D&D General Ioun Stone house rule - attunement

[Benjamin Olson]

Well I was going to say "just let people have a whole constellation of them with one attunement slot, the DM still gets to decide if the PCs get any", but that's before I realized that 5.5 did away with the possibility of them being snatched or destroyed by an enemy (which was already too hard in classic 5e).

To me the barrier to using Ioun stones should be that you risk losing them, because that's what the "orbits around your head at 1 to 3 feet" nature of the thing suggests to me.

 

[Silam]

Well I was going to say "just let people have a whole constellation of them with one attunement slot, the DM still gets to decide if the PCs get any", but that's before I realized that 5.5 did away with the possibility of them being snatched or destroyed by an enemy (which was already too hard in classic 5e).

To me the barrier to using Ioun stones should be that you risk losing them, because that's what the "orbits around your head at 1 to 3 feet" nature of the thing suggests to me.

It’s very interesting to consider the implications of making some of the ioun stone tiers completely attunement-free. It could imply that someone who manages to snatch one of your orbiting stones not only deprives you of its bonus, but could immediately (at the cost of an Action, perhaps?) start making it spin around them. Now that’s a whole lot riskier, and might be a sufficient counter-balance for the benefit of making it attunement-free in the first place.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I like to have things that "break the rules" from time to time. Ioun stones were one of those things; there are / could be a potent item that didn't require a slot or attunement. Eventually the players would ask "why not?", and that could spur another adventure to either discover why or learn how to make them.

At the moment I have a limit to 1 + CHA bonus to the number of stones they can have orbiting them. This isn't a significant limit, really, as they are relatively rare. There are a couple of (homebrew) classes that add to that +1/level, so there are stories of heroes that have a dozen circling them.

Limits become more significant if there is opportunity to have a dozen or so discovered. Given they have one function per stone, I would consider the number of powers or bonuses items of equivalent rarity grant, and match or approximate that.

 

[Clint_L]

I like that attunement slots force you to make hard choices. Working as intended, it makes equipping a new magic item a meaningful choice, and usually the progression is pretty clear (swapping out a stone of good fortune for a ring of protection, etc.). But it does create a category of magic items that kind of get caught in the "probably not good enough to use a slot on at the level where you normally find them," and Ioun stones fall very much into that range, for me. I like the idea of having them be unattuned.

 

[Teemu]

I don’t like tying a single roll to such powerful and essentially permanent boosts so instead I’d have the ritual permanently reduce the character’s HP total. It could be your HD maxed, so 6-12 hp permanently lost, or maybe even the die rolled if you really wanted a bit more randomness. But personally I think such a permanent effect should be much like other character building elements and thus the player should decide whether they want the kiss-curse option or not.