I have been looking at guides for dramatically boosting a character's potential with a single skill. In addition to toolkits, I have found mention of Competence bonuses and Enchantment bonuses (or “Enhancement” maybe?), but I cannot find the actual costs of making the skill enchantment bonus items. I have seen many references to these bonuses but am failing to find the information needed to craft them.
[RPG] the rules for crafting Skill Enchantment bonus items
craftingdnd-3.5emagic-itemspricingskills
Related Solutions
Mechanical Trap Minimum Cost
It doesn't look like you're pricing that trap correctly. Here's from the mechanical trap rules:
The base cost of a mechanical trap is 1,000 gp. Apply all the modifiers from Table: Cost Modifiers for Mechanical Traps for the various features you’ve added to the trap to get the modified base cost.
The final cost is equal to (modified base cost × Challenge Rating) + extra costs. The minimum cost for a mechanical trap is (CR × 100) gp.
And from the trap creation rules:
The base CR for a mechanical trap is 0. If your final CR is 0 or lower, add features until you get a CR of 1 or higher.
By the rules, you can't create a trap below CR 1, and the minimum cost is 100g.
Trap Math
Lets look at your costs compared to the rules. The base cost is 1000g.
It is location trigger (no cost)
Correct, this is no change to the base cost.
with repair as a reset (-200gp)
Correct.
there is no bypass
No modification to cost.
the search DC shouldn't be more than 20 (no cost), if not less (-100gp x (20-DC))
Correct, so a search DC of 15 would be a modifier of -500. Total of -700. You have no extra costs, as there's no alchemy involved.
Your cost is calculated as such:
The final cost is equal to (modified base cost × Challenge Rating) + extra costs. The minimum cost for a mechanical trap is (CR × 100) gp.
So you have (1000 - 700) x 1 + 0 = 300g. You could get it down to 100g if you lowered the save DC on the pit to 18 instead of the base 20.
Note that you currently have a CR 0 trap, and the rules require minimum CR of 1. You can get to 1 without increasing the cost by adding average damage (adding 7 average damage increases CR by 1). This would not increase the cost.
What if it really didn't have a cost?
If something really doesn't have a cost, you can make something up. For "digging a hole in the ground", the cost is time. The PCs can do it themselves, or they can hire someone. An untrained labourer costs 1sp per day.
The economy in 3.5 doesn't make a ton of sense, so you can assume the extra cost in a trap vs a hole in the ground is what's required to actually fool anybody into ever falling into it. It's best not to try to expect too much logical consistency on this stuff, becuase unless you use houserules, it doesn't exist.
How Long Does Digging a Hole Take?
Races of the Dragon p.98 has rules for using Profession (Miner) to mine, which you could also use for digging a big hole for your trap. The rules cover how long this would take based on how good a check you can make, with modifiers for different type of ground. You could combine those with the hireling cost to get an idea of what it'd cost to hire a bunch of people in town to dig a 10x10x10' hole.
(Summary version: a medium size miner can empty a 5' cube per day with a DC 15 check. DC 10 would do half of that, and every 5 you beat it over 15 lets you do another 5' cube. Large size works twice as fast, small half as fast. A second medium miner can assist and use aid another to boost the role, while smaller creatures can have more assistance.)
Now that you have your hole, you'd just have to figure out how to conceal it. There's no particular rule for that outside of the trap rules that I know of, but you could make something up.
There are two official optional rulesets for crafting
Both are optional and require that you work with your DM as to if they're an option and how they'd work. In either place that these rules appear, they are optional variants to the base rules.
Dungeon Master's Guide
The first official optional rules released appear in the Dungeon Master's Guide in chapter 6 as part of the "Downtime Activities" section:
Crafting a Magic Item
Magic items are the DM’s purview, so you decide how they fall into the party’s possession. As an option, you can allow player characters to craft magic items.
Within these rules, there are the following requirements:
- a formula that describes the construction of the item
- the character must also be a spellcaster with spell slots and must be able to cast any spells that the item can produce (and expends the relevant spell cost each day during crafting)
- the character must meet a level minimum determined by the item’s rarity
- a required gold and time cost to craft the item during downtime (consumable cost half as much as other magic items)
\begin{array}{c|c|c} \text{Rarity}&\text{Cost}&\text{Minimum Level}\\ \hline \text{Common}&\text{100 gp}&\text{3}\\ \text{Uncommon}&\text{500 gp}&\text{3}\\ \text{Rare}&\text{5,000 gp}&\text{6}\\ \text{Very Rare}&\text{50,000 gp}&\text{11}\\ \text{Legendary}&\text{500,000 gp}&\text{17}\\ \end{array}
Xanathar's Guide to Everything
An alternative ruleset is part of the optional variant to downtime as a whole (and one I personally think is more fleshed out) that appears in the supplement Xanathar's Guide to Everything in the "Downtime Revisited" section of chapter 2:
Crafting Magic Items. Creating a magic item requires more than just time, effort, and materials. It is a long-term process that involves one or more adventures to track down rare materials and the lore needed to create the item.
Within these rules, there are the following requirements:
- a formula for a magic item in order to create it
- an exotic material to complete it. This material can range from the skin of a yeti to a vial of water taken from a whirlpool on the Elemental Plane of Water. Finding that material should take place as part of an adventure. (the suggested challenge rating of the creature to face, though not necessarily harvest the material from, appears in the table below)
- whatever tool proficiency is appropriate, as for crafting a nonmagical object, or proficiency in the Arcana skill.
- a required gold and time cost to craft the item during downtime (consumable cost half as much as other magic items). Do note that downtime rules as a whole are revised when using the Xanathar's Guide to Everything rules
\begin{array}{c|c|c|c} \text{Rarity}&\text{Challenge Rating}&\text{Time}&\text{Cost}\\ \hline \text{Common}&\text{1-3}&\text{1 workweek}&\text{50 gp}\\ \text{Uncommon}&\text{4-8}&\text{2 workweeks}&\text{200 gp}\\ \text{Rare}&\text{9-12}&\text{10 workweeks}&\text{2,000 gp}\\ \text{Very Rare}&\text{13-18}&\text{25 workweeks}&\text{20,000 gp}\\ \text{Legendary}&\text{19+}&\text{50 workweeks}&\text{100,000 gp}\\ \end{array}
Best Answer
The Table
I believe the table you're looking for is Table 7-33 Estimating Magic Item Gold Piece Values on PHB 285. The two rows you're interested in are
I don't believe there is any magic item (in the core rule books, anyway) that directly provides an Enhancement or Enchantment bonus to a skill.
However, all skills are based on an attribute (strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma). An Enhancement bonus to that stat (say, a +2 Cloak of Charisma) will provide a boost to skills based on that attribute (for Charisma, say, Diplomacy) as if your attribute were naturally that much higher.
Crafting
If you're interested in crafting these items yourself, check out the PHB's Feats section for feats such as Forge Ring (PHB 94) or Craft Wondrous Item (PHB 92). The cost to create an item is 1/1000 item price in days, 1/25 item price in XP, and 1/2 item price in GP for materials.
There are also special requirements for some items; namely, for the competence bonus items, the creator must have ranks in the skill equal to the bonus the item will grant.