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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 3392799" data-attributes="member: 94">D&D is definitely balanced to include, not just "correct value of gear," but "correct gear."In my opinion, there's just no way to balance a helm of comprehend languages, a folding boat, and Murlynd's Spoon against the Big Six-- no matter how much you reduce their value. There are certain kinds of items/abilities for which you could reduce their cost to nearly nothing, lump them all together in the aggregate into a Heward's Handy Haversack, and they still won't be balanced against a +5 sword.Let me amend that somewhat. There's no way the the upcoming Compendium is going to tackle that balance issue. That's a big problem inherent to the d20 System. "Stuff" that gives you big, chunky, discreet d20 bonuses is infinitely more valuable just by nature of the System. Even within the statistical bonus items there's a pecking order: attack and damage; AC; saving throws; skill bonuses.My supposition is that the System isn't granular enough to handle this kind of rebalancing. Not only would you have to reduce the monetary costs of these items to near nothing, you'd have to reduce their opportunity costs as well in order to fit them into the Encounter framework.It doesn't matter if you can get 10 or 20 "lesser" items to add up to one of the Big Six-- you won't have enough time within round or even the Encounter to use them.EDIT: To put it another way, the "cost" of the Big Six is measured on a scale inside the Combat Round and the Encounter. Certain other kinds of magic items can't be measured on that scale, because they are non-combat or extremely situational. It's apples and oranges and they simply can't be balanced against each other. You can't even measure Murlynd's Spoon against a magic sword, let alone balance them.Rebalancing D&D, from the top down, against the Combat Round and the Encounter seems to be one of the big problems they are tackling right now.</blockquote>

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