# Pathfinder Spark of Creation and Hedge Magician discounts

The Traits Spark of Creation and Hedge Magician each grant a 5% discount to magic item crafting.

Would this discount apply to the adjusted price or the original price?

For example if I was crafting an item with a purchase cost of 100,000 gold would the equation to find the price be

100,000*(.5+.05+.05)


(This would make the total cost 40% of the purchase total)

Or

(100,000*.5)*(.05+.05)


(This applies the extra discounts after the original 50% off for crafting it in the first place.)

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Wow. My brain was not working when I did those equations. – Aaron Jul 3 '14 at 14:40
One thing to note is the benefits from traits are non-stackable. Also taking two traits from the same section(Magic in this case) is also not permitted. – Guest Jul 5 '14 at 10:11

## You'll end up paying either 45,000 gp or 45,125 gp

(depending on your interpretation of the multiplications rules in PF)

First of all, as our mystery guest noted, a character can't normally benefit from two traits from the same group (magic traits in this case). A DM can always overrule that, however, and in that case, two things to note:

First, the discount is from the creation cost - not market price (this will come into play later):

Hedge Magician
Benefit: Whenever you craft a magic item, you reduce the required gp cost to make the item by 5%.

Spark of Creation
Benefit(s): You gain a +1 trait bonus on Craft checks, and the cost of creating magic items is reduced by 5%.

(Emphasis mine in both)

This means that for an item with market price of 100,000gp, the discount for each trait separately will be only 2,500gp (5% of 50,000) and not 5,000gp.

Second, I'm not sure it applies here since this is not a roll but a static number, but note that multiplying in D&D works differently than normal algebraic multiplication.
Taken from PF SRD Common Terms:

Multiplying: When you are asked to apply more than one multiplier to a roll, the multipliers are not multiplied by one another. Instead, you combine them into a single multiplier, with each extra multiple adding 1 less than its value to the first multiple. For example, if you are asked to apply a ×2 multiplier twice, the result would be ×3, not ×4.

This is a somewhat awkward way of saying that the multipliers are applied to the base and their effects are added (so X2 is really just "base + 1 more" and X3 is "base + 2 more", combined they yield "base + 3 more" or X4, not X6). So, two options:

1. If this does apply to your case, than 5%+5% are 10%, so the 50,000gp creation cost of the item will be reduced to 45,000gp
2. If this doesn't apply, and you calculate the multiplication the same way a shop-keeper will do for multiple discounts, you'll get 0.95 x 0.95 x 50,000 = 45,125 so the item will cost 45,125gp.

Note, that if you consider the multiplication rules to apply to your case, and ignore the first point. than you'd add all the multipliers for 0.05 + 0.05 +0.5 = 0.6, and end up with paying only 40,000gp as you suggested.

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Personally, I'd go with the second interpretation (normal multiplication - the cost is 45,125 gp). – G0BLiN Jul 5 '14 at 21:50
As you guessed, and as the text you quoted says, the roll multiplication rules only really apply to multiplying rolls. With this in mind, everything from the "Second" part of your answer onward (except your case #2) is irrelevant. Then, everything in the "First" part is relevant but unnecessary - the order doesn't really matter because multiplication is commutative and associative. – EnvisionAndDevelop Jul 7 '14 at 15:00
@EnvisionAndDevelop - I agree, though I had a DM who'd probably disagree. I thought covering both interpretations and leaving the decision to the reader makes for a better answer (especially as this scenario already deviates from the RAW). Note also that the first and second parts are both needed to invalidate the OP's first possible (and imho wrong) answer. – G0BLiN Jul 7 '14 at 15:28

Neither. Er, Both. Neither of your equations fit, because it's all multiplied and order doesn't matter.

The cost would be 100,000 * 0.5 * 0.95 * 0.95.

The 0.95 is there because it's the full 1 or 100% minus the .05 or 5%. Thus when you apply the traits, you're subtracting 5% of the cost, (cost - 0.05*cost), which simplifies to multiplying by .95.

Because of the way multiplication works, the order of applying the 0.5 and 0.95 multipliers is irrelevant. As long as you start with the market price, half it because you're creating it yourself, and then reduce the price by 5% twice, you'll get the same result, which ends up being 45.125% of the original price.

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As mentioned by Guest in a comment on your original post. You cannot stack those two traits because they are both Magic Traits.

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