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View Full Version : D&D 3.x Other Can you help me to price this magic item correctly? Ring of Anti-Hunch



Jon_Dahl
2017-06-03, 09:19 AM
Ring of Anti-Hunch

Any Sense Motive: Hunch check made against the wearer automatically succeeds and always reveals the following information:
You get the feeling from the wearer's behavior that nothing is wrong, such as when you’re not talking to an impostor. Alternatively, you get the feeling that the wearer is trustworthy.

This ring has no effect on any other use of Sense Motive skill. It is limited to this specific use of the skill.

Faint abjuration; CL 7th; Forge Ring, creator must have 10 ranks in the Bluff skill; Price ? gp.

noob
2017-06-03, 11:04 AM
Price: The players will not get it and it will always crumble to dust when picked up but 999999999% of the npcs will have it.
look it is 100% intended to make players never ever trust npcs forever.(even if you say the players they can trust it and that you kill the players in real life and replace them by robots who obeys you they will still not trust any npc under any circumstance for all eternity)
The normal reaction when an major artifact like this exists is to destroy the multiverse where it is.
Cl: infinity squared times omega^omega!!!!!!!!(! for factorial)

Basically it is like if you removed the bluff skill and said it succeeded automatically without any investment other than this ring.
Now a ring that adds 44 to bluff costs 200.000 gold and do not make you autosuceed to your bluff check(if you did not put points in bluff and that your target is a level 20 priest you will have 1d20+44 against 1d20+36 or something like that)
if you want to add more to bluff you need the epic pricing rules since you want to automatically beat a priest that is good at sense motive you need more than 56 of bonus which would cost 3.136.000 GP and that is before epic and against a priest who only have wisdom+23 ranks now if the priest did cast guidance of the avatar(level 2 spell so the priest can get it frequently) or moment of prescience he would get 20 more to his check so you would need for automatically beating him a boost to your bluff of 86 so the item for bluffing to that priest would cost 7.396.000
You immediately realize how silly it is to make so that someone without ever spending any point in bluff can just pick a ring and be the best liar of the entire multiverse and better than the god of lies at bluffing.

Dankus Memakus
2017-06-03, 12:50 PM
Im going to assume you are giving it to the players? I would advise against giving to npcs but i see no issue with giving it to the players.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-03, 12:58 PM
Im going to assume you are giving it to the players? I would advise against giving to npcs but i see no issue with giving it to the players.

Thank you the suggestion. Any ideas on the price?

noob
2017-06-03, 12:59 PM
Im going to assume you are giving it to the players? I would advise against giving to npcs but i see no issue with giving it to the players.

If the players gets it they have the same problem as if they find out a npc have it: they will be completely unable to believe anything the gm says for all the gm life even outside of the game.

If you go by epic pricing rules of a +86 bluff ring it would cost 7.396.000 gold.
And it would still be better than a +86 bluff ring due to it not allowing to bluff against gods automatically without any training in bluff.
However if you compare it to buff spells it is like having guidance of the avatar,moment of prescience and the bluff boost spell of the bard reunited and cast every time you lie.
So it would be an automatic use activated object which would still have super high cost and with automatic use items you could also make a sword that cast wish and true-shot every time you swing it.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-03, 02:39 PM
Thank you, noob, but I don't quite understand what bluff has to do with this ring. The way the ring works has nothing to with bluff, no matter if you have a +86 modifier.

Bohandas
2017-06-03, 04:49 PM
I think a good starting point for determining price would be the bestow curse spell chain and cloak of hate as IIRC these have the potential to do the opposite and make people automatically appear untrustworthy (although the mechanics are different, affecting starting attitude instead, which is an aspect of the diplomacy skill rather than sense motive)

rferries
2017-06-03, 08:06 PM
I believe the point noob is making that anything this powerful (i.e. automatic success on Bluff checks that can't be circumvented) should be considered an artifact. It might be more balanced if you made it along the lines of zone of truth - listeners can make a will save to resist the ring; if they succeed they can detect the bearer's lies with Sense Motive as normal.

