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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 6901304" data-attributes="member: 6802765">From my perspective, the change in magic item expectations between editions produces an annoying continuity problem when world-building. I've been using a custom-made campaign world since the very first days of 3.0, and I have no intention of throwing that out to start over every time a new edition comes out.My world doesn't have magic item shops per se, but the idea that magic items are (expensive) commodities is baked into the basic economic assumptions. Cartels, sprawling trade fairs, and political rivalries over control of the production of high-end items are all basic features that can't simply be hand-waved away.Accordingly, the sudden excision of trade in magic items in 5e presented me with a serious dilemma. Unless I wanted to rewrite large portions of my setting, I would have to either adapt the 5e magic item rules to permit (and support) buying and selling, or else skip this edition just as I skipped 4e (for even bigger incompatibility reasons).I chose a middle path and created an isolated, magic-item-poor location within the setting to try out the new system to see if I liked it enough to be worth adapting it to fit my world. The conclusion is a definite yes, and when I start my next major campaign it will be back on the mainland with heavily-houseruled magic item rules (mostly more-coherent pricing and item creation guidelines, quite possibly using or based on some of the community's fixes).But it's frustrating knowing that I almost missed out on this edition's improvements simply because the developers apparently never assumed that anyone would want to tell continuous storylines across edition boundaries. I don't mind that the default expectations changed, but I do mind that the tools were missing to provide optional backwards-compatibility. At a minimum 5e needed specific item prices also taking into account demand (i.e. utility) instead of only supply (i.e. rarity), so that magic-items-as-commodities was supported from day 1.If and when another new edition comes around, I hope backwards-compatibility is maintained. But based on the last two new editions, I think it's safe to say that what the always-changing magic item assumptions really mean is that continuity simply isn't a priority.</blockquote>

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