God-Save Exploit, or No?

[-XXX-]

The only way I can see 5% items being a cheper and viable alernative to using masterwork runes is if people keep relentlessly changing servers to "refresh" godsaves to negate all the risks and expenses related to non-5% enchantments.

So I suppose the question here is whether an excessive pattern of behavior meant to circumvent the game mechanics for non-marginal gains should be considered an exploit.
I don't think that's even a question without a rather self-evident answer, if we word it that way.

Perhaps enchantment basin godsaves should go altogether.

[Skibbles]

So I suppose the question here is whether an excessive pattern of behavior meant to circumvent the game mechanics for non-marginal gains should be considered an exploit.
I don't think that's even a question without a rather self-evident answer, if we word it that way.

This was pretty much my summarized thoughts on when I made the thread in the first place, yeah, I agree. I was so certain this was ruled in a distant past, but could not find evidence of it.

I didn't even know this was kind of a slumbering beast of a topic lol

[Sincra]

Regardless of the conjecture and discussion here, the enchantment system is ancient and will need someone with a penchant for insanity to make any adjustment, firstly to make it actually accessible and modifiable, secondly to actually make any changes.

Soon(TM).

[The GrumpyCat]

Regardless of the conjecture and discussion here, the enchantment system is ancient and will need someone with a penchant for insanity to make any adjustment, firstly to make it actually accessible and modifiable, secondly to actually make any changes.

Soon(TM).

This is very true, but leaving out a conversation on the benefits or not of a RNG system, one big question I kinda feel we have to ask, as devleopers, is what is our expectations here?

There's a big temptation, I've noticed, to speed up and power up everything.

From one end of the spectrum you have:
'I've been playing for 12 hours a day for 10 years and AT LAST I've got a character to 30!'
To the other
'I've been palying here for a whole day! I'd expect to be at 30 with top stat gear + 10 mil gold + massive guildhouse by now! Ugh!!'

As said above, I do echo the sentiments that, whilst the skipping servers is an exploit, it's not the worst nor is it one we can accuratly police so I'm not going to loose sleep over it. But I will take a moment to explain why, also, it isn't /good/ either.

Lets say that there was another exploit, where by if you typed -delete_character three times quickly, you got a 100% chance of a 5% award.

And lets say people did this - suddenly the whole server is filled with those 5% characters. Sure there'd be the odd human, but most people would want to play something special. More so if there were mechanical boni involved.

Suddenly that 'special' award you earned? That's nothing(*). Being a Tiefling? Eh. There's 20 others down the road.

Allow me to divulge why fixing it is bad:
You enchant an item
It has an 87% success chance.
This actually falls into the allowed godsave range.
It procs a godsave.
Great, now you have to wait a substantial amount of time to actually finish an item.

Compared to:
You proc at god save.
You can now use that server to prepare your equipment up to a threshold.
Move to another and try applying a NOT EVEN GUARANTEED property with a godsave.
This item is still not done if it you need a rune or is not your end end game tier.

I get this. But maybe thats the point? Maybe - in theory - pcs are meant to look at that double stat three skill item and go "OH MY GOD! YOU'VE GOT ONE OF THOSE! WOW! YOU MUST BE MADE OF MONEY!'
Rather than 'Yeah you'll need one of those on all your slots to survive.'

Or maybe not? Maybe there's better ways go about this than the above? (which is very frustrating certainly.) Again I'm not really arguing that the current system is correct, nor that the current situation is under powered, over powered, or anything in between. Maybe we should make it a lot easier to get the usual 'top notch' enchantments? Maybe we should make it harder? But what I do know is that there's a temptation by... humans really to charge after the goal whilst forgetting that the destination is also important and that (at least in terms of games) a little inequity to show time played/involvement/investment isn't a bad thing

(* I do realize that by bringing this up, I am opening the can of worms that is a discussion on the award system, what it encourages at present, what it should do ect. I beg you, dear reader, to please not engage in that discussion here? I'm plopping this down as I think it's a particularly good analoge for some of the enchantment exploits, not to dicuss it's merits, or lack of them by themselves)

[-XXX-]

TBH, what is considered 'top notch'? For example, a cookie cutter WM will probably be more than fine if they equip gear like this:

