I usually just limit penetration on items to a max of Lab Total - Spell level (not including modifiers for frequency, linked triggers, item keeps concentration...).
This limits the item's penetration, while still keeping it potentially interesting compared to spells (which can benefit from Mastery, OOTH).
For further limitations, I'd say consider Lab Total - Item level.
For even further limitation, add a limit of Max penetration = (Penetration ability * 5 + lowest art involved).
BTW, agree on the whole "expiry should be counted from creation" thingie
Gosh yes!
Wouldn't want anyone searching for the legendary Wands of the Founders , now would we.
As for those Diedne items stashed away by various Houses , good thing they will all be useless now.
With charged items think of what Tremere could do. Get a mage with a decent leadership working with other mages and you invent say a 150 charged item with 1 charge. They then set a dozen apprentices to manufacture 5 each per season.
This would mean that ridiculously powerful charged items are very common especially in Tremere. We get around that issue by having minimum lab totals needed to get any charges equal to the base effect total.
They still have their use of course, giving a bunch of Grogs items to say take down magic might for example. The volley effect has its uses that a straight up longer term magic item doesn't.
But in general short term items are one thing our group found to be seriously overpowered. For example if you want to make an effect that is say a 32 effect and you have a lab total of 50, you can either spend 3 seasons opening and enchanting using a lot of 12 pawns of vis or one season enchanting using 4 paws of vis and have it last 70 years. Sure in 70 years the magi will need to make a new one, but by then the lab total will be high enough to make it in one season. So you still spend less time on it and less vis.
Charged items don't expire, they last until used, and can only be used once. The problem with them is that if you get a high level script for one, you can set your apprentice to churn them out. You might only get a few per season, but a few 100+ effect totals per season is a big deal.
If your lab total is not equal to the level of the device then you can't recreate it from a lab text. Having apprentices churning out level 70 stuff isn't going to happen.
However if you can equal the lab total you get 1 charge per every five points of your lab total. So when you get a crew together that can reach level 70 and you have a lab text for a level 70 charged device you get 14 charges per season.
I am still trying to figure out why people think you can use effect expiry with a charged item. Effect expiry multiplies the number your score is above the level of the effect to reach the level of the spell effect. You don't do that with charged items, how many charges you get depends on the multiples of five you have over the effect. Totally different structure.
You still have to beat the level to produce charged items. Where does it say that you cant use the multiplier on whatever excess you have? Nowhere to my knowledge.
Nor does it say that the modifier cant be used for charged items, or that it can only be used for some other type.
Personally I feel like charged items already have used their own version of effect expiry and so I would not allow effect expiry on top of that. As far as I know this is the spirit of the rules, but this is not backed up by the rules. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I haven't seen anything saying one excludes the other. For us this is one that seems to be a gentlemen's agreement, one we won't use so we don't have to rule on it. (Our big gentlemen's agreement is to not use Summoning/Imbued with the Spirit of (Form) to generate ridiculous amounts of permanent Vis.)
I honestly don't see the issue. Yes, effect-expiry allows for the construction of powerful items, but not moreso than creating a 1-shot charged item does.
The only place it becomes problematic is intersecting the two rules sets, but it isn't insurmountable.
Making a bunch of 1-shot charged items with a 1-year effect expiry means you get 2 charges per 1 point of lab total excess, rather than 1 charge per 5 points. If all the charges were in one item, the effect expiry timer starts from the moment you use the first charge. If you distribute the charges amongst different physical objects, why would the rules suddenly change? I'd say in this situation that the entire batch starts to expire from the moment the first item from that batch is used.
So: if a wizard with a CrIg lab total of 60 decided he wanted to make a Pilum (lvl 25) wand of awesome, he could:
Make a 1-shot wand with a penetration of +70
Make a 10-shot wand with a penetration of +60 that dies after 1 year of first being used.
Make 10x 1-shot wands with a penetration of +60 that all die after 1 year of one being used.
Each has different purposes. The second and third are probably more useful, since you can repeatedly immolate the target in a fight, but you'd probably still aim to use up all 10 shots in one engagement or wizard's war - since it is a rare magus who engages in wizard's wars more frequently than 1/year. The 10x item version is great if you have grogs - you can volley-fire the whole lot at once. If your primary issue is just -landing- a blow on a very high magic resistance target, you may well be forced into the first option.
