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Hello!
Does anyone else feel the cost of magic armour is prohibitive or out of whack? 4k gold to up AR by one, but 30k gold for Leather of Iron? I know its my campaign & i can can change it if I want. Has anyone else adjusted the prices (up or down)?

No it is not.

No, I haven't adjusted the prices in my games.

However, I do find that I really need to push players that are used to other games (primarily D&D and Pathfinder) to realize that there is a lot you can do without magic. Exceptional quality weapons and armor do a lot of things in Palladium that are only available through magic in those game systems. Enchantments are great once you have come into a pile of money, but you can do a lot with mundane items before you get that pile of coin.

drewkitty ~..~ wrote:No it is not.

EDIT: Remember that there are more than just one person living off the sales of magical items. Just like in today's economic society no one person does everything needed to make a magic item. There are the miners that dig the metal out of the ground, there are ranchers that rase the livestock. There are tanners that make ether out of the hides of side live stock. There are adventurers that have to get paid to get the rare plants and minerals in the wilds. etc...etc...
Then there is it that you want the alchemists that make the magic items not to sell you a defective product which means there are failed enchantments that have to be paid for also.

Plus you have the rarity of the item to consider; they probably don't sell a lot of them either. So they might need that one sale to live off of when sales drop. Also you are paying for a service that cannot be rendered by just anyone, so you are paying for the magic user's expertise as well. If you don't want to pay those prices, don't buy magic items.

When it comes to magic armor, there are ironhide rings that give you a natural AR (Western Empire), and there's everything else. Those rings are worth their price. Everything else... well, if it grants you a bunch of useful abilities and it can regenerate its S.D.C., then it might be worthwhile. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother, at least not with the rules as written.

Well, I personally don't like a game in which everyone has magic items all over the place and it's commonplace. As such, I think the prices are correct. It's expensive to acquire these items and thus difficult. Plus it takes 5-10 days to attach the magical effect to the item. That's a lot of the Alchemist's time. So, you're paying for parts and labor, as well as the supply chain, and that's on top of supply/demand.

Now, if you want a game with much more magic in the world, then you can cut those down and make it more prevelant. But you sort of have to increase it for the NPCs as well to be fair.

-Vek
"Maybe a can of magic armor all, that can make the armor shine and be more protective for a short period of time."

It could be interesting to take a look at ways in which one might upgrade combat effectiveness vs expense. There are few magic effects that would add the kind of benefit you can get from a maximum dwarf-smithed weapon (+2 to parry/strike, +4 to damage), and at ~30x the price of the standard weapon, you're looking at no more than a few thousand gold for such craftsmanship, which is less than almost any magic weapon effect you can get.

As for armor, its main benefits come at lower levels when you don't have much of a hit point reservoir and enemies mostly don't have bit strike bonuses. At those levels, most characters don't have large sums of money to blow on equipment upgrades. Once you get to the point when enemies start having +8 to strike or so, most armor becomes irrelevant in the rules as written, but by that point, money generally isn't a major issue.

Overall, you're better off being opportunistic in your armor upgrades and grabbing what you can as you adventure from treasure hoards and such.