If it's inspired by Earthdawn, it must be good
What were you thinking, if you're willing to share?
I can't quote the specifics of the Earthdawn item rules at the moment, but for those not familiar with them, they are similar to 4E artifacts (albiet minor ones) or 3E leveled/legacy items, where the player has to invest some personal resource in order to unlock the item's properties. In Earthdawn this involves a series of rituals (among other things).
Now, there is a lot of room to go off here and design a similar, elaborate system of ritual item unlocks, which would be a fun topic for the house rules forum. Hopefully RedBrick will someday show us their GSL-based take on Earthdawn item bonding. A nice design goal would be completely divorcing market price of item properties and powers from enhancement bonuses.
For simply accomodating inherent item bonues, this is probably overkill. So rather than derail this topic, here is just one simple approach to maintain most of the existing RAW pricing structure with the DMG2 inherent bonuses (this is off the top of my head and untested,
YMMV!!1!11)...
Color Text:
Some magic talismans gain power from both the blood and sweat of their powerful users as well as the initial enchantment of their creation. An adventurer's enchanted gear will natually increase in power as they grow in stature. However, if such an adventurer aquires and uses enchantments of less power than themselves, the inferior nature of the talisman will interfere with the ower's own abilities. Such lesser talismans must be enchanted to a higher standard to attune them to the owner's greater power.
House Rules (assumes inherent enhancement bonuses):
- When your character's inherent bonuses increase from gaining a level, any of your magic items that provide an enhancement bonus equal to your previous inherent bonus gain a number of levels corresponding to your new inherent bonus, according to the level progression of each item. As long as your magic item's bonuses stay in synch with your own inherent bonuses, they automatically upgrade along with your character at no cost.
- However, when using both inherent enhancement bonuses and magic items with enhancement bonuses, use the item bonus if it is less than your inherent bonus. Items with a smaller enhancement bonus can be upgraded using the standard item enchantment rules.
As noted, the Character Builder still recognizes item bonuses in addition to the inherent ones, it simply gives you the better of the two. This handles all cases except where the inherent bonus is larger than item bonus. In this case, you will have to override the CB results and use the actual item bonus instead of the inherent one. If a PC wishes to use their inherent bonus with the properties and powers of a magic item with a lower bonus, they need to use the existing enchanting rules to upgrade that item as needed.
As an example, a 15th-level PC sells
deathcut armor found in a dungeon at 5th-level and worn ever since. This item is now
+3 deathcut armor (Level 15) with a base value of 25k GP (@20% = 5K GP). At 20th-level, this same character is awarded a
+3 jagged weapon (Level 12) as a quest prize; wielding this weapon will reduce the PC's enhancement bonus by 1 unless it is upgraded to +4 (Level 17). The upgraded
jagged weapon will automatically increase to +5 (Level 22) when the PC reaches Level 25.
While this scheme doesn't have much flavor (as say, ritual foci binding, item history insights, etc.), it does the least damage to the RAW and Character Builder. It has the advantage of not changing any item GP values, and such item trading as desired can procede normally under the usual rules.
The next step would be treating the case of item bonus > character bonus with special rules. Like requiring a special bonding ritual with a cost based on the item's level, for example.
