Erekose13
Explorer
A similar system to my original proposal was asked in this month's Dragon Column ~ Save my Game.
This is very similar to what I was proposing with a little more grace.
[~link~]Stephen Radney-MacFarland said:Magic Item Misfits
My group has been playing 4th Edition and having a blast with it, but my players have brought up a concern regarding magic items, and I was wondering how we could deal with it. Right now we are in low-epic levels and my players are distressed that they cannot hit anything without their magic items. Any level-appropriate challenge becomes extremely difficult if they are not using their best stuff. This is a problem for my players, who like to carry different assortments of weaponry (and sometimes armors) for different situations, especially for the fighter who likes to use different weapons for different effects with his powers. My players argue that at such high levels they should be able to stay relevant with ordinary equipment and that magic items should be a nice bonus. One player expressed that magic items don't feel special because they are a requirement for the character just to be viable.
Do you guys have any optional rules or anything of that sort that could resolve this before I have a full-scale mutiny on my hands? I have considered using the magic item threshold rules for NPCs from the Dungeon Master's Guide (page 187) to give the players a flat bonus as they level up that wouldn't stack with the enhancement bonus of magic items. Would this be a reasonable optional rule in your opinion?
-- Spill-All-You-Know Crow
Well, we wouldn't want a mutiny, would we? While we have some optional rules lying here and there on desks (we are all game designers, developers, and editors, after all), your basic solution of using the magic item thresholds for NPCs should work reasonably well. If you want a system that is low magic or where the majority of the magic of an item resides in its powers and properties, you can also just assume that all items have the baseline bonus for magic for that level. This would make those super-generalist characters more powerful than the baseline D&D characters, but it sounds like that's what your players want out of their epic play.
Be careful, though. If this issue is enough to really cause a mutiny, I have a sneaking suspicion that you have a power gamer (or many power gamers) on your hands. You'll want to make sure that they don't push to add magic bonuses on top of the assumed enhancements or try to get you to relax the restrictions on magic item daily powers. Make sure your game is fun, but that it's fun for everyone, not just the person with the loudest or most persistent arguments.
This is very similar to what I was proposing with a little more grace.