The Magic Items that WotC cannot publish

[Celebrim]

You might have a point.

The standard 3E magic items where what? The "Christmas Tree" of Ring of Protections, Amulet of Natural Armor, Magic Armor, Magic Weapon, Gloves of Dexterity, Cloak of Resistance, Headband of Intellect, Belt of Giant Strength? Those weren't particularly interesting, but often treated as mandatory

With the introduction of 3.5 they actually became mandatory, because the CR of high challenge monsters was computed with the assumption that all high level players would have an optimal suite of these items.

The problem 3.0 introduced to D&D was the idea that magic items were non-random fungible comodities which could be easily bought and traded at any nearby community and which could therefore be considered part of your character's build. Players basically were allowed to, and ultimately encouraged to by the rules set, to pick and choose which items were best for them and DM's were encouraged to allow this.

So naturally the result was something like Nethack or Diablo without the need to quest to find your victory package of ultimate weapons. People naturally and correctly choose items which provided basic enhancement to things that they did all the time.

Under these conditions its impossible for magical items to feel magical or interesting regardless of their powers or abilities. Magical items, not even strong ones are not scarce. Not only do you get that +5 Holy Avenger that you long for, but you can buy it in town and are expected to do so as part of your standard level progression. You might as well make 'Acquire Magical Item' a part of your level progression, the way 1st edition made 'Acquires titles, lands, and followers' part of your expected level progression.

The most coolness in this is like buying a new Blackberry or IPod. It's cool, but everyone has one.

In 1st edition, the ultimate combination was belt of giant strength (especially storm giant!) and gauntlets of ogre power. Every fighter longed to have both, because with them he became an almost unstoppable force (a vorpal sword would just have been frosting). I never once saw it happen. You could dream, but no DM worth his pizza was going to allow it to happen easily. I've seen fighters with one or the other, but never both. You kept questing to find the pieces of your combo, hoping that the DM randomed up a treasure and allowed it to be because he felt the challenge of obtaining made it worth it. Whatever you found was cool, because it was one more tool in your arsenal that you couldn't obtain anywhere else. Even swords +1 were cool: you wrapped them carefully in cloth and threw them in your bag of holding (if you had one!) and distributed them to followers and henchmen for big loyalty bonuses and added combat ummph. Your castle was defended by followers with magic weapons. That was cool.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Ok, No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Emphaticly NO!!!!

There is the problem. The combination of those two ideas is deadly.

The idea that it is 'always easier to ADD something into a rules set than to take it away' is so ludicrous on the face of it that I'm surprised you can say it and keep a straight face. It is always easier to remove something from a rules set than to add it in if it is missing.

Heh heh... you should tell this to all the people who continue to rant and rave about the Expertise feats. It seems like all of them to a man have said they wished those feats never existed for anybody, rather than just make a personal decision to remove them from their own games. LOL!

But let's be honest here... if enough people clamor for it, then WotC eventually will add it. It's simple marketing. "Give the people what they want". Anyone who doubts WotC will do it just needs to take a look at the Tempest Fighter. Folks were clamoring since the beginning of the first PH release that they wanted their fighters to be able to dual-wield, despite most of the Wizards staff saying "Well, that's why we have the Ranger. It's the martial dual-wield class! That's how it was designed!" But because everyone got hung up on the idea that they wanted to play a "Fighter" in name... and not just a warrior in general (which all the martial classes are)... they kept complaining and complaining until finally WotC gave it to them in Martial Power.

So just wait about six months for Dungeon Magazine, or whenever AV3 comes out... you'll probably see exactly what you're looking for.

 

[nightwyrm]

Once you introduce a magic item retail market, most PCs would trade in their quirky, funky items that is useful once in a blue moon for things that are Boring But Practical.

In any case, if you don't like magic items being treated as commodities or necessities, blame the creation of a standardized PC power vs Monster power balance system. If you want to compare the power level of a PC to the power level of a Monster, you need to make assumptions on how much PC power comes from items.

 

[Mallus]

The problem 3.0 introduced to D&D was the idea that magic items were non-random fungible comodities which could be easily bought and traded at any nearby community and which could therefore be considered part of your character's build.

I'd say the 'problem' that 3e exposed was that quite a few players enjoyed commoditized magic items; which is to say they like having more control over designing their characters abilities. 3e is a hybrid class-based and point-buy system.

Players basically were allowed to, and ultimately encouraged to by the rules set, to pick and choose which items were best for them and DM's were encouraged to allow this.

Yes, just like Champions players are allowed and encouraged to spend their points to buy character powers. The difference is that Champions/HERO is upfront about being a point-buy system, and D&D 3.x kinda clouds the issue by referring to 'supplemental character build points' as 'gold'.

