Magic Item Rarity List

[Felon]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who wondered about this, but we actually already do have a thread about this very topic right on the front page.

 

[captainspud]

It's kind of funny. My young teenage daughter plays in our group and when we discussed the common item concept and I mentioned that only about 1 item in 30 is common with the current definition, she responded with "1 in 30 items are common? How's that common? I don't think that word means what WotC thinks it means.".

Sometimes kids see what adults do not.

Actually, it makes PERFECT sense.

Say I'm a magic blacksmith. You bring me a load of Rubidium, and want me to make you a suit of armor. I know how to make plain, basic +1 Rubidium Armor, which is easy and I can knock our quickly. Any other blacksmith can also make the same +1 Rubidium Armor.

On the other hand, if I'm feeling particularly adventurous today, I could spend five times as long lovingly crafting a suit of +1 Pulchritudinous Rubidium Armor, into which I weave a spell that grants the wearer gorgeous, wavy blond hair. This spell and this armor are my own creations, and are unique in all the world. If another blacksmith wants to make it, he'll need to figure out the spells from scratch, and will likely end up with a different result than mine. After all, Pulchritudinous Armor is more a work of art than a simple object to be constructed.

I have other options as well; I could craft +1 Armor of Stinging Nettles, +1 Armor of Badgers, or even +1 Windsurfing Armor. Like the Pulchritudinous Armor, these works of art would be wholly unique.

Magewright Wilkins down the street can also make armor from Rubidium, but you'll get different products if you shop with him. He can make you your generic +1 Rubidium Armor, but his skilled hand might also whip up a +1 Armor of the Glaring Tapir, or the dreaded +1 Armor of Pandemic Herpes. Like my work, Wilkins' creations are unique, and can't be replicated by my hand.

And so on, and so forth. In the end, you're left with a very long list of things that could be made with your Rubidium. At the top of the list is the plain +1 Rubidium Armor; it's the easiest thing to make, so you'll find it absolutely all over the place, but in the end it's still just one item on the list. As you progress down into the more difficult items to create, they start to take up more slots on the list; because while there are less Uncommon suits of armor out there in the world than generic suits of +1 Rubidium, they exist in a far wider variety.

Or, in other words: your daughter should probably take an economics course.

 

[KarinsDad]

Or, in other words: your daughter should probably take an economics course.

Any statement that real world economics has anything to do with WotC D&D non-existent economics is way off base. You're playing in a game system where a 10% increase in damage results in 5x the cost.

Where one draws the line between common and uncommon should be subject to gaming style, preference, and campaign. Where WotC drew the line is all mechanical, extremely narrow, and introduces the untenable issue of too few common items per level. It was totally based off one specific set of narrow game mechanics for an idea that should be based off of overall campaign magic item power and utility.

300 common items (10 per level) out of 8900 items just doesn't cut it.

When your players can only make +1 Rubidium Armor, guess what? They will not be crafting any items. It drops an entire element that some players find enjoyable out of the game system.

Players who enjoy crafting items don't want to craft +1 Rubidium Armor. They want to shine. They want to craft the +1 Armor of Stinging Nettles, +1 Armor of Badgers, or +1 Windsurfing Armor. But the current guidelines suggest that these are uncommon items that the DM should be handing out, or that the players should have to go on a quest to craft. My players who are not powergamers would look at that and say "pass". They would want to go on more exciting quests than ones to figure out how to craft one specific item.

Hence, the reason I came up with a house rule that upped the number of choices from 3% of items to 22% of items. That gives the players who enjoy crafting items a much greater pool to choose from.

 

[captainspud]

I was only responding to the comment that WotC's definition of "common" was somehow flawed-- it isn't. It makes absolute, perfect sense for the most common items to be a tiny fraction of the item list.

I have no comment for or against your game's rarity system-- whatever works for you works for you. That's the nice thing about playing such a modular game.

