Class Abilities
Up till now, we have covered what amounts to generic character creation. Picking races, feats, skills, etc, things that you would do for any character, regardless of class. These are things you could likely have done on your own without too much difficulty, but if you’ve been reading straight through, it should hopefully have given you some ideas on the rough outline of how the class works. Now we will be getting into more specific details on what makes an Artificer an Artificer, their class abilities. If you find that there is something about how an Artificer works, mechanically speaking, this is likely the section you should pay special attention to. While this guide won’t cover *EVERY* ability the Artificer gains (partly for OGL reasons), what it skips over should be self-explanatory (such as Bonus Feats and Disable Trap).
InfusionsInfusions are arguably one of the more confusing abilities possessed by an Artificer. While it is true that the Artificer is not a spellcaster, and that they do not have spell lists, they do have something similar going by a different name, Infusions. Superficially, infusions act very much like a cross between a Cleric and a Sorcerer’s spellcasting abilities. All Artificers automatically know all infusions available to them, much like how clerics know all spells of a given level, but the Artificer can choose which infusion to use without preparation, like the Sorcerer. The biggest difference, mechanically speaking, is that Infusions cannot be cast directly, they must be infused into an object or a construct. In effect, an infusion creates a temporary magic item (or affects a construct), and that is all. They could infuse Bull’s Strength directly into a construct, like a Warforged, but not directly into a human. They would instead need to infuse the spell into an item, like a belt, and then have the person wear the item, creating a kind of temporary Belt of Giant’s Strength.
This does not come cheap, however. Many infusions have very long casting times (anywhere from 1 round actions up to a full minute or longer), and as a general rule of thumb, any infusion that would let the Artificer grant abilities to someone else will have a very costly material component. The long casting time can be partially sidestepped by using action points. If you burn one action point (AP), you can speed up your infusion into a full round action. Note that a full round action is not the same as a casting time of 1 round. 1 round casting times begin when you start casting them, and when your turn comes around again, where full round actions all happen on your turn normally, they simply keep you from taking a move action (although a 5’ step is still available to you). There is also a feat that can help you speed up infusions without the use of action points, as covered in the Feats sections of the guide above. The costly material components, however, you cannot get around so easily.
For example, lets look at one of the Artificer’s best combat infusions, Personal Weapon Augmentation. With this, the Artificer can give any weapon they wield a +1 equivalent ability, even if the base weapon is not already magical, or even masterwork, and it does not cost them anything to do so. However, this infusion relies on the skill and expertise of the Artificer to maintain the temporary enchantment, meaning it cannot be passed on to someone else to use. To give someone else’s weapon that same +1 equivalent ability requires the use of the Weapon Augmentation infusion, which has a costly material component, namely 50 gp worth of oils and unguents, making it fairly expensive for low level use. Worse yet, the infusions that require these costly material components all typically require different components, meaning you must carry a wide arrangement of oils and such with you, tying up a good amount of character wealth in components. While this might not seem so bad, the logistics of trying to carry dozens of various vials and bottles around can become an issue, not to mention the fact that they can get rather heavy. So, you will usually find yourself sticking mainly to buffing yourself via your infusions, and either only using infusions without the costly components on others, while carrying around a few bottles of the costly stuff for emergencies. At higher levels, when you can afford to spend 50 gp a pop to boost someone else’s weapon, by all means do so, and if the party members want the use of your expensive infusions at earlier levels, they can always buy the components for you (see the Team Play section towards the end of the guide for details on interacting with the other players, including charging them for services).
This may all make Infusions sound like a lot of hassle, and to some extent they are, but the benefits far outweigh the costs if used properly (see Tricks of the Trade for some particularly good infusions to use). Beyond their obvious power, infusions are not arcane spells, and do not suffer from Arcane Spell Failure, meaning they can be used in medium and even heavy armor without fear of failure. However, the downside of an infusion not being a spell is that they cannot be used like spells. Yes, you can use metamagic on infusions, but an infusion cannot be used for spell prereqs when crafting items, so that while you may have an infusion that duplicates the Light spell, you would still need to make a UMD check to fake the spell when crafting anything that required that spell. Another drawback is that the Artificer cannot research new infusions like a wizard can research new spells. It simply cannot be done, no matter how bright and creative your Artificer is, he will never be able to simply invent a new Infusion. Adding new infusions to the list should be a big deal, adventures in their own right to wrest the secrets from some long forgotten cult, or finding a schema detailing the new infusion somewhere in the buried heart of Xen’Drik in a long abandoned giant temple, never something the Artificer just does in the downtime and suddenly has an infusion no one has ever seen before.