Under these conditions its impossible for magical items to feel magical or interesting regardless of their powers or abilities.

Impossible? Horse-pucky! (should that be hyphenated?) A creative DM can make a commoditized 3.x item interesting (I did). Conversely, in the hands of a less-than-creative DM, scarce and non-commoditized pre-3.x items were uninteresting. I'm sure you've experienced this yourself, Cel.

Magical items, not even strong ones are not scarce.

A lesson I learned from the classic 1e tournament modules.

Also, while I hate to descent into tautology, but interesting things are interesting. Scarce things are not inherently interesting. And how does scarcity actually operate in fictional spaces anyway? A DM might decree +1 swords are rare in his/her homebrew, but to most experienced gamers, they're commonplace. In and of themselves, how magical or wondrous can they be? (note you can replace '+1 sword' with any fantasy trope: dragon, elf, lost city, evil god, etc.).

To an audience familiar w/the genre, virtually nothing is really scarce/rare. If you're going to impress them, it's going to come down to your presentation, your imagination. Accepting that's true --and you should, BTW-- the business of magic items becomes a non-issue. Magic will be as interesting as it's described, and in how creatively it can be used.

Whether or not it had a price tag on it is irrelevant.

Even swords +1 were cool...

In my experience, +1 swords were never cool, unless the DM went to great lengths to glom some non-canonical --ie, outside the rules-- coolness unto them, in which case, it wasn't the +1 sword that was cool, it was the DM's creative output.

 

[Dausuul]

Heh heh... you should tell this to all the people who continue to rant and rave about the Expertise feats. It seems like all of them to a man have said they wished those feats never existed for anybody, rather than just make a personal decision to remove them from their own games. LOL!

I've never seen anyone say this. Speaking as somebody who has in the past complained about the Expertise feats, my complaint is simply that the feat should have been built into the system from the beginning; we shouldn't have needed a feat-fix.

Given that it wasn't built into the system from the beginning, a feat-fix was probably necessary.

Back to the main topic of the thread: I don't think commoditized magic items are the problem with 4E, at least not by themselves. If the rest of the system were built differently, commoditized magic items could be left up to individual DMs to allow or not as they chose. Unfortunately, the problems in the system are greatly exacerbated by commoditization.

The problem is magic items having a direct and substantial impact on the core math of the game. This means the core math has to account for those items. This in turn means:

• The "best" magic items, the ones players agitate for, will always be the boring vanilla ones. Anything that boosts your core numbers is going to be strongly favored over quirky situational stuff.
• Magic items have to come at a fairly well-defined rate and have a fairly well-defined power level, which imposes an extra burden on the DM to hand out loot in accordance with the system's needs. Furthermore, the items the DM is required to hand out (or provide money to buy/create) are the boring vanilla ones.
• To the extent that the system incorporates commoditized magic items, prices in the game economy will be dictated by the need to keep high-level items out of the hands of low-level players. Thus the ludicrous prices for epic-level items, which make it very difficult to set reasonable prices in other sectors of the game economy. (For instance, they had to implement a clunky fix to the component cost of the Raise Dead ritual, to compensate for the fact that what's difficult and costly for a Heroic-tier character is a minor expense at Paragon and chump change at Epic.)

 

[Celebrim]

I'd say the 'problem' that 3e exposed was that quite a few players enjoyed commoditized magic items; which is to say they like having more control over designing their characters abilities.

That may well be true, but to the extent that is true then they shouldn't complain that the magic items don't feel magical. Those players and DMs made a choice - player choice over a magic as magic.

Yes, just like Champions players are allowed and encouraged to spend their points to buy character powers. The difference is that Champions/HERO is upfront about being a point-buy system, and D&D 3.x kinda clouds the issue by referring to 'supplemental character build points' as 'gold'.

Indeed. The thing that bothered me about this is that one of the things that bothered me about 1st edition was the gold=XP mechanic pretty much required high level characters to find enormous staggering sums of treasure to advance. When they removed this idea, I was a little upset to find that they had replaced it in many players minds (and ultimately within the game balance itself) with the idea of gold exactly as you put it, as required 'supplemental character build points'.

Impossible? Horse-pucky! (should that be hyphenated?) A creative DM can make a commoditized 3.x item interesting (I did). Conversely, in the hands of a less-than-creative DM, scarce and non-commoditized pre-3.x items were uninteresting. I'm sure you've experienced this yourself, Cel.

Ok, impossible was a bit too strong of a word, but in my defense I did qualify the statement with 'under these conditions'. My guess is that you are making a commoditized item interesting by somehow departing creatively from the default conditions.