As it is now the ring is effectively a ring of Bluff + infinity; yes it perhaps could be defeated with truth-telling magic but that means the DM will have to have a ham-handed reason for why everyone the party interacts with has suddenly decided to start using zone of truth all the time :D

The bard spell Glibness (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/glibness.htm) would be a great alternative, I think.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-04, 01:08 AM
I believe the point noob is making that anything this powerful (i.e. automatic success on Bluff checks that can't be circumvented)

I don't know what you mean. Where does it say that? Automatic success on Bluff checks?

Bohandas
2017-06-04, 01:10 AM
Yeah. The hunch use doesn't allow an opposed bluff check by RAW; it's a fixed DC

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-04, 01:43 AM
I think a good starting point for determining price would be the bestow curse spell chain and cloak of hate as IIRC these have the potential to do the opposite and make people automatically appear untrustworthy (although the mechanics are different, affecting starting attitude instead, which is an aspect of the diplomacy skill rather than sense motive)

I think that would put the price range somewhere around 90,000 gp. Expensive, but understandable. I think I could easily drop the price to 30,000 gp, I don't think that would be a bad idea.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-04, 01:52 AM
The only that makes me a bit worried about the price, whether it's 30k gp or 90k gp, is that it will place a great burden on the PCs' wealth per level. They are finishing a quest in which they will recover a Ring of Anti-Hunch and once they get it, I don't think I can give them almost any treasure for a very long time. Their APL is 9.

Hish
2017-06-04, 10:28 AM
And also, it doesn't make the wearer any more trustworthy unless the other person specifically makes a Sense Motive check to have a hunch. So if the wearer is doing something suspicious, others will probably still distrust them.


I believe the point noob is making that anything this powerful (i.e. automatic success on Bluff checks that can't be circumvented) should be considered an artifact. It might be more balanced if you made it along the lines of zone of truth - listeners can make a will save to resist the ring; if they succeed they can detect the bearer's lies with Sense Motive as normal.

I do think a high DC will check (scaling to wearer's level?) might be good. That way, you're mostly unsuspicious, but there's still a chance some NPC will call you out.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-04, 10:43 AM
And also, it doesn't make the wearer any more trustworthy unless the other person specifically makes a Sense Motive check to have a hunch. So if the wearer is doing something suspicious, others will probably still distrust them.




Yes, this ring only functions for Hunches, hence the name.

rferries
2017-06-04, 10:58 AM
Ah mea culpa! I had forgotten that particular aspect of Sense Motive. However I'm not sure it makes much difference -if you intend to Bluff someone then they'll be both checking you for hunches anyways and rolling Sense Motive. If you aren't intending to bluff someone... why use the ring at all? The "hunch" aspect doesn't seem very well thought-out by the developers; you'd think you'd get a bonus on Sense Motive vs. Bluff checks if you first got an accurate hunch, at least.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-04, 11:06 AM
Ah mea culpa! I had forgotten that particular aspect of Sense Motive. However I'm not sure it makes much difference -if you intend to Bluff someone then they'll be both checking you for hunches anyways and rolling Sense Motive. If you aren't intending to bluff someone... why use the ring at all?

An easy question. If you are an untustworthy person, you automatically pass the first hurdle.

The second hurdle is to actually con someone and the ring does not help you in that, at least with individual lies.

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-04, 11:09 AM
And is it necessary to have the ring cost tens of thousands of gp? It will place a huge burden on the PCs' wbl. I'm kind of ok with that, but it's not ideal.

VoodooPaladin
2017-06-04, 11:53 PM
And is it necessary to have the ring cost tens of thousands of gp? It will place a huge burden on the PCs' wbl. I'm kind of ok with that, but it's not ideal.

They're mostly just scared that it'll show up a lot in NPC hands later on. There are other ways to railroad PCs, and limiting it to high-level NPCs doesn't really help with that anyway, so I don't see the problem with it having a lower price tag. Perhaps... 3500 gp?

Jon_Dahl
2017-06-05, 02:11 AM
They're mostly just scared that it'll show up a lot in NPC hands later on. There are other ways to railroad PCs, and limiting it to high-level NPCs doesn't really help with that anyway, so I don't see the problem with it having a lower price tag. Perhaps... 3500 gp?

3500 gp seems like a fair price. That would only mean an insignificant bump in WbL, at best.