A helpful way to visualize exactly what an Infusion does when its used is to picture the item you are infusing as being a picture, a diagram, or a web of lines. The pattern of those lines define what the item is, what properties it has, etc. When you infuse the item, you are essentially delving into the pattern, and moving lines around, changing the properties of the physical object in the process. So, if you move this line over here, erase that line, and draw a new one over here, you’ve re-written part of that item to resemble fire, and your sword suddenly bursts into flame (you just infused a personal weapon augmentation to give it the Flaming ability). However, these changes are temporary, and eventually the original pattern re-asserts itself, hence the infusions having a limited duration. The more skilled the artificer (aka the higher their level), the more drastic of a change they can make (hence more powerful effects).
Craft ReserveNormally, a spellcaster uses their knowledge of magic to imprint a new property onto an item, and has to put a bit of their own life force into it to hold that impression in place. To use the previous visualization, a wizard would see magic item creation as being like taking a big rubber stamp and smooshing the fire symbol on top of the pattern for a sword, and then forcibly holding that symbol in place to make a permanent magical item, but they have to leave a little bit of themselves behind to hold it there. In game terms, they have to spend xp when making items. The Artificer has another option though, which allows them to craft items without spending xp at all, they have their Craft Reserve. Think of it like a reserve of magical energy that the Artificer can tap into to use while crafting. When they craft that new item, they can use some of that energy to hold the new design in place, instead of having to use their own life force.
Mechanically, the Craft Reserve is essentially a little pool of points that can be used instead of xp when crafting magical items. Something important to remember though is that this pool of points resets at every level to the value given on the table, it is not additive. In other words, if you currently have more points in your craft reserve than normal (typically by having used Retain Essence, covered later), and you gain a level, you can actually lose crafting points as your total resets to a lower value. This also means that any points you don’t use from the previous level will essentially be wasted when you level up, as you will have the same number of points for this new level as you would have if you had totally emptied the reserve before, or hadn’t used it at all. Many times, the adventuring Artificer will find that they get enough xp to level up while in the middle of nowhere, without having had time to use all of their craft reserve. If this happens close enough to the end of that particular adventure, the Artificer can make use of the often ignored rule that you can delay leveling up, that you don’t automatically gain a level as soon as you have enough xp for it. That means the Artificer can go home, use up his craft reserve, and then level up, and not have lost anything. If this happens in the middle of an adventure though, not leveling up can put them behind the power curve, and endanger themselves and the party by not being a high enough level to effectively combat the threats presented to them, so it is a balancing act on when to level, and when not to level.
Artificer KnowledgeAs the Artificer advances, they begin to get an innate feel for all things magical, as far as items go anyway. Be it a gut feeling or just experience enough to recognize tiny little details that others miss, the Artificer can tell if something is magical just by looking at it. This is their Artificer Knowledge ability.
By handling and examining an object, an experience Artificer can make an Artificer Knowledge check in much the same way a Bard can make a Bardic Knowledge check, except instead of that check telling you the background of the item, this one tells you if it has magical properties or not. Ideally, the Artificer would make an Appraise check to see which items appeared to be unusually valuable, and then make an Artificer Knowledge check on those items in particular. If he thinks they are magical, he can then use Identify on just those items, without worrying about wasting 100 gp worth of pearls and an hour’s worth of time on a mundane item.
Granted, a simple use of Detect Magic is more effective, but is also going to be a more limited resource that may not always be available (like if you’ve already used all of your infusions for the day). This ability is mundane, and costs the Artificer nothing, not even an infusion per day to use.
Artisan BonusKnowing how something is made often times gives insight into how it works, and the same holds true for the Artificer. Any time an Artificer attempts to activate a magic item for which he also knows how to create, he gains a +2 bonus to the Use Magic Device check to do so. For an often overlooked and forgotten example, the Artificer gets Scribe Scroll at level 1, as well as his Artisan Bonus, meaning that he automatically starts the game with a +2 circumstance bonus UMD to activate a Scroll, which stacks with his skill ranks, his charisma modifier, possible synergy bonuses, everything. When he gets high enough to be able to craft a wand, he would then gain a +2 bonus to activating the wand. Add that to the fact that UMD automatically grants a +2 to the check for any item you’ve activated before, and you’re looking at an automatic +2 to activating that wand the first time, and an automatic +4 to activating that wand every time after that.