 

[KarinsDad]

I was only responding to the comment that WotC's definition of "common" was somehow flawed-- it isn't. It makes absolute, perfect sense for the most common items to be a tiny fraction of the item list.

Does it? There is a compelling reason why the WotC selected way is "flawed".

This is a game. It's supposed to be fun and enjoyable.

The super tiny fraction of items that WotC picked are limiting and boring. +2 to Stealth is ok for a common item, but +2 to damage isn't??? The game is played by human players who look for enjoyment. It might make some plausibility sense to you, but for a game concept, it's less useful if there are an extremely limited number of items that players can craft. The model only works if it makes the game enjoyable for the players. Any model, no matter how plausible it seems, is less useful if it minimizes some fun aspect of the game system.

The suggested guideline is that 50% of all item acquisition come from this tiny 3% (and for games that do not include dragon or dungeon or some other items, the total number of common items is even smaller).

Sorry, but that tiny fraction is boring both on a receiving an item POV and on a crafting POV. Dropping 97% of craftable items from the list is not conducive to fun. IMO. As a player in the past, I might have one of my PCs take the Ritual Caster feat, primarily to get the Enchant Item ritual. With these new WotC guidelines, I wouldn't. It wouldn't be worth a feat selection because crafting +1 chainmail (and very little else) isn't worth a feat (yes, I know the feat could do more, but for some character concepts, to do things beyond crafting is not why the PC would be selecting the feat).

By the way, I really like this magic item rarity idea. It takes a major step towards item balance. I just find the super tiny fraction to be a flaw that needs fixing.

 

[BlueChowder]

Both captainspud and KarinsDad seem to make good points here. In my opinion, players should be able to craft a wide variety of items, since it's fun to do so, and it gives the player some control over his character. At the same time, if we believe WotC's claim that uncommon items will be too powerful now (with the daily power limit change) if players continue to create them as easily as before, we need some mechanism to reduce the number of uncommon items in play.

Perhaps we should simply multiply the construction cost of an uncommon item by 5? This gives players something to do with extra gold, limits the number of uncommon items in play, and gives people a reason to prefer to make common items (that is, players won't completely ignore common items when deciding what to craft).

I may try this out...

-BlueChowder

 

[Saeviomagy]

I think that the rarity system CAN be used to fix "this low-level daily is too good once you get to the point where the entire party can buy one for pocket change". However I think that the current broad categorization is awful. Noone will carry around a low-level flaming weapon in order to use it's daily, because the daily requires a hit with the weapon in question. Making it uncommon is silly.

People taking a frost weapon over all contenders? That's purely because of two ridiculous feats that have never been fixed. Isolated from those feats, frost weapons are interesting and good, but not the crazy good they are now. Don't expect the rarity change to fix them.

People WILL use multiple flutes of the dancing satyr, because the daily is good no matter what level you are. So making the flute uncommon is a decent fix. In fact this is pretty much the ONLY situation where an item should be bumped to uncommon - one of the item is interesting at any level, it's power cannot be reduced for lower level items, the power remains viable at high levels and it's abuseable in large quantities.

Nobody will want a holy avenger ever (ok, slight exaggeration, but only slight), so making it rare is ridiculous.

 

[MrMyth]

Does it? There is a compelling reason why the WotC selected way is "flawed".

This is a game. It's supposed to be fun and enjoyable.

The super tiny fraction of items that WotC picked are limiting and boring. +2 to Stealth is ok for a common item, but +2 to damage isn't??? The game is played by human players who look for enjoyment. It might make some plausibility sense to you, but for a game concept, it's less useful if there are an extremely limited number of items that players can craft. The model only works if it makes the game enjoyable for the players. Any model, no matter how plausible it seems, is less useful if it minimizes some fun aspect of the game system.

The suggested guideline is that 50% of all item acquisition come from this tiny 3% (and for games that do not include dragon or dungeon or some other items, the total number of common items is even smaller).

I think you are misinterpreting the existing situation with WotC's actual goal - as well as people's responses to your daughter's quote.

