An issue with Magic Items is the way creating them costs a feat, time, gold and XP. They do need to be restricted– if you allowed unlimited production without a cost, spell casters would be turning them out by the truckload at tremendous profit.
The standard system doesn’t work very well though, especially for our group, since we’re eager to keep everyone the same level, with the same XP rewards and the like. Here are a few options I’ve seen or dreamed up.
a) Do nothing; enforce the rules in the books. The rules setup some assumptions and it’s good to carry them through if you don’t have a good replacement. Unfortunately, the way the XP affects levelling and group cohesion is a drawback. *A common variant is to allow the person the item’s being enchanted for to pay the XP, instead of making the caster do it.
a1) Do almost nothing. Use the standard rules, but make each person in the group contribute XP equally. That keeps PC levels together, and remedies the situation where a caster pays XP for someone else. It succeeds completely on keeping everyone level, but may anger people who are having XP drained for someone else’s benefit.
a2) Use a WOTC XP transference system– evidently, they came to the same conclusion I did.
b) Altered costs. In the Living Ebberon games, they’ve altered the cost of items for their environment. Instead of costing 50% Book GP + XP equal to 4% of Book GP, they instead have it cost 66% Book GP.
c) Level limits. Allow casters to create magic items = 1% of their current XP each level. (So a first level character has a 10XP budget, a fifth level character has 100 XP budget, etc. You could combine this with an “overdraft”– say, if you use more than 1% (and less than a 5% hard limit), then you’re drained by the experience. (The game effect would be a negative level, which as usual effects you until you level again.)
d) Limit the total XP available for items to what’s found. Allow casters to “disenchant” items to free up the XP locked in them… and perhaps 1/2 the cost of the item sacrificed (the same amount as selling it, or the cost to enchant it.) This also allows for special treasure; balls of material for storing XP, just waiting for a disenchant.
e) A good thought you have? Leave ideas in comments.
f) From Jonathan Drain’s D20 source: Rare Components for Spells and Magic items. There’s a similar idea for using Item components to power metamagic.