Which magic item problem? If you're talking about the "big six"... get rid of some of those items. Net effect on your game: pre-splat monster CRs are actually useful. If you're talking about "christmas tree characters," well sorry but that's always been a fact of life in standard D&D. You can easily reduce how much money you give your characters, as long as you understand that you'll have to eyeball monster effectiveness vs your party (like we all did before 3e) rather than just relying on CR - and the DMG talks about this (expected wealth per encounter, etc.) so it's not some unknown "under the hood" side effect. If you're talking about the ease of creating & buying magic items, remove those aspects from your game. The mechanical balance isn't going to radically change because of it.AllisterH said:Well, take the Magic Item problem.
If you REALLY want to fix that, you have to go to the underlying problem, namely the magic system itself and fix how that works.
The magic system isn't the problem. And in fact, getting rid of some of the big six items actually makes a bunch of defensive / buff spells useful again (since they currently do not stack with enhancement, deflection, etc. bonuses).