Disenchanting

[kclark]

Or instead of finding magic weapons, find magic gems that will bestow certain properties to weapons, and then treat the gems like you would normal magic items.

I was going to add these to my game right before MIC came out.
The idea works really well in 4th edition. Basically the gem or ancient dwarven rune, etc.. is a ritual scroll to enchant an item to a specified bonus and ability.
You can even have the process of attuning the gem (5 minutes per the ritual scroll rules) into an already magic weapon results in the excretion of residuum worth 1/5th the value of the prior enchantment. Basically it combines the disenchant of your old item with the reenchant.
If you really want to be a penny counter DM, subtract the cost of doing the enchant and disenchant rituals as scrolls from the residuum that you get from the process.

 

[Palladion]

Enchant Magic Item (PH 304), "You can also use this ritual to resize magic armor..."

If you take this line of the ritual one step further, allow the ritual to change armor or weapon type (as long as the new type is allowed by the enchantment). Therefore, you could take +2 black iron scale armor and make it into +2 black iron plate armor, but not into +2 black iron leather armor. If you want to, enforce a small component cost for this change (instead of a free transformation as per the ritual).

 

[FadedC]

Enchant Magic Item (PH 304), "You can also use this ritual to resize magic armor..."

If you take this line of the ritual one step further, allow the ritual to change armor or weapon type (as long as the new type is allowed by the enchantment). Therefore, you could take +2 black iron scale armor and make it into +2 black iron plate armor, but not into +2 black iron leather armor. If you want to, enforce a small component cost for this change (instead of a free transformation as per the ritual).

Now that is a quite reasonable idea. Personally I might add a significant cost but make it far cheaper then buying/ehcnating the new things from scratch. But that's just me.

In an unrelated side note, the font color you use is really painful to read against a black background.

 

[IceFractal]

Magic items lost all of their wonder.

The "wonder" of magic items comes from how interesting they are, not whether you're forced to use them or not.

If you just say "It's a +2 longsword", then that's not going to be wondrous, no matter what the incentive to keep it is. I mean, there's an incentive to keep flasks of oil around, but people don't consider them wondrous.

If the items you give out are things that are interesting and useful to the players, they'll keep them - especially as there's a lot less "necessary" items than in 3E. If an item isn't something that the players want to keep, what do you gain by forcing them to do so?

 

[Falling Icicle]

If the items you give out are things that are interesting and useful to the players, they'll keep them - especially as there's a lot less "necessary" items than in 3E. If an item isn't something that the players want to keep, what do you gain by forcing them to do so?

Well said. 4e seems to prefer the stick to the carrot.