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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5581714" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I just disagree that this is the case. There are as many traps inherent in the original 4e magic system as there are in the rarity system, but the rarity system has fixed a number of problems.1) You noted above that there 'very few items' that are a problem There's a good reason for this, all the ones that were a problem were nerfed practically to irrelevance. The original system left VERY little room for developers to work in, it was a very constrained design space. Every item needed to be made such that any number of cheap copies of it wouldn't cause an issue. The result was bland items.2) Another constraint on the design space was the requirement that daily item uses be restricted to a small number. This means that players don't really have the option to use daily item powers which are not competitive. Only a narrow range of daily item powers are thus viable and many interesting powers which would be somewhat useful if allowed once per day are simply ignored because they now have to compete not only with other items that could go into the same slot, but the daily powers of ALL other items the character might have. This is too constraining.3) 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. The original system thus really only catered to a very narrow range of possibilities in any logical fashion. It also only allowed for a narrow and bland range of item designs and almost inevitably resulted in most PCs filling their slots with a few fairly optimal choices, leaving the rest as "stuff we didn't really want, but the DM gave it out in treasure, so we'll make do". Given the realities of the economics of making items in the first place ironically the characters were STILL mostly dependent on the DM to give them the good stuff anyway, but the system had to bear the disadvantages of the loopholes and limitations forced on it by the way it worked.I just don't personally think it was in any way a good trade off. I don't disagree that the existing inventory of items in 4e doesn't really exploit the current rarity system terribly well, but there is obviously a limit to what the dev team can put out in a given amount of time. Since books pretty well have a year lead time such is the situation. At least you have choices now, you can use the old system, you can use the new system and gain some of the benefits, and you can also draw up some better items to add to it (and there are some excellent lists online as people have pointed out). Finally, as a guy who's played D&D since the very earliest days of the game I don't actually think the whole 'bad DM' thing holds a lot of water. DMs managed to give out useful and interesting items in 1e AD&D when the system was MUCH more dependent on items as a way to distinguish your character and there was no such thing as player control and no such thing as a viable way to craft anything much either. Sure, there were people who had complaints against DMs WRT item distribution, but overall the system worked. At least the items were really interesting for the most part. Obviously no one approach is going to please everyone, but I think the rarity system took a huge step in eliminating some glaring flaws. Beyond that you can still do virtually the same thing with it you could do before, so it seems both better (to me) and is more flexible in general.</blockquote>

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