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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6156488" data-attributes="member: 27160">One of the genius implications, in my view, of 4E's division of items into "Magic Items" (that I view as largely player-controlled, through the item market and rituals) and "Artifacts" (that are DM-controlled reqards, maguffins, NPCs and enigmas) is that you can easily eliminate one or the other from the game, if you want to. With Inherent Bonuses, you can even eliminate both.Without magic items to spend gold on, rituals and consumable items would likely become much more used/useful. If you are feeling inventive, larger sums might be spent on "boon fonts" that are part of a base or stronghold, and that generate consumable-type boons once per level or once per day (although this might be counterproductive, if part of your aim is getting rid of breadth of player choice). Alternatively, as already suggested, you could just can the whole "treasure" economy entirely.I would mention, though, that you do lose something, in my opinion, in the mix, here. Many players - several of mine included - like the character design and development sub-game. 4E style Magic Items bring something to this particular party, because they represent character power options that can be shared and selected by the player group, rather than being character-specific boons chosen by a single player for his or her own character. The bringing of teamwork and collaboration into the realm of character building has been a useful contribution of the 3E and 4E magic item "economies", I think.You don't have to go the whole hog, though, in removing Magic Items in order to tame the "Magic Item Economy" a bit. One problem I have seen in my own game is the strong tendency for players to have their characters scrimp and save in almost all ways in order to get "proper magic items" - i.e. not consumables or the like. This is easing off at high-Paragon levels, but in Heroic and early Paragon it was endemic.One approach I plan on trying in my next campaign is to split off "Magic Items" from the general economy. To do this I'll just make "residuum" (possibly renamed) a separate thing; to make a Magic Item you need its full value in residuum (plus gold for the transformation ritual), but the "Disenchant" ritual returns the FULL amount of residuum used to make the item. This means that the party is limited in the quantity of Magic Items it can have by the amount of residuum (either in the form of Items or in the form of dust) it finds. Gold, in this schema, is used to convert residuum from one form (Item) into another, to power rituals, to buy consumables, to buy bases and such like, and even to get other "one off" bonuses (such as being used for bribes in a social conflict, or buy mundane gear to help in an exploration challenge).In summary - I think there are loads of ways that 4E's item/gold/artifact economy can be reconfigured to make engaging and interesting games. Whatever version you intend to try, good luck!</blockquote>

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