+1 STR
+1 CON
+1 Universal saving throw bonus

^that's a piece of gear that requires 8075gp to enchant and a lesser rune. So yes, we do have tools to make relatively good and cheap gear. (What rings the alarm here for me is when people claim that they'd rather 5% enchant their gear than use any runes. I don't get that and sense shenanigans)

Now let's say that I want to spend a lot of gp here to enchant 5% items and apply masterwork runes on them. What are the options? Our cookie-cutter WM won't get any stronger or tougher... so maybe allow them to spot things better since we've found a way to get 33 hard spot ranks already? We might end up with something like this:

+1 STR
+1 CON
+1 WIS
+1 Universal saving throw bonus
+2 Spot

I'd estimate a piece of gear like this might cost around... 200,000gp~600,000gp to enchant without any godsave shenanigans, plus any expenses for the masterwork rune. Is there an increase in power if I equip our cookie-cutter WM with a set like this? Yes, but it'll be horizontal, not vertical.*
Our WM won't become a better WM because of it. They'll just become more adept at other things. It's a nice perk and a motivation to engage with the endgame gold sinks, not a must have (you can achieve similar results much cheaper by simply asking your wizard friend to scribe you a stack of true seeing scrolls).


Now, I don't think that the enchanting system is bad as it is, but an argument could be made for godsaves not being a thing for the enchantment basins.
Unlike crafting where godsaves protect often priceless crafting materials from the roll of the dreaded hard 1, there's little sense in godsaves intervening with enchantment basins that are primarily designed to be random.


*OK, the exception here are Div dip builds that actually do gain some vertical increase in power with more complex gear, since they benefit the most from a 3 stat spread. It's still OK IMO as the increase in power level is marginal.

[Aelryn Bloodmoon]

TBH, what is considered 'top notch'? For example, a cookie cutter WM will probably be more than fine if they equip gear like this:

+1 STR
+1 CON
+1 Universal saving throw bonus

^that's a piece of gear that requires 8075gp to enchant and a lesser rune. So yes, we do have tools to make relatively good and cheap gear. (What rings the alarm here for me is when people claim that they'd rather 5% enchant their gear than use any runes. I don't get that and sense shenanigans)

How much does a lesser rune cost? You don't need a rune at all for the above item (the total GP value is just over 8K) and can god save it - if a major rune is 350K, I'm assuming a lesser rune probably runs for at least 10% of that value, so I'll say 35K. (More about if I'm wrong momentarily). Even if you failed to pop a godsave on the above item 3 times, in this scenario, so long as you get the godsave by your fourth try, you're saving money. If you get it on the first, you saved a lot of money. Perhaps lesser runes aren't as ridiculously inflated as major runes, and this doesn't hold true for this particular example. You can ignore this paragraph, I realized where I dumbed- like I said, it's been a long time. Hurry up already, March.

If major runes are going for 350K+ as someone reported, as someone who isn't carrying around millions of gold on characters that are over five years old, I'd personally still rather 'settle' for a +2 to 4 skills (Discipline, Spot, Spellcraft, Choice), +1 Uni saves, +1 Stat(godsave), and then hard 5% another +1 stat. If the same WM in your example chooses to not spend 350K gold on a major rune, the saved gold will fund most of every set of 20 attempts at a hard 5% roll, with some tens of thousands of gold left over afterwards in some cases. There is a chance you'll fail them all- but there's also a chance you'll succeed on more than one, which can completely offset the cost of the entire project and turn it into a ridiculously oversized and unexpected profit.

Runes are for convenience of time, and for Tri-statting (or double-statting, with a lesser) an item that's got unisaves on it. They aren't statistically likely to save you any gold in any other scenario. The truth is that everyone who enchants this way is spending considerably more time to get to a finalized successful product than the people who are using runes, even when they take advantage of the one godsave/server. If you have a million gold to throw at the project, you're probably going to buy the crafting rune so you don't have to wait a month RL time on the process described above.

Then again, if you have a million gold to throw at the project, plus a whole lot of patience, you could get two to four times as many hard 5%'s without using the rune at all.

Now, I don't think that the enchanting system is bad as it is, but an argument could be made for godsaves not being a thing for the enchantment basins.
Unlike crafting where godsaves protect often priceless crafting materials from the roll of the dreaded hard 1, there's little sense in godsaves intervening with enchantment basins that are primarily designed to be random.

