(2nd Edition) Seriously, why it was wise to go around naked, in 2nd Edition D&D

[Edena_of_Neith]

I'm not complaining. It's nolstagia for old times I write about (even if some of those times were messy.)
I realize that in 3E your items are protected. You need worry little about item loss from area effect attacks.
I honestly think the Game Designers grew tired of hearing from angry players who lost everything to Fireballs, and changed the rules to make folk happier. Just an opinion.

Yes, a Helm of Brilliance was a ticking time bomb, in the old days. You had to fail your save, then it had to fail it's save (as a double strength Ring of Fire Resistence) and then it went off.
If it went off (get this, folks) EVERY GEM IN THE HELM DETONATED SIMULTANEOUSLY.
That is, 40 light spells went off, 30 fireballs (each 6d6) went off, 20 walls of fire went off, and 10 prismatic sprays went off, with your character at Ground Zero (Ground Zero includes Mushroom Cloud and Glowing Crater at no extra cost.)

Heh. Even in 3rd edition, I think your items would be worse for wear after that! (think 30 fireball saves, plus 20 wall of fire saves, plus death, disintegration, petrification, insanity, being teleported to another plane, and more damage than even a dragon could shake a stick at.)

 

[Plane Sailing]

Yes, a Helm of Brilliance was a ticking time bomb, in the old days. You had to fail your save, then it had to fail it's save (as a double strength Ring of Fire Resistence) and then it went off.
If it went off (get this, folks) EVERY GEM IN THE HELM DETONATED SIMULTANEOUSLY.
That is, 40 light spells went off, 30 fireballs (each 6d6) went off, 20 walls of fire went off, and 10 prismatic sprays went off, with your character at Ground Zero (Ground Zero includes Mushroom Cloud and Glowing Crater at no extra cost.)

Yep, that happened to a PC when I was DMing "The Shrine of the Kuo Toa". He got zapped by a mighty lightning bolt, the helm needed a 1 to save and it failed. There wasn't much left of him and his near neighbours by the time we had stopped rolling dice...

House Rule Alert
- personally I like item destruction in games, and I think the standard 3e/3.5e rules lack verisimilitude. The house rule which we have (which mitigates to an extent the problem you note above) is that items have to make massive damage saves just like individuals. The base threshold is the same (50) but I do half the threshold for vulnerable materials (e.g. paper against fire, glass against sonic, possibly cloth against acid etc.)

One of the things this does is make dragon breath particularly fearsome, as it is one of the few ways of getting such high damage (or maximised fireballs). This breaths some truth into the MM text for the red dragon which says "it rarely uses its breath weapon on foes because it doesn't want to destroy their treasure" or some such nonsense. In 3e it has less than a 5% chance of destroying a single item per person, most likely a useless shield or helmet or something!

Cheers

 

[Davek]

Just recently I threw an sorceror and assassin cohorts against my players. The sorceror had improved invisibility and a necklace of fireballs. One of the players had the ability to cast fireball.

After a few rounds of the assassins beating on the party, the party finally managed to locate on of the assassins, and were closing in on him. He fell, and the invisible sorceror cast invisiblity on the unconcious assassin and was preparing to drag him to safety. The party sorceror cast guessed what was happening and cast fireball in the general area, but placed so the rest of the party would be fine.

The invisible sorceror was within the blast radius, but just barely, and he was actually quite close to the rest of the party. He failed his save, and then his necklace of fireballs failed as well. 14d6 later and two party members were down unconcious, and the other was in single digits. All the gold coins carried by the enemy were fused into a large lump.

 

[dagger]

We did (1st AD&D) item saves for character like you do it, but we did it only when a natural 1 was rolled.

We learned a lot about saving items. For example, people would put a portable hole in leather covering under their armor, thus there would be 2 saves (save for the armor, if that fails, save for the leather) before the portable hold had to save and so increasing the chances of it saving.

Creative things like that.

I remember a time when my 15 level fighter rolled a natural 1 and had to make saves. At this point every one in the party was near the fighter. The first think he rolled for was the Necklace of Missiles, which failed. And at this point, all hell broke loose (It was the most powerful necklace on the chart and had never been used). I was also carrying 10 vials of Greek Fire in a backpack, and yes the back pack failed. The save for glass against magical fire was not that good, if I recall correctly.

Needless to say, that character really hated fire of any type after that

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

There was a spell released, I believe in Dragon Magazine, called Iron Sack (or Iron Backpack, one of the two.)
This 3rd level spell gave your backpack the item save of Hard Metal. Very useful for the poor wizard who had to carry around his unreplaceable spellbooks.

Another trick was to put everything in your Bag of Holding, then put your Bag of Holding under your armor. If you weren't wearing Armor or were wearing Leather Armor, you gave the Bag to the fighter to wear (making sure he wasn't evil first!)
If the armor was enchanted, it's plus added to the saving throw, and excluding a Disintegration attack, was relatively invulnerable to the chain reaction item destruction effect (I do stress the relative.)

If you look at Disintegration, the (formerly, still is?) 6th level wizard spell, you will see that, in 2nd edition, it was INCREDIBLY destructive.
Here were the saves against disintegration:

Bone or Ivory: 20
Ceramic: 19
Cloth: 20
Crystal or Vial: 20
Glass: 20
Leather or Book: 20
Liquid: 20
Metal, hard: 17
Metal, soft or Jewelry: 19
Mirror: 20
Parchment or Paper: 20
Stone, small or Gem: 18
Wood or Rope, thin: 20
Wood or Rope, thick: 19

(Well, ok, these are the 1st edition saves, but the 2nd edition saves were similar)

Therefore, if your character failed the save against the spell, he ceased to exist (no dust, no nothing, and no resurrection) and if Wished back to life, had no items anymore.
Even + 5 Plate Armor, would need a 12 to save against disintegration!

Note that beholders have a disintegration beam in their eyestalks, and can use this beam once per round. It counts as per the Disintegrate spell, along with the awful item saves.
And people wonder why we were all terrified of the Eye Tyrants, or just why a beholder could get away with demanding half of a high level party's treasure in return for not attacking them!

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

On the subject of beholders, to digress a moment, did you know there was a spell, from FOR 7 The Seven Sisters, that allowed an archmage (it was a 9th level spell) to become a beholder while his or her body was placed in stasis, and he or she gained ALL the powers of the beholder while that form persisted?
This spell was known as Tyranteyes. A bit dangerous, for if killed while in this form a Contingency or Chain Contingency was required to return the soul of the archmage to the Stasised body - no Contingency, and the archmage was forever dead.
Still, a neat spell (and just think, magic resistance - or spell resistance 3E, was calculated against an archmage, not a lowly beholder!)

Or, as I liked to say back then, be nice to the high level mage or lady mage. And leave that lich alone!

 

[Altalazar]

To get back to the topic of the thread - I wonder how often PCs getting naked happens in LARPs...

 

[dagger]

Yea we used to really FEAR beholders just for that reason. Really mean ones (err the DM) would get rid of stuff that the party needed while fighting it.

Beholder "Damn that paladin with that big holy sword is chopping me up" zap bye bye holy sword

Next Round: zap, bye bye Staff of Power

etc....