D&D 5E Dissapointed with Attunement

GreyICE said:

You act as if the DM should omnipotently know absolutely everything, yet what happens without attunement if the DM includes magic items at a reasonable pace (aka 1 a level per player or so, which feels pretty slow to him compared to how CRPGs work)?

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D&D magic items have different design demands and require different implementation than CRPG magic items. If a DM treats D&D like a CRPG, they will be disappointed in more than just the graphics. If a the rules make it clear that magic items are raw power-ups, and that a DM shouldn't add them unless she's willing to have more powerful characters, I don't know why a DM would assume that it works any other way, unless they can't read directions.

GreyICE said:

I wish, wish, wish people wouldn't try to make the system BY DEFAULT punish newer DMs, especially with these land mine decisions where the negative consequences won't be felt for months and months of REAL TIME.

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Right, because giving DMs the information they need to add an optional rule onto their game is totally punishing new DMs.

You're going to have to make that case better before I believe you.

GreyICE said:

The system should be default designed to make sure new DMs make reasonably good decisions if they follow the default system. Attunement is a serious step in that direction, and that's all positive.

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It is designed that way by making magic items optional. You don't seem to fully understand that a DM is under no obligation to use any magic items whatsoever to run a fun D&D Game. They are something you can choose to include.

You also don't seem to fully understand that attunement itself doesn't protect against that problem, as I pointed out in the post you cited.

GreyICE said:

You're a high level DM. You probably don't need the rule. Hey man, cut it out. The simplest thing in the world.

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I'm just some jerk on the internet. No one needs this rule. And newbies are better off when dealing with optional add-on systems in learning and applying what they've learned than they are being nannied by the rules-system. They need to be empowered, not dictated to.

Inessential rules should be added on an opt-in basis. Magic items are inessential, so they're opt-in. Attunement is inessential, so it shouldn't be opt-out.

I must literally be going insane. I can't have read what I just read.

Kamakaze, do you seriously believe that the average table with the average group of players playing D&D will have no magic items? Are you serious? Can this be an actual opinion?

Never in D&D's history has that happened. And I'm starting this with Gygax. Magic items were core parts of the very first bits of D&D ever run. And you think this will suddenly become the default?

No. Way. New DMs are going to have magic items. Their players want them. They sound cool. And they get out of hand so very easily

- No magic <- some people may do this
- attunement keeps the magic items under control while allowing them to be incredibly strong <- default
- MONTY HAUL 9000 BABY <- Kamikaze midget

To suggest that new DMs will default to zero magic is ridiculous. It will not happen.

Systems should be easy to run by default. Optionally you can break them. We've taken steps forward in use ability in every edition. Lets not suddenly start back peddling.

The default will be what new players gravitate towards UNLESS there's a big enough reason. Magic items are that big. They're a classic of the fantasy genre. New DMs will use them, and that means making them friendly to new DMs.

GreyICE said:

No. Way. New DMs are going to have magic items. Their players want them. They sound cool. And they get out of hand so very easily

- No magic <- some people may do this
- attunement keeps the magic items under control while allowing them to be incredibly strong <- default
- MONTY HAUL 9000 BABY <- Kamikaze midget

To suggest that new DMs will default to zero magic is ridiculous. It will not happen.

Systems should be easy to run by default. Optionally you can break them. We've taken steps forward in use ability in every edition. Lets not suddenly start back peddling.

The default will be what new players gravitate towards UNLESS there's a big enough reason. Magic items are that big. They're a classic of the fantasy genre. New DMs will use them, and that means making them friendly to new DMs.

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This is also true. What a conundrum.


It boils down to your basic philosophy, neither way is "wrong".


1. If DMs don't game and make mistakes they never learn. (People learn from experience and mistakes)

2. A common easily understood baseline makes gaming easier for new people. Some will quit and never try without it.


It's when the philosophies get polarized (extreme) that we have the unsolvable differences. (Not accusing anyone, this is an example).



Camp #1 fears that every guideline or framework will become handholding and nobody will ever learn anything.

Camp #2 fears that everything must be learned via experience and that all new DMs will be tossed to the wolves.


Me? I "lean" towards Camp 1, but realize we need support from Camp 2.

IMHO.

GreyICE said:

Kamakaze, do you seriously believe that the average table with the average group of players playing D&D will have no magic items? Are you serious? Can this be an actual opinion?

Never in D&D's history has that happened. And I'm starting this with Gygax. Magic items were core parts of the very first bits of D&D ever run. And you think this will suddenly become the default?

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You say this like there hasn't been hundreds of people in every edition of D&D who run games where magic items are nigh to completely non-existent. And like the playtest document itself doesn't say things like "You can add or withhold magic items in your adventures as you see fit; such items are a reward, not a necessary part of a player character’s advancement" and "Such wonders are desirable, but characters do not need magic items to be effective, nor are they entitled to them."

