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I have, in this post.

Daily Item restrictions are unnecessary for most items WotC classified as uncommon (i.e. the general argument is fine, but in practice the items didn't actually need that restriction). Thus the argument that they needed item rarity to be able to drop the daily item restriction is a strawman: they didn't need item rarity as implemented, just in a select few cases (and I can't even name one off the top of my head.

Daily item restriction isn't a restriction on individual items, it is a restriction on the character's number of item uses, so I don't actually see how it relates to any particular item. Daily item restriction was a bad rule, but one that was required in order to allow CHARACTERS to function properly in an environment where the players could pick and choose their item daily powers freely.

Magic items can be essential to interesting PC builds. Such magic items should have been common, e.g. rushing cleats, or teleport enhancers, damage type exchangers. If you want to change game balance that's a seperate errata, which I don't believe is necessary in general, but perhaps for some items.

I think the problem here is the whole idea that every PC needs an array of items. I don't think this is true. I think character concepts work fine on their own. A perfectly good charging barbarian can exist for instance without needing horned helms, badges of the berzerker, rushing cleats, and a vanguard weapon. You guys may have set your expectations there, but I don't think this kind of thing is genuinely required at all. Once you don't simply have free access to all of these items then actually acquiring ONE (or eventually more) of them becomes a real genuine valuable goal.

The argument that they designers were forced to make bland items because high level PC's can make tons of low level items is absurd. It's generally totally uninteresting to make tons of low level items, and when it is potentially interesting, it's often not problematic (e.g. 3.5's masses of wands of cure light wounds). If you take the actual list of items defined as uncommon evaluate them using this criteria it's instantly obvious that the criteria is just a bunch of hot air. Almost all items wouldn't need the uncommon classification.

Except the 3.5 masses of CLW wands were EXACTLY a huge problem. They are a vastly meta-gamey heap-o-nonsense. In fact the entire 3.5 crafting system ended up reeking of meta-gaming. The 4e crafting system likewise where the object was what? To fill in the checkboxes of some optimum build? That to me is a horrible set of motivations to run a game on in general. I want the players engaged in doing things for STORY reasons, for reasons that are related to the inner life of the character, not because the game mechanics happen to dictate that X, Y, or Z combination of items means you can pump out more damage, etc. I mean, yes, I can imagine a character concept where a character is obsessed with the need to say squash his enemies with the utmost effectiveness and you could sort of justify that, but that isn't the majority of characters in most games.

It's always been the case that the DM can introduce items that cannot be crafted and are unique. This is not a strength of the item rarity system. The item rarity system merely makes it possible for WotC to publish items that aren't balanced if PC-craftable, and that's fine - but that concept isn't what's on offer! The item rarity system was hijacked to the dubious aim of making PC's less interesting.

Well, it is inarguably true that artifacts CAN fill that kind of slot, but they carry a lot of other connotations. I think it is a legitimate need to have a grade of items without all the baggage of being an artifact that is still under DM control.

As for 'hijacked to the dubious aim of making PC's less interesting', lul wut? Yeah, that's WotC's aim, to make all the characters dull and boring 'cause you know that will sell more books... The rarity system IS exactly offering you more interesting and potentially not 'balanced' items, what exactly concept do you really think it is in service of?

[MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION], yeah, we have different concepts. It isn't so much to me a matter of I want the players spending all their time exploring stuff that I've come up with. It is that we don't want to spend our time on the whole very meta-gamey constant searching around for that next +1 or playing accountant all the time. I mean the resource sub-game is a fun part of D&D, up to a point. I just see it having gone way too far with having to track whether or not you used each item yet, plus tracking per-character daily item use, etc. Ugh.

You're probably correct, you could implement a whole bunch of different tweaks to the system which HOPEFULLY combined together might deal with the issues surrounding items, but at the cost of now I have to track not only daily item uses but which ones are also character item daily uses and some are and some aren't? FEH! I don't think that's taking the game in the direction most people are interested in going. I don't think rarity was a 'lazy' at all. It was an ELEGANT solution. In the software engineering world we have a sort of a saying which is that laziness is a virtue. In other words the elegant minimalist solution, the one that perhaps requires a bit more work up front to come up with but makes things simpler and easier down the road is often the best. It also has a connotation of practicality to it. Don't overcomplexify things to achieve dubiously useful ends. IMHO in that sense rarity is a 'lazy' solution, one that is both minimally complex to implement and minimally complex to administer in play.
 

