Experiences with Weapons of Legacy

[roguerouge]

Just use the ancestral weapon feat. It allows you to spend gold and time to improve your signature weapon over time. That signature weapon idea has been a massive gift to my campaign, as my player loves her +2 keen thundering crystal echoblade rapier. She gladly pays the costs and the tasks necessary to reforge it are usually great side-treks.

 

[Jhaelen]

Right. So it is a great book if you ignore all of the rules in it. Really why would people want this book again? I know what you are saying regarding the items themselves and their histories. I love those. But drop $40 on a book for 40 odd pages of "fluff"? You can't seriously expect anyone to consider that a good deal.

Well, the WoL rules take up a whopping 24 pages of a total of 224 pages.
The suggested retail price back then was 34.95$. I don't think I payed that much, though.
And, yes I like the book purely for the idea it presents and the fluff it provides. The rule section was useful in so far as it allowed me to analyze how it was supposed to work and come up with a better solution. So, for me it was definitely a good deal.

Another book I really liked was Lords of Madness. Incidentally, it's the same price point and page count as WoL and it doesn't even have 30 new monsters in it. Wow, what a waste of money, you say? Except it wasn't (to me). It's what helped to shape my campaign and that's 5+ years of gaming. So, yeah, totally worth it (for me)!

Anyway, unless I'm mistaken, all of this is completely unimportant for the OP, since he was asking about the WoL concept and not the book (which he may or may not already have). And the concept (as in idea and not as in mechanics) is excellent and I can only recommend to introduce them into a campaign.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Well, there are two other problems that "weapons that level with you" had compared to normal magic items.

1) Golf bag. With all the various different types of DR, you'd want a weapon of every material. Having just one cold iron longsword that you always used was nice thematically, but then a group of lycanthropes pop up and well, there goes that. Your cold iron longsword is pretty sweet, right up until the enemy wizard casts Stoneskin.

2) In general, people would much, much rather have a sword that's +1 and a whole bunch of other enchantments, then a +5 sword with one or two other enchantments. This ties into the golf bag, in that a +1 shocking/flaming sword is cheaper then a +5 shocking/flaming, and you need a shocking/flaming sword of all materials.

I think the style of item, where it gets strong with you, works a lot better in Pathfinder, where having a +x also passes through DR, helping eliminate both 1 and 2. When your +5 weapon can pass through any DR, you no longer NEED to have a golf bag, and you can focus on having just one weapon.

As for WoL itself, good idea with absolutely atrocious mechanics to go behind it. Sure, you can take penalties to upgrade your item, and you might break even! Or you can just get ahead and not bother with it altogether.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Well, there are two other problems that "weapons that level with you" had compared to normal magic items.

1) Golf bag. With all the various different types of DR, you'd want a weapon of every material. Having just one cold iron longsword that you always used was nice thematically, but then a group of lycanthropes pop up and well, there goes that. Your cold iron longsword is pretty sweet, right up until the enemy wizard casts Stoneskin.

You know, I keep hearing about the golf bag - but the most weapons any of my players has used has been 3 - 1 blunt (often iron), one edged (often silver) and one shooty (which might have a putt putt bag of arrow/bullet/shot/bolt materials - a mini golf bag). They never went after adamant, but would take mithril if it showed up (for my purposes I allowed mithril to injure critters that were affected by silver). They never tried to buy mithril.

I liked the idea of WoL, but felt that the implementation was pretty poor - they would have been better off with a straight up gold/XP cost than the oddball skill points/hit points/whatever that they went with. Heck, even the need to take a feat to attune the item would work better.

Then again, I never encountered the 15 minute adventuring day, either.... The spell casters tended to keep a few spells in reserve, rather than going for broke in every encounter. (Though the reserve feats in Complete Arcane met with loud applause. )

The Auld Grump

 

[Will]

I've never encountered the golf bag, either. Generally folks would prefer to pour their finances into one weapon, and just let whomever had the 'right' weapon step forward when it really applied (a dragon? Ok, guy with dragonbane sword, show us your stuff).

With the exception of ranged weapons, where having arrows of this or that is easy.

 

[doomwh]

Another option

You could take a look at Green Ronin's Artifacts of the Ages. I remember reading it when it came and was turned off by the Prestige class Scion option but you might like better than the weapons of legacy approach. Back in my 2nd edition campaign I simply altered the bonus every 4 levels and added powers as I saw fit and it worked fine. if I gave the sword a power that threw things outta whack I told my player he had tapped that power out. I then would add an ability less powerful and see how that went. I did enjoy the book, it is a good read plus my buddy did all the artwork, check it out if you can find it.

 

[Beginning of the End]

From what I've been able to tell, the main beef against Weapons of Legacy is that the rules actually expect you to pay meaningful penalties for weapon powers that are far, far beyond what you'd normally get for the same amount of gold.

My complaints boil down to:

(1) The system is needlessly bloated and overly-complicated for what they're trying to achieve.

(2) The penalties are designed to go after the exact same stats the items are boosting. When you run the numbers you find that the math makes a sort of pseudo-sense, insofar as (for example) you end up paying as much for a +4 weapon with a -2 penalty (rendering it a +2 weapon) as you would for a +2 weapon.

... but then you realize that you're paying just as much for a pseudo +2 weapon that causes you to suffer a -2 penalty whenever you aren't using that specific weapon as you would for a +2 weapon that doesn't give you a penalty and you realize that the designers didn't check their math.

I prefer the simple solution suggested by Justin Alexander: Legacy Items have latent abilities which can be unlocked with rituals. These rituals cost the same amount of XP and gold as if you were creating any other magic item with the same abilities; the only advantage is that you don't need an Item Creation feat to perform them.

Done.

If you want to make them slightly more appealing, offer a 10% discount on the costs. Or, if you're feeling really generous, eliminate the XP penalty. (But the advantage of not requiring the Item Creation feat while halving the cost in gold is nice all by itself, frankly.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm another player who has never seen the "golf bag." While my PCs often carry more than one weapon, its typically 2 ranged weapon (typically a bow or X-bow, plus a sling or thrown weapon), and 2 melee weapons (a main & a backup). Eventually, the nature of those weapons settles down- I don't keep trading up.

And most of my buddies are the same.

When the warriors don't have the weapons to deal with a foe, the spellcasters step up their efforts to knock off the problematic critter while the rest of the party plays "meat shields & mook-sweepers."

 

[pawsplay]

I really like the scion rules from the UA. What books use those rules?

 

[MerricB]

I really like the scion rules from the UA. What books use those rules?

I hate those rules greatly. Weapons of Legacy at least doesn't kill your class abilities the way that the scion rules do.