Excerpt: You and Your Magic Items

[Lizard]

This is true. It is much more conducive to a sense of wonder to have the players piece together the instruction manual by themselves.

DC 20: "The runes on the top read: Welcome to happy joyous sword of much reaving!"

DC 25: "The runes on the bottom read: For avoiding all double badness..."

DC 30: "You see a message deep within the emerald on the pommel: ...blade not to be touched with digits!"

I completely agree.

 

[hong]

I completely agree.

It's that bad, huh?

 

[keterys]

I love this messageboard sometimes

 

[Stormtalon]

This is true. It is much more conducive to a sense of wonder to have the players piece together the instruction manual by themselves.

DC 20: "The runes on the top read: Welcome to happy joyous sword of much reaving!"

DC 25: "The runes on the bottom read: For avoiding all double badness..."

DC 30: "You see a message deep within the emerald on the pommel: ...blade not to be touched with digits!"

And then they're left wondering if the sword has a curse that's only invoked when the blade comes into contact with written representations of numbers.... and why.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

It isn't what's in the rulebook that makes the DM look like a mean DM, it's the DM always saying no to this, that or whatever.

...

If the rules were written intelligently with a conservative outlook on what's allowed in campaigns, then the DM wouldn't have to say no in the first place, thus they would not look mean. So yes, it is a fault of the book that DM's who have to houserule stuff and say no are made to look mean. D&D isn't just about high magic / high fantasy settings. It has the capability to be used for a variety of campaigns and WotC should have went middle of the road. That would allow the default setting to be a magic is uncommon points of light campaign where items are wondrous and you'll most likely only find them adventuring or very rarely from specific merchants. Then if the DM's wanted, they could give double standard treasure for magic rich campaigns and have the magic shops. Or the DM could abolish all magic items, reduce npc stats by the threshold and poof. Low to no magic. Very easy and more appealing to a variety of gamers instead of just the magic rich gamers.

I haven't seen WotC's market research, and likely never will. But, over all the time I've been playing, the number one reason I've heard from people who had tried DND and didn't want to play it again has been some variation of, "I tried that once and it was just some guy [though the word used was always less polite than guy] saying over and over, "You can't do that."

And if the rules were written to be a little more conservative... you know middle of the road, guess what?! The DM's would not have to say no to a half dozen things every game. The DM's that want the overabundant magic item crap would be able to say, yes you can get that and the DM's that want a normal game could stick to the rules and not have to say no.

So, shifting the blame from the game to the DM making the restrictions is doing the right thing in my opinion.

Yeah, let's punish all the dm's that have campaigns they have been running for years because they want to keep running those campaigns and maybe find some new players or something. Let's punish dm's and provide players with an even bigger sense of entitlement that is already way out of control. I'm sick of players that whine because I won't allow them to use the latest splatbook with the next arms race upgrade to feats and powers and prc's. My campaign setting, my rules. I don't need craptastic splatbooks from WotC ruining my setting.

That's right. Because that's the most FUN for the majority of players. If you can't recruit players because they don't like your restrictions, maybe its because your restrictions aren't fun. And that seems like your problem. Not the game's problem.

Yeah, because high magic automatically means "fun". Give me a break.

 

[Xanaqui]

I can deal with the ID rules from the article. I've thought for a long time that some (or all) items should be able to be used pretty much immediately upon acquisition, which mechanics like "Identify" make more difficult. I also think that Identifying an item should be far cheaper than buying it (if you consider that the seller and the buyer would both likely want to be certain of what they're exchanging, that's the cost of 2 identifies, even if the item has no significant value).

It's not your game though. It's WOTC's game. You just play in it.

I consider "setting details" things like "you buy your magic items from Joe in my world, he lives in the city of Citysburg." and "The elves haven't been seen in a number of years due to some event lost to the past, they aren't allowed as player characters."

The physical properties of magic, the rules of classes and the like I've always considered part of the game itself.

If I had an idea for a campaign that went against the default assumptions of D&D, I likely wouldn't run it in D&D. And the default assumption that players have magic items and they get better ones as they go up levels has been part of D&D since the beginning. The designers realize this...which is why its still in.

I gather that you aren't fond of Dark Sun

I tend to modify any RPG to taste, once I've played with it enough. I like designing and playtesting rules modifications.

In the last 3.x game I finished running, I altered:
1) The Cosmology
2) The Panetheon
3) Multiple classes
4) Multi-classing rules
5) Many magic rules (mostly weakening magic that competed with or enhanced skills)
6) Several skills
7) Movement rules (yes, including walking)
8) Vision/hearing rules

Now, many (5-8) of these were mostly hidden in a pervasive terrain, but they were rules all the same.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Seems to me that identifying magic items could be a great skill challenge.

Obvious skills include Arcana, History ("I recognize this blade! It was used in the battle of Squatront!"), Religion ("This symbol is the icon of the god of magic!"), and possibly Nature.

I'm already doing this in my game. It's sort of a blend of Monte's BOXM identify rules, and 4e skill challenges.

 

[keterys]

In my last 3.5 game I modified (where modified mostly means recreated from scratch in a different way) all the classes, all the feats, all the spells, all the monsters, and the rules for all 'special attacks' like grapple, trip, etc.

But I left the rest mostly the same

Weirdly, it was still D&D - it just worked a lot different. Lot of similarities to stuff in 4e actually. That's one of the reasons I took so quickly to 4e. I had grown tired of a lot of basic math and assumptions in 3e and was designing my way out of it... then they announced 4e and as time went by there were more and more similarities.

 

[Wormwood]

If the rules were written intelligently with a conservative outlook on what's allowed in campaigns, then the DM wouldn't have to say no in the first place, thus they would not look mean.

Some people prefer a more open baseline than a more restrictive one.

Luckily, you have years and years of nice 'conservative' rulesets to choose from.

 

[JuJutsu]

... My campaign setting, my rules...

...and players always have the option to vote with their feet.