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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5838981" data-attributes="member: 82106">Here's the thing though. You have 2 choices:1) Magic is not needed by PCs - In this case magic items must be fairly trivial since the rules clearly won't be factoring them in. Any powerful item will cause issues. No combat type bonuses, no major powers, etc. This is like 4e with inherent bonuses but more extreme. 2) Magic is needed by PCs - You can now have (and really must have) powerful items and all that goes with it. Any PC not having the requisite expected items is gimped.Those are your two choices really. So far no edition has defaulted to 1. 4e can be played with option 1. Some will say AD&amp;D could be as well, but it was clearly a rough row to hoe. You could abolish the &quot;+N weapon needed to hit&quot; rule trivially, but without items there was NO defense progression at all in AD&amp;D. With basically no player selectable options there wasn't much of a way to distinguish one PC from another either, nor was there any way for non-casters to gain the ability to do much of anything beyond fairly low damage weapon attacks. I think the problem is that the basic format of the game just doesn't really work well with magic not being an expected part of the game. The question to me is more about HOW is magic expected to work in the game? Just how do we deal with the dependency on it and how do we fluff magic in a game so that you can have a cool powerful item show up and be interesting to a player and not create the demand for a christmas tree of items. One of the primary things that would help is of course to retain a rich set of character options for players to use. At least then they can make choices about the mechanics of their character. Of course this means you're going to have the hardest time with items in a 'basic' form of game without a lot of options.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5838981, member: 82106"] Here's the thing though. You have 2 choices: 1) Magic is not needed by PCs - In this case magic items must be fairly trivial since the rules clearly won't be factoring them in. Any powerful item will cause issues. No combat type bonuses, no major powers, etc. This is like 4e with inherent bonuses but more extreme. 2) Magic is needed by PCs - You can now have (and really must have) powerful items and all that goes with it. Any PC not having the requisite expected items is gimped. Those are your two choices really. So far no edition has defaulted to 1. 4e can be played with option 1. Some will say AD&D could be as well, but it was clearly a rough row to hoe. You could abolish the "+N weapon needed to hit" rule trivially, but without items there was NO defense progression at all in AD&D. With basically no player selectable options there wasn't much of a way to distinguish one PC from another either, nor was there any way for non-casters to gain the ability to do much of anything beyond fairly low damage weapon attacks. I think the problem is that the basic format of the game just doesn't really work well with magic not being an expected part of the game. The question to me is more about HOW is magic expected to work in the game? Just how do we deal with the dependency on it and how do we fluff magic in a game so that you can have a cool powerful item show up and be interesting to a player and not create the demand for a christmas tree of items. One of the primary things that would help is of course to retain a rich set of character options for players to use. At least then they can make choices about the mechanics of their character. Of course this means you're going to have the hardest time with items in a 'basic' form of game without a lot of options. [/QUOTE]

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