Hussar said:
As far as magic items being special, that varied hugely by game. As I said before, I mostly played modules which meant that the party magic list was some four or five PAGES long. It's pretty easy to be jaded when your paladin maxes out his allowable magic items by 3rd level. The idea of adding in special stories or making magic items an "Ohmigosh" sort of thing doesn't exist in modules.
I tend to agree with your assessment of some of the prepublished modules, but in our group we never had much of a "Christmas tree" effect going. Maybe it was becuase we mainly played either self-written adventures or heavily modded modules...
And, I would add that there were many, many articles in Dragon that talked about adding in that wonder factor back into the game. So, I know that mine wasn't the only group doing that. If we were the only ones, there would be no push to add the wonder back in.
To be honest I haven't bought a Dragon mag since back in the 2E days, so I couldn't really comment...
On the point about builds and the lack thereof in previous editions. I'm sorry, but that's pretty disingeneous. You didn't have builds in 1e and 2e because you couldn't. Any and all building was done at 1st level and that was it. The players were absolutely locked into a single path after chargen and could do extremely little to change that. Yes, there was human dual classing, but, it was so difficult to do, that it was almost never done.
I concede this somewhat - 3.X does allow for much more character flexibility
mechanically than earlier editions. Having said that, I totally disagree that same level characters of the same race/class were carbon copies of each other. I never got that feeling in any 1E game I was involved in. Perhaps on paper they might seem so, but in practice I never found it to be the case. Player style, personality and many other factors serve extremely well to define a character's individuality - you don't need to have a radically different stat block to distinguish yourself from someone else, IMHO.
But, there's one thing about it, I've watched players sort through Dragon magazines and various other sources for HOURS trying to squeeze out a better deal at chargen time. Powergaming and munchkinning have existed since day 2. Heck, the Unearthed Arcana method for rolling character stats gives you NINE dice.
If you read back through this thread, I have acknowledged that powergaming and min/maxing has been around long before 3E about three or more times now. It just happens to be my opinion that the current ruleset cater to and encourage this more than did earlier editions (in core-books terms).
Just for the record, though, even back in 1E my group was pretty much core only, exactly like we are now. No DM I ever played under allowed the UA character generation system, for instance.
On Magic Shops. You do realize that this doesn't actually exist anywhere in the rules. And, there's absolutely nothing wrong with stating that you cannot buy X? Also, except for extremely large cities, very little magic, even if you had magic shops, would be available? The guidelines for town wealth are pretty clear and easy to use. Don't want magic shops? Don't go to huge cities.
Oh, I am fully aware of that. I personally don't have a problem, as they simply do not exist in my game. Never have (in any edition), never will.
However, magic shops are, to my understanding, a fairly accepted feature of most published campaign worlds. And from what I read in various places, characters going out and buying hand picked magical gear is very common - otherwise, why would there be so many threads that start with "How much would this item cost?"...
... they will also spend more time predesigning the optimum path for their character. Its not special if everyone can do it. The value in diamonds is not because they are shiny, it is because they are rare.