It's clearly opt-in. So if you choose to include magic items, you're turning on an option that makes your characters more powerful, period. So before you choose to include a magic item, as a DM, you should understand the basic ramifications of including them. Thus making a mechanic to "balance" magic items superfluous.

GreyICE said:

To suggest that new DMs will default to zero magic is ridiculous. It will not happen.

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The RAW makes it pretty clear that this is the default. So it will happen if you follow the rules. If you don't follow the rules, the rules can't really help you.

GreyICE said:

Systems should be easy to run by default. Optionally you can break them. We've taken steps forward in use ability in every edition. Lets not suddenly start back peddling.

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If you want to run the easiest version of D&D, you won't include magic items. If you choose to include magic items, the D&D rules should let you know that they are raw power-up, so if you add too many of them, your players will likely be able to face significantly tougher challenges. That's not really very hard to do.

The christmas tree and the treadmill and the wishlist were thought to be a good idea because the game designers for 3e and 4e thought a lot like this: "Magic items will be in the game, so they should be balanced!"

None of those efforts at balancing magic items lead to satisfying gameplay at the table, though, where a discovery of a +1 sword should have been a cool thing, not simply a requirement for character power. They also introduced a problem in that they forced the DM's hand: now a DM who didn't want to abide by a wishlist was being "stingy," and not meeting the expected wealth guidelines was actually making your party weaker.

So to make magic items actually fun to use, the idea is to make it more like 2e, 1e, and OD&D, where a DM could run an entire campaign comfortably without any magic items, and where, if a magic items was awarded, it could be taken from you, cursed, given a severe restriction, made a plot point...so that they were options for exciting gameplay, not elements of balance.

In my limited experience (I've been adding 2e magic items to my "inherent bonuses" 4e games pretty seamlessly for a while now), it's a LOT of fun. When magic items are not prerequisites, you can use them for all sorts of mischief.

GreyICE said:

The default will be what new players gravitate towards UNLESS there's a big enough reason. Magic items are that big. They're a classic of the fantasy genre. New DMs will use them, and that means making them friendly to new DMs.

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No, the default will be what the RAW says is default. That's how new players learn how to play: they join a game and they read the rules.

A lot of people will opt into using magic items, yes.

And when they do, they will read text that says "magic items are not a requirement, they are a raw power-up, and adding too many of them will make your party significantly more powerful than other parties of the same level."

Thus, newbies placing their +1 swords are under no delusions that the magic item is necessary, essential, useful, or in need of strict and arbitrary balance.

Also, I feel the need to keep pointing out that attunement doesn't actually stop you from abusing magic items, but given that the shock of optional magic items has apparently rendered you fantastically incredulous, perhaps you're going to need a moment on that.

Kamikaze Midget said:

The christmas tree and the treadmill and the wishlist were thought to be a good idea because the game designers for 3e and 4e thought a lot like this: "Magic items will be in the game, so they should be balanced!"

None of those efforts at balancing magic items lead to satisfying gameplay at the table, though, where a discovery of a +1 sword should have been a cool thing, not simply a requirement for character power. They also introduced a problem in that they forced the DM's hand: now a DM who didn't want to abide by a wishlist was being "stingy," and not meeting the expected wealth guidelines was actually making your party weaker.

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Unfortunately, I think 4e got the math right, but the psychology wrong.

They could have retained the same balanced math and made magic items seem like raw power-ups if they had just done the following:

1. Re-work monster levels so that they are equal to the level of the characters that they are supposed to be a standard challenge for plus the bonus from the magic items that the characters are supposed to have. So, if a 12th-level monster is supposed to be a standard challenge for a 12th-level party armed with +3 gear, it is now a 15th-level monster (12 + 3).

2. State in the rules that a monster of level X is supposed to be a standard challenge for a party of the same level. However, if the party is armed with +Y gear, it is able to take on monsters of higher level (X + Y)!

I know it seems like sleight of hand that shouldn't fool anyone with a basic grasp of mathematics, but somehow, it makes a significant difference psychologically. A 12th-level party without magic items that can "only" take on a 9th-level monster feels bad about it, and one that has the "expected" +3 gear and takes on a 12th-level monster feels that the gear is "necessary". A 12th-level party without magic items that takes on a 12th-level monster feels that is routine, and one that has +3 items and takes on a 15th-level monster feels good about the fact that their equipment "allowed" them to take on a higher-level challenge. This is even if the 9th/12th level monster and the 12th/15th level monster have exactly the same game statistics except for level.

People are just funny that way, I guess.

