Difficult

I'm currently working on the alchemy book which Dark Quest Games has on their upcoming products list (which hopefully means I can mention it without getting bitch-slapped) and it's turning out to be pretty cool. This company's got some extremely detailed stuff coming out. It's a shame they seem to fly under the radar of the community (at least it seems that way to me). Anywho, I've been tasked with coming up with more items (no problem) and text but at the same time try to determine WotC's scheme for the pricing and DCs of alchemical items.

This is no picnic. If you've looked at the magic item price calculation page in the DMG, then you know what I'm getting at. Why can't any calculations with 3rd edition be easy? I've come up with a pretty good system for calculating DCs (although the tindertwig defies this) but the market prices are pretty mind-boggling. That's the problem with fleshing out a minor part of the system with new stuff--figuring out how the designers came up with the originals. I suppose consumers won't settle for new alchemical items without crafting DCs or prices. No? Oh, well.

5 comments:

Daniel M. Perez said...

Reverse engineering SRD mechanics is a headache, no matter what. Some things work out well, but others involve strange arcane formulas we are not privy to (or that may not have been there in the first place). Good luck on finding that formula.

And to think I got into writing to avoid math!

Bret said...

Believe it or not, I think I've got a formula for DCs that works pretty darned well. Pricing isn't too bad but I'm not extremely comfortable with it until I apply it to more of the new items in this book. We'll see. Whatever I come up with I'll be sure to have DQG put into their book!

Anonymous said...

Can you actually bitchslap someone via blog?
Just theoretically want to know.. not that you deserve it. :)

Bret said...

I'm sure you can virtually bitch-slap. And it probably won't be the first!

Anonymous said...

Ah, but in this case you are starting to pimp the product. Not a bad thing.


Neal Levin
Dark Quest Games

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