4th edition D&D embraced the “Christmas tree” character concept of 3rd edition. PCs are usually festooned with tons of magic items. The only real limit was magic item slots and Daily Magic Item Power uses. 4th edition also continued 3rd edition’s economic approach to crafting magic items. A simple system that prevents abuse, but also makes almost no economic sense.

The RAW Rules

4th Edition has three rituals that are used for dealing with magic items, Enchant Magic Item, Disenchant Magic Item, and Transfer Enchantment.

Enchant Magic Item: You spend magic components equal to the gold cost of the magic item you are creating. You can also use this ritual to improve magic items, spending components equal to the difference in gold cost between the two items.

Disenchant Magic Item: You turn a magic item into residuum with a cost equal to 1/5 of the cost of the magic item you destroy. Residuum is a magic component that can be used for the construction of any magic item.

Transfer Enchantment: You transfer a magic item’s properties from one item to another. So if you find a cool sword, but you’re an axe user, you can transfer the cool sword powers to an axe and still use your axe powers/feats.

Why This Doesn’t Make Sense

D&D has never made a ton of economic sense. Prices are sometimes ridiculous for mundane items. Crafting times may not make sense either. And how would the existence of magic affect a medieval world’s economy and industry? Some of these questions are too complex to answer or… too boring to answer for most people. But with magic items we have no outside references to muddy the waters and some clear math rules for how stuff works.

1. An enchanter’s labor is worthless
   Enchanting an item consumes the full cost of an item in materials. And then the enchanter puts the item in their shop for the same cost as all the components they just used to make it? This indicates that the enchanter’s labor is entirely worthless. Despite enchanting being a highly skilled activity that requires the Ritual Caster feat, no one will pay you to do it apparently. Perhaps the labor is worthless because it only takes 1 hour? But even in the real world we know that highly skilled labor like plumbers and electricians are still pricey regardless of only needing an hour to fix your problem. When the labor is on the scale of “construct a rocket launcher from raw steel in one hour” we start to see some bigger cracks in the RAW logic.
2. Magic items have no value
   4th edition has rules for how much money you get when you sell items. Most items will sell for 1/5 of their stated cost. So your +1 flaming sword costs 1,000GP to buy, but if you decide you don’t want it anymore it only sells for 200GP. Disenchanting an item also only gives you 1/5 of the stated cost in residuum. It seems that a magic shop owner is only paying you for the base components they can harvest from your +1 flaming sword and they don’t care about any value it derives from its functionality. So the act of transforming 1,000GP of residuum into a +1 flaming sword? You just burned 800GP of residuum and received no market value. Despite performing some labor and giving functionality to a raw material, the market assigns no value to that task.
   The reason for this rule is so that the Disenchant Magic Item ritual doesn’t provide any value beyond selling magic items. The designers didn’t want to make Disenchant Magic Item an optimized choice where it was always a better option than selling magic items. So from a game perspective, it makes sense. Ritual Casters don’t become an extra money factory for turning unwanted magic items into bonus GP.
3. Enchanting time doesn’t fit the genre
   Enchanting magic items in fiction is often a mutli-day process. Forging the all-powerful sword capable of defeating the demon king should take a week, a month, or a year. Instead, an enchanter can pop out eight of them in a day as long as they have the components.

The New Rules

The goal of these rules is to bring back a mystic quality to magic item creation by lengthening the task’s duration and to make enchanting magic items a viable career choice for NPCs. The rules don’t directly contradict the old system if you don’t want to engage with them. Thus you can introduce the rules and if your players don’t want to use them, the old rules are still contained within the new ones.

Enchanting

When you make a magic item, you spend 1 hour and roll an Arcana/Religion/Nature check against DC 15 + the level of the magic item you are creating. You may choose which skill you use for the check. If you roll exactly the DC, you can create the item and spend 100% of its cost in magic components to finish the creation in 1 hour.

If your check is not exactly the same as the DC, then the component costs are changed. Your check alters the creation cost up or down by 1% per point under or over the DC. Every point above the required DC results in a 1% cost savings up to 10% savings. Every point below the required DC results in a 1% cost overrun that must be paid, or the money and the item are lost.

After rolling you may spend more time to increase your savings at a rate of 4 extra hours to increase your result by 1. You may continue doing this until you take a rest (you can’t recharge powers/healing surges, but you can sleep without receiving the benefit of a rest).

These same rules apply when upgrading magic items with the component cost equal to the difference between the base item and the upgraded item.

As an example, you are enchanting a +1 flaming sword, a 5th level magic item worth 1,000GP. You roll a 19 on your skill check, 1 less than the 15+5 requires for a 5th level item. This means that you will have to spend 1,010GP in components to finish it in 1 hour. You decide to conserve as many of your components as possible. You spend an extra 44 hours or 5 and a half days of work to bring your skill check result to a 30. Your result is now maxed out at a 10% discount. You only need to spend 900GP in components to enchant the +1 flaming sword.

Transferring Enchantments

The Transfer Enchantment ritual takes 1 hour and costs 10% of the item’s value.

Disenchanting

When you disenchant an item you spend 1 hour and roll an Arcana/Religion/Nature skill check. You may choose which skill you use for the check. The residuum you gain from disenchanting is equal to the result of this skill check minus the item’s level as a percentage of the item’s value.

After rolling you may spend more time to increase your percentage at a rate of 2 extra hours to increase your result by 1. You may continue doing this until you take a rest (you can’t recharge powers/healing surges, but you can sleep without receiving the benefit of a rest). The percentage caps out at 50%.

Using the +1 flaming sword as an example again, you roll a 19 once again on your disenchant ritual. The +1 flaming sword is a 5th level magic item. 19 – 5 gives us 14% of the item’s value in residuum extracted if you only spend 1 hour. That would be 14% of 1,000GP for the +1 flaming sword, or 140GP of residuum. If you want to get as much residuum as possible, you need to raise your result by 36 to get to 50%. That requires another 72 hours or 9 days of work to extract the maximum possible 500GP of residuum from the +1 flaming sword.

Components

You can also get components other than residuum to make magic items. Residuum can be used for any magic item, but other components often must be used to make a particular type of magic item. Red dragon scales could be used for many defensive items or to make a flaming sword. Assigning the value for other components that PCs gather from dead monsters is up to the DM. Care should be taken as these components become part of an adventure’s treasure total. As a general rule a component should only sell for half of its worth if used to make a magic item. Thus dragon scales worth 1,000GP for crafting, could be sold to a magic shop for 500GP.

New Feat

Expert Enchanter

Prerequisite: Enchant Magic Item ritual, Disenchant Magic Item ritual

Benefit: You gain a +5 bonus to your check when you use your Magic Item rituals. You may take 10 on your Magic Item ritual rolls. Additionally, you spend half the usual time to improve your rolls (1 hour for each point for Disenchanting and 2 hours for each point for Enchanting).

Services

Shops will buy magic items for 20% of their value. Shops will disenchant items for people, taking a portion of the residuum. The percentage depends on the store and the adventurer’s relationship to the store owner. Typically a shop will give a client 20% of the item’s value as residuum and keep any excess that they squeeze out. Shops will typically charge 100GP plus expenses for transferring enchantments. If a shop owner likes a PC they may waive the 100GP fee for transferring.

A NOTE
These rules were created assuming the 8 hour work day is the maximum amount of useful labor a PC can perform in a day. I didn’t come up with additional rules for the equivalent of a “forced march” for magic item crafting.