How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Standard Plusses

[JohnSnow]

Belts are listed as temporarily boosting strength. Promise: already broken.

You have no idea what they mean by "temporarily boosting strength." It might mean "bonuses to carrying capacity and strength checks" and not "an enhancement bonus to your strength score."

As a matter of fact, since we've told they aren't giving out enhancement bonuses to ability scores, I'd say that it definitively does NOT mean the latter.

Promise: very much alive. You just want to read it as broken.

 

[Atlatl Jones]

Yup, that's pretty much the intent. We went out of our way to embrace transparency in the rules, to better help DMs understand how magic items interact with PCs, how they interact with the system math, and what happens when you start to change things.
...
With 4e, it'll take even a newbie DM maybe a half hour once he has learned the rules. Heck, you've already done the meat of the work in this post.

That's great to hear! I hope that at some point Wizards will publish explicit guidelines for what to do, rather than leaving it for DMs to figure out (even if it is relatively easy to figure out). It would make a great optional rule sidebar for a DMG or an Insider article.

 

[Atlatl Jones]

You have no idea what they mean by "temporarily boosting strength." It might mean "bonuses to carrying capacity and strength checks" and not "an enhancement bonus to your strength score."

As a matter of fact, since we've told they aren't giving out enhancement bonuses to ability scores, I'd say that it definitively does NOT mean the latter.

It could even be an item that gives a temporary direct bonus to, say, Strength checks and melee damage. There are a few items like that in the magic item compendium, and it doesn't cause the same problems as stat-boosting enhancement items.

 

[Voss]

You have no idea what they mean by "temporarily boosting strength." It might mean "bonuses to carrying capacity and strength checks" and not "an enhancement bonus to your strength score."

As a matter of fact, since we've told they aren't giving out enhancement bonuses to ability scores, I'd say that it definitively does NOT mean the latter.

Promise: very much alive. You just want to read it as broken.

Sorry if I can't come up with creative ways to read 'temporarily boosting strength' that mean something other than 'it actually boosts your strength'. Strength is a game term. If the item actually does something other than boost Strength, the game term, they should say that.

While we're on the topic, though, can you put a link to the 'no enhancement bonuses to ability score' statement? I was looking earlier, but could not find it. It seems relevant because this thing with belts did seem to directly contradict it.

 

[Agamon]

Belts are listed as temporarily boosting strength. Promise: already broken.

Nothing wrong with getting a bonus to strength for a round every encounter or for an encounter once a day. Different than a permanent bonus that is considered part of the PCs abililties. As someone that dislikes the 3.x abilitiy enhancement items, this looks fine.

 

[Dragonblade]

Sorry if I can't come up with creative ways to read 'temporarily boosting strength' that mean something other than 'it actually boosts your strength'. Strength is a game term. If the item actually does something other than boost Strength, the game term, they should say that.

While we're on the topic, though, can you put a link to the 'no enhancement bonuses to ability score' statement? I was looking earlier, but could not find it. It seems relevant because this thing with belts did seem to directly contradict it.

A lot is explained in Races and Classes and Worlds and Monsters. No magic items will boost ability scores, period.

A belt of strength will NOT boost your strength attribute. What they hinted it will do is boost your strength in terms of carrying capacity, lifting, perhaps bonuses to strength based skill checks, etc. In other words you gain "strength" but not the combat bonuses that would ordinarily come from having a higher strength score.

This is fantastic. It makes items cool without making them broken, and conveniently eliminates the stacking problem since there is nothing to stack and no way a character can get multiple attribute boosts from different items, etc.

 

[mearls]

If you take all those separate items together, in all their different slots where they don't overlap, how does that not accumulate into a giant pile of combat-related awesome, even if it doesn't give a single enhancement bonus?

The key is that, in most cases, magic items give more options, rather than improvements to existing options.

Strictly speaking, the fighter with no items is less powerful than the fighter with a ton of items, yet if the campaign tends toward few or no items, the game still functions fine. For instance, the math behind monsters looks to magic items only for the static bonuses that they grant.

Primarily, the benefits conferred by magic items are useful in specific situations or they cater to specific tactics. Many also are limited in scope, such as providing a benefit for the length of one encounter per day.

The important thing to remember is that, in monster and math design, only the static benefits had an effect on the math. If you change how items work, everything works out fine as long as you are consistent wtih that change. We've shifted away from making some classes, like the fighter, heavily gear dependent, while others, like the wizard, don't need it as much.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Gone but not forgotten

I always like comrade raoul's posts & threads...good analysis!

I'd heard all of this about 4E, and actually wasn't concerned about this aspect of the game at all.

Then it occurred to me that there is still a way for +N items to reappear, albeit in the form of an enchantment just like Fire or Holy or whatever.

If one were to design a weapon that allowed the weilder to fight like Sir Killsalot- a famous warrior from ages past- because it channels a bit of his warrior spirit (or whatever the weapon's backstory is)- it would seem to me that the easiest ways to design this are either:

1) Makes your PC have the BAB of a warrior of X level while wielding it and the magic is active

or

2) Raises your PC's BAB to a warrior of X level while wielding it and the magic is active.

Functionally, its very nearly a +N weapon. Now, because of the new (as yet unseen by me) magic item construction rules, you probably won't find as many such weapons, and this power probably comes at the expense of others.

In addition, as the weapon's wielder approaches and then surpasses the puissance of Sir Killsalot, the weapon decreases in relative value, eventually becoming worthless to him...assuming it has no other abilities of note.

 

[Warbringer]

Such as? I can only think of the Rings from LotR and the thing they were inspired by, the ring from Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Socrates ... posits a man who finds a magical ring that makes him invisible in one of his discussions on morality (the true source for gollum)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Such as? I can only think of the Rings from LotR and the thing they were inspired by, the ring from Der Ring des Nibelungen.

What are the other mythological and legendary precedents? Please enlighten me. How do they compare to other mythological and legendary items? Are ANY mythological or legendary items not "objects of great power"?

As I mentioned in another thread ( http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=217274&page=4&pp=30 see post #101), semi-trivial rings exist in all kinds of forms. Plato's Republic mentions a ring that makes a man invisible- that's it. Two historical rings have the equivalent of "Healing" spells inscribed in them.

Cloaks of invisibility and pouches that are always full of just enough money to pay for your purchases appear in Grimm's Faerie tales- powerful in their context because the context is extremely magic poor relative to a typical RPG.

Others from European legend include Sleeping Beauty's poison apple that put her into suspended animation and Rumplestiltskin's magic spinning wheel, Jack's beans, and the singing harp he found in the castle in the clouds...

From Sir Gawain & the Green Knight comes a sash or ribbon that protects the wearer from 1 blow (only) from the Green Knight's axe (only).

Crystal balls, scrying bowls, Seven League Boots, Magic Mirrors on the wall - all from legend.

Talismans of Dionysus supposedly warded off insobriety, while certain fetish objects warded off impotence.

According to anthropologists, many charms and pieces of art made by Neandertals & Cro Magnons were examples of sympathetic magic designed to improve (but not guarantee!) the odds of a successful hunt...and to ward off retibution by animal spirits afterwards.

From Dickens' The Christmas Carol, The Ghost of Christmas Future's cornucopia could make people happy if he shook it over people.

Peter Pan's Pixie Dust.

How about Love potions?

That's off the top of my head- if I scour my encyclopedias of mythology and look at African, Asian, or Native American legend, I'll find more.