I was envisioning level adjustments of 1 to 3, certainly no more than that. I just want a way to estimate the impact of such items when planning encounters.
The Magic Items that WotC cannot publish
- Thread starter hailstop
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I was envisioning level adjustments of 1 to 3, certainly no more than that. I just want a way to estimate the impact of such items when planning encounters.
Nebulous
Legend
Note that i do like the artifact rules quite a bit. but for one thing, having 5 members of a party with 5 sentient artifacts all talking in the heads about their own agendas can get really complex really fast. Artifacts striving for concordance or failing to meet that concordance, and having the DM track that for the players can also be hard.
I think the lesser artifacts are just introducing non-intelligent items that break the 4e mould that any PC can own. That's my take on it anyway. Maybe they use charges. Maybe they are ritual-based. Maybe they just queue-up several at-will powers from other classes and give them to you for free.
Of course you can also bend the existing artifact rules to do the same thing. I do like the artifacts and i already have several of them planted in my campaign, but they are more "story" oriented.
Same reason I don't want to use a chainsaw to mow the lawn. It's overkill and not the best tool for the job.
Artifacts are designed to make an appearance for a couple levels, then disappear again. Furthermore, they require a lot of DM involvement to track how happy the artifact is with its PC wielder. They're as much NPCs as magic items.
I'd like a book of items that can become PCs' signature items. Think Raistlin with the Staff of Magius, or Aragorn with Anduril. (I was going to say Elric with Stormbringer, but with its sentient and semi-independent nature, Stormbringer might be better modeled as a full-scale artifact.) Such things would need to be more powerful and versatile than the standard run of magic items. At the same time, I don't want something that I as DM must constantly monitor - I want to be able to hand the item to the player, then let the player worry about the mechanics.
In AD&D, such things were simply regular items at the top end of the power scale, like the staff of the magi and the +5 holy avenger. AD&D could take that approach because it was assumed that players couldn't simply go out and buy any item they had the cash for, and the item creation rules were 90% DM fiat.
3E set out to codify item creation and wealth by level, as well as providing support for magic items as fungible commodities. However, that model left no room for the unique big-ticket "signature item." If you gave a mid-level 3E fighter a +5 vorpal sword, the response was seldom, "Wow, this sword is awesome! I'm going to use it forever!" Much more likely, you'd see, "Wow, this sword is worth a freakin' fortune! I sell it for 100,000 gold, then buy myself a +4 sword, +4 full plate, a +4 periapt of health, and a +6 belt of giant strength!"
So 3E introduced minor artifacts, in between normal magic items and full-bore artifacts like the Hand of Vecna. Minor artifacts existed outside the regular continuum of magic items - you couldn't craft them and they had no listed gold piece value - but they didn't carry the plot baggage that major artifacts did. It wasn't a perfect solution, mostly because it didn't address how such items would affect PC power level and it punted on the question of what happens when the PC wants to sell one. But it did provide a way to keep such specialty items in the game.
4E currently lacks such a category, which I think is unfortunate. I remember when they released Raistlin's stats for the Character Builder, I looked at 4E's version of the Staff of Magius and thought, "What the heck? That's the most pathetic Staff of Magius I've ever seen." But they didn't have much choice; either they gave Raistlin an outright artifact, which would disappear a few levels later instead of staying with him throughout his career, or they gave him a crappy regular low-level magic staff.
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Pk, I'm really not getting it.
Staff of Magius and Anduril _WERE_ artifacts though.
Staff of Magius has been an artifact in Dragonlance since at least 2e.
Similarly, Anduril (Narsil) is most assuredly an artifact and been treated as such by every game I've seen. Hell, I don't even think the MMO, LOTRO even allows for players to gain Narsil.
It's like people WANT powerful magic items but not the responsibility.
Staff of Magius and Anduril _WERE_ artifacts though.
Staff of Magius has been an artifact in Dragonlance since at least 2e.
Similarly, Anduril (Narsil) is most assuredly an artifact and been treated as such by every game I've seen. Hell, I don't even think the MMO, LOTRO even allows for players to gain Narsil.
It's like people WANT powerful magic items but not the responsibility.
Anduril doesn't exist in D&D, of course, but the Staff of Magius does, and it's been downgraded. Look at Raistlin's stats in the Character Builder. It's just a crappy regular magic staff now.
The 4E artifact rules don't work to model either the Staff of Magius or Anduril, because 4E artifacts are designed to stick around for a few levels, then move on. That's the point of the Concordance system; you aren't supposed to be able to hang onto an artifact for your entire career.
Raistlin got the Staff of Magius as a 3rd-level wizard fresh from the Test. He then kept it for the length of an entire campaign. When he challenged Takhisis, he was a 25th-level wizard (according to the AD&D Dragonlance sourcebook, anyway), but he was still wielding the Staff of Magius. It never tried to move on. After Raistlin's death, Dalamar shut it in a locked room for 25 years, and it stayed there till Raistlin himself came back to give it to his nephew.
Contrast the dragon orb, which was a notably squirrelly item. At one point it made an active attempt to escape from Raistlin; at another, it tried to trap him and send his soul to Takhisis. The other dragon orbs also had a habit of making trouble for their owners. That's what the 4E artifact system was designed to model.
Similarly, Narsil/Anduril never tried to get away from Aragorn, at least not that I know of. It stayed with him from the time when Elrond gave him the shards as a young man, all the way until his death. The One Ring, with its treacherous jumps from one master to the next, is what artifacts look like.