This is an innate part of what the Artificer is (since you gain it at level 1), and is essentially 2/3rds of the Skill Focus (UMD) feat for free. A subtle but very powerful ability.
Item CreationThis is the area that even the most experienced D&D player will often stumble over, so do not feel ashamed if you don’t understand it right away. That said, this is the defining ability of the Artificer, the function that the class was built to perform. Through the use of their unique abilities, as will be explained shortly, the Artificer is potentially capable of making literally any magical item ever printed, regardless of who it was originally intended to be made for or by. The process is fairly complicated though, so we will take it one step at a time, and provide some examples of the process towards the end of this sub-section to show you how its done.
Getting StartedAt the most basic level, the Artificer makes a magical item just like everybody else. You take the market value of the item you want to make, and divide by 1,000 to get the number of days it will take you to craft the item. Take the market value of the item and divide it by 25, and you will get how many xp the item costs to create (some or all of which you can supply from your Craft Reserve). Take the market value of the item and divide it by 2, and you will get how much gold it will cost you to make the item. This is the basic information you need to start the crafting process.
Cost to Craft (gp) = Market Price / 2
Cost to Craft (xp) = Market Price / 25
Time to Craft (in days) = Market Price / 1,000
The primary difference in what the Artificer does is that instead of casting the spells (if any) that are required as prerequisites, they make a Use Magic Device check to fake it. The DC is 20 + Caster Level of the spell being faked. So, lets say your Artificer wants to scribe a scroll of Magic Missile, a lvl 1 spell, they would need to make a UMD check with a DC of 20 + 1 = 21 (to make a scroll that only fires a single missile). If they pass the check, then they succeed in making the item. If you fail the check, it does not necessarily mean that you fail at making the item though. While crafting, you get to make one UMD check per day, plus a single extra check at the very end as a last ditch emergency check, giving you a minimum of two attempts. You only need to pass one of these checks in order to succeed, so even if you fail the first check, you will always have at least one more try at it. For the more expensive items, you will even get dozens of chances to make that single check, meaning you are virtually assured of success. Should the Artificer attempt to make an item that does not have a spell prereq to emulate, success is automatic. Making a +3 sword does not require you to cast any spells, you only need to be a high enough level, meaning there are no UMD checks to make, and the Artificer can craft it normally.
QuirksThe next level of complication is that an Artificer counts as being 2 levels higher for meeting minimum crafter level prereqs only. For example, take a Wizard making a Scroll of Fireball. Normally, level 5 is the minimum crafting level for that scroll, as that is the earliest level that the wizard could cast a Fireball to fulfill the Fireball spell prereq. The Artificer, however, could potentially scribe that same scroll at only level 3, because he counts as being a lvl 5 crafter, thanks to the +2 boost. The drawback to this is that while the Artificer counts the +2 to determine when he or she can make the item, they do not apply it to their “caster level” when determining the effects of the spell. So, using the Fireball scroll example, when the Wizard scribes the scroll at lvl 5, his caster level for it is also 6, meaning it does 5d6 damage. When the level 3 Artificer scribes that scroll, they have to use their real Artificer level as the caster level, meaning the Fireball will only deal 3d6 damage, not 5d6.
The Artificer also has one further kink in their item making process, that pertains mainly to scrolls. Since they make Use Magic Device checks to scribe their scrolls with, the spells contained in said scrolls are not arcane, or divine, meaning that the only way to activate them is with a UMD check. An Artificer cannot, by the rules, make a scroll of Fireball, hand it to the Wizard, and have the Wizard cast from it like they normally would. While seemingly odd, there is a reason for this limitation. An Artificer can make a scroll of any spell they want, by virtue of faking it with UMD, they do not have to have it as a Spell Known. A Wizard does need to know the spell before they can use it. Given a bit of time and gold, an Artificer could make a scroll of every arcane spell in the game, hand them to the party Wizard, and let him scribe all of the spells in the game into his spellbooks. That’s unbalancing, so this fix was put into place. It does have its up side though. Since a scroll made by an Artificer is not Arcane, it does not suffer from Arcane Spell Failure, meaning the Artificer can cast from it with UMD while wearing medium and heavy armor without worrying about botching the spell.
