Then you haven't actually read what I wrote...
again, read what was written.
OK, well, I went back and re-read your posts in this thread, and the only section I found that I had not addressed was one post with these three points in a discussion you had with eamon:
1) You noted above that there 'very few items' that are a problem There's a good reason for this, all the ones that were a problem were nerfed practically to irrelevance. The original system left VERY little room for developers to work in, it was a very constrained design space. Every item needed to be made such that any number of cheap copies of it wouldn't cause an issue. The result was bland items.
This is a bit of a generalisation with no specific items to work on, but I am convinced that, for every "problem" item, there was/is a good solution - many of WotC's "fixes" struck me as heavy-handed and rushed. Items that are a problem if spammed were generally controlled by the daily item uses (which I'll come back to later), other items just needed to be more expensive but at the same (or a corrected) level.
2) Another constraint on the design space was the requirement that daily item uses be restricted to a small number. This means that players don't really have the option to use daily item powers which are not competitive. Only a narrow range of daily item powers are thus viable and many interesting powers which would be somewhat useful if allowed once per day are simply ignored because they now have to compete not only with other items that could go into the same slot, but the daily powers of ALL other items the character might have. This is too constraining.
If I actually found this to be a genuine problem in practise I would just define some item daily powers as "Daily but does not consume a daily item use". Easy, elegant and a minimal change.
3) From a fluff perspective you can't easily achieve a setting where magic items aren't a commonplace commodity. Higher level PCs can simply churn out 100's of instances of lower level items. Even if this isn't something the PCs want to spend their own treasure on you can't really justify any sort of low availability of lower level items. The only thing you can do that logically makes sense is to make low level items almost worthless, but that doesn't work either because low level PCs need good interesting items that are effective for them at the levels they can acquire them. Every garden variety NPC bad guy that has any possibility of being able to craft items (and it is hard to see how many of them wouldn't) would logically festoon his henchmen with useful googaws.
Just cut down the monetary treasure (and item treasure). Money is the resource used to control player-acquired magic items; cut it down and you have a low-magic campaign. High level PCs spamming low-level items in such a setting will have even lower magic themselves; probably not a great plan.
Obviously no one approach is going to please everyone, but I think the rarity system took a huge step in eliminating some glaring flaws. Beyond that you can still do virtually the same thing with it you could do before, so it seems both better (to me) and is more flexible in general.
It's now my turn to say "read what I wrote". It seems to me that, for every flaw in the original system, there is a better way to address it than booting it all to a mass of DM judgement calls.
Likewise items are an element of the story and setting, and I can just as logically therefore assert that they are logically within the domain of the DM.
Only in the same sense as characters are an element of the story and setting - but I hope we are still in agreement that the players should have some role in their development and activities?
Yes, yes, anything that isn't in conformance with YOUR aesthetic is laxness and laziness. Nonsense.
Not what I was saying; please read it again. I think it's pretty clear that item rarity could be used to allow designers to skip balancing items or considering their effect on a game they are introduced to - the "lax and lazy" element I refer to. But I was asking what other advantages the rarity system gave - I honestly see none that don't have larger negatives than positives. But maybe you can point out a specific bit of design space that isn't just producing an abusable or unbalanced item?
Nonsense, the DM has a story to tell, a setting to portray, etc.
A setting to portray, sure - but story has to be an emergent property in any roleplaying game, as far as I can see. If the story (as opposed to the plot, which is the setup that makes a story likely to happen) "belongs" entirely to the DM then they would be better served writing a book, script or screenplay. Story in RPGs comes from the alchemy of DM
and players.
Please explain to me how daily item use constraints, an imposition on the players and the designers isn't a bad idea.
All rules create constraints on players - constraints that give the game activity form and meaning. Designers also need to be constrained to produce designs that perform the function desired for the design. This, of course, is the rub; those designing and using the product do not entirely agree on its purpose.
My own experience with the daily item limits is that they are far from bad. They add relevance to milestones, allow at least as many item daily powers to be used each adventuring "day" as the characters themselves have daily attack powers and they control the abuse of such powers when used repeatedly from multiple items. My players have not been bothered by them, and if I find neat items that I would like to see more of that have daily powers that are "too weak to spend an item use on" I will houserule their daily power to not use a daily item use (even though it is usable only daily).
Mike Mearls said it quite well when he said "we took that dog out back and shot it", a sentiment that I expect quite well sums up how the designers feel about it. I can only tell you how the players I've played with feel on their side of things, which is they uniformly hated the fact that they could only use a trivial number of daily powers.
In a "typical adventuring day" of 4-5 encounters a heroic level character will have 2-3 daily item uses (compared to 1-3 daily attack powers), a Paragon character will have 3-4 daily item uses (compared to 3 daily attack powers until level 20, when they get 4) and an Epic level character will get 4-5 daily item uses (compared to 4 daily attack powers). I would hardly characterise this as a "trivial" number, when placed in context.
That was a huge straightjacket on the players and horribly limited the utility of items. I'm sorry, but that's just objectively true, you really can't argue with it
I just did. It was/is a restriction - all rules are - but I wouldn't call it even close to a "huge straightjacket" and I think all it does to items is mean they aren't more common and relevant in play than the character's own daily powers.
The removal of that one issue is well worth the development of the rarity system. Items have been vastly more useful and entertaining and I've been able to give out a much larger array of interesting and fun items since that change.
I'm glad DM control is working for you. I have felt no requirement for it, have had no complaints from players claiming that they feel "limited" and have not noticed any unreasonable constricition on the items I include in treasure.
I think we've reached that point where it doesn't make any sense to continue a debate where everyone has obviously heard, and apparently dismissed, the arguments of the other side, lol. It would be quite interesting to hear from Mike and Co on this point, but as it stands you're not going to convince me at this point, and I'm pretty sure the opposite is true as well. We'll just have to agree to disagree. It will be quite interesting to see what the new book contains. Perhaps there will be something more to discuss at that point. In the meantime I'm sure we will both happily go about playing the game in our own ways
I think this may well be true. We seem to have very different expectations of what players and DM should be focussed on and doing during play. Exploration of what the DM has made seems to be a far more prominent element of what you want your players to be concentrating on than it is for me; I want my players to be concentrating on playing the
game - overcoming the obstacles to them achieving their objectives. My players seem happy with that - if yours aren't, obviously you will have to run your game differently.
