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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5583353" data-attributes="member: 27160">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.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?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.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.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.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.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.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! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) 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.So why remove that fun from the game?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...)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 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.</blockquote>

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