WalkthroughsLets go through an example of the entire process using a fairly simple item from the DMG:[sblock=The Scabbard of Keen Edges]Found on page 266 of the DMG, the Scabbard of Keen Edges has the following crafting information:
“Faint transmutation; CL 5th, Craft Wondrous Item, keen edge; Price 16,000 gp; Weight 1 lb.”
From this, we pick out the information we need.
It’s crafting level is 5.
It’s market price is 16,000 gp.
It has Keen Edge as a spell prereq.
The rest of the information we don’t really need to worry about (aside from that you need to have Craft Wondrous Item before you can even start to make it). We now need to extract the other information we need out of the market price:
Cost to Craft (in gp) = market price / 2 = 16,000 gp / 2 = 8,000 gp.
It will cost us 8,000 gp to make this item
Cost to Craft (in xp) = market price / 25 = 16,000 gp / 25 = 640 xp.
It will cost 640 xp to make this item, which will have to come from the Craft Reserve, your actual xp total, or a combination of the two (so if you only have 600 points in your reserve, you could spend all 600, and only have to pay 40 real xp).
Time to Craft (in days) = market price / 1,000 = 16,000 / 1,000 = 16 days.
It will take just over 2 weeks of work (16 days) in order to make this item.
Now, the only thing we have left to figure out is what DC the UMD check is going to be, so we go to the PHB and look up the Keen Edge spell, and find that it is a lvl 3 spell, which means the minimum caster level for it is 5th. And we know that the UMD DC is 20 + Caster level, meaning this spell requires a DC 25 UMD check to successfully fake.
We bring all of that information together, and we get this:
Cost: 8,000 gp
XP: 640
Time: 16 days
UMD DC: 25
Assuming we have the necessary magical laboratory to work in, and that we have all of the needed supplies, we can start crafting. Lets assume we have the minimum level Artificer required to make this item, lvl 3 (don’t forget that while the item has a crafting level prereq of 5, the Artificer counts as being 2 levels higher than he really is for this), and we’ll just assume somebody else gave him enough gold to be able to afford it. We’ll also assume that he has a total of +8 to his UMD checks (+6 for max ranks, +2 for a Charisma of 14).
Day 1: Enchanting Begins.
Flavor text aside, the only mechanical aspect you need to worry about is the UMD check. Its DC 25, and you have a +8 to your UMD check, meaning you need to roll a 17 or higher to succeed. Pretty steep odds, so lets assume you fail the check. No big deal. Since it will take 16 days to craft, you get 16 tries to make the roll, plus an extra one at the end.
Day 2-12: Constant Progress, Constant Failure
You are working diligently, things are coming along, but you still haven’t made that UMD check yet.
Day 13: Success!
You rolled a 19 for today’s UMD check, meaning you passed. Hooray, no more skill checks required, you’re on easy street from here out.
Day 16: The End
You made your check, so at the end of this day of crafting, you will have your Scabbard of Keen Edges. If you had not made the check before today, you would get your normal check for the day, and if you failed that, you would get your last ditch emergency check to try and salvage everything.
Here’s the kicker though. If you fail that check every single time, then you will fail at making the item, and all of the money and xp/craft points you put into making it will be wasted as well. That is a *LOT* of time and money to flush down the drain, so should you actually find yourself using that emergency roll at the end, you should spend an Action Point to boost the outcome. Remember though that you can only spend an AP before you know if your roll succeeded or failed, and since you’re going up against a known, set DC, that means you’ll need to burn it before you make the roll. But by this point, potentially wasting an AP is far better than potentially failing the roll and wasting all that time and money. And if you still fail, well, you did everything you could, better luck next time.[/sblock]Now, lets throw some extra complications into the mix. What if your Artificer has some of the Artisan feats to reduce the time/gold/xp costs of making an item? Lets look at that Scabbard of Keen Edges again, this time with the Extraordinary Artisan feat.[sblock=Scabbard of Keen Edges with Extraordinary Artisan]Lets first grab the necessary information from the previous example, no need going through all of it again.
