D&D 5E (2014) Help me change how the identify spell works

[el-remmen]

I certainly agree about a short rest suddenly revealing everything about an item.

I didn’t even realize this was a rule! If I ever read it, I must have immediately ignored it!

In my homebrewed 5e rules I did make the pearl get consumed in the casting.

 

[Maxperson]

What I did was to add back in the pearl consumption per casting of identify. Then I limited identify to automatically working on common and uncommon items, and having a 50/50 chance to successfully identify a rare item. If upcast to 4th level, it can automatically identify up to very rare and the pearl(still consumed) needed to be 500gp. For Legendary items and artifacts, you needed Legend Lore or something more to find out.

 

[sevenbastard]

one of the elements of AD&D 1e that I absolutely hated.

Its brutal in 1e. I had a wizard who would pass out if he cast it because of the CON lose. Gooood Times!

 

[aco175]

This is one of the things I feel that the characters would play around with and experiment with until the figure it out. I recall 1e/2e days with going back and forth with the DM trying things out and doing silly things until the DM just went ahead and said what it was.

Now I just give them the item card if I made one or just tell them when I hand the item out. I do not have time to track each item and what they know about it and if it now becomes important.

 

[Maxperson]

Its brutal in 1e. I had a wizard who would pass out if he cast it because of the CON lose. Gooood Times!

I don't think we ever played with that part of 1e Identify. I certainly don't remember it happening to us.

 

[sevenbastard]

I don't think we ever played with that part of 1e Identify. I certainly don't remember it happening to us.

After you cast the spell you lose 8 Constitution. If you drop below a 3 you are unconscious for 24 hours. So my wizard with a CON of 10 was out for a day.

You also had to handle the magic items so if it was cursed, you were stuck with it.

Good Luck getting a NPC to cast the spell for you.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Attunement and learning properties should take time. First you have to figure out how to attune to an item. Maybe an arcana check gives you a clue. Then you try a few things to attune and maybe it takes a day or two or you have to say a specific phrase or do a specific task.

Once you are attuned, you can start learning properties. Maybe that’s an arcana charisma check. Maybe you learn a number of properties based on your intelligence or based on a dc.

Identify should just tell you how to attune to an item. Once you’re attuned, you can start experimenting with its powers. See above.

a second identify can speed the process by giving you one or more properties of the item once you are attuned.

 

[Silam]

I think one way to approach it might be to scale the difficulty of identifying based on the item’s rarity.

Common magic items should still be doable for free as a ritual. While higher tiers should require spending slots (which means having the spell prepared) and upcasting higher slots for higher tiers.

From that rough foundation, you can then layer a few variants:

1. If you want to put an emphasis on the mystery of magic items, then let the slotted Identify fail outright if it was not sufficiently upcasted. Characters can always retry with a higher slot if they really care to know what it does.

2. If you think 1 is too punitive, then let the free ritual reveal the rarity tier, so then the next slot spent can be guaranteed to be high enough (assuming characters can cast it at all, obviously).

3. If you want to get really fancy, some items might have different properties that belong to different rarity tiers. For example, a +1 weapon is uncommon, while a vicious one is rare. Let’s say a +1 vicious weapon was rare. You might be able to know that it’s +1 with a low level slotted identify, but need to wait a few more levels before you’re able to upcast sufficiently to discover that it’s also vicious. Under this system, presumably, you would not be able to make use of the vicious property until it’s identified (e.g., imagine there is a command word to activate the viciousness, or you need to hiss or jump and bump your heels in the air or whatever, and until you know to do that, you can’t use the property).

4. Consider whether cursed items have any special twist. For example, maybe they have a beneficial property at a low rarity tier, but the fact they’re cursed gets revealed only at a higher rarity tier. But as soon as you attune you’re cursed regardless. Will you make use of this +1 weapon now even though you’re not high enough level to know what else it can do? Maybe it’s +1 and vicious. Or maybe it’s +1 and makes you go berserk as soon as you see a priest of Corellon. Who knows!?

In other words, make players work for it, and let them have the feeling of delayed gratification. But once they do the right thing, let them know what the thing is, and move on.

 

[Tonguez]

It's always been a tension for me. I like magic items to feel mysterious and special, and so knowing exactly what they do straight away turns them into a tool. However, having to go to an effort to find out what they do means that often the items never get used, and I want them to be used.

I think possibly the problem is in the design of magic items themselves. Maybe items should have varying levels of magic depending on how much you attune to them and how much you understand them. So a +1 sword might be just that if you do no study, but if you cast identify, that will give you clues that you can use to study the history of the sword which then unlocks the other abilities you can attune to.

Possibly magic items should be impacted by the class and personality of the user, so a +1 sword could potentially be a flame blade or an ice blade or improve saving throws depending on the person that wields it. Should magic be a bit unpredictable like that?

But that would require a complete redesign of how magic items work for D&D.

a better version of Weapons of Legacy?

• Remove the negative adjustment penalties
• Drive rituals with narrative milestones or XP
• Provide customisation via a Menu of abilities linked to milestones rather than forced paths
• Then identify becomes about linking ability choice to XP milestones or something...
  
  

 

[Clint_L]

I don’t find making magic items hard to identify makes the game more fun, unless it is a unique and powerful item, in which case I’m gonna build story around it. But wasting game time and story to determine that this is a +1 shield and that is a wand of magic missiles is not for me. It’s not an actual challenge or puzzle, it’s just time consuming. Identify spell does it automatically, per RAW, and then Arcana checks of increasing difficulty by rarity.