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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 8177255" data-attributes="member: 93670">I think that a lot of those read closer to the kind of "improvised to cater to specific complaints" thing [USER=6855114]@Helldritch[/USER] mentioned back in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/does-the-artificer-suck.677667/post-8176773" target="_blank">#288</a> than looking at the forest sized problem & trying to address it as a whole rather than fixing the parasite  problem with one specific tree in it.  When "people complain that magic items are not assumed in the base assumption of progress" it's just not reasonable to ignore how that was done in prior editions. back in 2e it meant things like [spoiler="this"][ATTACH=full]131625[/ATTACH][/spoiler]That kind of thing from ad&d2e is trivially easy to add & doesn't require much to be assumed in character progression so probably not a big factor in what people are looking for.  In some ways 4e even took things further than 3.5 with baking magic items into character progression but 4e wasn't my strong suit so I'll leave it there for 4e.  In 3.5 players were pretty much expected to have +N items for  everyone's primary attack related attribute & in some cases +N magic weapon/armor by the time that players were at or around certain levels.    If players did not have those things they needed to get extremely lucky rolls just to hit/bypass saves or deal enough damage fast enough to kill things before succumbing to attrition themselves.At the time there wasn't much debate about 3.5 being very bad about getting that information to the GM by pretty much leaving it unsaid.  Perhaps you could call that omission a strength in the same bin where criticism of 5e omitting x & y is often met with people calling it a strength that allows the gm to decide for their table as we've seen repeatedly throughout this thread.  An important difference with that  cross edition strength by omission is that  "wow my players are struggling, I should give them magic stuff" is an easier pill for players to swallow when they find cool toys than 5e's "wow I just broke the game's math by giving my players magic stuff" when the players find their cool toys broken or taken away. Taking away toys without frustrations is another strength of having magic gear baked into the assumptions of advancement as well since the churn caused by getting better gear allowed avenues for a player to swap out an item the gm regrets for one they need or to keep it but find themselves behind the curve elsewhere to help compensate.In the light of how it was done in 3.5 & 4e monsters themselves would need to have ac/saves/hit points/hitrates/etc calculated based on a certain assumptions from the outset & a simple table can't really do that.  To some degree they could have baked it all into monsters with something like pathfinder's  slow/medium/fast advancement<a href="https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/character-advancement/" target="_blank">https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/character-advancement</a> where you might see a given ac/tohit/etc as x+LineQ or something, but I suspect even that would fall into the same quagmire as trying to do it with a table as a <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/brass-dragon-wyrmling" target="_blank">brass dragon wyrmling</a> <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/bugbear" target="_blank">bugbear</a> & <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/evil-mage" target="_blank">evil mage</a>  as a <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/quickling" target="_blank">quickling</a> so it would likely be fantastically complicated to apply.</blockquote>

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