I think when MME comes out, we'll see a good number of common items. I think WotC's goal is to have maybe 45% of items common and craftable, and 45% of items uncommon stuff handed out by the DM, and the rest Rares or Artifacts or whatever.

Not what we have now, true. I think largely because of balance issues with many existing items. But let's assume that this is the goal. Even then, we will have an equal number of common and uncommon items from a player perspective, and your daughter's comments about 'common' items would still be valid from an OOC perspective - if there is as many common item as uncommon items, aren't the terms meaningless?

And, again - no, because they are in-game terms. There are more of these items in character, even if there are an equal number, or some wild disparity, out of character.

You are treating people's defense of the term as an in-character device as a defense of WotC's existing rarity distribution, and I don't think that is what anyone is actually saying. They are just defending the actual definition of the term as valid from an in-character perspective, and I think you are missing that.

 

[KarinsDad]

And, again - no, because they are in-game terms. There are more of these items in character, even if there are an equal number, or some wild disparity, out of character.

You are treating people's defense of the term as an in-character device as a defense of WotC's existing rarity distribution, and I don't think that is what anyone is actually saying. They are just defending the actual definition of the term as valid from an in-character perspective, and I think you are missing that.

From an in-character perspective, the term doesn't apply very well at all.

There are no common items, just items.

With no real in character definitions as to which items can be crafted and which cannot, the PCs have no visibility into the system at all. It's just a list with some items on it and some not on it.

A PC tries to figure out how to craft a given item and cannot. The PC doesn't know that it is an uncommon item. A given DM might give a campaign reason (these are items from the Times of Trouble), but then again, the DM might not. The PC may or may not be able to recognize the difference based on campaign.

And the PC doesn't realy have any clue that 50% of items are common, 45% are uncommon, and 5% are rare. Those are out of character item distribution game distinctions. The player knows this, but the PC doesn't.

And I doubt that a PC would even recognize "Hey, we got 50% of these types of items and only 45% of those types of items, hence, the former type are common and the latter type less common.".

It's often difficult to distinguish the difference between knowledge that PCs have in character and players have out of character. This doesn't apply too well to the former outside of the one corner case that uncommon items typically cannot be crafted with the Enchant Magic Item ritual. And if the PCs do not have that ritual, there is even less reason for the PCs to have in character knowledge here.

I agree with you that as a game mechanics term, it is probably ok. It just sounds like an oxymoron with the current rules: common item. Not so common. That might change with MME, it might not. It might still seem like an oxymoron if the uncommon items significantly outnumber the common ones "out of character". In character, the term doesn't really apply.

 

[Nichwee]

In-game "common" item means one that is made by any blacksmith/itemsmith of sufficient quality all over the game world, and can be found in any appropriate store.

A notepad is common - I can go into any WHSmiths or Staples or Waterstones or ..... and buy a notepad. However buying a leather-bound 500 page notebook with an embossed inner-cover set out so the owner can fill in their personal details, and comes with a latching mechanism - that would be uncommon and I would probably have to search for months to find someone who could make it/teach me to make it.

It is exactly the same in D&D - a common item is one anyone in a given field learns to make, and uncommon is the really tricky, specialist item that 90% of craftsman don't know how to do. There may be 200 types of uncommon magic sword, and only 1 type of common magic sword but every trained member of the army will be wielding a "common magic sword" and only 5 people in the battle will be wielding any uncommon type of magic sword.

So the army has 200x(+1 Magic Sword), 1x(+1 Inspiring Sword), 1x(+2 Frost Sword), 1x(+2 Flaming Sword) and 1x(+1 Predatory Sword). So which do you think is the "common item"? Not hard to understand from an IC point of view, If a player wants to make/buy a common item it is easy to find someone to sell it to him/her or to tell him/her how it is made. If it is an uncommon item it may take a month or two just to track down someone who knows how to make it, and then you may find the ingredients needed are just as tricky to locate.