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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 1832163" data-attributes="member: 2067">This is why artifacts exist, IMHO. If the reason you're going down into the dungeon is for magical trinkets alone, you can find things more powerful than almost anyone alive today could concievably make in certain areas, but it seems a bit nonsensical to have every ruin loaded with magical items, only for them to dissappear when you get back to town. Take a gold rush as an analogue -- when a town springs up near a gold mine, they start getting clientelle with gold teeth, people with gold trinkets, lots of folks with gold coin. When a town springs up near a D&D ruin, they start getting people with magic weapons, magic items, magic rings, and other stuff found in there. Normal magic items don't need that kind of history, and for my games, it's kind of a waste of time to put it in there, because my PC's aren't interested in it and unless it's somehow integral to the plot, they won't be. The history is: "A wizard did it," and that's pretty much all that's relevant to them. That's not to say that they don't have *any* history. But every sword tells a tale if you know how to look at it right, and magic swords are no different. The difference between a Rokugani magic katana and a Barbarian Empire's magic bastard sword is huge. But stat-wise, they're identical, and I think that this is a fantastic advantage. Not every +1 blade was used in an epic battle of bumblescum. That's what the +5 blades are for, that's what the artifacts are for. THOSE get famous. A magic dagger exists anywhere there are wizards to craft it, and going by the standard D&D rules, there are wizards to craft it in pretty much any decently-sized town. True, Podunk won't have it, but Villageville might, and certainly Town City will.  You can definately go for a different feel if you like, but by the book, that's how things are, and there's nothing wrong with things being that way. You don't loose anything. It's just that you shift the focus. I don't want to have my PC's worry about analyzing every shiney piece of +1 trinket they come accross. But I want them to definately react more cautiously when coming accross a Deck of Many Things, for instance. But while that +1 trinket was probably made by some wizard under the employ of a king in a long-ago world that is barely relevant today, that Deck of Many Things was known to be in the possession of the King of the World, who mysteriously disappeared one night... I think the game looses a lot more, in my opinion, by having every piece of magic be exceedingly rare and exotic. It turns my job as a DM into being an onerous process of devising complex histories and turns my player's jobs as treasure-seekers to nervous archeologists. My PC's aren't interested in playing the detailed minutiae [sic] of excavation. They're interested in story, in plot, in developing characters and adventuring in the world. I can toss in the history of the item in the description of it if I think it'll help, but my games are way too fast-paced to deal with the largely-unimportant details of every peice of magic. Half an hour that I spend carefully placing a +1 doodad of thingy is half an hour I don't spend developing plot, motivation, statting up NPC's, figuring out what happens in the world, and working on what happens next.  I understand that that's not everyone's cup o' tea, or everyone's position, but the game looses *nothing* from having a baseline of common items, because it is still a continuum....you can have 200,000 +1 deeliebobs in your trunk out back, but that +5 omega toilet scrubber is still going to be important, especially if it has powers above and beyond what most people have seen. And that's how the default game works it -- as  a continuum. On one side, cheap potions, on the other, major wonderous items. You don't have to make potions or minor items rare to preserve the magical feeling of the more powerful and exotic items at all. It's not an all-or-nothing, it's not a slippery slope.  You can do it the other way, too, but I don't usually like to worry a lot about the fabric and behaviour of magic in my games, just like I don't like to worry about supply of steel or folds in a masterwork bastard sword any more than in a general sense. I come up with a theory, stick to it, and run with it. Don't need nuffin' else. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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