Andy Collins: "Most Magic Items in D&D Are Awful"

[Kobold Avenger]

The whole Big 6 goes back to me wanting to find things that were alternatives to stat-boosting items in a previous thread.

We tried to come up with ideas such as incantations with permanent effects, grafts, permanent tattoos, alchemical mixtures, oaths/blessings, letting permanency work on the stat boosting spells, and simply changing the way that characters in general raise their ability scores.

I have no problem with the bonuses these items give, it just seems like the system makes them too important and that their needs to be more creative options involved with the bonuses these items give.

 

[Deekin]

If I had magic shops in my campaign, my players would never bother with dungeons again.
"He's got a vicious, vorpal what for sale? We gotta loot this place."

But what if he keeps the best items for himself?

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

This is certainly one of the nastier threads I've seen on ENWorld in a while. If I wanted to enjoy this level of Schadenfreude I would've lurked the World of Warcraft forums.

Oh, don't worry. We'll get around to talking about how (poster 1)'s class was nerfed, and how (insert other class name) is overpowered and needs nerfing bad and makes playing the game badwrongfun soon enough.

Brad

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

OOOooooh, I gots me a new ENWorld Chewtoy.

Wonder how long this will last.

The story was fine. Lots of his ideas are good. He has no clear sense of balance. Does that make him crappy?

Yes.

Being able to fly is cool.
Leaping off a cliff in your Batman outfit like you're Wiley Coyote makes you a moron.

Being able to come up with ideas is cool.
Not being able to balance that idea, and killing everyone because of an oversight a 9 year with the incredible power of LITERACY might possess as mutant ability would be able to avoid makes him a crappy GM.

It makes him crappy at balancing, yes. Part of the problem is he has the same ideas many people here have.

Not everyone here is a good GM in the eyes of everyone here.

"Players dont need all this magic stuff, its ridiculous. No magic shops, thats ridiculous" and then the hard encounter shows up, half or more of the party dies, he's frantically fudging rolls,

Then he's an idiot for not reading the monster before he dropped it in because the illustration looked cool. If it states that something is needed to bypass DR, then you either give them the ability to do damage over the DR and seriously injure it, or you make sure they have a way to harm it.

its awful. Easily fixable by dropping the attitude and including magic items like the rules expect you to, whether you flavor it as "Magic shops" or just asking what they want, and magically its in the treasure pile instead of 20,000gp of "Art objects".

Say what?

So, to be a good GM, we have to ask you what you want and give it to you?

Talk about entitlement.

Did you even ask him about the demon? How you could have beaten it? Did he make a mistake, or did you?

Oh, no, it's all the fault of the evil Magic Items of Mass Destruction!

The rules expect a certain amount of magic items, either made the party or looted from the cold dead claws of fearsome wee beasties. Potions and MAYBE wands/rods/staves (IE: consumables) are about the only thing that MIGHT be purchasable.

Or you might have to find them in the temples of evil Gods after you've put all the worshippers to the sword.

Ask what you want and give it you?

No. There's the door.

If we had to beat up all bad GM's, when they could come to this very thread and read you guys advising them to just KEEP DOING WHAT THEY ARE DOING, I dont see the leg to stand on.

How about all the advice about making sure that an encounter possesses an opportunity of success?

You're GM obviously didn't understand ensuring the encounter was possibly survivable.

Or you're not telling the whole story.

If you plan to give people a folding boat and a helm of underwater action, while in a desert, and not allow them to sell it, and not give them magic weapons, first, I'm sorry, like the DM we're discussing, you're bad, and second, why? Does it give you a perverse thrill

Wait? I did what?

No I didn't. The only time they found a folding boat and a helm of underwater action was exploring the ruins of a river-side city that had since been swallowed by the desert, and...

You know what, maybe I should have asked the poor put upon players what they wanted, instead of putting logical treasure in a logical place.

I'm a GM with a group that has been playing nearly 5 years. Sometimes magic items are scarce, and every combat is the last resort, other times magic items are plentiful and it's g leeful kill & loot time.

I don't know where you got the idea that I did the idea in the above, but I'll be glad to return the favor:

If you would have used the helm of underwater action to check what was in the well, you would have found the bodies of foriegn messengers the king put to death by kicking them into the well, and you would have found the magical weapons.