CraftingCost: 8,000 gp
XP: 640
Time: 16 days
UMD DC: 25
Now, Extraordinary Artisan lowers the gp cost of the item by 25%, which seems pretty easy at first, but it has some pitfalls. Even though the feat says market price, it *ONLY* affects the cost to craft, nothing else. First, lets find out how much of a reduction we get. Market Price is 16,000 gp, to find the lower price we can either multiply the market price by .25 and subtract that number from the original, or we can just multiply the original by .75, either way we get that the new price is 12,000 gp.
Now here is where people mess up. You use that 12,000 gp price to determine only the crafting price (which will be 6,000 gp now, instead of 8,000 gp). You do not use the 12,000 gp price to determine time or xp costs, for those you still have to use the original 16,000 gp price.
You would use the same procedure with the other Artisan feats, changing each cost as appropriate. If you haven’t noticed it already, and didn’t read it in the feats section, Exceptional Artisan reduces the crafting time by 25%, which reduces the number of days required to craft the item 25%. That means you will have 25% fewer chances to make your UMD check to successfully create the item, which generally makes taking this feat a handicap to your crafting abilities.And now that you know how to make the items once you know their costs, lets spend a moment on how to correctly determine the price for custom made items.
The first step in making any custom magic item is to talk it over with your DM. Actually, talking it over with your DM should be the first step in making any magical item with your Artificer. (S)He may have an adventure ready for you that your new item idea could ruin, might not allow that particular item in their game, or have suggestions on how to modify the item to be a better fit with the existing game. Magic items as a whole are the domain of your DM, not you as a Player, even if you are playing an Artificer (which comes with certain assumed rights to being able to make magical items). Assuming you get the go ahead, somebody is going to have to stat this item up. Many times, this will happen one of two ways. One, the DM will let the player requesting to make the item stat it up, and then either okay or reject the finished item once you hand it to them. The other option is that the DM may ask you to describe everything you want the item to do to him (or her), and then they will create the item themselves, and give you the specifics on it when they are done. Either way, expect there to be some haggling back and forth over a custom magic item as you both try to make it into what you want it to be.
And remember, the guidelines in the DMG about how to price a magical item are just that, guidelines. They are not set in stone, and if a price sounds too low or too high when you use those rules, then chances are it is too high/low, and you’ve found another example of where the guidelines don’t work very well. That said, lets do an example of making a very simple little custom item that you would likely find in any affluent city dweller’s pocket.
Custom Magical Item: Magic Zippo. First step, come up with what we want the magic item to do. In this case, we want to make a nifty little item for a character that smokes cigars, or maybe they just want a fast and easy way to light their torches, either way, we need a magical version of a real life modern day lighter.
So, what does the item need to do? It needs to make fire, obviously enough, but stating out EXACTLY what you want it to do will make it easier to choose the right spell to base it off of. Do we want it to explode in a huge radius and kill people? No, that would be a grenade, not a lighter, so we probably don’t want to base it off of the Fireball spell. Thumbing through the spells, we find that Prestidigitation can produce a finger sized jet of flame capable of lighting a torch, that’s perfect, so lets use that.
Spell: Prestidigitation
Level: 0
We look in the DMG at the magical item making guidelines, and choose the one we think is the closest fit to what we want. We want an item that you flick open, it makes fire, and goes off when you close it. The closest thing to that is a Command Word Activation item. Now, you might think that its silly to have to tell a lighter “Flame On!” to make it work, but remember that “command word” also covers “command action”, like pushing a button, or in this case, flipping a lid.
Looking at the formula, we see that it is:
Spell Level x Caster Level x 1,800 gp
We want this to be as simple and cheap as possible, so we’ll use the absolute minimum caster level for it, 1. Plug this in to the equation, and we get:
0 x 1 x 1,800 gp = 0 gp.
What, its free? No, we forgot to read the rest of the guidelines where it says that 0th lvl spells count as lvl ½ when used in these equations. So, lets fix it and try again.
.5 x 1 x 1,800 gp = 900 gp.
