New article Design and Development Article on Magic Item Slots

[Toryx]

I didn't make it through every page of the posts, but I thought I'd provide my own opinion for prosperity.

While my first reaction is, "So much for waving goodbye to the christmas tree," I've seen some strong arguments posted about the primary slots not being so christmas treey after all. I don't like weapons and armor having a +x requirement at certain levels, but as it's been pointed out, this is far better than the 3.x offering of stat bonus items.

I don't want to get rid of magic items completely...I have Iron Heroes for that. But I still would prefer that weapons and armor provided interesting effects instead of any +x bonuses. I always liked the flaming swords or the ghost touch armor...those kinds of effect contribute to the game without becoming a requirement. Making it so that my character has to have a +2 armor bonus by 9th to compete with the monsters and my companions is simply less enjoyable for me.

But I do appreciate the progress they've made.

 

[TwoSix]

How many magic items does it take to make a Christmas tree? It's obviously less than 9, but I'm wondering what the cut-off is.

 

[Dragonblade]

What I find amusing, is that they say the 'christmas tree' is a bad thing and characters will be 'less dependent on magic items'. Then the example PC shown has items in every single slot except a ring which at 11th level he barely qulifies for. (and he seems to think that is a bad thing. i.e. "Rings: None right now, sadly".)

doesn't seem to add up.

In an article about magic items and slots, its only natural that the sample PC would have a corresponding item in most of their slots. Posting a sample PC that had no items in an article about magic item slots would be ridiculous.

 

[Irda Ranger]

The goal is not to "make rules which everyone has a easy time to houserule" but making "rules which don't need to be houseruled". And in this regard the ring issue simply fails.

I see no need to house rule the Ring level limit. Ergo - it's a success!

I would have preferred characters to each have a slightly smaller cache of magic items, but from the sound of things, I'm easily going to be able to adjust the math.

This seems right. Thanks to the vast improvement in how items are handled in 4E, the math to make a "no +x items" game is trivial now.

At this point I'm more concerned about fighter type characters needing an item of flying, teleporting, etc. to be viable at high level.

Ditto. One of the main problems with high-level 3E is that the classes were not equally inconvenienced by the loss or reduction of magical items. Take away the Cleric's or Wizard's items and CR's only needed a slight downward adjustment. Not so the Fighter or Rogue. One flying, invisible opponent with a decent ranged attack and they might as well be 1st level as 15th.

I am hopeful though. The design team seems to be very aware of these issues and is taking a careful eye to make sure PC's are "challenged", not "gimped", when facing opponents they are not optimized to fight. I am also hopeful because of Tome of Battle, where some high level powers seem well adapted to addressing issues such as this.

 

[Zimri]

What I find amusing, is that they say the 'christmas tree' is a bad thing and characters will be 'less dependent on magic items'. Then the example PC shown has items in every single slot except a ring which at 11th level he barely qulifies for. (and he seems to think that is a bad thing. i.e. "Rings: None right now, sadly".)

doesn't seem to add up.

Would you test a car at 5mph ? or an airplane at umm whatever minimum velocity to remain airborne is ?

They are play testing and in this instance (the snippet about magic items) we were shown a character that *gasp* *shock* *horror* has some. I think it would have been much more difficult to illustrate the points being made without them.

Haven't we been much lambasted here at enworld for taking one part of one snippet of an article and assuming that that is how EVERYTHING in ALL the playtests are being done ?

You don't (just, admittedly there is room for this especially in this case) stress test a system by toning everything down to the bare bones and saying "yup with just the minimum expected things going on everything is fine la la la " In a case like this where you are trying to see where things break you amp it up as far as you can to see how twisted and torqued it gets. I don't think that was what they showed either. I suspect what we saw was perhaps just this side of "average" .

 

[Jedi_Solo]

What I find amusing, is that they say the 'christmas tree' is a bad thing and characters will be 'less dependent on magic items'. Then the example PC shown has items in every single slot except a ring which at 11th level he barely qulifies for. (and he seems to think that is a bad thing. i.e. "Rings: None right now, sadly".)

doesn't seem to add up.

To me it adds up perfectly. In playtesting you want both extremes. This is one of them. Now... if every character in every playtest has every slot filled then there would be a problem. As of now we really have no way to confirm if this is the case or not (people up thread have said there was a report where a 10th level character had no items. I don't recall it but I don't read every playtetst report.)

In an article about magic items it makes sense to list magic items. Why they didn't list multiple characters for the example is anyone's guess.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Given that 4e is still a d20 game, I fail to see how NOT having a +2 armor is going to be acceptable by the standard rules. +2 armor is the equivalent of a 10% miss chance in most level appropriate cases. What could they possibly do to the system to make that not so?

This means that a character is going to get hit 10% more often and take 10% more damage, etc.

Given the wildly diverging possibilities in character builds, I think that a difference of 2 points in AC is hardly going to be enough to completely throw off the viability of that character in the midst of a standard 4 player adventuring party at that character level. In one party you might have a high dex ranger wearing light armor for your front line fighter. In another, you might have a plate armoured dwarf. The difference in AC between those characters in 3rd edition is going to be significant, much more than 2 points. Why should the differences be that much different in 4th edition?

This has less to do with character viability than monster survivability / viability, I think. Combat Balance is going to be based on the average AC, HP, Attack, etc of your players. 4th Edition will tie that to level and keep everyone within about the same neighborhood as a base line. The cap on magic item bonus I think is meant to be an advisor of "Ok, this monster will be effective against a party of these levels as long as the AC is not beyond X. Lets cap the modifiers to AC to keep it close to that".

I do not think this is a case of a character being hit 10% more often due to not having magic armour. I think this is more of a case of making sure that the monsters that the players face is not going to be trivial due to accumulated gear.

To Summarize:
- A 10% variance in AC is not significant when compared against other player equipment choices.
- You cannot assume that just because a character does not have magical armour that he is going to be automatically that much weaker than expected. The only think that a given character having magical armour tells you is that he is better than an identical character without it.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[ThirdWizard]

What I find amusing, is that they say the 'christmas tree' is a bad thing and characters will be 'less dependent on magic items'. Then the example PC shown has items in every single slot except a ring which at 11th level he barely qulifies for. (and he seems to think that is a bad thing. i.e. "Rings: None right now, sadly".)

doesn't seem to add up.

I do think one thing you're missing is that most people do, in fact, like magic items.

See the popularity of the Magic Item Compendium as an example. For all the naysayers of magic items, D&D players, and yes that even includes DMs, really do like magic items.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Seriously, isn't that going to be DM and campaign dependent?

However, in an upfront low or rare magic campaign, or with a DM who controls access to magic items more strictly, I don't see how you could get a Christmas tree.

We really don't need to have the discussion about the rules as written driving the expected playstyle do we? Again? Every single change we've seen has dredged up that argument.

Yes, individual DMs can always change things "back" to how they want them. Thanks for pointing that out... again.

You asked how we got to where we are and I answered. I'll say it again. If the "official" rules permit a particular playstyle, it is the nature of players to push that permission as far as possible. That's just how players think. In a larger sense, it is how human beings think.

Inch, mile, all that. I didn't coin the phrase.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Yes, individual DMs can always change things "back" to how they want them. Thanks for pointing that out... again.

I think I get what you're saying. I'll call it the "Prestige Class Effect." If something exists in the game, gamers will assume its presence in the game and want to play with it. Correct?