Why don't they do magic items like themes?

[mattcolville]

I haven't paid attention to how WotC treat magic items, so forgive me if this is a solved problem.

I really hated how 4E did magic items on release. I completely understand the design goals behind it, I even agree with them, I just felt the execution was terrible and damaging to the game.

By "damaging to the game" I mean they changed one of the core motivations of the players. By requiring items to dole out regular, predictable, small, benefits and bonuses, removing the chance of finding some ridiculously overpowered item, or even just something really *weird* and not obviously useful until pressed by imminent death to start thinking outside the box, treasure stopped being a reason for going into the dungeon.

The DMG actually ADVISES you to just ask your players what they want!

Anyway, I don't want to dwell on my objections, I just wanted to give my suggestion context.

So I was thinking about this and I noticed how awesome Dark Sun Themes are. At least, the idea is awesome. Not all the themes are awesome, but that's not the idea's fault.

I loved the Templar theme for instance. It was a Controller theme that made my Striker a passable Controller. That was cool. My Warlock was a great striker and a passable controller and a passable leader. A+

Why does that work? I know why. It works because the theme is class and stat-agnostic. Theme powers say "use your primary stat" whatever that is. So they can be grafted on to any character.

The powers, and therefore the themes, are--in other words--purely based on your *role*.

Well, why can't the magic items work that way? Make items grant benefits based on wide classes of character like Roles or even Power Sources so many more possible characters can benefit from any given item.

Now we can have random items again! No striker in your party? That's ok, someone in the party will enjoy a power that makes them feel like a striker once per encounter or whatever.

You give someone an Encounter power or a Daily power with only 1 use, or three uses, and now you can have really wildly weird and powerful items again and random generation.

So, yes, I recognize this would break one of their goals. Character portability. The current rules make it possible, actually easy, to take any character from any campaign and stick him in any other level-appropriate game. Because unless the GM went crazy, the PC doesn't have an Infernal Machine of Lum The Mad or Apparatus of Kwalish. That's why the new Encounters program allows you to bring your own dude. Because there's no way he could normally get the kind of magic items the real, official adventures used to hand out.

But surely we could just flag those wildly imbalancing, 1- or 3-use items and disallow them when moving campaigns. It's just one little restriction!

I dunno, maybe it wouldn't solve the problem. As it stands, the players I've run for find the magic items in 4E really uninspiring. And there's no real incentive to use an item that's not *exactly* what you would have picked.

 

[FireLance]

Personally, I think that most of 4E's problems with magic items stem from an overreaction to how important they were in previous editions.

One of the design goals for 4E (IIRC) was to ensure that most of a character's abilities stemmed not from his magic items, but from himself: his class, his race, his feats, and so on.

With the introduction of class encounter and daily powers, racial powers and so on, I believe they largely succeeded. However, I suspect that there was an unstated design principle for magic items that, in retrospect, I think was a mistake: magic item daily powers were, on average, about on par with a class encounter power, and magic item encounter powers were, on average, about on par with a class at-will power. The guidelines for wand creation are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

Naturally, given this set-up, magic item powers are going to seem anemic comapred to class powers with a similar frequency of use.

Personally, I think that adopting a theme model for magic items is not going to be all that unbalancing since a theme at-will power is generally only slightly more powerful than a class at-will power, making it fairly close to the current power level of a magic item with an encounter power, and any further abilities need to be gained at the expense of class powers. Unfortunately, this leads us back to the original problem of magic items defining a character more than his class abilities. However, maybe it will not be so bad if each character has only one or two of such "character-defining" magic items.

One other possiblity is to upgrade the power of magic item encounter and daily abilities to be on par with their class equivalents. However, I think that would lead to more balance issues than the theme approach.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Don't have Dark Sun material but I do like the idea of themes, on the subject of magic items I am of the opinion that they should abandon plussed magic items all together and have only powers and properties.

I do like the ideas presented though.

I also think that more work on the ritual system would benefit the game in more whacky magic without setting off an arms race in the combat. More rules on rituals would not go amiss. For instance, rules for arcana checks to hurry up a ritual or create a scroll that can complete the ritual in 5/10 combat rounds. Some simple resource like action points that could be used as the material components for rituals rather than tracking gold.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I've wondered about it similarly but from a magic items like feats instead of like themes. Throughout a level instead of the GM giving out X number of magic items of X level and gold pieces equivalent to level X magic item, they'd give out X level appropriate magic items. Replacing magic items could follow something similar to retraining.

I think it might be too complicated to work and depending on how it'd be implemented it could infuriate the "wish list" opponents. But it would allow the GM to focus on giving out gold as an actual treasure reward instead of giving out massive amount of gold to support the PC's need for magic items.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I've wondered about this, too. I think perhaps that they were still feeling their way, and magic items in 4E were thus very conservatively used to keep from breaking the new model.

There might also have been a failure of nerve, with all the other changes in the game. Magic items are one of the few places were they went to some effort to keep a patina of effect similar to the old rules. There is a healing potion, even if relatively devalued because of surges. Weapons still get +N to hit and damage, even if now everyone is expected to have an appropriate one. It would have taken some nerve to take that next step and decide that maybe weapons didn't need +N anymore, and would just flame or whatever. And perhaps if a healing potion had to be so relatively devalued to have a cheap one, maybe it would have been better to make them more rare and more powerful. (Of course, it is also possible that low-leveling playtesting made the need for potions obvious, but that raises the question of failure of nerve on equipment dependency.)

I think it is pretty obvious from the general gist of the comments made about equipment that doing something more radical was considered. For whatever reason, they decided not to.

 

[Insight]

I like the idea of using Inherent Bonuses (see the DMG or DSCS for more info) and then not having any + items. Instead, items give you additional properties or powers to use.

