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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5294785" data-attributes="member: 996">If you're making changes that make your game no fun, you really kinda suck as a DM, and you probably shouldn't be 'empowered' or 'burdened' any further.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  The idea of changing a game (using variants as a DM) is to make it more fun - maintaining game balance actually helps with that, even if it might disapoint a certain sort of player, some of the time.   OTOH, you have a player who is willing to throw fits to get his way, and is only happy with broken crap, you're probably well rid of him.We haven't seen any of 'em yet, so we can't say.  What I heard in the article at least suggested that part of the point was to be able to make up items without worrying so much about balance - that 'rarity' becomes the balancing factor.  Again, this is something that was done quite a bit in prior eds - and never worked that well.I have only heard the claim that they are 'compatible.'  They litterally /can't/ be balanced to the extent existing classes are.  They almost certainly /will/ balance at some intersection of encounter difficulty, number of encounters per day, and information availability.  It's up to the DM to find that balancing point and stick to it.That's not DM-empowering, that's just player-limiting.  And, players don't like being limitted - and they know the DM can give them that 'special permission,' so they'll try to get it.  If items are balanced, and players can make/buy what they want, the player is 'empowered' to customize his character a bit, and the DM doesn't have to worry.  But, items have to be balanced.  If items /aren't/ balanced, but the players can't easily obtain them, then you can bet they'll try really hard to obtain them.  "What 'reagent' do I need to make a Phylactery of Brokeness?  How about a +6 Gamebreaker weapon?  Have I heard legends of such an item?  blah, blah, blah..."  Of course, you can use all that as adventure seeds - if you really need adventure seeds - but, if you do, the PCs going to be expecting the item at the end.  Again, this is not some brilliant new idea.  Rare and uncommon items work /exactly/ the way most magic items worked in AD&D (both eds).  In those day, magic items /routinely/ defined characters who obtained them, overshadowed PC abilities, and wrecked campaigns.  A good DM could keep that genie in the bottle, but it wasn't exactly a walk in the park.  Unlike with the Essentials martial classes (which, at least, face less overwhelmingly potent dailies in the hands of their fellows this time around), I see no reason to expect it to go any better than it did back then.Worst case: we start seeing 'common,' 'uncommon,' and 'rare,' magic items in booster packs....The new rarity system assumes one rare item per tier, and about half your items being uncommon - players can't make or buy them, but 15th level characters also get to /pick/ a 14th, 15th & 16th level item.  If you allowed only common items, they're going to be decidedly sub-par.  So either you're going to have to let them pick their uncommons and rares, or you're going to have to do it for them, or you're going to have to dial down your game a bit.Then, there's all those characters already in play.  They have a lot of uncommon items.  They're not balanced out according to the new rules.  You're going to have to take items away from them or something.I can't read the developers' minds and say with certainty what they're designing classes to do or be.  All I can do is look at what we've seen in previews.  What we've seen is a lot of stuff that feels very much like it did in prior versions of the game.</blockquote>

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