Excerpt: You and Your Magic Items

[keterys]

Magic weapons add d6 per plus _on crits_, and that's it.

Vicious weapons add d12 per plus _on crits_, and that's it.

Frost you can see in the PrRC since it was at DDXP.

 

[Andor]

Huh. I'm not certain I follow the logic behind making the magic weapons add ons do more damage on crits, but add squat to routine use of the weapon. It seems to be deliberately adding back the "swingyness" whose removal seemed to be a major design goal of 4e.

 

[Thasmodious]

That is beyond lame. Fighters who've never had magical training whatsoever shouldn't be able to identify magical poop, let alone the properties and effects of a magical item. Sure, they can feel the balance of a sword is better and that it fits their hand perfectly, but anything beyond that should require a person trained in arcane knowledge.

Yeah, I agree. And wizards with no martial training shouldn't be able to tell a spear from a halberd from a longsword. "I know its got a +1, but I can't even tell which end is the pointy one..." -cuts self- "Ow. Apparently its electrical as well."

 

[mach1.9pants]

Why would it burst into flame without the proper mental command to do so? It requires a free action to activate, which to me, says that the pc must consciously decide to activate the weapon. Thus it requires something to do so. Maybe it's a mental or spoken command word, "FLAME ON!" or a hidden ring to twist or something. It should be the same thing for all characters though. You shouldn't make the flaming sword a physical activation just because the fighter uses it whereas the wizard would use arcana to discover the mental command word.

Fair enough if that is your thing, easily sorted for campaign. Arcana (or religion, or others maybe) DC 10+1/level to get the properties

 

[keterys]

Speaking of swingy. +6 Vicious Greataxe (high crit weapon) does, at least if I understand things correctly, +9d12 damage on a crit. Yowza.

 

[Rechan]

Huh. I'm not certain I follow the logic behind making the magic weapons add ons do more damage on crits, but add squat to routine use of the weapon. It seems to be deliberately adding back the "swingyness" whose removal seemed to be a major design goal of 4e.

Honestly? Part of it I think is because of this:

"Criticals aren't fun anymore because I don't roll anything! The fun of a critical is rolling buckets of dice! You could have rolled max damage on a crit anyhow!"

 

[kennew142]

The magic items are pretty much what we were expecting - not that this is a bad thing.

I really like the new method of identifying magic items. The default is that you can identify an item by playing around with it for a while. I've always liked this method. It's what we used to do in 1e, try out the item and see if we could get it to work. The Identify spell always seemed too trite and constrained for my tastes. Since the article leaves open the possibility that some items may require more work to identity, I'll be able to require some magical research or investigation in order to properly identify them.

I also like the fact that the expected bonuses from magic items have been presented in such a transparent fashion. It's much easier now to run low magic or high magic games, since the mathematics behind the system is so much more obvious.

I can't wait for 4e!

 

[FadedC]

Huh. I'm not certain I follow the logic behind making the magic weapons add ons do more damage on crits, but add squat to routine use of the weapon. It seems to be deliberately adding back the "swingyness" whose removal seemed to be a major design goal of 4e.

They do that to keep crits from becoming completely insignificant at higher level. Doing automatic max damage is significant when you hit for d8+4, but not such a big deal when you hit for d8+40.

As for swingy, but the time your getting too many extra dice of damage your opponents all have over 100 hp anyway....sometimes much more. An extra 20 crit damage to the 400 hit point creature is far from swingy.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

The +nd6 damage for +n weapons was something first mentioned in the Critical Hit article months ago.

But I like how we no longer have to deal with flaming-shocking-concussive-keen-weapons anymore.

 

[Korgoth]

Speaking of swingy. +6 Vicious Greataxe (high crit weapon) does, at least if I understand things correctly, +9d12 damage on a crit. Yowza.

Amulet of the Matrix: 55,000 gold pieces.

Plate Armor of the Iron Dragon: 115,000 gold pieces

+6 Vicious Greataxe: 225,000 gold pieces

Getting to tell the DM that you did an additional 108 points of damage: priceless.