FireLance said:

Unfortunately, I think 4e got the math right, but the psychology wrong.

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I mostly agree. I think that a consequence of getting the math right means the psychology will be wrong. 4e could've obfuscated a little better, but it ultimately still wouldn't have been satisfying -- if the DM just throws higher level monsters at the party, it's still a treadmill. Magic items don't feel significant if they don't change anything, and making them unable to change anything is how you'd balance them.

Better, I think, to say, "Magic items will change things. Be ready for that change before you drop a magic item into your game."

That said, I do think wishlists for treasure were kind of a borked idea from the start.

Kamikaze Midget said:

That said, I do think wishlists for treasure were kind of a borked idea from the start.

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Any particular reason why?

I understand that they're not a concept that works in every campaign, but then they weren't put forward as something you must use. Instead, they were put forward as one way of ensuring that the items you added to your campaign were ones that would be used rather than sold off or reduced into their component parts at the party's earliest convenience.

Knowing what sort of magic items are of interest to your players and their characters is, in my opinion and experience, a useful tool. One use is as a ready-made list of adventure hooks. If you know that the paladin really wants a Holy Avenger, then slipping into the tavern gossip rumours of one in the hoard of a mighty dragon in the nearest mountain immediately gives both the player and the character reason to want to go there. On the other hand, she might be a little more unconventional and really want a Lightning Longspear. Knowing that reduces the chances of putting in ineffective hooks.

Note that even in the suggestion they didn't put forward the idea that you were in any way obligated to provide any of the items that people wanted; I do feel however, that purposefully avoiding including items you know your players find interesting would be an odd choice.

Nothing makes magic items feel less magical to me than repeatedly finding ones that of are of no use or interest to the party. It turns them from desirable treasure into meaningless commodity.

It also defies my genre expectations. Most magic items that characters gain turn out, in most of my fantasy reading experience, to be either exactly what the characters need, or something that fulfills a specific desire that they have. When Bilbo needs to hide is exactly when he finds a ring that turns him invisible, not the source of light in darkness that Frodo is later given shortly before he's to travel through a dark tunnel. Now, it may turn out later that there's some downside to these items, something that D&D magic items often lack, but that's a whole other ball of wax. Rarely do authors bother to include magic items that are of no particular use in the story they appear in, or that no characters in the party have a way to use. Given that unless I've got the party locked onto a specific course I cannot tell exactly what items they will need at some point far in the future I cannot always use the author's trick of providing the appropriate key to the puzzle, then I can instead use the reverse trick of figuring out what sort of tools that the party wants to have and then providing puzzles to which those tools are keys.

I like magic items to have meaning. Wishlists are one way of ensuring that they at least have meaning to one player in my campaign. It's not the only tool in my toolbox, of course. If I know, and the players do not, that there are a bevy of trolls around the next corner, a flaming longsword that nobody in particular requested suddenly becomes a great deal more important. But if nobody in the party has a proficiency in longswords, maybe I'd be better off making it a different weapon.

Grydan said:

Any particular reason why?

I understand that they're not a concept that works in every campaign, but then they weren't put forward as something you must use. Instead, they were put forward as one way of ensuring that the items you added to your campaign were ones that would be used rather than sold off or reduced into their component parts at the party's earliest convenience.

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Kind of a long, off-topic answer, but...
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I think in the first place that problem of "this magic item is useless, I'm going to sell it off to the first merchant I see and get something useful!" is a problem created by assuming magic items (and player wealth) in the balance of the game. If you assume that, then players must have magic items (roughly measured by GP) to be useful, and you as a DM are sort of forced into giving them what they want. If you don't, they'll (a) sell it off and buy something they DO want, or (b) sell it off, not buy anything, and then be weaker than the rest of the party and/or too weak to address the challenges thrown at them.

Meanwhile, if you don't assume magic items (and player wealth) in the balance of the game, it's OK if a player decides that they'd rather have a few hundred GP than a decanter of endless water, since those GP can only buy them "ale and whores" (and perhaps consumable items) -- ie, it's okay to let a player opt not to bother to track or use a particular item, since nothing bad happens if they don't. They aren't "too weak."

In the same way, you can feel more free to give out "useless" items as a DM, knowing that it's OK if the party doesn't want to keep them. You don't need to give them a lot of gold for it, you don't need to worry about replacing their valuable items, and you don't need to worry about giving them "the big six" or anything like that.

You're also able to still drop in magic items as a world-building/plot-hook element, even if they're not assumed in the balance, because this then allows you to actually reward the player who does the legwork to get the Holy Avenger with a Holy Avenger, instead of merely fulfilling their request.

So the problem that wishlists were supposed to solve, IMO, wouldn't even be a problem if you didn't assume magic items in the balance of the game.

