[Donjon] Material Enchantment

[Manxome]

Is there anything stopping a player from doing the following?  Should there be?


A character's primary ability is an arcane magic called Material Enchantment (words: hard, light, crumble, mend).  The character takes low virility and high cerebrality.

Walks into town for the first mission, purchases a piece of DR3-4 armor.  Gathers magical power (in town, where the Donjon level is zero).  Spends two gathered spell dice to make the spell last the entire day, and casts "Light as Air" on the armor, reducing its weight for the day by the number of successes, probably taking the weight down to one or less.

Gathers magical power again, spends two dice to make the spell last the entire day, and casts "Hard as Dragonscale" on the armor, giving it the magical ability to resist all kinds of damage.  Maybe force the player to spend 2 successes for each die of bonus, to match the value of the ability being added, but it's an uncontested action clearly in line with the magic word's function.

The player has now made a purchase check for ordinary, non-magical DR3-4 armor and probably has, for the rest of the day, weightless armor that may add more like 5-8 dice to all damage resistance checks.  He can cast the same spells on the armor of every member of the party.  As long as he doesn't get attacked (in town) and doesn't try to strain himself to gather extra power, there's no way he can get hurt other than backfiring spells.  If you try to damage his equipment when he fails a spell check, he can "Mend" it again.

He can arguably add spells like "Crumble the Foe" (to damage weapons triking the armor) and "Mend the Wearer" (to provide healing).


He then proceeds to purchase a weapon and cast "Light as Air" and "Strike Harder than a Titan" on it, and puts similar enchantments on the weapons of all his allies.



He can still use "Crumble" and "Mend" to cast offensive and healing magic in combat, using the same ability and attribute he used to increase the value of his equipment by a factor of four.

He can create several useful magical artifacts between missions as per the rulebook.

There are plenty more words that could be used to add further cumulative enchantments to the equipment (Speed, Sharp, Accurate, Vanishing, Electric, Venom, etc.) and there's no rule I can find that would necessarily impede someone from repeatedly casting a single spell over and over on the same item to accumulate larger bonuses.



I don't know; it seems a bit excessive for one ability to me.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

It does seem a bit excessive - of course, I've noted for a while that magic in Donjon is pretty damn powerful. (See Magic in Donjon: Power Level for some ideas on lowering that power.) Still, what you're proposing sounds like something that would require a non-beginning character - maybe about level 5 or so. As part of the design of Donjon, you actually get less powerful relative to Donjon Levels of your level as you increase in levels. (I think I level have used the world level too much.)

Therefore, using crazy-smart tricks like this is exactly what you need to do to survive. If the characters are surviving too much, have them go somewhere with a higher Donjon Level.