Category: Challenges

Graded weapons and armor are very simple. Rather than working spells, exactly, they work with enhancement bonuses, plus weapon, armor, and general qualities. They can be crafted or enchanted, and follow the same guidelines regarding assignment of graded abilities. Graded Qualities for Weapons and Armor Many weapon and armor qualities are …

Over the last week or so I’ve talked about assigning graded abilities, graded wands, graded staves, how I determined their market price, and how to adjust their caster level. The first post was fundamental to all graded items, and the other articles were because spell trigger items are quite easy to work …

I released Draconic Bloodlines late last week, and it’s seen some favorable response (decent sales, for me, and a five-star review). I’ve been asked to give the sorcerer fey bloodline a similar treatment. I believe I will.

This should be the last math-heavy post for a while, then I can start getting into creating stuff with this system. When working on Crafted Graded Staves I found that some of the PRD staves cannot be implemented with these rules. For instance, the staff of necromancy has 21 levels of spells …

In Crafting Graded Wands and Crafted Graded Staves, I needed to determine how to price such items. I had a sense that the market price was going to end up being something like “Caster Level times Spell Level times a constant”, but I didn’t know what that constant was going to be. …

In my last post I looked at crafting graded wands. At its base, a staff is now a larger-capacity wand. It works the same, but is a bigger item (and usable as a weapon, a quarterstaff — I’ll look at graded weapons soon) and can have a Caster Level of …

The other day I described how graded items can be defined. That post is a bit dry, but that happens sometimes with groundwork. I’ll present an application of how spell trigger items can be implemented as graded items below. Wands are the simplest spell-trigger items to model. Per the Pathfinder Reference Document, …

Some abilities and special items are defined in terms like “up to nine levels of spells, no more than one higher than fourth level and none higher than sixth” (house rules I’ve seen for magic staves) or “six benefits; you can triple one benefit and double another benefit, or double …

I didn’t write as many articles this year as last year (28 vs. 32) and my word count is lower (27,000 vs. 38,000). However, I stayed closer to the theme: more than half, almost two thirds I think, of all posts were related to Polyhedral Pantheons. This includes drafting 72 deities …