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You must have read something else, because the linked thread starts with:


I merely computed a houserule under which PC wealth is comparable to RAW using random loot, the random loot chart you'll find at asmor's.

Your confusion is probably my fault since the sig links to a specific post in the thread for absolutely no reason, I'll fix that.
Thanks, that is exactly what I want. ;)

I would xp you, but I did so recently!
 

eamon

Explorer
Daily item restriction isn't a restriction on individual items, it is a restriction on the character's number of item uses, so I don't actually see how it relates to any particular item. Daily item restriction was a bad rule, but one that was required in order to allow CHARACTERS to function properly in an environment where the players could pick and choose their item daily powers freely.
That was the idea, certainly. It's just that it's not a necessary restriction even if players choose the same item 100's of times for the vast majority of items.

I think the problem here is the whole idea that every PC needs an array of items. I don't think this is true. I think character concepts work fine on their own. A perfectly good charging barbarian can exist for instance without needing horned helms, badges of the berzerker, rushing cleats, and a vanguard weapon. You guys may have set your expectations there, but I don't think this kind of thing is genuinely required at all. Once you don't simply have free access to all of these items then actually acquiring ONE (or eventually more) of them becomes a real genuine valuable goal.
The rushing cleats are specifically a game-changer for Polearm momentum. A frost weapon is a game-changer for the whole wintertouched-combo-thingo. Some of these builds you're probably not too sorry to see go, but others were just really nifty and fun to see in play.

Except the 3.5 masses of CLW wands were EXACTLY a huge problem. They are a vastly meta-gamey heap-o-nonsense. In fact the entire 3.5 crafting system ended up reeking of meta-gaming.
First off: I don't think with such difference starting points our perspectives will meet on this. Obviously you didn't like em, but they were the very antithesis of metagamey: you're "exploiting" the in-game reality that wands cost less the slower they heal; ergo it's quite cheap for a high level party to supply themselves with slowly healing wands of cure light. Effectively, this turns healing in 3.5. into 4e's short rests. Maybe that's not the in-game reality you wanted, but that's a different problem: I'm fine with reflecting the practice of magic in the day-to-day society; indeed, I tried to make a point of it as a DM to let the players encounter problems solved using rules they too can use; and that's a great way to get people thinking laterally. I absolutely revel in that: it's a real world, and people in it will use whatever tools they have to do what they need. Is it exploit that let's planes fly in ours? How 'bout wheels - you're playing unfair, expending so much less effort dragging things from A to B using a good set of wheels :). Wands of CLW: not an exploit, just a reflection of a different world, with different possibilities.

With that perspective in mind, "optimizing" doesn't look bad: that's perfectly reasonable behavior in-game too. There's a fine line here; it can be jarring if you look at it one way, but it can be a reflection of in-game professionalism and focus on the other hand. That depends slightly on rules, slightly on the game your playing, and heavily on the game you're trying to run.


The 4e crafting system likewise where the object was what? To fill in the checkboxes of some optimum build? That to me is a horrible set of motivations to run a game on in general. I want the players engaged in doing things for STORY reasons, for reasons that are related to the inner life of the character, not because the game mechanics happen to dictate that X, Y, or Z combination of items means you can pump out more damage, etc. I mean, yes, I can imagine a character concept where a character is obsessed with the need to say squash his enemies with the utmost effectiveness and you could sort of justify that, but that isn't the majority of characters in most games.
I just look at this so completely differently. These PC's - they are going to die if they make a mistake. They're adventurer's, and after their first few adventures, if they're still fighting under delusions that it's all just honor and glory, they'll soon be goners (and it'll be gory :)). So while we don't take it so seriously out-of-game, I'm used to characters in-game (at least the sane ones) being obsessed with their craft and the perfection of it.



