Ensorcelled Items

[Choinski, Burton]

Well, I'm sort of against a Will cost (and even the energy drain I mentioned
before), since who gets the hit?  The maker?  The "owner" of the item?  Who
ever happens to be carrying it?  However, if casting is truly limited by
casting ability, then you could have 1000 mana stashed in piles of
batteries, but you can still only trickle it out at your casting ability per
day....

And then you have to recharge them.  The batteries do give a mage the
flexibility to do maximum output casting over several days (instead of
running out on the first day, and then being tapped for a while) at the
expense of being tapped out for several days of down time to refill them.

To balance it I would make the recharge be "inefficient", sort of on the
model of the Knowledge spell.  At EL0 it may take 10 mana to stash 1 mana in
the battery, but at higher ELs the waste goes down since the battery is
better made (perhaps by 1 per EL, to a minimum of x2). Or perhaps x10 may be
too much and just have it start at x5.  Or maybe have it be x2 in a
protected area (free of outside influences) and x3 otherwise.

Another "irritant" to balance the flexibility is time to recharge.  What if
the maximum you could refill was MEL points per day?  Joe wizard with 100
points of battery would need a lot of days, even if he had the mana
available.  Yea, he could have apprentices do it, but it will take longer.
And like "Healing", the item could only be charged once per day (so you
could not pass it along to the next apprentice in the chain and thus tap it
up in a day).  Taking a Runequest bent to it, it should probably be a sort
of ritual, not a zap-bam casting (perhaps an hour for the process, maybe
even a strategic turn if you want to be a hard ass).

The battery is very useful, but if put enough irritants on the recharge
part, we won't need rules for how many you can have, or worry about drain or
MEL limits.-- the logistics of reload will make the numbers low (if you have
your wizard spending the day chanting over batteries, he isn't training
skills or anything.  It's intensive work.).  If you make it a day process to
recharge (and it should be at least a day process to make enchantments
anyways, so it's not like the refilling is any harsher than the
construction), then actually having apprentices becomes a desireable thing
(much like for crafting, in order to add to the work points).  This
reinforces the need for the player to hire people around them (rather than
be lone wolves, doing eveything themselves).  Hirelings are money sinks, so
of course they have to go off and adventure for coin. :}

The hireling money sink is a big game balance thing.  When my brother wanted
to go running about with his 10 warrior hirelings and attack giants in the
mountains, he better well bag them because it was getting expensive to have
them on retainer. :}



----------------------------------------
Burton Choinski
Principal Software Engineer, Quality Engineering
email: burton.choinski at matrixone.com

phone: 978-589-4089
fax:      978-589-5903

MatrixOne, Inc.
210 Littleton Rd.
Westford, Ma 01886
www.matrixone.com

The First in Intelligent Collaborative Commerce
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