Pathfinder 1E Pathfinder: How Should it Handle High Level Dependence on Magic Items, ie the "Big 6"

Pathfinder: How Should it Handle High Level Dependence on Magic Items, ie the "Big 6"


In a standard game IME, if you hand out 'too powerful' sword or armour, the spellcasters insist it gets sold and the money divvied out to everyone to buy stuff.
Fighter: Hey, it's Kas' sword! My very own artifact weapon, kewl!

Wizard: Sorry, you don't deserve that. We're going to sell it and divide the proceeds.

...who plays like that? If the fighter can kill stuff more efficiently, that helps the entire party out. No group would throw away a powerful item that's directly useful to them.
 

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The "Big 6" items are about as dull as dishwater, and it's a real shame that characters in 3.5 need them to keep up. I absolutely think #7 is where the game needs to go-- make power more of an inherent, rather than item-based aspect of a character. In my mind, magic items ought to be:
-Interesting-- nothing that simply raises stats or makes hitting easier
-Nuanced-- versatile and helpful in a variety of situations
-Few-- no more than two or three per-character. Head/Arms/Body seems like a good breakdown to me, maybe a Feet slot in there too.

Pathfinder ought to give the PCs enough bonuses so that magic items are completely unnecessary to defeat appropriately-CRed monsters. Yes, that means that non-casters will have to get the hell buffed out of them, but that's something I'm honestly OK with.

4e does some things right by making nearly every item have a special power to use, reducing the items a character needs to pull their own weight (and can use at all), and making spellcasters equally as dependent on items as non-spellcasters. But +1 swords and +2 plate armor are still in the game, and still rather unexciting.
 

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