Talk:Liber Demonica (3.5e Sourcebook)/Introduction

Magic items, common sense and the MIC
A lot of people have raised significant complaints against the pricing of the various magic items that have been put into this sourcebook. Very often, claims that they are too cheap for their level, as well as general claims of 'brokenness' have been raised. While these claims have no merit, I still need to address them, and will do so. They have no merit for the following reasons - firstly, magic items in general are overpriced, thus requiring significant price revisions to bring them into line; secondly, the MIC has a good pricing structure which has a firm logical foundation, which I believe is a far better guide to prices based on level-appropriateness of item abilities; and thirdly, reducing item costs actually benefits the least advantaged individuals within the system, which is firmly in-line with what this sourcebook aims to do.

Let's begin with the problem of magic items costing far too much for what they're worth. Let's take our favourite - the +1 sword, which costs about 2,500gp or so (give or take a hundred or two). According to the Monster Manual, which contains incorporeal creatures at CR 3, people are expected to face incorporeals as a matter of course starting from level 3. Now, this is not a problem, except that wealth-by-level guidelines indicate that, at 3rd level, your total wealth shouldn't exceed 2,700gp, which means that you have to tie up close to 90% of your wealth in a single item just to remain competitive. What's worse is that the growth of your wealth from 2nd level to 3rd level is only 1,800gp - which logically means that between 2nd and 3rd level, you won't find enough treasure to even amount to the item you critically need. This by itself is damning proof that the magic item pricing system doesn't work as written.

To make matters even worse, the need for +1 swords, or bows or whatever, is limited to the non-magic users - because magic-users have had access to magic weapon since they started existing at 1st level. Additionally, magic-users don't even need to hit incorporeal people with big sticks, as they can just use their magical mojo to handle them without ever needing to dirty their hands. This means, in short, that melee guys either bend over and take it up the ass, or suck wizard penis to try and get their buffs on. Neither of these is a positive game influence, and thus, needs to be eliminated. While the recommended rules deal with this problem, it highlights the fact that magic items are simply not priced correctly, and thus, need to be repriced in order to make any sense.

This is where the MIC comes in. Their idea of 'item levels' is a positive one, as in this way, you simply determine that 'people should have this item at level X', and then price accordingly. If some analysis is run on the figures provided on page 226, you can see that the indicated prices represent a more-or-less stable fraction of established wealth-by-level. To be more exact:

The full table is omitted because I don't want Wizards getting tetchy on us. There's a clear balance point of what percentage of your wealth an item of a given level should cost. While the numbers do wander a bit early-on, this is Wizards - you can't expect good mathematics from them even on good days. However, at the same time, this system is on fairly sound numbers, which is one of the reasons that we at Liber Demonica adopted it. As this allows us to tie something relatively abstract (how much something costs) to something fairly concrete (what level you're meant to have it at), this makes item design and balance much easier.

What does this mean? It means that for all the fighters of the world, life just got a lot easier, as they can take cool and interesting items to replace their lack of class features. While admittedly, casters benefit too, they already have cool toys - giving them a few more to play with won't likely change much. The little man ultimately benefits from this, and nobody breaks anything - provided they stick to giving things out at level-appropriate times.