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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7188992" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, I can happily agree with your judgment of that as well.To be honest, for me the perfect system would be somewhere between the two.&nbsp; Third editions transparency combined with its use of XP costs as a balancing feature was in many was quite inspired.&nbsp; But turning gold into a veritable secondary chargen point buy system, and reducing magic down to a &quot;vending machine&quot; model made it overly commoditized, far too easily broken (see 'wand of cure light wounds') and demystified.That being said, I've played around with different mechanics for making magic &quot;inaccessible, strange, ancient, rare, lost, eclectic&quot;, mysterious and numinous, and the big problem with them is that though I think they work pretty well, they shift to much mechanical burden on to the GM.&nbsp;&nbsp; It only really works to make magic mysterious and numinous if you have a system that does the book keeping for you.&nbsp; I think ultimately, table top roleplaying games will morph into a quasi-electronic system that runs off table apps and the like.&nbsp; I can imagine spells being cast by pressing barcodes up to phones or tablets to automatically do the bookkeeping, and DMs able to send messages from their app to all players like 'new round', 'new hour', 'new day', 'short rest', 'long rest', etc. to allow automatically updating resources, effect durations, and what not.&nbsp;&nbsp; At that point, you could have players owning items that they don't fully understand yet.&nbsp;&nbsp; But as it is, eclectic items with quirks and unidentified powers are really burdensome in play.As for magic item creation, I'd like to see a model move to research/recipe + XP cost, plus perhaps power ingredients, sacrifices, rituals and so forth to help defray XP costs.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7188992, member: 4937"] Well, I can happily agree with your judgment of that as well. To be honest, for me the perfect system would be somewhere between the two. Third editions transparency combined with its use of XP costs as a balancing feature was in many was quite inspired. But turning gold into a veritable secondary chargen point buy system, and reducing magic down to a "vending machine" model made it overly commoditized, far too easily broken (see 'wand of cure light wounds') and demystified. That being said, I've played around with different mechanics for making magic "inaccessible, strange, ancient, rare, lost, eclectic", mysterious and numinous, and the big problem with them is that though I think they work pretty well, they shift to much mechanical burden on to the GM. It only really works to make magic mysterious and numinous if you have a system that does the book keeping for you. I think ultimately, table top roleplaying games will morph into a quasi-electronic system that runs off table apps and the like. I can imagine spells being cast by pressing barcodes up to phones or tablets to automatically do the bookkeeping, and DMs able to send messages from their app to all players like 'new round', 'new hour', 'new day', 'short rest', 'long rest', etc. to allow automatically updating resources, effect durations, and what not. At that point, you could have players owning items that they don't fully understand yet. But as it is, eclectic items with quirks and unidentified powers are really burdensome in play. As for magic item creation, I'd like to see a model move to research/recipe + XP cost, plus perhaps power ingredients, sacrifices, rituals and so forth to help defray XP costs. [/QUOTE]

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