D&D 4E Eliminating magic items in 4e completely

[apoptosis]

Problems with removing magic items.
1.) I have played games (like 20 in the past 15 years) where few to none magic items were ever given out. You as sure could not buy them. What happen,
a.) Money became useless, and players had a LOT of it. Player would go in and buy whole towns! Some made gold houses for themselves. You have to have something to buy or add the painful online thing where you have to pay to fix your items to keep money useful in the game.
b.) Everyone became a spell caster of some kind. Funny how many NPC's become spell casters too. So low magic means little. Just the melee builds getting cut out of the game.

2.) magic items are part of the wonder. The problem with D&D, Magic items are a must have to be useful needful things. You do not get items for the "cool", you get them as you need them to live though combat. The 4th ed is not changing this.

3.) I hope 4th can be more low magic. In any 3th ed game that allowed spell caster, Low magic settings became a pain to play outside of playing a wizard/cleric. No spell casters and Player death became a lot more common.

Your points are definitely valid though I have some comments

1)
a) Money becomes useful for other things and money would no longer be considered the point to adventuring (which is a good thing, IMO). The acquiring money to acquire magic items has been a huge problem with 3E

b) I think if there are big penalites to both being a magic-using character and using magic then this becomes less of an issue.

If magic is only a beneficial tool then what you say is pretty much correct, but if say all wizards had large penalties on all actions and suffered larger penalties when they did magic then that problem would not occur.

2) this is actually a bad thing I believe. Magic items should not be necessary but they should be 'cool' and interesting to some degree

3) i agree (no comment )

 

[Benimoto]

How can a fighter ever be able to fly without magical means? That is just not possible.

On his own power no, but he could easily have a Giant Eagle or Griffon or something to ride on. Of course those are kind of like large magic items that don't have a slot...

I think that there will be enough high-level monsters that don't solely rely on the PCs being able to fly or breathe water or magically escape barriers or anything that you could keep up a no-magic-item game for 30 levels. The DM will just have to exercise a little discretion.

 

[Anthtriel]

1)
a) Money becomes useful for other things and money would no longer be considered the point to adventuring (which is a good thing, IMO). The acquiring money to acquire magic items has been a huge problem with 3E

I think the point is that most adversaries in D&D run around with vast amounts of money, which is supposed to be collected and then spent on magic items. If you cut those from the game, you either need another money sink, or have characters with mountains of gold.

The point is, if you cut items from 3E, you ended up with a cluster of a game. They were not options, they were hardwired into the system and couldn't be cut without making numerous changes throughout the entire system, or messing it all up.
4E items are apparently more transparent, but they are still part of the system, and cutting them will likely have unforeseen consequences.

Judging by the article, those secondary items are completely unnecessary to the game, just interesting options.

They cannot be both interesting and completely unnecessary. Boots of Speed don't affect the game like +x to dexterity does, but it still affects combat. If you have five items like that, you are obviously more powerful than one without those five items, just not in the same way (not as obviously, and not as much), as the guy with five +x items in 3E.

 

[JohnSnow]

How can a fighter ever be able to fly without magical means? That is just not possible.

Griffon or hippogriff mount. No magic necessary. Anyplace where he can't use his griffon, climbing and jumping is probably sufficient. And no, griffons aren't magical in a D&D world. They're a beast as natural as a horse or an eagle.

Fighter now has flight capability. Problem solved.

They cannot be both interesting and completely unnecessary. Boots of Speed don't affect the game like +x to dexterity does, but it still affects combat. If you have five items like that, you are obviously more powerful than one without those five items, just not in the same way (not as obviously, and not as much), as the guy with five +x items in 3E.

Ah, now I see the difference in perspective.

If something is "useful," people decide it has to be "necessary."

As Mike said, the character might be, by strictest definition, more powerful. But are they more combat effective? That totally depends what the items are, and in what situations they're useful. For instance, slippers of spider-climbing are a powerful item...but how much use are they in combat? The aforementioned boots of speed might allow a character to move 3x their speed for 1 round. But do those trump the Boots of Levitation that let you spend one round avoiding hazardous terrain? Or the boots of elvenkind that let any character gain the wildstep ability of the elves (no movement penalty for hazardous terrain)?

And again, it's not like you're going to be changing boots mid-combat. Any DM who allows that deserves what he gets.

 

[Oldtimer]

And no, griffons aren't magical in a D&D world. They're a beast as natural as a horse or an eagle.

GRIFFON
Large Magical Beast

Well...

 

[Irda Ranger]

I think the issue with eliminating magic items would be how do you allow for the vastly different capabilities which an arcane or divine caster has over a martial type without allowing for magic items for divination, travel and so forth?

If Tome of Battle is an accurate preview, high-level Fighters and Shadowhand Swordsages Rogues have nothing to worry about. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

And besides, on the rare circumstance where only Fly will cut it, that's what your spellcasting buddies are for. You defend them all the time with that shield of yours, the least they can do is return the favor every now and then. As long as the Fighter class powers are sufficient to carry the day 90% of the time, asking for a leg-up every now and then would be seen as "good tactics" rather than relegating all spellcasters to "the Martial support team."

