Ignore the prices. Wizards Inc. does not like buying/selling magic items so they made a bunch of stupid, simple rules based on what was supposed to be how rare they were, irregardless of power. This totally screwed everything up.
I far prefer the "Sane Magic Item Prices" published by Giant In the Playground:
The prices in this are mostly good, but there's some batshit insane stuff in there as well. For example, a ring of resistance is 6000 gp. A frost brand longsword, which acts as a ring of fire resistance as well as a really great weapon is only 2200 gp.
It may be that you can wear more rings, and it's harder to disarm a ring than a sword.
Well, you can only wear one ring on each hand these days, and you could easily wield two swords. Plus, you're limited by attunement, which makes the frost brand more valuable (it does multiple things while only eating up one slot). It doesn't seem like the "harder to disarm" thing should be worth an additional 3800 gp.
Maybe rings of resistance are more valuable if you don't want to walk around carrying a sword. It's much easier to wear a ring to a party than scare everyone when you carry a sword.
I'm guessing that a piece of jewlery would be more expensive than a sword.
Say that the ring has a fire opal in it, that's 1000 gp alone, let alone the cost of the metal in the ring
By comparison, a greatsword is only 50 gold.
Just having more effect doesn't matter, it's probably the cost of materials.
I suspect they just forgot that the item grants resistance, though I'd say resistance is generally overvalued (if you want to prep for specific monsters, you're generally much better off with a bag full of Potions of Resistance, and if you don't know what's incoming, use a general purpose defense like an Amulet of Health or Ring of Protection).
Prices are also weird because the game designers want to discourage certain kinds of actions by players and incentivize other types of actions. Poison, for instance, has an rather high price of 100 gp but does only an additional 1d4 damage once while a potion of healing costs half as much and heals far more hp than all applications of poison combined. And the text doesn't even say whether the poison inflicts the Poisoned status condition. So why would a PC ever bother to buy poison? At low levels, 100 gp is a lot of money. At mid-levels, that 1d4 extra damage is far outclassed by most spells that don't cost money to cast.
The game economy is setup not to make sense, but to nudge players to play the game a certain way. At least that's the only explanation I've seen for making sense of the obtuse crafting rules in 5th edition.
I suspect they just forgot that the item grants resistance, though I'd say resistance is generally overvalued (if you want to prep for specific monsters, you're generally much better off with a bag full of Potions of Resistance, and if you don't know what's incoming, use a general purpose defense like an Amulet of Health or Ring of Protection).
I don't think it's just that they overlooked it; it's not just that one item, it's all over the place. For example, Dragon Scale Mail: this item combines +1 armor (priced at 1500 gp) and a ring of resistance (6000 gp) and a few other things that aren't really quantified (advantage on saves against breath weapons and draconic fear - that's probably worth at least another 500 gp). So, that's a total value of 8000 gp, yet the "sane" price of this armor is 4400 gp.
I'm not really trying to make any argument here other than that this list, which I see bandied about all the time, is terribly internally inconsistent and not that much better than the "official" system.
I do agree that resistance is generally overvalued. Valuing a ring of resistance at 6000 gp is bonkers insane. I also agree with you that a ring of protection is far more useful, yet the "sane" price list sets the price at little more than half that of a ring of resistance.
I suspect they just forgot that the item grants resistance, though I'd say resistance is generally overvalued (if you want to prep for specific monsters, you're generally much better off with a bag full of Potions of Resistance, and if you don't know what's incoming, use a general purpose defense like an Amulet of Health or Ring of Protection).
I don't think it's just that they overlooked it; it's not just that one item, it's all over the place.
Well, it looks like they had some sort of hidden formula that values resistance pretty highly, and thus they forgot that frost brand grants resistance. The big issue with the DMG is that its granularity is a bit too low, but yeah, not really convinced by the variant price list any more than I am by the original.
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I'm guessing that a piece of jewlery would be more expensive than a sword.
Say that the ring has a fire opal in it, that's 1000 gp alone, let alone the cost of the metal in the ring
By comparison, a greatsword is only 50 gold.
Just having more effect doesn't matter, it's probably the cost of materials.
I suspect they just forgot that the item grants resistance, though I'd say resistance is generally overvalued (if you want to prep for specific monsters, you're generally much better off with a bag full of Potions of Resistance, and if you don't know what's incoming, use a general purpose defense like an Amulet of Health or Ring of Protection).
Prices are also weird because the game designers want to discourage certain kinds of actions by players and incentivize other types of actions. Poison, for instance, has an rather high price of 100 gp but does only an additional 1d4 damage once while a potion of healing costs half as much and heals far more hp than all applications of poison combined. And the text doesn't even say whether the poison inflicts the Poisoned status condition. So why would a PC ever bother to buy poison? At low levels, 100 gp is a lot of money. At mid-levels, that 1d4 extra damage is far outclassed by most spells that don't cost money to cast.
The game economy is setup not to make sense, but to nudge players to play the game a certain way. At least that's the only explanation I've seen for making sense of the obtuse crafting rules in 5th edition.
I don't think it's just that they overlooked it; it's not just that one item, it's all over the place. For example, Dragon Scale Mail: this item combines +1 armor (priced at 1500 gp) and a ring of resistance (6000 gp) and a few other things that aren't really quantified (advantage on saves against breath weapons and draconic fear - that's probably worth at least another 500 gp). So, that's a total value of 8000 gp, yet the "sane" price of this armor is 4400 gp.
I'm not really trying to make any argument here other than that this list, which I see bandied about all the time, is terribly internally inconsistent and not that much better than the "official" system.
I do agree that resistance is generally overvalued. Valuing a ring of resistance at 6000 gp is bonkers insane. I also agree with you that a ring of protection is far more useful, yet the "sane" price list sets the price at little more than half that of a ring of resistance.
Well, it looks like they had some sort of hidden formula that values resistance pretty highly, and thus they forgot that frost brand grants resistance. The big issue with the DMG is that its granularity is a bit too low, but yeah, not really convinced by the variant price list any more than I am by the original.