New article Design and Development Article on Magic Item Slots

[Acid_crash]

They said they were going to REDUCE the x-mas three effect of magic items, not GET RID of it completely. That would be impossible, and if they did get rid of it completely, then most of you would be complaining rather loudly that they got rid of another sacred cow.

 

[Benimoto]

I think the new system sounds pretty good. I think it solved the major problem I saw in 3.0's magic item system, which was that +x items in a slot pretty much pushed everything else out of that slot. In 3.0 you would never wear, say, a hand of the mage because in almost every situation, an amulet of health, wisdom or natural armor was better.

In the 4th edition, they solved this by making it so that the +x items only occupy three slots, and that non +x items can't go in those slots (or rather, you get +3 of survival, like in the example.)

I never saw the "Christmas Tree Effect" as a big problem in 3rd edition, because to be honest, I was never totally clear what it was. It seems to me that it's more of a very loosely defined buzzword than an specific phenomenon. There's been like 4-5 competing definitions in this thread already, ranging from "PCs have an item in every slot", to "PCs need +X items to be viable" to just "magic items should be rarer and more special... Christmas Tree!"

I wouldn't mind magic items being more special but really it depends on the player. My main solution for more special magic items as a DM is to pay careful attention to the players and hand-pick items that I think they'll value, rather than rolling them randomly on a table, but that's not always possible. It doesn't work at all with pre-written adventures, for instance.

As for them being rarer, I've been using the Magic Item Compendium treasure tables, and am fairly satisfied with the way that works. But, if someone wants them rarer, it looks like you can just make them rarer without a big difference. The one thing I see a problem with is having a way so that each character doesn't have 6-ish secondary items by level 11, but the two solutions I can see there are either: give out less than 6 items per character (24 items in 110 encounters?) over 11 levels, which seems kind of stingy, but workable. The other way would be to allow the character to use less items, which would mean that the character would just have to min/max harder in deciding which items to keep, rather than the current way, where the characters actually keep marginally useful but interesting items.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Theoretically you're right. But, if that's the case why doesn't he have a ring? This isn't a sample character that got thrown together for the sake of showing us cool items. It's an in-play character.

My theory is that they had a host of characters to choose, and selected an interesting one with a lot of magical items. Maybe other characters just didn't have that many, or not ones that fit so perfectly into all the slots? Or maybe the author noted that his character had a lot of slots filled, and so didn't feel the need to ask for a "better" character.

 

[jester47]

This post really cleared up what I was missing in the article. I agree now the new system will rock, especially since you can house rule that the slot/silo is not connected to a body part.

 

[Kesh]

Theoretically you're right. But, if that's the case why doesn't he have a ring? This isn't a sample character that got thrown together for the sake of showing us cool items. It's an in-play character.

My emphasis. Most likely, the character simply hasn't found one yet, or the ones found were better suited to other characters.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In my view, [2] was the greater contributor to the Christmas tree syndrome because of the relative ease that players could fill the empty slots on their characters. I don't think that WotC has addressed this issue yet.

I just hope that magic items in the RAW and "Implied setting-as-written" are not on sale in every major city, nor "cheap and easy" to make (cheap would be better than easy, if it has to be one or the other).

 

[Mirtek]

3 required combat slots, 6/8 optional fun slots, limited stat boosters. Far more manageable. Color me happy.

New game: Guess how many splatbooks it takes until the "fun items" become so powerfull that they are in fact mandatory

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

New game: Guess how many splatbooks it takes until the "fun items" become so powerfull that they are in fact mandatory

That depends on whether Item Creation ever exists again or not.

If Item Creation exists, the answer is "zero." There will be optimal builds available from the DMG alone; you won't need splatbooks; and you'll see players designing such builds from Day 1.

 

[Darkwolf71]

My emphasis. Most likely, the character simply hasn't found one yet, or the ones found were better suited to other characters.

Gee, ya think? How that factors in to what I have been saying, I have no idea. But you are absolutly spot on.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I find it interesting that everyone is now crying foul that 4e won't be ignoring previous editions ENOUGH.

The funny thing is, even the people who think these changes didn't go far enough really have to acknowledge what a step forward this is. In 3e, attack bonuses increased with level but AC didn't (unless you were a monk), while magic item bonuses to AC stacked three or four times as high as attack bonuses. Obviously this meant that a magic-heavy game had a completely different balance than a magic-light game. That is GONE in 4e. The absolute worst-case scenario combat rejiggering you might have to do now is funnel some slightly lower-level monsters at the party if you've got no magic items in your campaign.

Beyond that, 4e seems to leave everything up to the DM. If you don't like high-magic campaigns, squabbling over exactly how many "item slots" a character should have, or what they should conform to (function or body part), seems really silly. What you want is for players not to have many magic items because they're RARE, not because, "Oh, I already have an arm/hand-slot item equipped." If you only want players to wear 3-6 magic items (as someone said), just make sure the DM doesn't hand out more than that.

By putting these harsher item restrictions into the core rules, all you'd be doing is trying to force everyone else to play by your preferences for no apparent reason. Of COURSE every player is going to want an awesome item in each slot, just like players in 3e want a Ring of Three Wishes at level 2. It's the DM's job to balance those desires against concerns about verisimilitude, challenge, and so on.