Old Gumphrey
First Post
You could try reading the article before you set your books on fire.
Essentials: Magic Item Rarity Explained, it's actually good!
- Thread starter Rex Blunder
- Start date
You could try reading the article before you set your books on fire.
Eh. Essentials introduces a lot of errata, either concurrent with its launch (new race mechanics, magic item rules, new feat categorizations, lots of changes to wizard powers) and introduces new builds for PH1 classes designed to pretty nearly completely replace the PH1 builds (or in a few cases, the PH2 builds) for that class. IMO, they're changing enough that calling Essentials + the July rules update + the post-Essentials rules update 4.5 is not unreasonable.
Heck, I'd argue in at least a few cases, doing 4.5 or 4e Revised would have been somewhat cleaner. With one flexible stat modifier, you don't really need Elves and Eladrin to do woodsy elves and magic elves. And while we'll have to see the Essentials paladin (or anything else getting a defender role build) and monsters to confirm this, it certainly looks like they're stealth-eliminating the marked condition (which has been pretty core to defenders to date) by just not including marking ability in future classes and monsters and providing rules for how its replacements interact with marks.
Heck, I'd argue in at least a few cases, doing 4.5 or 4e Revised would have been somewhat cleaner. With one flexible stat modifier, you don't really need Elves and Eladrin to do woodsy elves and magic elves. And while we'll have to see the Essentials paladin (or anything else getting a defender role build) and monsters to confirm this, it certainly looks like they're stealth-eliminating the marked condition (which has been pretty core to defenders to date) by just not including marking ability in future classes and monsters and providing rules for how its replacements interact with marks.
The Little Raven
First Post
There's more to those races to define them as the woodsy and magic elves than just a +2 Int or Wis. The Elf is still trained in the weapons of a wilderness hunter, while the Eladrin is trained in the weapon of a fey noble. The Elf is experienced at easy moving through brush and wilderness to the extent that shifting through such terrain is second nature, while the eladrin's culture focus on education grants them a broader knowledge base (extra skill).
Marked is being stealth-eliminated... which is why they put in rules for how the Defender Aura interacts with the marked condition and also why the put Marked on the list of conditions on the new Essential's DM screen and in the DM Kit.
...that makes sense....?
Tony Vargas
Legend
From the Article:"Second, characters cannot normally create or buy rare items. They are simply too hard to find to show up in the hands of a merchant or trader. You must find them or, at the DM’s option, track down the rare and wondrous reagents needed to create one. You can’t simply stock up on them or buy one for each item slot."
This is /exactly/ how all magic items (other than potions and scrolls) worked in 1e. Everyone remember how /wonderfully well-balanced/ magic items were in 1e? How they never caused any trouble? No? Me neither.
There's a hard guideline for giving out rare items - 1 per character per tier. That's not a bad guideline. It's still a guideline, though, leaving the DM plenty of room to screw up by giving too many or too-powerful rare items out. And, afterall, part of the point of rare items is that they won't be carefully balanced, they'll be quite potent for their 'level.'
There is only a soft "less than half the items found" guideline for uncommon items. More room for the DM to mess up.
Common items are basically a slot tax, you need to get those Enhancement bonuses to stay on the 4e treadmill, since the monsters and challenges get harder every level, but you only get better every other level. Flip the damn 'inherent bonuses' switch and be done with it.
One truism with 1e was that characters - particularly the non-casters - were defined primarily by their magic items. Stats were just bland numbers, and there was virtually no customization or choice within a class. You were your items. Some folks liked that, many objected strongly to it.
The 'feedback' the article says they've been gettting about items starting to overshadow character choices would seem to echo that ancient complaint. Players want their character to be special and defining (in ways they choose), not their character's sword to be special and defining (in ways chosen by the DM).
Yet, that's exactly what rare items are likely to do.
Then there's uncommon items. They're mostly dailies. They'll account for something less than half the items you find, so, you'll still have quite a few item dailies available as you go up in levels.
One of the complaints mentioned in the article was: "Particularly at high levels, a character’s boots, armor, gloves, belt, weapon, and other gear add quite a few powers and abilities that might overshadow other character aspects."
So, having too many items dailies was a problem. The solution: scrap the limit on item dailies. ???
Characters will still have multiple item dailies. There'll be less effort to assure that they're balanced and don't overshadow character abilities - that responsibility is being pushed on the DM. Characters will get to use /all/ their item dailies, every day. So, they're not likely sell an item with a daily - it might come in handy, and it's always available.
Once again, the line from WotC about Essentials isn't quite making sense. If the idea was to keep items from overshadowing PC abilities, you wouldn't add in even more-powerful items. If the idea is to limit the use of many item dailies, you wouldn't lift a restriction on item dailies.
If the idea is to make the game feel more like older editions, when items could rarely if ever be bought or sold, needed bizarre rare materials to make, and could be arbitrarily powerful and character-defining, all giving the DM a major headache when it came to maintaining balance within his party, OTOH....
