D&D 5E (2014) Magic Item Slots in D&D Next

[gyor]

I for one support a nipple rings slots.

 

[TwinBahamut]

dont forget the locate city bomb:

I must say, I've never seen that one. That's pretty impressive. Not quite as impressive as the attacks that could wipe out the entire cosmos due to dealing more hitpoint damage than the number of atoms in the universe (by several orders of magnitude), but still amazingly elegant. It is strange what happens when the old 3E char-op boards got bored of inflicting infinite damage, and just chased "largest quantity of non-infinite damage". It taught me new things about advanced mathematical notation.

Still, as for the whole issue of common sense...

Common sense is a terrible thing to base game rules on. Mostly because, well, it is a terrible thing to use in a discussion. Common sense is better described as "heuristic bias", the sum total of assumptions and axioms humans use as shortcuts to avoid the tedium of rational thought and logic. It is fast, crude, incredibly prone to error, and never alike among any two individuals. It is very useful in many ways, but it is absolutely terrible as the basis for settling disagreements between people. It is fundamentally impossible for a disagreement about a matter of "common sense" to be anything more than a futile shouting match. It is much better to be able to point people in the direction of a rule and resolve things easily and peacefully.

There is also the issue that, as both a DM and player of D&D, the last thing I want to do is worry about rule ambiguity. Everyone playing the game has enough to worry about. Simple questions like "can you equip and benefit from your boots of elvenkind without compromising your full suit of plate armor?" should not involve vagueness or require a DM ruling. DMs and players should be able to devote their time and effort to the fun parts of the game, not towards patching up an incomplete ruleset just to make it work.

 

[KidSnide]

I agree with the idea that slots are an artificial concept designed for games with tons of magic items. In a modular system, I would have no limits on the number of magic items worn other than the GM's common sense (i.e. only one cloak, only one belt, etc...).

I would also include an optional slot system (I prefer the one from 4e) for high magic item games.

-KS

 

[Argyle King]

No, this is how 3E works. 4E addresses this kind of exploit (which were rampant in 3E) and for the most part removes them completely.

There was a lot of rule stupidity in 3E. A lot. Look up Pun Pun or the Omniscificer if you so desire. Creating a being with infinite stats became a 3E subgame.

There are a few ways to do similar things in 4th Edition. I don't mean Pun-Pun, but the exploits for ridiculous damage. Some of the worst ones in 4th Edition don't even involve damage. In a notebook somewhere I have a concept sketched out in which the whole party consists of eladrin hybrid barbarian/warlords, and they all activate Iron Dragon Charge to set up an infinite loop of charging until the enemy dies.

I don't keep up with the errata, so some of the things I used for the concept may no longer be viable. I never actually used the concept in a game. I was simply interesting to see what I could do with some of the options.

The basic concept was that Iron Dragon charge allows an ally you choose to charge when you charge. All of the hybrid barbarian/warlords make sure to choose each other in such a way that it creates a loop. When one guy charges, he then prompts the guy he chose to charge; that second guy then prompts the third guy to charge, and so on, and so on in a never ending loop.

The eladrin part isn't necessary, but it allows the whole party to benefit from feycharger cheese. They all simply need to burn one feat on multiclassing into fighter.

 

[TarionzCousin]

The fun part about a bag of rats was making the fighter in my game work for it. He had a low Dexterity, so that was at least twenty minutes of fun as we all watched him roll "not quite good enough" to catch any rats. When he went to the pet store to buy rats, they were all sold out except for one incredibly-expensive bag of rats. I think I milked 1100 gp out of him for one bag of 20 rats.

Then he rolled pretty poorly and only got 7 extra melee attacks. The BBEG was not amused and focused all of his attention on the fighter.

Needless to say, nobody in that campaign ever bought a bag of rats again.

 

[howandwhy99]

IIRC magic item slots were only for Paladins originally. It was a limitation by class. Other classes had no such limits, but I could understand attempting to put a practical limit on the number of, say, codpieces someone could wear... at least functionally.

(what was the function of a codpiece again?)

 

[Sunseeker]

(what was the function of a codpiece again?)

For storing codfish of course.

 

[drothgery]

I know it's video-gamey, but I'd say weapon/shield/implement in hand (allowing for two weapons or weapon and shield), armor, neck, and one 'accessory' item that could be worn anywhere. Anything permanent that doesn't go in one of those slots has no combat effects (though I'll fudge and say a permanent light source is not a combat effect).

 

[Lord Mhoram]

My general way to handle Bag of Rats situation.

DM (me) "That's stupid and an exploit, you can't use it in my game"

Never had any problems.


Those kind of things were always fun for me - as a HERO player - I love and amused by things like that and the locate city bomb. Murphy's rules kind of thing.

 

[Incenjucar]

My general way to handle Bag of Rats situation.

DM (me) "That's stupid and an exploit, you can't use it in my game"

Never had any problems.

There are a lot of people who have issues with aspects of the game that other people do not have. This is simply one of them.

Back to magic items, this is actually an important consideration due to adventure creation. Adventure designers need to be able to predict the general power level of a party for their adventures to be adequately challenging without heavy modification.