Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FourthBear" data-source="post: 4299663" data-attributes="member: 55846">Just reward?  I'm not sure on what basis that entitlement is justified, outside of the expectation of previous editions.  I'm not aware of characters in the genre source material looting magical arms and armor off of nearly all of their humanoid opponents.  Perhaps you can remind of such scenes in Tolkien, Vance, Leiber or Moorcock?  As far as I'm concerned, it's a poorly justified expectation that leads to tedious overproliferation of magical items.  I'll be very glad to see it eliminated, if possible.Edited to add:  To bring this around to my original point, if expectation is not based on experience in previous editions, plain greed or genre emulation, it is almost certainly based on concerns about verisimilitude.  This is why I believe that the DM and players should agree either 1) no explanation is needed for the issue of NPC opponents not needing magic items to justify their stats 2)  all NPCs do need magic items and the system will need some house ruling to deal with this proliferation of magic items or 3) the PCs commonly confront NPCs with some power source to explain their increased stats.An example of the last would be if rituals were able to imbue a person with significant power from a patron (the appropriate attack and defense enhancements).  The rituals would be specific to the patron and would require sacrifices vile enough to explain why they wouldn't be used by anyone other than depraved organizations.  Further, they also give the individual a fatal vulnerability to the abilities of the patron and its allies (which may or may not be known to all of the recipients, but made clear to the PCs prior to learning of them).  This way, it would be highly unlikely for any PC to want to gain this power, since it would involve making themselves helpless against an abusive power, as well as having to partake of a vile sacrifice.</blockquote>

Verification