Ruin Explorer
Legend
I disliked the old girdles of giant strength because they wiped away your choices. Suddenly, your choice to play a weak character by assigning a low score to strength became completely irrelevant.
In a way, I think 5e's equivalents are actually worse, because the people with good scores (read: 20s) won't get any benefit from them. So they'll naturally trickle down to the party members with the worst scores.
Cheers!
Kinak
I can understand this POV, but I have to say, I prefer the "fixed stat" way, because it's more shocking/exciting/magical, and it's less open-to-abuse, because it means that you can't stack it with higher scores to produce REALLY high scores.
What you could do, potentially, to try and have it both ways is make it so if you had 19 or 20 in a stat, these items added +2 to that stat, instead of setting it to a value, but I personally think that that's kind of boring.