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.
