I'm looking at allowing my party's artificer to craft some +2 arrows, and in reading over the crafting rules in Xanathar's Guide, it seems like something is missing — or else I'm missing something.
It says crafting a rare item (like +2 arrows) takes 10 weeks and 2,000 gp, both of which are halved for consumable items. I assume ammunition counts as consumable, as it becomes non-magical after it hits. But even taking that into account, 5 weeks and 1,000 gp seems like an absurd cost for a single magic arrow; a whole magic weapon can't possibly be worth the same as two pieces of ammunition.
Have I missed a rule somewhere that says you craft ammunition in lots of 10 or something? (As I recall, that's how it worked in previous editions.)
If I haven't missed anything and magic ammunition really is prohibitively expensive compared to the benefit, would it be balanced and reasonable to rule that the 5 weeks + 1,000 gp crafts a set of ten arrows?
Best Answer
In the DMG, Ammunition +1, +2, or +3 refers to a single piece of Ammunition
So strict RAW, yes, it would be prophibitively expensive.
Core Rules
Xanathar's Guide contains optional rules. Based on the core rules, this would be even more expensive (p. 129, DMG).
And it would take even longer
So in total, for a single, one-shot arrow +2 you would look at a cost of 2,500 gp and 100 days of work.
In older editions of the game powerful fiends and undead could only be hurt with weapons that had +2 or even higher enchantments, so there was a real need to obtain them. In D&D 5e even the most powerful fiends in the MM, such as a Pit Fiend, can be hurt normally by any magic weapon. There is no qualitative difference between a +1 weapon and a +2 weapon, merely a quantitative one. Hence a more economic alternative could be crafting uncommon +1 arrows instead, which cost "only" 250 gp (DMG) or 100 gp (XGE) to craft apiece.
One indeed wonders which insane wizard spent their years to create the +2 or +3 arrows that player characters might find in game.
More reasonable costs
However, here is the rule for silvered weapons, from the PHB:
I would allow crafting 10 arrows for the cost of one item. Not only are they smaller and simpler to make than, say a sword, they also are lost as magic weapons when you use them.
Better calibrated costs
The economics for magic items are not well developed, likely because the default assumption is that they are obtained by adventuring, not bought or crafted (DMG, p.135):
You can see this in the rarity system that is used for costs, and that does not reflect play value, even though the DMG (p. 135) claims that
For example, compare Souvereign Glue (legendary consumable, worth >25,000 gp (Magic Item Rarity, p.135 DMG), to a Bag of Holding (uncommon, worth up to 500 gp). I'd trade the glue for the bag in a jiffy, nevermind for 50 of them.
Furthermore, the cost to craft magic items is not balanced with their value in a way that would encourage crafting.
If you are open to non-canon sources and want to support crafting or magic item values that reflect item power, using Sane Magic Item Prices as the basis for the cost for various items offers a practical alternative to pricing items. Just halve these to determine the crafting cost for each. For example, the price for Ammunition +2 there is listed as 100 gp, so 1,000 gp will get you 20 arrows +2.