So, we have a magical zippo to light our cigars/torches with, but it costs 900 gold? Sounds a bit high, doesn’t it? Well, it is. This item would be able to replication ALL of the functions of Prestidigitation, not just the single use we want, and that’s entirely too much. We’re using a much reduced functionality of the spell, so why pay for a bunch of stuff we don’t want? But there aren’t any really good guidelines on how to do this, because the exact value of any given part of a spell will be vastly different depending on how useful it is. Even if we give it 50% off for being limited, that’s still 450 gp for a lighter, you could buy a masterwork sword for less than that, and get a lot more for your money’s worth. So, it seems we have found an area where the guidelines have failed us, so lets look at one of the other pricing techniques. Compare what you want your item to do to other existing items, and if you find something similar, odds are that the prices will be similar as well.
The closest thing we find after a quick look around is a Tindertwig, a one use alchemical item that does exactly what we want, that costs 1 gp per use. If we look at our guidelines again, we notice where it says that if you are making an infinite use item of something that requires a costly component, you add the price of that component x50.
Now we’ve got two different prices, 450 gp on the high end, and 50 gp on the low end. What should the actual final price of our item fall, within this range? This is where magic item making becomes less of a science, and more of an art, as the correct price isn’t one that can be determined entirely by formulas and comparisons, there is a very real aspect of personal experience that has to enter into the equation as well.
So, lets also look at what level character we would think would be okay to have this item. Level 1 is probably too low for magical goodies, even one as simple as this. They can barely afford their gear, much less a luxury like a magical fire starter, so 50 gp is probably too low. But, this item isn’t really powerful enough to be a threat to anything, since all it does is light things on fire. They have to be normally flammable, and it doesn’t do any straight hitpoint damage (who ever heard of someone being zippo’ed to death?), although they could conceivably die from being set on fire as their clothes catch alight, but then, they could do the same thing with a regular torch, and that’s cheap enough to buy by the dozen at lvl 1. Either way, 450 gp is so expensive it would be lvl 3 or 4 before they got enough money to be able to consider spending that much in one lump sum for anything other than masterwork weapons and armor, so that’s out.
So we have at least narrowed the price range down quite a bit. Its somewhere higher than 50, but less than 450. Lets try doubling the minimum, halving the maximum, and see how we feel. 100 to 275 gp. Much more narrow range, so its easier to get a grip on. Would I pay 100 gp for this item? Yeah, I probably would. Would I pay 275 for it? Probably not, so lets reduce that maximum price. Would I pay 200 for it? Maybe, but not likely, I could buy so many tindertwigs with that much that it wouldn’t be worth spending xp/craft points to make it.
And perhaps that is the key we need after all. That original 50 gp for 50 tindertwigs. Its too low for the item, but we’re looking at crafting the item ourselves. You craft for half the final market price, so the same amount of money plus some xp/cr would get us an infinite use item, with a market price of 100 gp. Already said that 100 gp is a price I would pay for the item, so maybe that is a good price overall for it. Just to be on the safe side though, lets increase the price a bit (its always better to slightly overprice an item than to slightly underprice it), call it 150 gp. That’s still in the 100 to 200 gp price range, its right in the middle actually. Would I pay that for the item? Maybe, but I’d have to think about it first.
And that’s how you know you’ve got a good price for any custom item. When you hit the point where you can say “maybe”, odds are that you either have the right price, or are very close to it. If its so cheap you immediately say yes, its underpriced. If you immediately say no, its overpriced. If it’s a maybe, then just like Goldie Locks, its just right.
So, we’ve got everything we need to stat up our new magical zippo.
Its based on Prestidigitation, the minimum caster level is 1, minimum crafter level is 3 (since that’s the minimum you need to be to even make wondrous items in the first place), and the price is 150 gp. To have your artificer make one, it would cost him 75 gp in materials and the like, 3 xp/cr points, and the minimum of 1 day to craft it. Since he’s having to emulate Prestidigitation, he would need to make a UMD check, DC 21 (since lvl 1 is the minimum level you can cast Prestidigitation at).While it does get harder and harder to price items the more powerful they become, the above process is still essentially what you follow. Try to price it up as best you can with the guidelines, and see if that works to your satisfaction. If not, find other similar items and see if you can use their price for a guideline. If you still can’t get a good solid price, its time to start playing the “Would I pay this?” game until you get a maybe.
Since there will be two of you involved in this process, don’t be afraid to ask each other for input if you get suck. Use each other as a sounding board for ideas and prices. When you both find a price you can agree on, congratulations, you’ve got your finished price.