I don't agree with your assessment of the god saves not belonging in the basin, but I am sympathetic to your Hard 1 plight, and FWIW, I would whole-heartedly be in favor of the Hard 1 failure not existing on crafting checks, since skill checks are never supposed to automatically fail or pass. A 20 doesn't let you make a circuit board if you don't know how, and a 1 isn't supposed to stop you from tying your shoe laces on a use rope check.

To determine how much time and money it takes to make an item, follow these steps.

Find the item’s price. Put the price in silver pieces (1 gp = 10 sp).
Find the DC from the table below.
Pay one-third of the item’s price for the cost of raw materials.
Make an appropriate Craft check representing one week’s work. If the check succeeds, multiply your check result by the DC. If the result × the DC equals the price of the item in sp, then you have completed the item. (If the result × the DC equals double or triple the price of the item in silver pieces, then you’ve completed the task in one-half or one-third of the time. Other multiples of the DC reduce the time in the same manner.) If the result × the DC doesn’t equal the price, then it represents the progress you’ve made this week. Record the result and make a new Craft check for the next week. Each week, you make more progress until your total reaches the price of the item in silver pieces.

If you fail a check by 4 or less, you make no progress this week.

If you fail by 5 or more, you ruin half the raw materials and have to pay half the original raw material cost again.

This is a case where I think for mechanical consistency we should look at "but in PnP, it works this way." Even when auto failure on 1 and 20 is turned on in vanilla NWN, it doesn't apply to skill checks - I'm curious as to the reasoning it was done this way.

[-XXX-]

Then again, if you have a million gold to throw at the project, plus a whole lot of patience, you could get two to four times as many hard 5%'s without using the rune at all.

We're talking about 5%-ing an already 5% item. You want a rune for that.

[Skibbles]

I'm assuming a lesser rune probably runs for at least 10% of that value, so I'll say 35K.

They're like 1k. If that. I often just vendor them since they take too long to sell at a shop for even 1k gold and waste shop space.

Edit: I noticed you crossed it out, but left it here just to say the following:

There are some surprisingly cool things one can do with lesser runes (like you can rune a gonne with lesser blueleaf and then do a weight reduction - for any noodly arms wizards out there), but they drop so frequently it's not difficult to get.

Runes are for convenience of time, and for Tri-statting (or double-statting, with a lesser) an item that's got unisaves on it. They aren't statistically likely to save you any gold in any other scenario. The truth is that everyone who enchants this way is spending considerably more time to get to a finalized successful product than the people who are using runes, even when they take advantage of the one godsave/server.

Yep, I wholly agree here. This has been my experience. I'd estimate that my current PC has probably pulled in maybe 3-4 million over the last year and a half, and in that time I've made 9 hard 5% items without a rune. Without server hopping. If I accidentally God save a batch of gems or something I just wait and try later. Not a big deal.

Most of the gear has 5 +2 skills, 2 +1 abilities, and +1 uni. Masterwork runes can't make items like this. Here's an example of what I mean (sorry for potato quality).

So if I miraculously was able to buy all these runes at rock bottom price I'd have spent 3,150,000 minimum, and received items that are subpar for my class (which needs a lot of skills).

Instead, by taking the obviously longer route, I've saved money and gotten better items. It's hard to tell how much I spent, since income is fairly constant, but I still have about 800k left. I think that might amount to maybe 500k-1m savings to get better stuff.

(What rings the alarm here for me is when people claim that they'd rather 5% enchant their gear than use any runes. I don't get that and sense shenanigans)

I think it depends on the character class and direction.

WM is basically just a guy who hits stuff. Probably doesn't need discipline on items, or most other skills, and can get away with just STR and saves and maybe a detection skill like in your example. This is all fine, and while it is expensive is very serviceable and can make items that aren't easily accessible too.

What about a rogue, or a ranger? These classes could arguably benefit from huge amounts of skills. Discipline is almost mandatory for non-Str classes. Rogue might need hide/ms on everything that can't be found (ring of hiding), also can use spellcraft in addition to +uni, and then maybe a detector skill too.

So already this can quickly inflate gear to the need to have 5 skills. Disc/Hide/MS/Spot/Spellcraft, then DEX/CON, +Uni, and so on.

Here's the same example I put above to sort of put a picture to words.

That's my current take on it, and why I don't currently use masterwork runes except for specialty things like craftables.