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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WSmith" data-source="post: 507762" data-attributes="member: 106">I was a heavy duty 3rd edition myself. However, I tried to write adventures for it and produced some horrible attempts. I even tried to make magic items and monsters for the various submissions, but all were either terrably flawed with regards to game mechanics, or totally lacked the flavor I thought to be ineresting cause I was worried about making them comply with the rules. I came to realize something was missing FOR ME and I couldn't put my finger on it. Then things in my personal life started chippng away from the free time I had for my D&D hobby. I was doing website work for THE BEST d20 company going, but had to give it up cause of the real life issues made me undependable to work on the website. Little by little, I was unawareingly moving away from gaming cause of first and mostly, real life getting in the way, but also, my lack of proficency to make 3e work as a DM. My Dragon and Dungeon magazines kept arriving, but many remained unopened.  It was if I was losing interest in D&D for the first time in 20 something years. One day I was organizing my gaming products in preparation for my cross country move. I found one of my copies of the Otus Cover/ Moldvay edition "Dungeons and Dragons" Basic handbook loose from its box.  I picked it up and gave it a glance. Well, 64 pages later, I had completed a reading session full of nostalgia, adventure, mystery, and excitment. Most of all, though, I realized that in my case, less was more. I remembered long ago, not worrying if my monsters or spell item conformed to the rules, or if my custom classes were balanced. Once again, the RPG flame that almost died was instantly stoked again. It all started coming back to me. I asked myself, "why not go back to Basic?" Did it really matter that it was OOP? No, I have not only this book, but the Expert book, too. I could run a game up to level 14-16 depending on the class. The rules, which I was very familiar with (after getting back on the bicycle after not riding for a while) were so simple. Simplicity. That is what I need in a game when spare time is diminishing. So, I turned in my 200-300 page tomes for two 64 page booklets, and have been enjoying gaming as much recently as I did when I opened that magenta colored box set for Christmas, back in the early 80's.  Of course I brought some 3e rules back with me to Basic, (like AC that goes up to name one) but I found out that, in my experience, more rules constrained my imagination. I needed a simple, "rules-lite" engine, that was right under my nose the whole time. I guess in one sentence: the old Basic and Experts books saved my game. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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