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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 794080" data-attributes="member: 537">If you mean apples and oranges are both fruits, then yeah, probably. <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=":)" /> I've never really had a problem with the whole "magic items are external to a character" issue, because I consider the items to be just as much a part of a character as any other abilities they may have. The problem is that going strictly by the core books, there's little in the way of crunchy bits to support this paradigm: if you have a +1 sword, there's nothing stopping you from throwing it away as soon as a +2 sword comes around.However, if you look around, there's actually several places to find rules that make items more closely tied to a character than just being expendable tools. There's the samurai's ancestral daisho in OA, the "imbued items" article from Dragon 289, and the concept of "nemuranai", or awakened items, in Magic of Rokugan.I've munged all these things together to come up with some rules for imbuing magic items that I'm using in my game. Consider the basic feature of item creation, where a spellcaster spends XP (and gp) to create a magic item. A common in-game explanation for this is the creator putting a part of her soul, spirit or essence into the item. The imbued magic rules just extend this idea of imparting one's spirit to one's possessions to everybody, not just spellcasters.Imbued items have a few other quirks:- You don't need gp to awaken their magic (although the XP cost is bumped up to compensate).- They only work for the character who created them. If you kill Bob the orc and pick up his imbued +2 greataxe, it's only a normal greataxe in your hands.The end-effect is to create a real, tangible link between a character and their items, and has a number of other benefits:- Since gold isn't required to imbue items, it removes (or weakens) the looting mentality common in D&D. You can play an altruistic, noble-hearted type who refuses to hoard gold or loot dead bodies, and not feel screwed for it.- It makes planning encounters much less complicated, since I don't have to worry about the golden rule: never give an NPC an item I don't want the PCs to get their hands on.- All that XP spending means characters take longer to level up, which is good for me, because I like lots of fights in my campaigns. If the PCs never spent all that XP, they'd be levelling up like rabbits.</blockquote>

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