Reworking the treasure system: The Magic Item Reset

[Psikus]

As much as I like 4E, I've always found its treasure system to be underwhelming. To be more specific, I think the basic framework for magic items is fine (even the rarity rules!), but the absolute lack of balance and the excessive amounts of worthless items ruins it for me. This is not a problem that can be solved by releasing even more material, nor is it realistic to errata thousands of unimpressive items (and dozens of overwhelmingly good ones) into playability. For these reasons, I decided to try and design a small, yet complete item collection which could fully replace the existing one. As a nice side effect, starting from scratch has allowed me to have a system that actually supports the rarity rules, which I found to be a great tool for a designer.

The new magic items (slightly over a hundred unique items), along with my comments on the design process and some additional optional rules related to magic items, can be found as a series of articles on my blog. Alternately, you can download the item list in pdf form here.

This is intended to be a living document, and I'll be glad to update the item list with any feedback I receive.

 

[RangerWickett]

Someone else linked to this system a while back. I like the general idea, at least as a fix to the current system. But I hope future editions loosen the reins a bit and let magic items do crazy stuff again.