Wow nice personal attacks...but I've seen you jump to the defense just because someone doesn't agree with your philosophy of 4e isn't really rules...it's all guidelines and thus it never actually tells you to do anything. Which IMHO is an absurd position to take and a cop out. In other words 4e does everything because it never really lays down real rules...bull
Terrible strawman here. Although, to be fair, you could really believe this. Based on your ridiculous inferences from your own reading of 4e rules to your ridiculous representation of those who don't agree with you, I find it reasonable to question your basic reading comprehension.
I've never stated, anywhere, that 4e doesn't have rules. I have stated that 4e takes the approach of leaving a lot of fluff outside of core gameplay to the highly creative and imaginative DMs that have been houseruling their own games to suit their tastes since the 70s. The 4e DMG even has a section on houseruling. Much of the DMG is guidelines. It describes core assumptions and the reasons for them and gives the DM the tools he needs to modify those assumptions to his heart's content. I just fail to understand why this approach is such a problem for some people.
your proof amounts to, "A DM can change anything..." Yeah, great argument for 4e...in fact great argument for any game.
Rather than go paragraph by paragraph, I pulled this out. You go on and on about how I was dodging the question while not quoting the part of the post where I directly answered your silly little question, despite your assumptions about the validity of that question. How hard an item is to identify does not equal how mysterious or special magic items are. That assumption is flawed. I will, however, explain again things I already said.
The 4e designers, in the PHB, spell out exactly the edition's philosophy. Normal magic items should be easy to identify with a bit of group effort in a short rest, while mysterious and powerful items should require much more effort. This means that item idenfitication is harder than in previous editions. For many items it is just as easy. In 4e you tinker with it until you figure it out, similar to the way many did it in 1e. It's just suggested you don't play out that scene because its time consuming and not very fun. In 3e you cast identify and the DM told you. What is mysterious about that? 2e identification was a joke. It was such a pain in the ass that I've never met a DM or played in a game in which 2e's version of Identify worked as written. 8 hours of work before casting, learn only 1 function of an item, lose 8 points of CON and therefore another 8 hours, have a chance of failure, spend 100gp, and not actually learn the plusses of the item or the number of charges (expecting the DM to keep secret notes on every magic item the PCs have and do secret math in his head, mark off all charges, etc.). And this is per function of an item. 2e's method wasn't mysterious, it was annoying, time consuming, and silly.
Mystery isn't in the rules, its in the narrative.
What...is this how you ran 3e? Really? In 4e every magic item your PC's get is centered around a quest? Uhm, ok...whatever.
No, its not how I ran 3e. But you shouldn't waste breath trying to deny that this is exactly what the 3e books lay out as the norm. The NPC wealth by level and the surrounding chapter on building NPCs and monsters with class levels state exactly what I said, that by 4th-6th level, every NPC warrior or fighter is expected to be weilding a +1 weapon. Its built into the design. The math works out with those expected plusses in the CR and encounter systems. A common houserule in 3e for DMs who didn't want mounds of +1 weapons was to use innate plusses, the same system employed by 4e to prevent magic item creep through the mathematically necessary arming of the NPC populace.
As for your last comment, you failed your reading comprehension roll again. You really should put some points into it. I didn't not come close to saying that in my 4e games all items are centered around a quest. I said that the position of 4e is that your basic magic items are easy to identify. More powerful, mysterious, and special items can be the focus of quests, special rituals, research, and the like. This is spelled out clearly in the PHB, I even quoted it above. You are making a herculean effort to ignore it since it pretty much tears down the entire foundation of your argument, but still yet, it's there in plain text.
I don't get it. People go ballistic over the inclusion of dragonborn in the PHB. Yet, THIS is perfectly fine?
I just can´t agree with the sentiment that a magic item trading business is always illogical. This smacks of one-way-ism, IMHO.