But if your general point is that the nature of opponents would have to be tempered and tweaked in a no-item game, I would think that goes without saying. More giants, fewer flying, invisible ranged-attackers.

 

[D_E]

If something is "useful," people decide it has to be "necessary."

Not "necessary," just that they influence game ballance. Whether they're necessary or not depends on where the game is ballanced.

For example: We know that a wizard who's used all his per day abilities will be at about 80% strength, but we don't know in what condition a wizard finishes combat. It may be that a character is expected to have about 40% of his power left at the end of a combat (before recovering per-encounter stuff). If his "useful" items constitute about 5% of his total power, and he doesn't have any, then he should finish combat at about 35% total power, which still leaves over a third of his strength in reserve to deal with bad luck or tactical blunders. If we pretend that every time he messes up it costs him 15% of his total strength to recover, then he can mess up twice and still walk out of the battle alive.

If it's expected that a character will finish with 20%, on the other hand, and not having items knocks him down to 15%, then he went from being able to survive one mistake per encounter to not being able to survive any mistakes at all.

In the first case, the useful items aren't necessary. In the second case, they kind of were. It all depends on where the game is balanced.

 

[JohnSnow]

Not "necessary," just that they influence game ballance. Whether they're necessary or not depends on where the game is ballanced.

For example: We know that a wizard who's used all his per day abilities will be at about 80% strength, but we don't know in what condition a wizard finishes combat. It may be that a character is expected to have about 40% of his power left at the end of a combat (before recovering per-encounter stuff). If his "useful" items constitute about 5% of his total power, and he doesn't have any, then he should finish combat at about 35% total power, which still leaves over a third of his strength in reserve to deal with bad luck or tactical blunders. If we pretend that every time he messes up it costs him 15% of his total strength to recover, then he can mess up twice and still walk out of the battle alive.

If it's expected that a character will finish with 20%, on the other hand, and not having items knocks him down to 15%, then he went from being able to survive one mistake per encounter to not being able to survive any mistakes at all.

In the first case, the useful items aren't necessary. In the second case, they kind of were. It all depends on where the game is balanced.

It is my belief that attrition-based mechanics have gone the way of the dodo in Fourth Edition. So while 100% may be nice, 80% is probably sufficient to deal with any encounter. It just won't be as "easy."

Oh, and as far as the comment about griffons as magical beasts...all I can say is "that's 3E." In Fourth Edition, monsters are "a part of the world as natural as a horse or a bear."

 

[Klaus]

How can a fighter ever be able to fly without magical means? That is just not possible.

As I read somewhere (might've been in Worlds & Monsters, I'm not 100% sure, or maybe the latest news in the front page), the Martial power source isn't exactly nonmagical, even if it is the less magical of the three originally presented.

 

[BeauNiddle]

Not "necessary," just that they influence game ballance. Whether they're necessary or not depends on where the game is ballanced.

For example: We know that a wizard who's used all his per day abilities will be at about 80% strength, but we don't know in what condition a wizard finishes combat. It may be that a character is expected to have about 40% of his power left at the end of a combat (before recovering per-encounter stuff). If his "useful" items constitute about 5% of his total power, and he doesn't have any, then he should finish combat at about 35% total power, which still leaves over a third of his strength in reserve to deal with bad luck or tactical blunders. If we pretend that every time he messes up it costs him 15% of his total strength to recover, then he can mess up twice and still walk out of the battle alive.

If it's expected that a character will finish with 20%, on the other hand, and not having items knocks him down to 15%, then he went from being able to survive one mistake per encounter to not being able to survive any mistakes at all.

In the first case, the useful items aren't necessary. In the second case, they kind of were. It all depends on where the game is balanced.

Rather than concidering the % of resources left (since we have no information from previews about it) lets instead consider what sort of bonuses magic items will give. The obvious answer is Powers [per encounter abilities]

If a character has 10 powers then adding another 5 wont necessarily be unbalancing (and consider they want players to have something interesting to do every round and that battles are meant to last longer then 10 powers is probably on the low end of what a character can manage by the time they've accumulated a supply of magic items). Furthermore consider the Power we've been shown so far - Elven precision, can reroll one attack roll per encounter. The gnome in the magic item article has bracers of accuracy it seems fairly likely that all they will do is grant the Elven precision ability. I'd file that under useful but not necessary.

In 3rd ed items gave fighters their ONLY special abilities. In 4th ed magic items are competing with all the other things the character can do so it's a lot less likely they'll be pivotal in battle.

Until we see 4th ed in much more detail we wont know whether a character is meant to end every encounter having used every single ability they have or if they're expected to have used only 50% and it's the tactical choice of choosing which powers that makes the game challenging. Until we know that we can't say what effect adding another 5 abilities to a character will have.