jamesjhaeck
Explorer
I love 5e, but I have a big beef with its magic items.
They aren't bad, per se. A lot of them are just as good as when I first saw them in earlier editions. But I'm coming to expect more from magic items, not just "spells in a can" or a magical "swiss army knife."
Take a look over at Paizo's RPG Superstar contest right now, and you'll see hundreds of great magic items. Every single one still in the voting pool is easily a B-, and there are dozens of A+ items in there. I look in the 5e DMG and... not a lot of the magic items in there grab me.
It's not that the items aren't tightly designed; most of them seem to be mechanically sound. (There are a few exceptions; the mantle of spell resistance tweaks me a little bit. 5e ditched spell resistance, ditch the mantle, too, it's sloppy as written.) No, the real issue is that there are very few "superstar" items in the DMG. Now that magic items aren't an assumed part of the math progression, do we need +X items, like cloaks of resistance anymore? They don't interest me, either as a gamer or a storyteller.
Most of the items that wowed me were legendary. Which is a shame, because I love low-level magic items. It's a hard design space to work in, but WotC is definitely up to the challenge. Personally, I wish they were more strange, off-the-wall magic item ideas than the array of classics currently in the book. I guess those are what supplements are for.
They aren't bad, per se. A lot of them are just as good as when I first saw them in earlier editions. But I'm coming to expect more from magic items, not just "spells in a can" or a magical "swiss army knife."
Take a look over at Paizo's RPG Superstar contest right now, and you'll see hundreds of great magic items. Every single one still in the voting pool is easily a B-, and there are dozens of A+ items in there. I look in the 5e DMG and... not a lot of the magic items in there grab me.
It's not that the items aren't tightly designed; most of them seem to be mechanically sound. (There are a few exceptions; the mantle of spell resistance tweaks me a little bit. 5e ditched spell resistance, ditch the mantle, too, it's sloppy as written.) No, the real issue is that there are very few "superstar" items in the DMG. Now that magic items aren't an assumed part of the math progression, do we need +X items, like cloaks of resistance anymore? They don't interest me, either as a gamer or a storyteller.
Most of the items that wowed me were legendary. Which is a shame, because I love low-level magic items. It's a hard design space to work in, but WotC is definitely up to the challenge. Personally, I wish they were more strange, off-the-wall magic item ideas than the array of classics currently in the book. I guess those are what supplements are for.