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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tehnai" data-source="post: 5778444" data-attributes="member: 59518">There's been a lot of noise on this board about magical items, the christmas tree effect and so on. I see a lot of people saying that they would love to bring back the uniqueness of magical items to D&D, how they miss the sense of wonder that would bring finding a magical sword back in the 80's, where every +1 seemingly made the biggest difference in the world.Then third edition came in with it's tight maths and concern for encounter balance, and treasure per level and so forth, making it nigh impossible for a GM to run a campaign with low magic without house-ruling the game in some way. 4e followed the same path, but was even more transparent about it.Thus, the way to remove reliability on magical items (especially the few "Necessary" ones, such as 4e's weapon/armor/amulet trio) is to remove them from the combat maths as much as possible. In my mind, this would best achieved by removing non-situational to-hit modifiers from magical weapons, non-situational AC modifiers from armor and any non-situational modifiers from amuletsSo a +1 sword would deal extra damage, which is always fun, but still rely on the wielder's skill at swinging it. It should also have something cool about it, such as providing light or what-have-you, but let us stay on the subject of numbers. Such a magical weapon could still give special modifiers to attack rolls, but only situationally, and thus not need to be part of the design math (let's say a +1 Assassin's blade would have a bonus to hit when attacking a target in the back, or a +2 Orc Slayer's Sword would get a bonus to hit against, obviously, orcs)Armor would have to take a similar path in the name of balance, maybe making the bonuses damage resistance instead. In short, the key to interesting magical items would be, in my humble opinion, to find a way to remove them from the designers calculations when building the game's system, and add them after the rest is built.Also, I want a Horn of Bubbles in the core books.</blockquote>

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