A lesson I learned from the classic 1e tournament modules.

I agree. And if you built your campaign on the back of 1e tournament modules and 1e 'adventure paths' (which by necessity force leveled the participants), then yes, you'd have much the same problem.

Also, while I hate to descent into tautology, but interesting things are interesting. Scarce things are not inherently interesting. And how does scarcity actually operate in fictional spaces anyway?

If you'll permit me to descend with you, the answer is 'balance'.

Whether or not it had a price tag on it is irrelevant.

It is if it is fungible. It wouldn't matter how much flavor you attached to something, if you hang a price tag on it and allow it to be traded away, all that creativity is just fuel for the auctioneer and its value is simply what its exchange rate for bonuses is. It's not the price tag, but the ability to transform the item into something else. You run the risk of creating complex items that the characters simply want to trade away for things of narrower scope and greater marginal utility.

In my experience, +1 swords were never cool, unless the DM went to great lengths to glom some non-canonical --ie, outside the rules-- coolness unto them, in which case, it wasn't the +1 sword that was cool, it was the DM's creative output.

Under the 1st edition rules, in the Henchmen loyalty table, one of the easiest ways to ensure that your retainers and henchmen would fight to the death for you was to bestow on them magical gifts. You could use this gift to counter the fact that you often treated retainers as expendable, thereby under the rules of the game ensuring their loyalty. This was one of those things the resident rules laywer made sure I was familiar with. And if your retainers/followers survived, then you had one of the worlds only forces (per RAW) of magically armed mercenaries which mattered a good deal in battlesystem (if you did that sort of thing). I'm not sure what part of that counts as 'DM's creative output'.

 

[DEFCON 1]

To an audience familiar w/the genre, virtually nothing is really scarce/rare. If you're going to impress them, it's going to come down to your presentation, your imagination. Accepting that's true --and you should, BTW-- the business of magic items becomes a non-issue. Magic will be as interesting as it's described, and in how creatively it can be used.

And therein lies the problem... those who have played D&D (or any rpg for that matter) for any real length of time is already familiar with pretty much everything. There really isn't any mystery that can WotC can publish for mass consumption... it will all come down to your personal DM's presentation of those things. Even a magic item that has three powers in it rather than just one, is no more mysterious than anotherbasic one when the DM says "you find this in the pile of treasure" and then just hands the player the power card for it.

I mean, let's get real... this is Dungeons & Dragons... a game that's existed for over 30 years. Just how "mysterious" do you think it can really be made in the books alone? Especially considering that as D&D players, you're going to BUY THE BOOK AND READ IT, thereby knowing beforehand every potentially mysterious thing in it before the DM presents it to you in his game. The ONLY way to be surprised is by the DM's creativity and how the "known quantities" of the game are given to you in ways that are "unknown quanitities" to you.

 

[Stoat]

Yes, just like Champions players are allowed and encouraged to spend their points to buy character powers. The difference is that Champions/HERO is upfront about being a point-buy system, and D&D 3.x kinda clouds the issue by referring to 'supplemental character build points' as 'gold'.

Agreed. D&D's magic item economy is a point-buy system in disguise.

I know it would raise a lot of hackles, but I'm getting to where I'd almost prefer a straight, meta-game point buy system for magic items. Gain a level, get some points, pick some items, work with the DM to decide how the items get into the game (maybe you buy them from genies, maybe you take them from monsters, maybe some patron bestows them on you.)

 

[Rel]

I should be more thankful that I have the players I have I suppose.

Hell, for the current campaign I'm running, I don't even let them take feats, powers or stuff like that from outside the PHB1. I don't think it would ever cross their minds for a moment to whine about not having access to every item in such a publication.

 

[Hjorimir]

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Emphaticly NO!!!!

There is the problem. The combination of those two ideas is deadly.

The idea that it is 'always easier to ADD something into a rules set than to take it away' is so ludicrous on the face of it that I'm surprised you can say it and keep a straight face.

Yes. etc (ad nausem).

We are not talking about the process of rules creation; we are talking about taking something away from the players. If the magic items never existed, the players can't rightly complain about not having them.

Go to your leaders and reduce the number of heals they can use per encounter by one and see them complain (and I think they'd be right to. this is just an example). On the other hand, if you went and granted each of those leaders an extra use of their base class heal per encounter, they'd be thankful.

This all stems from the baseline of the core rules. When the DM deviates from that baseline by taking away access to powers, feats, whatever, the players are unhappy (and an unhappy player can REALLY moan about stuff).

So, yes, it's easier to add something to the player characters power than it is to take away.

Yes. etc. (ad naseum).