In terms of making magic items like themes, I'm sure it could be done. The only issue with a theme is that it gives you a free encounter power (not a huge problem since magic items already do this), but also free power swaps through to level 10 (and nothing after that). Personally, I don't mind the power swaps being free, but you'd have to come up with several additional powers to swap. I don't know how many powers you'd want an item to have.

I could see special (ie Rare) items being modeled like themes. I'm sure a Ring of Wizardry or a Holy Avenger could have lots of potential powers.

 

[Redshirt]

I like the idea of using Inherent Bonuses (see the DMG or DSCS for more info) and then not having any + items. Instead, items give you additional properties or powers to use.

I plan on doing this in my next campaign. Plus it gives you alot of leeway to play with cool powers without nerfing the player.

 

[RangerWickett]

In 3e, you couldn't survive without your items, and often non-spellcasters couldn't do anything "unusual" without magic items. So with 4e they decided we will change this!

So they got rid of unusual stuff.

Like, y'know, I thought they'd maybe take cool magic item powers and give them as PC options. Like hey, I'm a druid, so I have a "bag of tricks" to summon minor critters really easily. Or instead of having a ring of blinking, a rogue would learn on his own how to flicker between realities. Or a fighter might develop "giant strength" so he could throw barrels and stuff like Donkey Kong.

But no. They just removed the unusual stuff altogether. Maybe the most famous magic item in fantasy literature is Bilbo's ring, and now it's just impossible to be invisible for more than a couple rounds at a time.

Also, I miss weird flaming thundering vicious dancing swords with three minor magical powers that get recharged whenever you eat poultry.

 

[mattcolville]

In 3e, you couldn't survive without your items, and often non-spellcasters couldn't do anything "unusual" without magic items. So with 4e they decided we will change this!

So they got rid of unusual stuff.

Like, y'know, I thought they'd maybe take cool magic item powers and give them as PC options. Like hey, I'm a druid, so I have a "bag of tricks" to summon minor critters really easily. Or instead of having a ring of blinking, a rogue would learn on his own how to flicker between realities. Or a fighter might develop "giant strength" so he could throw barrels and stuff like Donkey Kong.

But no. They just removed the unusual stuff altogether. Maybe the most famous magic item in fantasy literature is Bilbo's ring, and now it's just impossible to be invisible for more than a couple rounds at a time.

Also, I miss weird flaming thundering vicious dancing swords with three minor magical powers that get recharged whenever you eat poultry.

I suspect the DevTeam drastically underestimated the effect of magic items as motivation.

Right now if I have two groups of players, at the same level, and run them through two adventures, you could not tell, looking at their character sheets afterwards, which party went through which adventure. They've turned adventuring into a Black Box.

I think they did that to maximize character portability, but I think they went too far. Back when we had a robust network of players, which is to say the 1970s and 1980s, a player might say "Oh man Castle Amber! I want to go through that, there's a set of +1 FULL Plate Mail in there!" He knew about it, stories, maybe not entirely accurate accounts, because his brother had run it, or the older kids at school had talked about it.

Which seems now a pretty good simulation of how actual adventuring would work. You hear legends, half-remembered stories, accounts that grew in the telling.

But my point is; the players were motivated to go into dungeons. Go on adventures. Not because they wanted to be Heroes, they wanted the loot. Actual published adventures had some fantastic loot in them, unique stuff you couldn't find in the DMG (though much of it would end up in the UA).

Different modules gained different reputations. Even two different groups going through the SAME adventure might come out with radically different XP rewards and items.

The DevTeam seems to think this is a flaw. Content, now, no longer matters. Only play time. If two groups both play for 10 hours, the expectation is they'll both get roughly the same XP, level up at the same rate.

Which means the only choices that matter now are the ones the players make when levelling up.

This seems to me a serious problem. Content SHOULD matter, Content should be king! Adventures should provide lots of choices, branches, opportunities to negotiate, make choices. The players actions should matter, not just the choices they make when they level up.

The players should think "I want to go in there because there's some awesome loot." As opposed to "I want to go in there because it's D&D night and that's what we do on D&D night."

 

[Haltherrion]

Personally, I think that most of 4E's problems with magic items stem from an overreaction to how important they were in previous editions.

One of the design goals for 4E (IIRC) was to ensure that most of a character's abilities stemmed not from his magic items, but from himself: his class, his race, his feats, and so on.

I agree but I think that goal was driven also with an eye on MMORGs. In WoW it has become absurd: your character is your gear and your base stats almost irrelevant. That's mostly an issue with how they did expansions, of course. I haven't read much of the 4e designer's notes but to be honest, an undercurrent to 4E seems to me to be: "Hey we tried a MMORG with pre-4E rules, it didn't work so well. Let's rework D&D so it would play better on a MMORG."

And for the record, I like 4E and don't actually mind an eye on MMORGs as a design goal.

As a general principle I do prefer the character is defined more by instrinsics than his gear. But I don't think 4E (or any system prevents that). Over multiple editions, my group has tended to oscillate between having lots of small incremental stuff out there versus rarer but more powerful items.

Aesthetically, I prefer the later. It tends to fit what you see in myths, books and movies but aside from that, it just has more punch. You care more about that one super useful item than about the six +1 items you have. Consider King Arthur: he had a cool sword and a cool scabbard. That's it.

In our current 4E campaign, the players have a little middling stuff but the items that count are items that are many levels higher than normal play. These items, however, do wear out with use. This concept is built into the core setting in this case but its fun to put an "excaliber" in people's hands and let them experience some real power, however transient. It also brings out the "oh wow" factor when they get find some treasure.