Well, it is inarguably true that artifacts CAN fill that kind of slot, but they carry a lot of other connotations. I think it is a legitimate need to have a grade of items without all the baggage of being an artifact that is still under DM control.
I agree. And whether you label that as a grade of especially minor artifacts or particularly rare items is just an almost irrelevant details. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

As for 'hijacked to the dubious aim of making PC's less interesting', lul wut? Yeah, that's WotC's aim, to make all the characters dull and boring 'cause you know that will sell more books... The rarity system IS exactly offering you more interesting and potentially not 'balanced' items, what exactly concept do you really think it is in service of?
I don't mean to say that that's WotC's intent; it's a consequence, however. You've got less items; less tools to make novel PC's: hence, less interesting PC's. The DM still has access to those, but that doesn't help since as a player you can't rely on getting these items (i.e. can't build to use them), which is a reflection of the in-game reality that a PC can't specialize in a fighting technique relying on an item he's probably never even heard of.

Obviously, you don't have to agree with me. But consider that the game will be played by many people, and I hope I've at least helped you understand what I'm looking for. Finally note that it's much easier to restrict the item list further than it is to open it up: the game has a fine mechanism for this, inherent bonuses. If you don't like those, then it'd be easy enough for wotc to come up with a item-light alternative (similar to now, but more focused and better for not having to cater to everyone), but it's very hard to go the other way. As you say, WotC publish some items that aren't OK to mass craft or aren't OK in all parties: but amonst all those thousands of uncommons, how the heck are you going to find them? The DM's going to have to hand-check character sheets again... not having to do that was one of the nice things in 4e, pretty much everything's non game-breaking.

Think of it in terms of service provided: WotC could label their items with a warning saying "may need player restrictions" on the items that need em. But that's not what they've done: they just labeled everything "restricted" and then made a few explicit exceptions. So now, what should I do? Just swallow it and lose all those items - or allow em (99% are fine), and make exceptions?

It's sunday evening here, and I'm signing off for the week, but I hope you see that if you like items to be part of the emergent in-game reality, the way the item rarity was introduced just sucks.
 
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Balesir

Adventurer
Daily item restriction isn't a restriction on individual items, it is a restriction on the character's number of item uses, so I don't actually see how it relates to any particular item. Daily item restriction was a bad rule, but one that was required in order to allow CHARACTERS to function properly in an environment where the players could pick and choose their item daily powers freely.
Well, it's a rule to limit the range and quantity of magical item power available to the party. Such a rule is required, whether the players can pick and choose their item daily powers or not. Rarity has a rule for it, too - a whole plethora of rules, in fact. Those rules just boil down to "whatever the DM thinks is OK", subject to X number of uncommon and Y number of rares.

I think the problem here is the whole idea that every PC needs an array of items. I don't think this is true. I think character concepts work fine on their own. A perfectly good charging barbarian can exist for instance without needing horned helms, badges of the berzerker, rushing cleats, and a vanguard weapon.
You're right - there is absolutely no need for a PC to have any magic items at all (if you use inherent bonuses or otherwise make allowance for the "enhancement items"). But nor is there any need to substitute in a clump of DM doggie treats; what purpose do they serve?

Character design is part and parcel of D&D 4E; players don't roll randomly for feats and powers, why should they have their characters' tools and equipment dictated to them?

You guys may have set your expectations there, but I don't think this kind of thing is genuinely required at all. Once you don't simply have free access to all of these items then actually acquiring ONE (or eventually more) of them becomes a real genuine valuable goal.
Why is this needed? There is a disconnect, here; it's true that magic items as a player resource/design element are not required, but that does not mean that they are required as a DM biscuit barrel. Neither is required - but I know which I think is more fun and functional.

Except the 3.5 masses of CLW wands were EXACTLY a huge problem. They are a vastly meta-gamey heap-o-nonsense. In fact the entire 3.5 crafting system ended up reeking of meta-gaming.
3.5 was, along with most earlier editions, a game built such that it encouraged a gamist focus in play but could not cope with the ramifications of that. It tried so hard to "make sense" of the senseless that it became brittle to the point of not even withstanding a glance, and yet was essentially unplayable unless you took advantage of the crazy stuff.

