D&D 4E Points of Light, Dawn War, and Magic Item Economy (4e)

[the Jester]

But not so much a ready market where you could buy a specific item you wanted (or even know about a specific item you'd want). I think that conceit - which makes sense as a way to transition items fully to a player build resource without unduly overpowering the ability to /make/ items - is the disconnect. Not the items, but the market for them, if that makes sense?

I didn't have a market for magic items in my 4e game, but instead relied on the pcs disenchanting and then enchanting their own (or relying on whatever loot they found).

 

[Garthanos]

Milestones were a nice pacing counterweight to the 5MWD impulse of dailies, I'd rather they'd gotten more emphasis as time went on.

I have seen some home-brew stuff where milestones were given more oomph. (for some groups being encouraged to use dailies is quite valuable and disconnecting them from "day" is something I like )

For instance the following

• All encounter powers are immediately refreshed
• The players regain 1/2, rounded down, of their max healing surges
• The players may each spend 1 healing surge as a free action
• For each expended daily power, roll 1d6: On a 456, the daily power refreshes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In other words if a DM actually wants his players who are interested in making items they want there is a context for making story around it. You don't just stumble into the resources to accomplish it for the general case. Specific components are still an option where you make those the object of quest lines too.

Right, the mechanics are available so that the DM can simply say "here's 20,000gp worth of residuum" and that's BASICALLY giving the PCs a "make your own favorite item choice" card, with some flavor to go with it (it is a pretty good bet SOMEONE has "Enchant Item" ritual mastery, although I guess you might need to provide an NPC for that as well, no biggy).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I did not care for rarity - it was just a flimsy excuse to make some items of a given level more powerful/potentially-game-breaking than others, in lieu of making them simply cool or interesting.

But I /really/ didn't like dropping the milestone limit on item dailies, nor, before that, the rapid proliferation of item encounter powers. Milestones were a nice pacing counterweight to the 5MWD impulse of dailies, I'd rather they'd gotten more emphasis as time went on.

But, that's off my own topic. which is fine, I feel my concerns have been adequately addressed.

I just thought all the bookkeeping was foo. I'd have been more happy if it had just been "spend a surge, use an item daily" but really the BIG problem was that if there's a cost which is gated on a limited resource of any sort then all item daily powers are being thrown into a small pool and players only ever use the very most powerful ones. Thus most daily power items became unusable trash, even though a lot of them were quite interesting and flavorful. Then everyone complained that 4e items were boring! So then we did away with the rule that forced you to only use a few boring optimal item powers, and everyone was peeved about it! LOL!

This was THE one thing that Mearls did to improve 4e that was actually good and showed a real deep understanding of the issue at hand. The classification of items into rarities was then basically hamfisted, like they just couldn't be bothered to do it well, but that's another story (and one you could fix yourself if you were so inclined).

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'd have been more happy if it had just been "spend a surge, use an item daily" but really the BIG problem was that if there's a cost which is gated on a limited resource of any sort then all item daily powers are being thrown into a small pool and players only ever use the very most powerful ones.

The point about the small pool is well-taken, but the cool thing about keying it to milestones, like Action Points, was that it was a pool that was in opposition to the usual daily attrition. So you actually /had/ benefits to toughing out a longer day, in gaining Action Points, and Item Dailies, and unlocking better item powers, and a random bit here or there. Milestones could've done with more, that way, not less.
Though it's mostly unrelated to my original concern, above.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The point about the small pool is well-taken, but the cool thing about keying it to milestones, like Action Points, was that it was a pool that was in opposition to the usual daily attrition. So you actually /had/ benefits to toughing out a longer day, in gaining Action Points, and Item Dailies, and unlocking better item powers, and a random bit here or there. Milestones could've done with more, that way, not less.
Though it's mostly unrelated to my original concern, above.

I agree that removing item dailies from the milestone mechanism was not going in a good direction with milestones. They should have been improved in SOME way, even beyond their initial significance. I thought PP/ED could have had a strong milestone related feature for instance (maybe theme too).

 

[Garthanos]

The power is in the hero that fuels the greater abilities of the items of power he wields is pretty damn cool too.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The power is in the hero that fuels the greater abilities of the items of power he wields is pretty damn cool too.

Yeah, and that is basically why HoML lets you power stuff via Vitality Points, and those do get some replenishment. So the idea is pretty strong there, the character fuels everything, though "ancient magic" or whatever plays a part in enabling that.

 

[Garthanos]

Yeah, and that is basically why HoML lets you power stuff via Vitality Points, and those do get some replenishment. So the idea is pretty strong there, the character fuels everything, though "ancient magic" or whatever plays a part in enabling that.

Before 4e arguably D&D really didnt support the idea, that said in 1e, I used the concept of the powers of this relic that he learns as he goes along are really his.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The power is in the hero that fuels the greater abilities of the items of power he wields is pretty damn cool too.

One issue that comes up when you have one resource fueling different things, is that those different things have to be more & more carefully balanced against eachother, or the resource is just used to spam the best (broken) ones.

1e memorization, for instance, partially avoided that, since you couldn't swap spells around during the day, you still might memorize the 'best' spell of a given level more than once, but you couldn't just cast nothing else all day - 'mana point' variants, OTOH, let you do just that. Spamming was the 3.5 Sorcerer's strength, and, of course, in 5e, neo-Vancian casters get the best of both worlds. 4e AEDU didn't just put resources on different schedules, it made it very hard to set up swapping among them, so if say, a 3rd level encounter, say, was a little OP, it just crowded out the other 3rd level encounters, not everything else you might want to do with a 'slot' that day.

So as much as I like the concept of expanding healing surges or action points into some heroic surge able to heal or power dailies or whatever else, it'd run into that issue.