The Magic Items that WotC cannot publish

[korjik]

And there you go... I am kind of glad WOTC magic items are on the functionally bland side I can squash multiple together and mingle with story and boom I have magic items that make the players wish lists envious.

I can up there potency but I am hesitant .. for instance I need a burden of the one ring mechanic that rocks.... so that at-will invisibility to everything but un-dead ... becomes a real choice instead of an every battle always on. anyone got ideas for cool detrimental effects and after effects for items.

Use surges to use/activate as a very basic one. After that, get evil. After everytime you use the ring, three hours later you get attacked by wraiths.

Things like that

 

[billd91]

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.

That's my general take on it too. I can empathize with WotC wanting to design a game in which players can build their characters exactly how they want to. I can also empathize with them wanting to add in an easier magic item building subsystem. But it really does have unpleasant downstream effects. Quirky items that PCs used to get through horde placement get turned into cash to get stuff more regularly useful (the Big 6).

Back in 1e, you could sell your magic gear, sure. The DMG had prices for that. But it wasn't so easy to turn that back around into new magic gear by the rules. Getting the big 6 (or big 3-4 considering there were no amulets of natural armor and the rings of protection/cloaks of resistance did double-duty, and magic users didn't want a girdle of giant strength) was still desirable, but not such an easy strategy to pursue. Most PCs came away with 3 (weapon, armor, ring/cloak of protection) eventually and ended up having to be satisfied with the level of the magic they got - or went on quest to get better ones.
Most often, you sold magical gear to get the money you needed to train up a level or save up for a castle.

Simple magic item creation in 3.0 commoditized magic too much. And 4e hasn't exactly improved on that because it hasn't fundamentally changed that idea. The numbers have been fiddled with. That's all. But what's the solution? I can think of a few ideas.

1) Don't build assumptions about what magic PCs have into your challenge ratings or appropriate-level monster defenses. No need to keep up - no need to go with upgrade after upgrade. People will still want the upgrades to a certain extent, but won't feel they're so "mandatory". 4e may have relatively weak magic, but they're still built into the expectations of the system.

2) Make consumable magic fairly easy to make but permanent magic harder. Wondrous Items at 3rd level? I think NOT! In 1e/2e, 11th level was the norm when magic users started getting Enchant an Item.

 

[coyote6]

1) Don't build assumptions about what magic PCs have into your challenge ratings or appropriate-level monster defenses. No need to keep up - no need to go with upgrade after upgrade. People will still want the upgrades to a certain extent, but won't feel they're so "mandatory". 4e may have relatively weak magic, but they're still built into the expectations of the system.

The problem there is that characters with magic items will be more powerful than characters without, and will likely make "challenging" encounters too easy. For adventure-writing purposes (where the adventure isn't for your personal gaming group -- i.e., you know nothing about the PCs that will undertake it), you can't know how hard to make encounters.

That makes pre-written adventures less valuable to GMs, meaning they'll sell fewer of them, meaning they'll need to sell more sourcebooks, leading to more power creep and a faster edition turnover; then the sky falls, the Mayan calendar ends, Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich team up to make a movie together, and the CGI/explosion singularity occurs, and we all become slaves to our new computer overlords.

More seriously, maybe they should silo "combat" off from "utility" more. The primary balance concerns revolve around combat; if something has little-to-no effect on combat, then they get as weird and wahoo as they want, without worrying about breaking something.

Clever players will be able to turn utility powers into something useful in combat, but that's not a bad thing -- they're likely to be things not clearly delineated by game mechanics, so page 42 and GM judgment can handle it.

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).

Nah, you needed the hammer of thunderbolts to make the girdle & gauntlets combo effective; only that one weapon (in the DMG; there may have been other items in adventures, there certainly were in home games) allowed the girdle & gauntlets to stack. Otherwise, 19-25 Str from the girdle took precedence over the gauntlets' 18/00.

I never saw the combo in action, either, though there was a character or two that got close. (Some of the groups I were part of were very fond of high powered AD&D characters. Mmm, 1e psionics...)

 

[Garthanos]

I have always hated use and toss magic items.... reminds me of modern mass production (here take your medicine... or use the plastic fork then throw it away) NOT the right mind set for magic - magic should be more personal. A shaman didn't sell his fellows magic pigments ... he taught them how to create the markings to overcome their personal limits and the pigments were like cheap spell components which had to be created by the one using them as that was part of the ritual for there use.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Even with the little bugs I love my monster builder ( it is beta after all) . I want the CB to be as customizeable.

Yes, that would be cool. Why can't I design powers in the Character Builder?
Probably because the development resources are now focused elsewhere.

Time for a new DDI survey, I think.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Quick question, how many of you brought the [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Artifacts-Dungeons-Dragons-Fantasy-Roleplaying/dp/1588469352"]Tome of Artifacts[/ame] when it came out?

 

[Nebulous]

I used a healing surge mechanic for a 4e bag of tricks i recreated from scratch. Twenty animals, from minion rats to a lion and bear. It didn't get used very much, unlike its 2e and 3e counterparts. Why? For one, PCs didn't want to spend their surges on animals that would fight for them, and two, it wasn't listed as a power card, they never saw it in their "draw", and thus it was forgotten.

They still have it, and i need to find a way to bump up its significance and take the middle slot again between "mundane" magic items and artifacts.

 

[Dausuul]

Quick question, how many of you brought the Tome of Artifacts when it came out?

I didn't, but that's largely because I don't consider artifacts to be magic items. To me, artifacts are MacGuffins. They exist to serve the specific needs of my campaign; therefore they are always homebrewed (and may not follow the artifact rules given in the DMG).

 

[Umbran]

Apparently, if you trust people with unbalanced material, and give suggestions for how to use it well, you are not attempting to make a "balanced" game.

There's a major difference between producing optional unbalanced elements for a game with a solid foundation, and a game that doesn't have a balanced foundation to begin with.

That's because you're not just accepting the fact that WotC is building their D&D brand for more than just you and people like us... (i.e. experienced D&D players).

Please do not attempt to tell me what I do and don't accept.

I understand that they aim to have the game appeal to as wide an audience as possible. However, a game that requires an initial investment of hundreds of pages of rules, and has many hundreds of more pages already published beyond that, has lost the "don't want to confuse an alienate folks" battle already. A book or two of more highly advanced stuff isn't going to have a notable impact on that score.

They are building the game in many ways to the lowest common denominator, because that is what they've determined to be the best way to get the widest range and amount of people to play the game.

Just because you don't want to make it your own

Again with the telling me what I think and want. Stop that. It is rude, and also incorrect.

I make my games my own so much so that the online tools they provide are often worthless to me. That doesn't mean I don't want to see a professional take on it, that has had multiple brains applied to the ideas, and maybe some more playtesting than I can provide before putting it into my own games, and so on.

I'd like to spell that out for everyone: Any item they publish has to be LFR legit.

I don't think that's true. Does LFR really bring in so much money that this needs to be a consideration?

And any item they publish has to go onto DDI.

This is a stronger point. I still don't think it is strictly true, but even if it is, if GMs don't review what they are handed by their players, I don't think they're doing their jobs as well as they should.

 

[Hjorimir]

Quick question, how many of you brought the Tome of Artifacts when it came out?

I didn't, but one of the main reasons is that I found most 3PP material lacking in quality and game balance than having an aversion to artifacts.