The 4e crafting system likewise where the object was what? To fill in the checkboxes of some optimum build? That to me is a horrible set of motivations to run a game on in general. I want the players engaged in doing things for STORY reasons, for reasons that are related to the inner life of the character, not because the game mechanics happen to dictate that X, Y, or Z combination of items means you can pump out more damage, etc.
And yet the players in my game manage not to do this. Just like whether or not a DM is a "bad DM" does not depend on whether they have control of magic items entering the game or not, whether a player is a balls-out optimiser is not related to whether or not they can make or buy magic items. The player can pick items to optimise - or to support a character visualisation and concept. The same applies to all the rest of their character build; allowing them or disallowing them to pick their items (within the necessary rules criteria) is not going to change that, substantially.

I mean, yes, I can imagine a character concept where a character is obsessed with the need to say squash his enemies with the utmost effectiveness and you could sort of justify that, but that isn't the majority of characters in most games.
A few players will doubtless choose to play that character in all games. The vast majority won't (although any adventurer that wants to live for any length of time will need to be at least moderately professional about their gear). Whether or not the player may select magic items won't change this; selecting magic items for their characters doesn't force a player to optimise any more than the ability to select their character's powers or feats does.

Well, it is inarguably true that artifacts CAN fill that kind of slot, but they carry a lot of other connotations. I think it is a legitimate need to have a grade of items without all the baggage of being an artifact that is still under DM control.
What baggage? I really think that baggage is in your mind. I am aware what artifacts were in previous editions - 4E is not one of those editions. Atrifacts not only can but should and were intended to fill that slot; reading the 4E rules for artifacts makes that pretty darned clear, to me.

[MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION], yeah, we have different concepts. It isn't so much to me a matter of I want the players spending all their time exploring stuff that I've come up with. It is that we don't want to spend our time on the whole very meta-gamey constant searching around for that next +1 or playing accountant all the time.
Then why not trust them not to do so? This is a stereotype that I simply don't recognise in my players at all. Do the players think about their builds in mechanical terms - yes, sure they do between runs. As a downtime activity. During actual play I hardly ever see them do so; they are much too absorbed in the situation and what neat ways they can find to screw the bad guys over or find the princess or otherwise win the day. There is also character expression and inter-character banter (during combat as well as outside it). There is in-character speculation about "what is really going on". There is in-character boasting and posing. There is out-of-character kudos giving and high fiving (not literally - we're Brits! :) ) for particularly neat manoeuvres (again, in combat and out).

I don't see that a player's proclivities for any of this stuff is going to be swayed significantly by whether or not they get to pick the gear their character uses by comission, as well as by omission.

I mean the resource sub-game is a fun part of D&D, up to a point.
So why remove that fun from the game?

I just see it having gone way too far with having to track whether or not you used each item yet, plus tracking per-character daily item use, etc. Ugh.
I don't see the big deal. We use little glass beads - red for healing surges, silver for action points and blue for daily item uses. And poker chips for gold pieces. When a player uses an item daily power, they hand me a blue bead, just as, when they spend a healing surge, they hand me a red bead. Simple and elegant (of which more later...)

You're probably correct, you could implement a whole bunch of different tweaks to the system which HOPEFULLY combined together might deal with the issues surrounding items, but at the cost of now I have to track not only daily item uses but which ones are also character item daily uses and some are and some aren't?
We already have item properties, item encounter powers, item at-will powers, item recharge-with-a-healing-surge powers, item recharge-with-an-action-point powers and whatever else. What's the biggie with one more type?

I don't think rarity was a 'lazy' at all. It was an ELEGANT solution. In the software engineering world we have a sort of a saying which is that laziness is a virtue. In other words the elegant minimalist solution, the one that perhaps requires a bit more work up front to come up with but makes things simpler and easier down the road is often the best. It also has a connotation of practicality to it. Don't overcomplexify things to achieve dubiously useful ends. IMHO in that sense rarity is a 'lazy' solution, one that is both minimally complex to implement and minimally complex to administer in play.
I am very well acquainted with the concept of "elegance" - it was used in mathematics before it was ever a concept in software engineering (in fact, probably before software engineering was even a concept). My problem with item rarity is, in part, precisely that I think it is extremely inelegant.

