Experiences with Weapons of Legacy

We had a really great time with Weapons of Legacy, mainly because I designed our own ones, and then the players really became invested in them (and they were rather good items at that).

Enough so that I've occasionally heard them lamenting that they don't exist in 4e.

Cheers!

Jeff Wilder said:

People would have been fine, for instance, if the penalties for a weapon's combat powers were things like "-2 on Diplomacy checks," because for the vast majority of melee-oriented PCs, "-2 on Diplomacy checks" is meaningless. On the other hand, "-4 HP" or "-1 to all attacks" is a trade-off that isn't a no-brainer.

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The bonuses weren't really so hot, though.

Looking in Bo9S, the weapons there have abilities that are kind of meh at best. They're either highly situational (and thus prone to be forgotten) or something that is covered in the rest of your panoply, or they come in at so high a level that they aren't useful.

So, giving up hp or taking attack/skill/save penalties for what eventually turns out to be a +7-equivalent weapon with some SLAs doesn't seem to be that much of a good idea. I'd rather spend more money on a weapon of my own design, thank you.

Brad

As written WoL is pretty much worthless. And I read and re-read that book over and over again wanting to like it. I even brought in some for 2 different groups and neither liked them very much. That said the backgrounds and histories written for most of the weapons in the book are really top notch. I have found many uses for them over the years. I would never thrust one upon a player though - they really just suck. For the record I used 11 different WoL (of my own devising using some of the histories from the book) and none of them really worked for me or the group.

A good idea with just terrible implmentation.

Another issue is that you can't customize the abilities granted by the item (well, you can, but that typically involves redesigning the entire item from scratch, which seems to defeat the purpose of getting the book in the first place).

A player given the opportunity to craft or commission the crafting of a magic item he really wants will surely use the chance to cherry-pick properties which complement his abilities the most. Not the case with weapons of legacy.

Throw in the various penalties you have to suck up and you typically end up with a far inferior weapon compared to the next best alternative - creating one yourself.

I liked the ideas espoused in WoL, but not necessarily the execution.

The rules lacked flexibility- I'd have liked more info on how to design & balance new WoLs, with broader themes.

I also think that the single biggest problem with them is that it costs a feat to "buy in" to WoLs when most classes are Feat-starved (and some of us like Sunder *raises hand*). It might have been better if the Legacy feats worked a bit more like the Vows from BoED/BoVD, and actually replaced the feat lost, albeit at a later level.

Better would have been to have a WoL linked to a particular backstory...and have the "buy in" be in the form of either PC/campaign backstory, PC action, or innate to the weapon itself.

Besides all the 'don't' like statements, there was a moment where I took a high-light and literally found a word, one word, (forgot what it was now), and repeatedly mark the word out, line by line, page by page (alot of lines and several pages).

I was seriously turned off by that. Never touched it again.

p.s. locate Dragon Magazine # 289, pg 56. There, you can simpifly the process.

Yeah, the penalties struck me as made of fail. "Here's a weapon -- it will make you worse at combat and adventuring, by penalizing things you need to survive, and costing you resources you have in short supply." Uh, no thanks.

For me, penalties like -2 Diplomacy or similar "-X to something you won't do" wouldn't have made it better; they would have been clearly cheesy.

It seems like it would be easier to just make the weapon/item's cost rise appropriately as its abilities increase, and give out less treasure if you care about staying in the wealth guidelines. If you are concerned about party balance, give everyone an item of legacy.

It may be the worst 3e book ever written. Insofar as the costs were "balanced," they were a needlessly complicated way to get you back where you started, or from a GM standpoint, a needlessly complicated way to bribe your players to stick with a particular item. Despite the explicit inclusion of a pair of paired weapons, using more than one of these items would "balance" your character so much that a half-dragon drow sorcerer would look strong by comparison. The mechanics didn't work, the balancing mechancis didn't work, the rules assumed non-standard uses of Knowledge checks which were never explained, and the items which supposedly arose as a result of legendary acts required special insenses and such costing thousands of gold that you needed to contemplate the weapon's specialness. Apart from that, Exordius has an awesome backstory and would work great as an artifact, whereas most of the other items were either boring or, frankly, dorky. Bullybasher's Gauntlets pretty much win the prize for worst name married to least interesting item with most pathetic legendary origin.

Apologies to any board posters who contributed to that book, nothing personal, I assure you.

You would do better with the item advancement rules in Unearthed Arcana, any of a number of third party supplments that supported that concept, or any number of other approaches to the same concept. Really, anything other than using Weapons of Legacy. Before you use Weapons of Legacy, you should strongly consider whether there are any downsides to simply handing out improvements to their exisisting items in place of treasure.

I wrote this review in a fairly generous mood and before I sold my copy:

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/12/12190.phtml

pawsplay said:

It may be the worst 3e book ever written. (snip)

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No. Surely that honour must belong to the Epic Level Handbook?

While I do agree with you and your review, I must admit I have found some of the weapon backstories quite good and will eventually include several in my 4E games... but completely ignoring the mechanics. That said, it was a bloody expensive way to buy the backstories of a few magical items!

No. Surely that honour must belong to the Epic Level Handbook?

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Make that a 3-way fight for 2nd last place with Savage Species?

Ironically, I liked the idea behind SS, but felt that the execution was extremely bad. Worse - it came out right before 3.5, thus invalidating quite a bit of material.

As for weapons of legacy, why do I get this feeling said book could easily have been a web enhancement, but the designers decided to try and bloat it so they could package it as another splatbook?