Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5580344" data-attributes="member: 82106">I pretty much agree with you Unspeakable <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The problem with 'players can make anything' is you simply have no flexibility. Either an item is on the menu for players to make, or it is an artifact level object. While you COULD simply call unusual and potent items all 'artifacts' and you could then assign ways for PCs to make certain ones as part of the story it is pretty useful to be able to create a category of items which are potent but not at the level of story items which artifacts rise to and which the DM can control the construction of. It isn't necessary for every unusual item to have concordance etc. Some very classic items like vorpal weapons are nice things to be able to slot into an in-between category.Now, could there be one less category than there is now? Perhaps. We could have common, rare, and artifact. Still, what's the harm in having the uncommon category? It allows the developers to provide more guidance to DMs where they can say "this is an item that it is OK to give away pretty casually, it won't cause any problems if the PCs find one now and then" vs the rare items "you probably only want this to show up once in your game". Generally you might allow the possibility that anyone might craft an uncommon too. They're hard to find, not generally on sale, and you probably need something more than just Enchant Magic Item and some residuum to make them, but it does happen. Even rare items might be Enchanted now and then under unusual circumstances that don't show up often. As for the notion that it is somehow 'patronizing' when certain specific things the players want to do have to go through the DM, that strikes me as ridiculous. There are ALWAYS going to be some things that the players don't have unlimited access to. Is it patronizing that the players can't decide to have a rule that lets them get 2x more than normal amounts of powers? Of course not. Nor is it patronizing that the DM controls artifacts. The whole argument doesn't work. As written the rarity system allows players to create items that they actually mechanically need. Beyond that there's no coherent argument that they have to be able to make other things automatically.The inevitable "any bad DM" argument that will be advanced next doesn't work either. It is no better than the "any good DM" argument. Bad DMs will be bad DMs, good DMs will be good DMs and regardless of where you draw the line on what can and can't be created you won't turn one into the other. All of these arguments also fail to address the extreme constraints on item design that the old crafting system created. Clearly having a broader range of potential item design choices in the hands of the developers is a plus and I don't see any compensating benefit to the old way of doing things. As for the 'Christmas Tree' thing... First of all 3.x and it's "go ahead and make anything" theory is an anomaly in the history of D&D. It clearly had negative consequences too. In AD&D there effectively was no crafting at all. Characters got what the DM gave them, period. If characters were decked out with items left and right that was a game style choice, it wasn't inherent to the rules in AD&D. 4e has a middle ground. If you want to deck people out with stuff, you certainly can. If you don't you now have a choice to not do that which is supported by the rules. In either 4e or AD&D the default treasure distribution rules will produce a fair number of items but at least there's a way to tweak that now, which didn't exist at all in 3.x or earlier in 4e unless the DM was willing to take away game elements that the players normally had access to.</blockquote>

Verification