Elegance, in mathematics as in software engineering, implies a solution that is at once simple and effective; effective beyond the effort required to implement it, you might say. Item rarity is simple enough for the designers, but it is far from simple for the DM and it is far from achieving the task it should be achieving in the rules. It is "elegant" in the same way that a software tool that makes the user perform all the calculations him- or herself would be "elegant". In other words, not at all, in my view.

"Item Rarity" hides a whole mess of complex rules, guidelines, prejudices, preferences and considerations that it just lumps together as "DM judgement". Within those guidelines and considerations are some things that are necessary to make the game run reasonably smoothly, and some that are pure matters of taste. A truly elegant set of rules would cover the first category here explicitly and simply, while leaving the latter category open to the game groups to decide. "Item Rarity" fails spectacularly in the first of these tasks, while limiting the decisions about the second to the DM, unnecessarily.
 
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pemerton

Legend
I don't see DM control as a good remedy for items that cause issues when spammed. I don't see it as "elegant" in the least - pretty much the opposite, in fact. It adds "heavy-handed influence over character design" to the DM's core role in 4E of "setting up fun, fair and interesting challenges for the players", both compromising and diluting the DM's effectiveness in one fell swoop.

<snip>

We're back to "mother-may-I" and the 'game' of influencing the DM instead of playing the darned game.

<snip>

My comments are those of a DM who was sick of the old game of "whoever can butter up the GM best wins" reality of dysfunctional gamist systems (including, but not limited to, earlier editions of D&D).

<snip>

I came to realise that finding such stuff came down to either (a) the GM has included stuff in the campaign by either random methods or their own preferences (which, as a player, amount to the same thing), so finding it would be dumb luck, or (b) the GM had included it because I wanted to find it, in which case why not cut the crap and just let me have it, since I'm now just the equivalent of a performing animal, jumping through the right hoops to get what we have already established I can have. Neither case adds to the fun, for me, any more.

<snip>

Bad players assuredly exist, but taking away their candy and saying they can only have it when mother says they can will not fix their immaturity.
Great stuff - can't XP you yet, however.

One of the key attractions 4e has had for me is that it gives up on the traditional D&D balance and player control mechanism of "let the GM do it as an ostensible part of setting and scenario design" - in relation to class abilities, alignment, and treasure, among other elements of the game.

Reintroducing that sort of thing isn't an improvement to the game, in my view.
 

pemerton

Legend
From a fluff perspective you can't easily achieve a setting where magic items aren't a commonplace commodity. Higher level PCs can simply churn out 100's of instances of lower level items. Even if this isn't something the PCs want to spend their own treasure on you can't really justify any sort of low availability of lower level items. The only thing you can do that logically makes sense is to make low level items almost worthless, but that doesn't work either because low level PCs need good interesting items that are effective for them at the levels they can acquire them. Every garden variety NPC bad guy that has any possibility of being able to craft items (and it is hard to see how many of them wouldn't) would logically festoon his henchmen with useful googaws.
Am I the only GM who regards item level as primarily a metagame notion?

The other constraint you mention - the crowding out of a variety of daily items by the daily item limit - is one that I can see the logic of. But the one I've quoted seems, to me, to be a problem only if a certain simulationist logic is applied to a ruleset pretty clearly not intended to be used in that fashion.

(Just read Eamon's post below yours - who goes the opposite way in responding to your two points - there's just no pleasing some of us posters!)

we don't want to spend our time on the whole very meta-gamey constant searching around for that next +1 or playing accountant all the time.
Then don't. Are you saying that the typical player, if given the chance of optimising his/her items, will be unable to stop him/herself from doing so, and needs the GM to step in and prevent this weakness of will?

Heck, I run a wishlist game and three of my players haven't submitted wishlists because they're too busy doing other stuff when we play and can't be bothered between sessions!

This is making me wonder whether the rarity system isn't an idea with, perhaps, some relevance to tournament (or otherwise highly competitive) play that is being foisted on the game as a whole.