Like I said - mowing the lawn with a chainsaw. You can do it, but it's a poor fit. I don't want to be constantly monitoring Raistlin's player to see if he's keeping his damn staff happy*, but I do want his staff to be an item of special significance. Neither 4E-style artifacts nor 4E-style magic items are well-suited to this.
[SIZE=-2]*That's for Crysania's player to worry about.[/SIZE]
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Trying to model a quasi-european medival economy to determine whether the price of a bottomless keg of ale is worth the cost of magic armor to determine whether a game designer knows what he is talking about? Nerds!
Really, I think his point might be getting lost in the arguments and the edition warring that is going on. What I got out of the article makes sense to me. He would not feel comfortable publishing a book of magic items that he knows don't fit the mold. He likely knows how charop and LFR work. If the players have access to clearly overpowered options (windrise ports, salves of power, etc) they are used and overused in great disproportion to other items or choices. I also get the impression that publishing a book that is entirely DM fiat is not in the cards. How would such a book sell relative to AV3? or 4?
I don't really want to sound like I'm in 100% agreement though, because I'm not. While an entire book of these items may not make business sense, Dragon or Dungeon articles do, as would a chapter in a future DMG. A category between Artifacts and Magic Items makes sense, and whomever brought up Narsul and the Staff of Magus is inspired, because I think they hold the key.
The problem is, all the speculation about these types of items has illuminated the hole in the design space. To make them, Wotc would have to design them to fit into the current game in an elegant way. And what motivation do they have to do so? PC's are already swimming in options as far as magic items go, and DM's may not be interested in accomodating the potential game-breaking effects of said items.
In the end, I think that such a class of items will not be published because there is *no good reason to*. Nothing sinister or broken about it. I'd rather them bend their creativity towards more exiticing content for me, and if this kind of item is not it, I'm content.
Jay
Really, I think his point might be getting lost in the arguments and the edition warring that is going on. What I got out of the article makes sense to me. He would not feel comfortable publishing a book of magic items that he knows don't fit the mold. He likely knows how charop and LFR work. If the players have access to clearly overpowered options (windrise ports, salves of power, etc) they are used and overused in great disproportion to other items or choices. I also get the impression that publishing a book that is entirely DM fiat is not in the cards. How would such a book sell relative to AV3? or 4?
I don't really want to sound like I'm in 100% agreement though, because I'm not. While an entire book of these items may not make business sense, Dragon or Dungeon articles do, as would a chapter in a future DMG. A category between Artifacts and Magic Items makes sense, and whomever brought up Narsul and the Staff of Magus is inspired, because I think they hold the key.
The problem is, all the speculation about these types of items has illuminated the hole in the design space. To make them, Wotc would have to design them to fit into the current game in an elegant way. And what motivation do they have to do so? PC's are already swimming in options as far as magic items go, and DM's may not be interested in accomodating the potential game-breaking effects of said items.
In the end, I think that such a class of items will not be published because there is *no good reason to*. Nothing sinister or broken about it. I'd rather them bend their creativity towards more exiticing content for me, and if this kind of item is not it, I'm content.
Jay
Scribble
First Post
I think that's part of what the original blog is saying. If they came out with a book like this, they'd become items that people saw as "must have items" not based on story (as they were intended) but based on pure number bonuses.
People (especially in organized play) would want them to become a regular part of the game. They then loose that "special" nature they have as being something out of the ordinary.
Stuff like this- "amendments" to the rules for story reasons- should best be left to the players and DMs of individual campaigns.
WoTC gives us the baseline "balanced" rules, and we bend and break them to fit what we want.
Want to do Raistlin's staff? Just have the player continue with the same staff, only revealing it's full "artifact" nature when the player reaches epic levels. The "Moving on" happens when Raistlin fails to defeat the Dark Queen.
How about using multiple "versions" of the same artifact? As each tier is obtained the artifact "moves on" into the next version.
Or model a sword that is an artifact, but the moving on part only concerns the rules nature. The physical item never leaves, only the "magical artifact powers." Theostories and tails remain the same, but the magic part might not return, or might only return when it's needed again.
Narsil was broken when last it was an artifact at that point it "moved on" until it was again needed, in the hands of Aragorn. When the sword was reforged as Anduril the artifact nature returns. After the defeat of Sauron, it again moves on, yet the physical sword remains.
So true!
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I suppose one could do those things, but I can see a number of problems with each of those implementations, and... what for? Just so I can say, "The Staff of Magius now fits into an artifact template, sort of, if you squint?"
That was my point above; yeah, you can cram square magic items into round artifacts if you really want to, but it's a bad fit and a lot of trouble and it's never going to work quite right. The artifact system in 4E is designed to model a very specific type of magic item - the dangerous, powerful, self-aware magic item with a will of its own. For that type of item, it's absolutely brilliant. For more passive tool-type items, however, it's useless, not because there's anything wrong with it but because that's just not what it was built for.
As an individual DM, if I want the Staff of Magius in my game, I'll stat it up as a high-powered homebrew magic item, like the ones Peter S. describes in his article. But it would be nice to have a framework for such items, and some guidelines on power levels, and some examples, so I have an idea of what the impact will be. If 6th-level Raistlin is using the Staff of Magius, does it make him equivalent to a 7th-level threat? 8th? More? Is the Staff of Magius better or worse than the Sword of Kith-Kanan that I gave to Tanis, and if so, by how much?
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