D&D (2024) 2024 needs to end 2014's passive aggressive efforts to remove magic items & other elements from d&d

[nevin]

I think for me it is a cognitive disconnect. It would be like Apple suddenly saying "nope only 3 apps for you." then when people complain. "Oh it's ok you can uninstall an app and install what you need and just swap em out as needed. " Just no..

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I explained it before.

If you run 5e without magic items, you are more or less agreeing that the DM has to be an expert to replace the holes magic items filled and a social contract that your game will not play like normal D&D and put characters in different or additional roles less a large percentage of the monsters removed.
.

Magic items were not required, they are just nice to have.

 

[tetrasodium]

I was trying to subtly raise the possibility you are putting way too much faith in "body slots" as a solution. I wasn't keen on entering that part of the debate while the basic "does 5E stop working without magic items?" debate was still raging.

With that mostly settled, I can confess I don't see 5E has nearly the kind of stacking problem that motivates adding a formal body slot rules framework.

And TBH I didn't think body slots really solved any balance issues in 3E either. They were good minmaxing fun because they added texture; something to wrap your minmaxing around. But any gamer worth his salt weren't stopped by hyperspecific nonsense like "you can't benefit from both a medallion and a brooch at the same time" anyway. (Yes, I had to look that up)

But I feel that level of detail is inappropriate for 5E.

Insofar as three attunement slots feels overly crude and restrictive in 5E, I would encourage you and everyone to look for other solutions. With special emphasis on things that actually solve specific problems, rather than just decorates them (like detailed rules about how many rings you could wear would).


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Maybe take a page out of PF2 and go like this:

• you now have 10 attunement slots
• every existing major item now costs 3 attunement slots

So far you've basically blown up supply and demand three times (with a 1/3rd added for good measure).

But now you have design space to designate less awesome items to use only 2 or 1 attunement slots.

This way one character attunes to three major items while another attunes to ten individually less impressive items. This way you would attempt to mitigate a real problem with 5E; the fact that so very many cool and evocative items go by the wayside simply because you already have three majorly impactful items, and you can't attune to any more.

But maybe, just maybe, you'd be willing to give one of these up, if you could get the cool and evocative item PLUS something other as well?


(The comparison with PF2 basically ends at having 10 attunement points. In PF2 the rule is: you can only invest 10 items during any given day. 5E items are allowed much more variety in power, which is why the comparison ends here)

You are jumping the gun a bit & overlooked the first couple steps that made them relevant. the DMG for 5e HAS a rule for what to do when two magic items need to be worn on the same body part.

Spoiler: this is it

MULTIPLE ITEMS OF THE SAME KIND
Use common sense to determine whether more than
one of a given kind of magic item can be worn. A charac
ter can't normally wear more than one pair of footwear,
one pair of gloves or gauntlets, one pair of bracers, one
suit of armor, one item of headwear, and one cloak.
You can make exceptions; a character might be able to
wear a circlet under a helmet, for example, or to layer
two cloaks.

This is not a rule supporting the GM, it's a tediously specific application of rule zero for players to cite to the GM. So much so that it only manages to avoid being a extreme example of a hardcore Oberoni fallacy by virtue of the fact that 5e both pretends there are no consequences to this kind of thing and it's just rule zero but phrased in a way that gets in the GM's way if they ever want to say no there. In fact it's so specific that it almost reads like "I'll show bob" type rogue commit you sometimes see in OSS projects with public repositories before they finally fork & split but put to print.

Indeed slots aren't a one stop solution & I've never claimed otherwise. Having a similar 5e rule on dmg141 that is designed to encourage rather than limit stacking is a pretty solid reason to make the comparison. When the 5e sheet lacks a couple fairly important sections related to that comparison it's hard not to point out the pattern. Those sections are areas for recording magic items and for recording attunement. 3.5 launched with similar character sheet omissions in 2003 then in the 2006 corrected them with the revised sheet(linked in the OP). Back then 3.5 was only about a third of 5e's nine year run at the time but a year later it went a step further with the 2007 MiC pg286 slots sheet. Here we are nine years in and 5e still has the tediously specific rule zero entry and a sheet that still has not been updated to include some form of the obviously missing sections for magic items & attunement.

