Magic Item Daily Power Usage Limits

[Ahzad]

My group is trying out the 4E rules there are 7 players and I'm the DM. We've been playing fairly regularly and the group is currently 7th level. We miss stuff now and again, especially being a new ruleset, and when we realize it we add it back into the game b/c we are really trying to give the rules a fair/good shake. I'm dropping artifacts into the game with the last session b/c I want to try out those rules. One of the things we missed was the magic item daily power usage limits on PHB pg 266.

I've got to ask why are there these limits? Is it a balance issue? If so where does it break down? It doesn't seem overpowering to me unless you are draping your PC in magical gear. My bad guys all have the ability to use their best powers over and over thanks to recharge, as long as you roll the right numbers. We've not played with the limits before now (b/c we overlooked the rule) and the ability to use more than 1 daily power on their items has saved their bacon a few times over now, where otherwise it would've resulted in a TPK or two. So I'm not seeing an issue with multiple daily powers from items, and it's the one rule I'm thinking about ignoring so far.

Anyone have any issues with this so far?

 

[DracoSuave]

Well, firstly, you get a daily item use every two encounters, so it's not like you're forever restricted.

But besides that, the idea is to de-emphasize magic items and emphasize the characters themselves. Hard limits on dailies prevents the party from loading up on cheap magic items with powerful daily abilities.


Also, Monsters aren't designed for the same purpose as PCs, so they use different rules to do so.

 

[Griogre]

This was done to encourage players to keep more magic items instead of sell them and to hit milestones to get the use of different item's dailies. Magic item dailies are tied to the magic item. At heroic levels a character can use one item daily for free and a different item's daily after every milestone.

I think they did it that way to encourage the characters having to make a choice on what daily they were going to use instead of just having it all.

4E wanted to keep a strict limit on how many encounter and daily powers and abilites a character could utilize to try to keep D&D viable at the upper levels. I think this was their way of trying to keep even the guy with the "golf club bag" of items from out shining the guy with the number of level appropriate items.

Edit: Pretty much Ninjaed by DracoSuave.

 

[Uruush]

Also, if you're doing a nice 50/50 mix of Skill Challenges and Combat Encounters, they're reaching a Milestone with every Combat Encounter.

 

[Victim]

It's designed to fix problems that don't really occur at your level. A higher level character could trivially have multitudes of many low level items with useful daily powers.

Consider a character with several suits of Dwarven Armor (or Veteran's from AV) stored in a bag of Holding - with unlimited daily powers he can basically ignore healing surges out of combat or get back Daily powers after every other encounter. Or how about using several Orbs of Inevitable Continuance in succession to maintain a status effect for the encounter.

The number of low level magic items a high level can bring to bear is more limited by his Daily Item limit than the value of the items.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I absolutely concur with my fellow posters on the reasons for these limits. But if you are looking for someone who doesn't bother with them, I can tell you how it works for me.

The game I DM has eight players, and I have not been exactly stingy with handing out magic items. I also allow the players to use each of their Daily magic item powers each day, ignoring the limit imposed on the game.

I have found that the only result from this is that I have to scale the encounters 1 or 2 levels higher than what I normally would build for an eight-person party. And that is not a big deal at all.

I have found that in any encounter... selectively turning some enemies into minions on the fly if the battle is harder than I thought it would be, or doubling some enemies hit points because it was easier... more than covers the flukey nature of the dice and the extra Daily powers.

 

[DracoSuave]

The one problem with getting rid of limits: If you have an enhancement item with a powerful daily power, chances are you can get the same daily power on an item five levels below.

So let's say you have this armor:

+3 Healing Armor
Enhancement: +3 to AC
Daily (Minor, Healing): Gain hit points as tho you spent a healing surge.

This is a decent item for a Daily power under a limited system, but remove the limit and for the same cost you can have

25 suits of +1 Healing Armor
Enhancement whocares
Daily: Same thing as above.

Granted you'll be trading in 10 of those suits for bags of holding, but is that really a downside to having 15 free healing surges?

Or, let's be less rediculous and say they're not buying it, and are receiving it as a treasure. Well, at that level nothing stops them from Disenchanting it and using the residuum to make five suits of +1 armor, giving access to five healing surges rather than one. Still rediculous.

 

[CapnZapp]

Well, this particular problem isn't as insurmountable as you all might make it out to be.

In a nutshell: don't have multiple identical items.

There's an upside to this as well - it makes items more unique (doh!), which is good for keeping the mystery and magical feeling of things.

Consumables yes, but permanent items no. Possibly excepting the generic "Magic Item" items with no bonus powers, but those are boring already.

Having a rule that says something mumbo-jumbo like "magic items radiate mystical energies, and two items with the same powers interfere with each other." which is easy to justify in-game.

Then you as the DM could say that two Dwarven Armours won't work if brought within 10 squares of each other, say. And that their energies linger throughout a short rest (so you can't just use Bags of Holding to switch copies) or whatever you need to rule to stomp down on rules-lawyers trying to find loopholes...

You could also rule that almost-identical items still interfere with each other in unpredictable ways. (Giving you carte blanche to disallow two different items who could be combined for pretty much the same result)

 

[Ahzad]

The one problem with getting rid of limits: If you have an enhancement item with a powerful daily power, chances are you can get the same daily power on an item five levels below.

So let's say you have this armor:

+3 Healing Armor
Enhancement: +3 to AC
Daily (Minor, Healing): Gain hit points as tho you spent a healing surge.

This is a decent item for a Daily power under a limited system, but remove the limit and for the same cost you can have

25 suits of +1 Healing Armor
Enhancement whocares
Daily: Same thing as above.

Granted you'll be trading in 10 of those suits for bags of holding, but is that really a downside to having 15 free healing surges?

Or, let's be less rediculous and say they're not buying it, and are receiving it as a treasure. Well, at that level nothing stops them from Disenchanting it and using the residuum to make five suits of +1 armor, giving access to five healing surges rather than one. Still rediculous.

That's crazy if I had a player try to suggest that I would politely tell him I don't cotton to those kinds of shenanigans in my games, and it doesn't matter if the rules would allow it, I won't allow it and if he didn't like it he's welcome to leave the group.

 

[DracoSuave]

It's -legal- shinanegans tho. It's not even bending the rules. If there's no daily item limit, you can bet your ass I'm going to make items -specifically- so I can use their powers, and you can bet that I'll be making them at the lowest level they're feasible.

So it might not be five of the same power, but if I have an item my level with useful power... and the same item at -10 levels with the same power, I'm going to DE, make the lower level item, and use the residuum to make other daily powers.

Perhaps cloning the same power is an 'exploit' but it isn't an exploit to make items specificly to take advantage of the fact you want more item use.

Or if it is, then you understand why they have the limit in the first place.