Instead, you got killed by engaging a demon who was supposed to be scenery, and strutting his stuff. You should have cut and run, but instead, you just had to toss your cojones on the t able and try to beat every monster, going on the typical battle call of poor players: "EVERYTHING ENCOUNTERED SHOULD BE DEFEATABLE!" and got your butt handed to you.

Next time: RUN!

Someone's sig is something like, "I have a place to go, advance slowly, get no recognition for my efforts, and get very little rewards for my efforts, and its called work" and thats oh so true.

If that's gaming for you, find a new hobby. D&D is a hobby, not a lifestyle, and sure as hell not a job.

 

[hong]

I would have just liked a little more mention of rule 0 and where the game can head from its default guidelines. That's all.

Well, you know, maybe the writer didn't think the reader was too stupid to conduct a game without needing the hand-holding of an explicit mention of rule 0. Why do you need a rulebook to tell you that you can change things to suit yourself? Are you 12 years old, insisting on doing everything by the book?

 

[jasin]

In other words, I'm drawing on things like Beowulf, and the Illiad, and medieval epics and all sorts of other things, and I expect the players to get into that. I'm not drawing on Diablo, and if you want to play Diablo, I suggest we have a LAN party and not bother with pen, paper, and imagination.

But neither are you drawing on Vance or Leiber, where magic is for sale for the right people with the right amounts of money.

Not that it's wrong to prefer Beowulf to Leiber, obviously, but neither is the opposite preference, and a preference for plentiful magic and/or magic for sale isn't necessarily a sign of lack of imagination or a perference for computer games over literature. And neither is a preference for literature over computer games (at least as applied to a game where people pretend to be elves) a sign of a superior intellect.

To use a somewhat imperfect example, consider the campaign laid out in the popular web comic - 'The Order of the Stick'.

The example is indeed imperfect, since I don't think that OotS is ultimately the same form of entertainment (or art, if we can be so presumptuous) as a RPG campaign: OotS is about the funny, RPGs are about vicarious experience. The fact that Rich has lately been neglecting the funny in favour of elements like plot, which are more at home in a RPG, has only detracted from my enjoyment of the comic.

But I got your point, so...

Is it your contention that all that interaction with NPC's are things were 'nothing is happening'

Of course not. By "nothing exciting is happening" I didn't mean "combat is not happening", I meant "nothing exciting is happening". And I don't think playing out in detail the search for the dealer willing to buy a +1 sword for the fifth time in the campaign sounds very exciting. I suppose it could be, if set up well, but then, that's true of most anything. As a default, I'd prefer to play out the adventure where I get the +1 sword in detail, and only gloss over the selling, on the assumption that in a big city (the kind where you can sell expensive magic items under the DMG guidelines) some wizard or adventurer or itinerant merchant will have a need for it and give me the appropriate amount of money.

 

[howandwhy99]

But what if he keeps the best items for himself?

So at low levels we got a guy selling about 100K worth of magic items.
At high levels it's probably closer to 1M.

Is El Minister the guy who sells items? I guess I don't have so much of a problem with that.

The difficulty comes in with pricing based on scarcity and need. Bartering is probably far more likely and genre appropriate.

Of course, there's the NPCs act like PCs question: Why doesn't he just blow you away and take your stuff?

 

[Seeten]

As far as I can tell, you've got a chip on your shoulder; you are going to rant about this regardless of what anyone says to you, and you aren't going to actually listen to a darn thing anyone says to you. On top of that you are going to completely misrepresent anything anyone says to you, and you are going to be content sit here and knock down strawmen of your own creation while insulting anyone else around. So I for one am done. Go find some new DM's. Get some new experiences. Run your own games. Come back later.

A chip on my shoulder? Probably a boulder.

Just like you, and your fellow posters will rant about trying to give as little as possible to the players.

I do run my own game, its called, "Mutants and Masterminds" and I bet if I did run D&D, it'd be very well balanced. Though it'd have purchaseable magic, so people could spend the gold they find, and it'd be fun to play, both for me and the players alike. I think of D&D as a collaborative effort, not "DM tell me a story". Maybe thats just me.

I'll leave the rest of your personal insults on the table, where they lie.

 

[Celebrim]

If I had magic shops in my campaign, my players would never bother with dungeons again.
"He's got a vicious, vorpal what for sale? We gotta loot this place."

Also QFT.

 

[MerricB]

My work-around for buying magic items is that I require the PCs to commission them - so they have to wait 1 day per 1000 gp to have them made. Assuming they can find someone to make the item in question.

Cheers!