Jeff Carlsen
Adventurer
Oh, dear - it looks like magic items are back to being nothing but sweeties for the GM to hand out to good little boys and girls... Ho, hum - I don't think I'm the intended audience for "default" style DDN, and nothing for any other style has come out, yet.OK, now here I see a real oddity.
The categories of "Easy", "Tough" and so on relate to levels; in other words, what is a "tough" encounter for a party of 1st level characters is an "easy" encounter for a 3rd level party. Items don't have a level - they are just "common" or "rare" or "awesomesauce" or whatever - but they are allocated depending whether an encounter was "easy", "average" or "tough"?? Where does that leave "sandbox" campaigns? Tackling a load of "tough" encounters apparently leads to more "rare", "very rare" and "legendary" items - but those exact same encounters tackled a couple of levels later would be "easy". Would they, then, net the same haul of "rare", "very rare" and "legendary" items, or not??
If you use the provided charts as they are intended, then the magic items received are based on the difficulty of the encounter at the time the PCs overcome it. The idea being that greater risk demands greater reward. In a sandbox game, the overall result might be the same. By taking on the greater challenges early, the rewards are greater up front, but it means that the remaining encounters are weaker and will provide lesser goodies. The reverse would then also be true.
The magic items aren't leveled because most of them are equally useful regardless of level.