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Where Has All the Magic Gone?
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<blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 4813208" data-attributes="member: 21169"><p>Your ideas are interesting, Jack, you've taken the Wand of Wonder to its ultimate end point. I particularly like the idea that an item's powers could vary depending on the time of day, month or season of the year. How about an item that has different powers at night than it does during the day?</p><p></p><p>However in D&D magic items are principally a reward for the player, they're like a different form of level up. So I don't think all, or even the majority, of magic items should be like this. Mostly they should do something beneficial and non-mysterious.</p><p></p><p>As Mallus says, in D&D some items have always been very mysterious, such as artefacts (in 1e there were spaces in the DMG for the DM to write in his own powers for each artefact, which seems to assume players would be reading the DMG incidentally), some have been somewhat mysterious such as the Wand of Wonder or an item with a lot of functions such as a Ring of Shooting Stars, and some are very straightforward, the +X items.</p><p></p><p>The 'All magic items are artefacts' approach can only work, imo, if the PCs don't have a lot of magic items. In a typical game of D&D they are expected to have a great many, so it simply isn't practical for the DM to make them all complex and interesting. And that's fine. I think it's perfectly good DMing to have most items non-mysterious, non-storied and useful, with the occasional Stormbringer, Deck of Many Things or Hand of Vecna to add magic to the game. Not everything can, or should, be weird.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Doug McCrae, post: 4813208, member: 21169"] Your ideas are interesting, Jack, you've taken the Wand of Wonder to its ultimate end point. I particularly like the idea that an item's powers could vary depending on the time of day, month or season of the year. How about an item that has different powers at night than it does during the day? However in D&D magic items are principally a reward for the player, they're like a different form of level up. So I don't think all, or even the majority, of magic items should be like this. Mostly they should do something beneficial and non-mysterious. As Mallus says, in D&D some items have always been very mysterious, such as artefacts (in 1e there were spaces in the DMG for the DM to write in his own powers for each artefact, which seems to assume players would be reading the DMG incidentally), some have been somewhat mysterious such as the Wand of Wonder or an item with a lot of functions such as a Ring of Shooting Stars, and some are very straightforward, the +X items. The 'All magic items are artefacts' approach can only work, imo, if the PCs don't have a lot of magic items. In a typical game of D&D they are expected to have a great many, so it simply isn't practical for the DM to make them all complex and interesting. And that's fine. I think it's perfectly good DMing to have most items non-mysterious, non-storied and useful, with the occasional Stormbringer, Deck of Many Things or Hand of Vecna to add magic to the game. Not everything can, or should, be weird. [/QUOTE]
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