If I actually found this to be a genuine problem in practise I would just define some item daily powers as "Daily but does not consume a daily item use". Easy, elegant and a minimal change.
There is an item that does this, in effect, in the PHB: the basket of everlasting provisions.

a DM needs some control over the game, as he is basically laying out the story to tell
the DM has a story to tell
story has to be an emergent property in any roleplaying game, as far as I can see. If the story (as opposed to the plot, which is the setup that makes a story likely to happen) "belongs" entirely to the DM then they would be better served writing a book, script or screenplay. Story in RPGs comes from the alchemy of DM and players.
I'm definitely with Balesir on this one.
 

I don´t disagree with him either... but the DM has to lay out the scene mostly... the more unput from the player, the better the story of course...

If you are playing in an enviroment that should make it difficult to gain access to water and such (as in Dark sun) and some player comes at the table with an item that susatins the whole party... then there is no point in telling THAT story...

so the DM, who puts the effort into laying out the basic is :):):):)ed up, because a player insits on his right to have any item he wants, then something is wrong... so you need to have a last word on anything as a DM...
 

Balesir

Adventurer
If you are playing in an enviroment that should make it difficult to gain access to water and such (as in Dark sun) and some player comes at the table with an item that susatins the whole party... then there is no point in telling THAT story...
Sure, but this is quite a different case. The world setting would not exist with the water-generating items, so they cannot exist. It's not that "they are a part of the world, but you can't have them unless I say so", it's "they are not a part of this world, because the world would not be the way it is if they existed, here".

As a picture of this, I thought the "old" character builder handled this just about perfectly. You could set up a "Campaign File", in which every single character relevant game-element was listed with check boxes beside each one. You could un-check the box on every item that did not exist in the world setting you wanted to play. One of the little things that made it a good tool.

so the DM, who puts the effort into laying out the basic is :):):):)ed up, because a player insits on his right to have any item he wants, then something is wrong... so you need to have a last word on anything as a DM...
I don't even think this is a "DM needs the power" thing. World setting definition can just as well (maybe much better, in fact) be done with significant input from the players. That way, you ensure you will get a world they will enjoy playing in, as well as a world the DM wants to run.
 

Of course, if the players help, they have a say in what is allowed and what not... and the CB custom campaign was a great tool...

But in the end, it still comes down to the DM...
 

Of course, if the players help, they have a say in what is allowed and what not... and the CB custom campaign was a great tool...

But in the end, it still comes down to the DM...

Right, and just to clarify...

I don't think much of the whole "DM's will be control freaks" notion. I've played a lot of RPGs with a lot of GMs (though honestly I probably 'trained' a lot of those GMs) and I haven't really seen a whole lot of that issue. I've seen situations where the players and the DM needed to get their heads in the same space regarding what sort of game it was, but the answer to that wasn't to put all the responsibility on either one side of the table nor the other. Regardless of what the rules say both sides have to work out a way to get on the same page. While I can certainly imagine, and have heard plenty of stories about, DMs who can't manage that and try to just impose their way of doing things by fiat, I find that to be pretty rare in reality.

However, each side of the table has different dynamics driving their approach to the game. It CAN be helpful to have the DM be able to define the options the players will be exposed to. I don't think having the DM need to go through the entire item list and decide at the start what is and isn't going to show up as player resources is very practical. Sure, in theory you can go through CB and check checkboxes, but no DM is going to know ahead of time exactly what all that list needs to be.

I find that the default limited accessibility policy is a good idea. It relieves the players of the temptation to meta-game so much. I find all the talk of 'doggie biscuits' and 'mother may I' to be hmmmm, I'm not sure what the proper adjective is. Lets just say I'm unimpressed with that. RPGs are a collaborative effort. Granted there are people who don't understand that, but whether or not items are a resource the players simply have control of or that the DM has control of isn't going to really change anything about that. If rarity can fix some issues with the mechanics of the game, which I believe it does, then it is a good idea.

You can say 'players can police themselves' but my experience is they are always tempted to play the optimization meta-game, and I think it is largely a meta-game. The DM OTOH is generally not subject to the same temptations.
 

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