A character who focuses predominantly on Enchanting to and ignores other skills will be at a disadvantage except in certain types of campaigns. However, it is relatively easy and cheap for a player to develop a moderate level of expertise in Enchanting, which can be used to make your magician character's life easier, particularly if you have a number of spells requiring fetishes or talismans, or want to make your own mana lodge from scratch.

One of the major breaking points of the Enchanting rules of previous editions, for example, was not the creation of foci but of orichalcum. In Fourth edition, it is more difficult for a player to churn out massive amounts of orichalcum for huge profit (or a huge discount in Karma on crafting foci). Converesely, the need for huge amounts of orichalcum is also more limited: crafting foci costs a minimum of Karma. It makes no difference if you purchase the focus, steal it from an enemy, or craft it yourself-the bonding cost is the same.

Thus an enchanter would actually pay more karma for a focus as it takes some karma to create the focus and additional karma to bind it. Yes?

The enchanter would trade off time and money for karma when compared to someone who purchased a focus (not that purchasing a focus with no SIN would be a simple matter).

Do I understand you correctly?

The enchanter would end up paying slightly more karma because it costs 1 point to complete a focus. It's not a huge amount. It is 1 karma that wouldn't have been paid otherwise. What you will save is money.

It's probably best to do a (very) quick example of the process.

Let's take a Force 4 Sustaining Focus. From your local talismonger, this will cost you 40,000 and has an availability of 16, meaning it's not just lying around either. It will cost you 8 karma to bond.

Now Little Miss Enchanter (LME) decides to make her own. The steps (slightly simplified by ignoring some options like what you can do with orichalcum) are as follows:

1. LME makes an Arcana + Magic roll, extended (Force^2, 1 day).

Let's say that she has magic of 4 and arcana of 3. Assuming no glitches, it might average out at six or seven days work. There are no financial costs here. GMs may enforce extended test limits though, so it could take a couple of attempts. Edge might also be needed.

2. LME sources the telesma (raw materials) for the focus.

There is no roll here (unless there is a story reason), but there is a financial cost. Assuming a mundane telesma (you bought a knife from a shop) then these costs can be neglible. Mundane telesma is quick but imposes a big penalty to the final enchanting roll, so lets take the time to make virgin telesma. There are no specific rules for this, but the GM will probably add a time requirement and probably a craft roll of some kind.

3. LME makes an enchanting test of Magic + Enchanting, extended (17, 1 day)

If we give LME a very professional Enchanting skill of 4, that means eight dice and a further two for virgin telesma. With ten dice, it will probably take just over a week to complete the enchantment. There's a fair chance of glitching. Edge could smooth that out, if you didn't glitch too often.

Anyway, if you pull that final roll off, then you just need to spend your final karma point and your focus is ready for bonding.

So the cost of the force 4 sustaining focus, is about a month's work (with a chance of failure or mischevious GMs demanding exotic components) plus a karma point, vs. 40,000 Sounds quite a bargain to me. The mage will need to buy up a couple of skills (Enchanting and Arcana) that she might skip otherwise, but it's not such a huge impact.

It's certainly viable. It depends on the GMs attitude to some extent, however. Does your GM want to allow extended downtime during which one character will gain wealth whilst others do nothing? Does the GM intend to make full use of the exotic reagents rules which will complicate things massively?

Making foci is viable, but check what mindset your GM is in.

-K.

True. I was comparing straight doing it all yourself with unmitigated Buy It As Normal, and not getting into any of the compromise approaches.

Since posting the above comments, I've revised my opinions to thinking that having some enchanting skill is actually better than I thought at first. If your GM doesn't allow you the opportunity to use it, then you've wasted some points. And obviously it's not compatible with a min-maxed slaughter-mage, but I put together a hermetic with some enchanting skills and think I'd benefit from it in game. The biggest problem for starting characters is probably spending all the money on an enchanting workshop.

