Should weapons in RPGM1 be priced like this?

Str +30 Price: 3000
Str +15 Price: 1500
Str +5 Price: 500

or this:

Str +30 Price: 5000
Str +15 Price: 2000
Str +5 Price: 500

During test plays I have noticed that the str bonuses of weapons don't really increase the damage that much, and sorta seem like a waste of money. Should the price go up exponentially (2) or consistantly (1)? What does everyone else do?

You have to take in account the heroes' attack level and the defense of the monsters. It takes constant tweaking.

Price takes just as much effort, as you must balance the money that the hero group will have at different points of the game.

It's unique to every game, so no one can really help you here.

Find out how much money the player will have by the time they reach each new shop, and make it so they'll have just enough money to buy the latest equipment and a few other supplies like potions.

By the way, the amount of extra damage a weapon will give is half the amount of power you give it. So a weapon with a strength of 30 will cause 15 more damage than if the person was weaponless.

Thanks, but what about defense? There must be some kind of formula, is it like (str/2) - def or str - def? Defense seems to be a lot better than strength.

The formula for calculating damage is:

(Total Strength / 2) - (Total Defence / 2)

So, if your character has a base attack of 74 and is equipped with a weapon with a power of 32 (for a total of 106) and he attacks an enemy with a defence of 85, the attack will only take off around 21HP. Assuming of course that it's not a critial hit or a miss. If it's critical, it's doubled.

Magic is more straightforward. A spell with a power of 20 will deal just that much, not counting weaknesses and strengths. There is no real magic power stat. The stat reffered to as M DEF is more of an immunity stat, which affects how likely one is to be affected by bad status attacks such as sleep, paralyze, and death. Though death and one of the other status effects (I forget which) have an additional hit percentage of their own. Best I can tell, when M DEF is turned on, a M DEF stat at 0 means a base 100% chance that the bad status effect will take place, while all the way up to 9999 would be a 0% (or maybe a 0.01%) chance that the status effect will work. I don't think M DEF affects good status effects.

Alright thanks.

Wouldn't it be 11 damage give or take?

53-42.5 = 11.5

Yeah, you can totally tell how long it's been since I've had to do any math.

Generally, exponential growth in the cost of weapons makes more sense.
To me, at least.
If the prices of weapons are too close there won't be as much inscentive to cash in early instead of waiting out for a better weapon.

Simple prices are the way to go. If you keep the numbers simple and make sure that the weapon has something different from the others. Then you'll succeed