Powerful? Yes. Overpowered? Not really. You just devoted a season to making really sure one or two people got fried, and if your target got wind of your intentions and showed up with Ward Against Heat And Flame, your entire season may well have been a waste of time.
This is possibly a core part of the issue: penetration is only half the battle. There are things your target can do which will render your spell ineffective -regardless- of its penetration. Even the infamous DEO is not immune to being countered by means other than magic resistance.
But... how does that work with the 1061 ruling regarding selling magic items to mundanes (AM5, p.16) ?
The passage goes on to explain that trading temporary enchanted devices to mundanes in exchange for permanent ones is encouraged, and outlines the (probably deliberate) loophole of selling the magical item to a mundane covenant member and letting him sell it to the mundane.
But a mundane covenant member is still a non-magus, and so the item must still be of limited duration. So if we add this errata about effect expiry and lesser enchanted items, it is only possible to sell charged items or invested items to mundanes, but not lesser ones ? But surely a Verditius at some point would have worked a way to put effect expiry on a lesser enchanted item, just so he could still sell it and remain withing the letter of the ruling ?
Effect expiry not being applicable on charged items, that is entirely logical. But I don't see the logic of making it inapplicable to lesser enchanted items.
The description of effect expiry says that it allows the enchantment to happen faster. Getting more charges is not happening faster.
I admit, I had not grocked that it wouldn't work with lesser enchanted items. but it does make sense. Effect expiry is not supposed to allow you to cast something you couldn't otherwise enchant. If you could enchant it in a single season, you can enchant it in a single season.
The thing is it really doesn't let you make anything you could not otherwise make. It just lets you do it in far fewer seasons than first opening the item then spending several to many seasons enchanting it.
It basically lets you get items that are 16% more powerful by having them last longer than many campaigns. You can still only make an item that is 66% of your lab total with 70 year expiry as opposed to 50% of your lab total. It just lets you do in a season what would take 3(1 to open and 2 to enchant). It really is just making it faster and cheaper.
Has anyone told a cool story about devices with effect expiry?
People say that they like having the option and I can get behind that. But regardless of the questions about how or if the effect expiry rules should be modified I'm going to ask if the option has done your games any favors?
What stories have taken place around your table that were richer because of effect expiry?
We had a device cease operations as a plot device once (I was the one running the adventure) but I did not design it according to expiry effects. Retroactively it could have been a 70 year expiry item, though. it was a scrying mirror connected to another scrying mirror in a cave that the players had no idea where it was, and that contained a bound dragon. The players knew that the dragon was enraged at them (their covenant, actually) ffor binding him but had never taken the time to locate the dragon. It was bound, after all. Until a day the scrying device in their council chamber stopped working and they panicked since I had explicitly said that they had not a chance against that particular dragon in combat repeatedly. It ended up being a false alarm, since the dragon was still bound, but hey
That drove them to build up a one use "kill the pesky dragon" nuke wand item and get rid of the potential problem just in case. In that second case it was a one year item with maxed out "bang for the buck", and it was not exactly climatic IMO, but my players were doing nothing wrong, so off they went.
I have two points, one a clarification shown us by David years ago and the other a possible application if you want effect expiry for lesser enchanted items:
You can only enchanted a lesser enchanted device if you could normally instill the effect in one season. I don't know why so many of us lost this bit, but David pointed it out for us. What this means is that you must have a lab total of at least double the effect level.
If you were to allow effect expiry with lesser enchanted devices, this would mean you would still need the same minimum lab total. What it would do is allow you to make multiple items (of the same TeFo combination as per the rules) in the same season. For instance, with a lab total of TeFo60 you could make a lesser enchanted device of TeFo30. Using effect expiry you could make one TeFo30 and one TeFo10 both with a 70-year effect expiry in one season. You could not, however, make a TeFo40 effect using 70-year effect expiry. This violates the errata but would be how effect expiry would apply without the errata.
It ended up being a false alarm, since the dragon was still bound, but hey 