If the missing sheet support for magic items & attunement were the only ways that 5e makes needless work that would be one thing, but that's not the case & all of the individual things add up in aggregate often presenting compounding problems like a rule that encourages a nonsense "common sense" standard while encouraging PCs engage in magic item stacking as if "yes Bob you can use both magic items" is going to result in meaningful resistance from Bob rather than a rule supporting the GM when Bob wants to push back against "no Bob".

 

[Yaarel]

which in reality means everything but the most impactful and useful are simply trash for the D&D landfill or actually gold that you don't call gold that is still useless in far too many 5e games.

Remember, right now the math assumes zero magic items.

The proposal is for a "safe amount" of magic items that the official math expects.

I cant cry about too few magic items because spell slots work the same way. You pick your favorites for flavor and usefulness, and the rest remain largely unused, but are available for situational oddities. Same with magic item attunements.

With regard to increasing attunement by tier, might as well simply use the proficiency. So two items at the lowest tier, upto six items at the highest tier.

Back to a "safe" math expectation, only one attunementment can be the current tier. So at the lowest tier 1-4, only one item can be from levels 1-4, the other item must be level 0 common. At the highest tier 17-20, only one item can be from levels 17-20, and the rest of the items must be from lower levels.

The highest magical bonus is proficiency/2, so a +1 sword at the lowest tier and so on.

Any magic item whose tier is too high is unattunable (unless a DM says otherwise), and is unexpected by the math.[/QUOTE]

 

[Yaarel]

For strict balance, a different approach is, one uses feats to attune magic items.

 

[mamba]

PCs engage in magic item stacking as if "yes Bob you can use both magic items" is going to result in meaningful resistance from Bob rather than a rule supporting the GM when Bob wants to push back against "no Bob".

you have basically the same slots in 3e and 5e, they are just listed differently. If you cannot push back against Bob with the 5e text, chances are Bob would not accept your 3e recitation either.

You have this weird notion that the rules have to say exactly what you want to do as a DM, as otherwise you could never get to do it, because the players just mop the floor with you.

 

[Yaarel]

In this context of magic items, I include magic nonitems, sometimes referred to as boons (not to be confused with epic boons).

I prefer, by far, a flavor of magic that is innate and personal.

So an award of a magic item might instead be something like a Dragonborn shedding ones serpent skin and emerging from it with dragon wings. Or an Elf figuring out the innate ancestral ability to shapeshift, or fly or teleport at will - whatever might be appropriate to the tier. Any Humanoid might unexpectedly exhibit psionic powers. These magic nonitems are part of awarding magic items too. These can improve while advancing, but seem more like permanent attunements that are harder to explain swapping out.

 

[Yaarel]

I think for me it is a cognitive disconnect. It would be like Apple suddenly saying "nope only 3 apps for you." then when people complain. "Oh it's ok you can uninstall an app and install what you need and just swap em out as needed. " Just no..

The apps I use take up alot of memory, and that is the way my computer is now. I have to choose what is on my computer and what is on my portable drive. It is time consuming to swap.

 

[tetrasodium]

you have basically the same slots in 3e and 5e, they are just listed differently. If you cannot push back against Bob with the 5e text, chances are Bob would not accept your 3e recitation either.

You have this weird notion that the rules have to say exactly what you want to do as a DM, as otherwise you could never get to do it, because the players just mop the floor with you.

Now you've moved to Oberoni... You also overlooked the parts where that post you quoted talks about the fact that the sheet itself does not in any way have a location for recording magic items or attunement and you want the GM to go beyond that by telling a hypothetical player to just do it like 3.5 did because the 5e DMG failed so hard at wording the relevant rule in a useful form? Why do you assume that Bob played 3.5 remembers it well enough and/or is willing to admit that they remember.

The GM should not be expected to fix that for the core rules & official sheet.

 

[the Jester]

Attunement slots are, to my mind, similar to the time required to complete a rest, which is to say, there should be significant space in the DMG dedicated to discussing the implications of modifying it from the base. In fact, I think the PH ought to lay out several options for both rests and attunement, with explicit descriptions of how each impacts play and a "check with your DM about which length of short and long rest/number of attunement slots they use".