This is /exactly/ how all magic items (other than potions and scrolls) worked in 1e. Everyone remember how /wonderfully well-balanced/ magic items were in 1e? How they never caused any trouble? No? Me neither.
There's a hard guideline for giving out rare items - 1 per character per tier. That's not a bad guideline. It's still a guideline, though, leaving the DM plenty of room to screw up by giving too many or too-powerful rare items out. And, afterall, part of the point of rare items is that they won't be carefully balanced, they'll be quite potent for their 'level.'
There is only a soft "less than half the items found" guideline for uncommon items. More room for the DM to mess up.
Common items are basically a slot tax, you need to get those Enhancement bonuses to stay on the 4e treadmill, since the monsters and challenges get harder every level, but you only get better every other level. Flip the damn 'inherent bonuses' switch and be done with it.
One truism with 1e was that characters - particularly the non-casters - were defined primarily by their magic items. Stats were just bland numbers, and there was virtually no customization or choice within a class. You were your items. Some folks liked that, many objected strongly to it.
The 'feedback' the article says they've been gettting about items starting to overshadow character choices would seem to echo that ancient complaint. Players want their character to be special and defining (in ways they choose), not their character's sword to be special and defining (in ways chosen by the DM).
Yet, that's exactly what rare items are likely to do.
Then there's uncommon items. They're mostly dailies. They'll account for something less than half the items you find, so, you'll still have quite a few item dailies available as you go up in levels.
One of the complaints mentioned in the article was: "Particularly at high levels, a character’s boots, armor, gloves, belt, weapon, and other gear add quite a few powers and abilities that might overshadow other character aspects."
So, having too many items dailies was a problem. The solution: scrap the limit on item dailies. ???
Characters will still have multiple item dailies. There'll be less effort to assure that they're balanced and don't overshadow character abilities - that responsibility is being pushed on the DM. Characters will get to use /all/ their item dailies, every day. So, they're not likely sell an item with a daily - it might come in handy, and it's always available.
Once again, the line from WotC about Essentials isn't quite making sense. If the idea was to keep items from overshadowing PC abilities, you wouldn't add in even more-powerful items. If the idea is to limit the use of many item dailies, you wouldn't lift a restriction on item dailies.
If the idea is to make the game feel more like older editions, when items could rarely if ever be bought or sold, needed bizarre rare materials to make, and could be arbitrarily powerful and character-defining, all giving the DM a major headache when it came to maintaining balance within his party, OTOH....
Why did I know someone was going to say this? The point is that the main reason you needed two races of elves was because the stat bonuses magical elves and woodsy elves need to be effective are different. It would have been easy enough to design more generic class abilities for a standard elf (every previous edition of D&D managed it).
Well, yes. It's a condition that's only there for backward compatibility with pre-Essentials classes and monsters. WotC is maintaining the polite fiction that Essentials + the July rules update + the post-essentials rules update are not 4.5 (or 4e Revised or whatever), which means that pre-Essentials stuff has to work, at least with errata. This is introducing some degree of clunkiness into Essentials stuff.
There is utterly no support for the marked condition being removed. It's actually still on the list of conditions in the new essentials DM screen, so very clearly you're barking up the wrong tree here.
TarionzCousin
Second Most Angelic Devil Ever
Dare I say... this makes rare items... "essential."
[SBLOCK]
[SBLOCK]
"YEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!"
[/SBLOCK]
fanboy2000
Adventurer
I'd hold off on the book burning. AV1 still has some good rules for mounts, mount statistics, vehicle rules, and vehicle statistics.
if the changes don't work for your group (be it for whatever reason), you could always hold off on implementing the rules updates on magic items until the next campaign (or next campaign arc if there is a good 'break' in action that provides a natural reset point), or not implement it at all.
It's a modular enough rule that it won't break anything and even if you're using character builder and such, it's simple enough to know you can pick any magic item vs. the ones specified as common.
It's a modular enough rule that it won't break anything and even if you're using character builder and such, it's simple enough to know you can pick any magic item vs. the ones specified as common.
Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
I disagree. There's a lot of evidence to say that the entire philosophy on the default balance level of 4e is different going forward. Some of it certainly seems linked to nostalgia reasons.
I mean, it appears as if the reason there's no dailies for the martial classes in Essentials, that there is a class named Thief, that Wizard spells are doing half damage on a miss, that Clerics powers are more based on their choice of god, and now that the magic items are being changed is to make the game "feel" more like 2e or 1e. This is especially confirmed when the first product in the series is the "Red Box".
As for why I think the magic item change is related to nostalgia is because the primary reason given by WOTC for the change is that the current system restricted them from making more powerful items. I'm guessing that they did some focus groups amongst players who hadn't played D&D since 2e and one of the things they felt was odd was that there were no (or at least very little) items that had an effect at will. But their current magic item philosophy says that items don't have at-will powers. So, they came up with rare items so they could make some of these.