Given that baseline, if you're working with a game where you "have to" award magic items, I still think that wishlists are a severely maladroit way to do so. Primarily, wishlists change the psychology of treasure from "something I want to try and get" to "something I get."

It's a bit like the difference between getting a prize for getting "All A's" on your report card (especially if you didn't expect it), and...well...:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4a9CKgLprQ]YouTube[/ame]

Or maybe more accurately, the difference between getting a performance-based bonus or unexpected raise at work, versus getting your Christmas bonus or a cost-of-living raise at work.

One is an unexpected or aspirational thing that you want and strive toward.

The other is an expectation that, if you don't get (or get it in a way you don't want), you're going to be disappointed.

That latter mental state is, IMO, pretty unacceptable for magic items in D&D. They don't represent entitlements or expected gifts, they represent something aspirational and lucky. They're not present as a matter of course, they're present as an exceptional scenario. They're valuable and desirable, not basic and functional. Even a +1 sword should be like that.
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Kamikaze Midget said:

You say this like there hasn't been hundreds of people in every edition of D&D who run games where magic items are nigh to completely non-existent.

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For every hundred people running D&D where magic is nigh to completely non-existent I would guess there are thousands that have run with the "default" amount of magic items. Why would you have them make the default that suits the minority instead of the majority? Or are you arguing that most people ran D&D with a low level of magic items?

I don't think we are completely on different pages, because I think we both want 5e magic items to be something magical, not mundane.

I hated 4e's way of doing magic items and think it was by far the worst way of doing it in my eyes. That magic items where in the PHB, the assumed amount of magic items (minimum +x/4 level armor, weapon, bracelet, usually that and a lot more) and the wishlist made magic items cool and all that, but it made magic items feel cheap.

One thing I feel they have learnt and is that +x/4 level magic items are detrimental to the game and makes the game a threadmill. That they instead went with +1 items (and no assumed +2 to +5 for later levels) and instead went with more exotic, not numeric effects that you don't have to take into account in the game math is a good idea. The differnce between having +1 or not is small enough that you can more or less ignore it when it comes to the math.

The attunement I think is something they are looking at for the majority of players that do like having magic items in their game and as a way of giving a guideline to how many magic items they feel is ok. For the minority that likes low-magic D&D I don't see the problem with this approach as it is much less intrusive than the game math based magic items of 3e and 4e.

Anyway, I hope they put the magic items in the DMG

Blackbrrd said:

For every hundred people running D&D where magic is nigh to completely non-existent I would guess there are thousands that have run with the "default" amount of magic items. Why would you have them make the default that suits the minority instead of the majority? Or are you arguing that most people ran D&D with a low level of magic items?

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Like I said above, I think that a lot of people WILL use magic items, at least occasionally.

But in 5e, they will have to actively choose to do so.

And when they make that choice, the designers can make it an educated choice, by describing the boost that magic items inherently bring.

If that's done, there doesn't need to be any way to then "limit" the magic items after the fact. The DM must be educated before they decide to do it, and once they decide to do it, they've been given the tools they need to do it responsibly.

Magic items being opt-in means that most people who learn to play D&D and who want to use magic items will then also be DMs who are empowered to make judgement calls about the level of enjoyable imbalance in their own games.

That's creating competent DM's. That can't help but improve the game for everyone.

Blackbrrd said:

The attunement I think is something they are looking at for the majority of players that do like having magic items in their game and as a way of giving a guideline to how many magic items they feel is ok. For the minority that likes low-magic D&D I don't see the problem with this approach as it is much less intrusive than the game math based magic items of 3e and 4e.

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Attunement doesn't do that, though. There's limits on "attuned" items, but a lot of "attuned" items give basic bonuses even if not attuned, and there's also a lot of items that don't need to be attuned that also grant bonuses.

I'm rather thinking that attunement was an attempt to make magic items feel "special" (ie: they require more effort than simply picking them up, and it's limited) while also trying not to make a magic item's activation dominate the game (hence the 10 minute rule).

Blackbrrd said:

I don't think we are completely on different pages, because I think we both want 5e magic items to be something magical, not mundane.
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Anyway, I hope they put the magic items in the DMG

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We likely agree more than we disagree. I don't think attunement is a horrible idea, I just think it's something that should be opt-in (and something that should be more significant than it is now).

Sort of, rather than making certain items "attuneable" and then having a general attunement rule, you can opt as a DM to add "attunement" to a given magic item, which then becomes "powered up" under the right conditions (much like you can add a "secret" to a given magic item now). You can include a menu of actions that attune an item, a limit on items that you can attune, and a menu of "powered up" abilities, and an example or seven.

They don't need to be part of everyone's D&D, though.