Cloaks are a Neck Item?

[D.Shaffer]

It seems to me that if you're willing to accept the idea of 'slotted' magical items to begin with, it's a tad silly that you can rationalise CERTAIN slot combinations, but not others. Why is it that not having a seperate cloak and amulet (Which both are generally fastened around the neck area) slot is silly, but not having...oh, magical socks and magical shoe slots isn't? Why can you only wear two rings, and not a full set of 10 on the fingers, 10 on the toes, and various magical ring based body piercings?

What pressing need does a seperate cloak and neck slot really give you in the game except for one more spot to toss on a magic shiny? From what I can tell, the entire basis of your argument is 'It's silly because it's not the same as 3rd.'

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

After reading the whole thread I'm still not sure what the problem is.

The OP says it's an 'absurd and ridiculous' rule. At no point does he say why.

Oh, come on. Everybody knows pig cloak and elephant amulet DNA body slots just won't splice.

 

[TwoSix]

Though, I suspect that this decision, like many others in 4e, has more to do with saving space (and thus, money) than actual design preferences. Remember, the magic items are going to be in the PHB now, so they want to cut down on the number of pages and are apparantly willing to make alot of sacrifices in the game to do that. Druids, Barbarians, Monks, Sorcerers, Gnomes, Half-Orcs, and many of the magic items (and who knows what else) are all getting the axe to save paper. At least, that's what I suspect. It saddens me that they would whittle the game down so much just to save a few cents per book. I think I'm going to start calling 4e "D&D Lite."

Obviously, the rationalization of trying to remove the Christmas Tree effect, which has been a major complaint about 3e on every gaming message board I've read since shortly after 3e's inception, was merely a cunning facade. All to save some trees. Curse those eco-terrorists!

 

[Wolv0rine]

Eh. personally I find the entire approach of 'body slots' to be not to my taste. It's not that hard to include a few paragraphs that outline what items have what limits on them ("you cannot gain the benefit of wearing more than 1 magic ring per hand" -- damn that took a whole lot of space, there. Even if you did it with a multiple of items/item types, it's not that much work.
But my REAL problem with this whole thing is the apparent set-in-stone nature of magic items. Items of this type do this, items of that type do that. I shouldn't know what Character X's magic cloak does just because it's a frigging cloak. Hell, maybe the thing boots his intelligence when he wears it because of the special runes inlaid along it's seams, and when he takes it off it functions as a magic carpet. But no, it's kick to Fort and does something snazzy because it's a cloak, duh. Hate it, hate it. Goes very much hand-in-hand with my dislike of body slots. Items that go in Body slot X do Y, period. They might do a little z here and there, but by and large they all do Y, because it's the function of that body slot. *shakes head*

And yeah, I think you should be able to wear, and benefit from, a magic cloak and a magic necklace/amulet. Just because they both make contact with your neck does not logically imply that they should negate each other.

 

[glass]

3. 4e is a gamist based games and it balances in the game

How, in the specific context of magic item slots, is 4e any more gamist than 3e?


glass.

 

[D.Shaffer]

It's easy enough to change. All the 'Body Slots' really do in DnD is marry some siloed magic ability types with fluff 'generic' descriptions. If you dont want that but want to keep the silos, it's no longer a Neck slot and a Foot slot, etc. It's Slot A and Slot B, or a Resistance Slot and a Movement slot, and you describe them how you want. Make em both rings if you want, and really confuse people.

 

[med stud]

Surely you're familiar with previous editions of D&D and how you were able to wear (oh, I'm sorry, I mean "use") both a cloak and an amulet the same time.

As far as other games, pretty much any game based on D&D (DDO, NWN, etc), as well as World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Everquest, there's several right there, and that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure you can find many others if you care to look.

Do you have any examples that aren't video games? D&D literature excepted.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

It's easy enough to change. All the 'Body Slots' really do in DnD is marry some siloed magic ability types with fluff 'generic' descriptions. If you dont want that but want to keep the silos, it's no longer a Neck slot and a Foot slot, etc. It's Slot A and Slot B, or a Resistance Slot and a Movement slot, and you describe them how you want. Make em both rings if you want, and really confuse people.

How about this:

You have a bag for carrying magic pies. You can carry no more than three meat pies and six fruit pies in your bag. You may not carry more than one of the same flavour of pie. While you carry your bag of pies, the pies give you special abilities (fruit) and improve your attacks and defenses (meat). You gain no special benefit from eating or throwing the pies, only carrying them.

It basically adds up to the same thing. The issue that the OP has is completely unrelated to how the mechanics work, and completely bound up in the fluff text associated with the mechanics. This means that it's easy to fix if you have some sort of attachment to accessorizing your cloak with an amulet, so that you will look simply fabulous while slaying goblins.

 

[Khur]

Don't think of the limit as "I cannot wear both an amulet and a cloak", but more as "I cannot benefit from the magical bonus of two magic items of the same nature"

There was someone (a designer I think ?) who wrote that you could remove the item slots by replacing their location with their function.

This, along with others who pointed out that this is a story issue more than a mechanical one.

You can wear a cloak and an amulet, you just can't get the same benefit from both. One of them is likely to be a "fluff description" over what really amounts to a wondrous item, and the other is going to be giving you the defense bonuses the neck slot item is supposed to give. As long as the two don't conflict, it doesn't matter how you describe it.

If it helps you to think of function, rather than slot, it's very easy to "house rule" that a character benefits from one item that increases AC, one item that increases defenses, one item that increases attack bonus/damage roll (per attack), and two items that function like rings.

The conceptual space provided by actual body slots just aids design, helping designers keep certain effects consistently categorized. It'll also help your house rule, because it'd be awful hard to categorize a hodge podge of effects on the back end without some sort of thought being given to it on the front end.

Take Jarlaxle, who wears a hat that functions as a bag of holding. If Jarlaxle were a PC in my campaign, I as DM certainly wouldn't say that his "hat of holding" actually took up his head slot. That hat isn't functioning like a normal head slot item. It's functioning as a bag of holding—like a wondrous item with another description.

And that's one cool Rouse thing about D&D. You can modify the roleplaying aspect of anything until your heart's content, without unduly affecting the structure of the rules. That doesn't require house ruling, as in tinkering with actual rules, so much as using the imagination to satisfy one's sense of narrative structure and fun.

 

[small pumpkin man]

[The impotant part is] accessorizing your cloak with an amulet, so that you will look simply fabulous while slaying goblins.

I agree.