Which is why cost and availability is given for renting an enchanting shop. Most of the low-level stuff, such as making fetishes and binding materials, can be done with an assaying kit anyway.

Hadn't noticed that particular change. Good to know.

Threshold for Magic+Enchanting test is actually 18 (guessing you typoed).

Also, you left out the most important difficulty - you get a negative dice pool modifier equal to the force of the foci. So, even using your example of 10 dice with some rare components, you only get to roll 6 dice for an average of 2 hits per roll. It is strongly suggested to use the limitation on rerolls for extended tests so you are very likely to fail. If I remember right, failure means the materials go poof so you have to acquire more materials before trying again.

My mage has some enchanting but, based on the foci creation rules, I think most mages are much better off just buying foci. Orichalcum requires either huge amounts of time (to find the components) or lots of money (to buy them) and generally isn't worthwhile either (I calculated that you need roughly 15 dice on the test to have a good chance of breaking even if you buy the components and sell the orichalcum). The only real use of enchanting I see in RAW is created binding components and fetishes.

The threshold is 16 + Object Resistance, so you're right. It would probably be 18.

Again, mistake on my part. It's not six dice, though. It's eight as LME was using virgin telesma (which is pretty easy to source).

Eight dice, threshold of 18. There's a resonable chance of a glitch in there, but if you use edge you'll prbably make it. I think it would be worth taking the chance in order to save 40,000 . At any rate, if successful it would take less than eight days so if the enchanter fails, she can probably try again. She's not lost anything much. The formula is still valid. A GM probably isn't spacing the runs within days of each other.

So although I messed up my numbers, which I apologise for, they didn't mess up the conclusions that much. The chances for someone with just passable skills to make a focus worth 40,000 are high enough to be worth trying and my example was a very simple one without use of costly reagents. Throw in just a few thousand nyuens worth of radical reagents and you'll get the lost four dice back. Get it up to twelve dice pool in fact. Admittedly you're now only saving about 37,000 on the cost of your sustaining focus, but I still rate that as worth some skill points.

The more I'm thinking about this, the more I think enchantment is worthwhile. It depends if you're willing to sacrifce some ability in straight-forward damage dealing, but ultimately you may come out ahead.

You're right on the threshold. I forgot it was actually 16+resistance (was thinking it was a straght 18).

Nope. 6 dice. 10 dice per your post (presumably 4 skill + 4 magic + 2 virgin telesma) minus 4 dice (force) = 6 dice.

In my character's case, it's currently skill 1 + magic 5 which isn't good but I could easily boost that to skill 2 + specialization. Obviously my character is not an enchanting specialist (just thought it would be an interesting flavor skill). The big limit is the number of rerolls (if I remember right, it's skill+1) for extended tests.

Also, in my experience, mages aren't looking for force 4 foci (usually force 5 (occasionally higher)).

To me, it seems like it is nearly impossible for a non-specialist (specialist = 4+ skill and specialization in my mind) to reasonably create his own foci. This seems broken especially when compared to the ease of creating ritual materials (threshold of force and no dice pool penalty).

If you want big foci, then unless you're a specialist making your own isn't a good option.

If you consider the situation, this isn't broken when compared to the ease of making binding materials and the like, because binding materials are by definition expendable-you use it once, and that's it. This makes the idea of a conjurer possessing a modicum of Enchanting Skill (enough to produce her own binding materials) more attractive.

Oh dear. Well I console myself that I may have made a mistake twice, but it's the same mistake. That's better than making two different ones, right? Right?

I agree that if you're going for Force 5 or more foci, then you're going to have to make a serious commitment to enchanting skills. But a Force 3 Power Focus is still pretty nice and don't forget the resale value on all of these things. They're almost free to make with Enchanting.

Regarding the ritual materials, don't forget that it requires refined or radical reagents to create. That rapidly reduces the cost saving over just buying the stuff in the first place. In fact, unless you're out harvesting your own raw reagents and refining them yourself (one of the least productive uses of time a shadowrunner can make), then you barely break even.