Reduced Magic Item Prevalence

[Banshee16]

I really like the idea the reduced number of magic items in 4E. Hopefully there's still a good variety.......it's just that the system will no longer be *dependent* upon characters having X amount of items to be balanced.

That to me, will be a huge improvement.

I guess this is a little of the Iron Heroes pedigree they'll get from Mike Mearls.

What would be cool is if 4E was developed with a "dial" that a GM could use, to control balance in the game, with a sliding variable equal to magic item quantity.....

Sort of like "if you want a high magic item content game, make X,Y,Z adjustments to encounters, XP awarded, if you want a medium magic item content game, make A,B,C adjustments, etc.".

There were some 3rd party companies that took low-magic approaches in 3E.....but never anything official that I can remember, from the actual creators of the game. Maybe it was in a book I didn't purchase, but I don't remember anything along those lines from WotC.

Banshee

 

[Cadfan]

I think the idea behind reduced magic item prevalence isn't necessarily about reducing the total number of magic items in the game. Its about removing the "must have" magic items.

A lot of monster abilities are designed to be used against a player who is assumed to have certain gear, like, say, a Cloak of Resistance +5 at level 20. If that player hasn't got that particular item of gear, he will suffer greatly when fighting CR 20 monsters. If you reduce the saving throw for the monster's abilities by 5, you can delete the Cloak of Resistance +5 and the game won't notice.

See? I think that's the animating philosophy behind removing magic items. Its not about removing the amount of items, per se, its about removing the generic items that do things which factor directly into your stats and are forgotten, but which you have to have because the game difficulty was calibrated on the assumption that you'd have them.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Its about removing the "must have" magic items.

I certainly hope that is the case! I'm not fond of items that do nothing but give bonuses (apart from armor and weapons), and I'd like to see more interesting and colorful items. I hope they are taking a page from the Magic Item Compendium, where the items may be somewhat limited in use, or have drawbacks, but allow you to do something cool, although only a certain amount of times rather than all the time.

 

[gizmo33]

I agree with you about magic items being ratcheted back. That's a really cool thing IMO.

I think it would be really difficult to come up with a scale for measuring the significance of magic items, though I can understand the usefulness of wanting to do so. In a system like 3E, how would you measure what the equivalent "level" was for adding a +2 Armor Class to one of the characters in the party? (In this case level would probably have to be a decimal value, like 4.2 or something) Granted 4E could be a streamlined system but I can't imagine it being so mechanical that such an approximation would be possible. I've never seen these other systems you're talking about though.

 

[Badkarmaboy]

I agree about the "must have" stat bump items. How boring is it to always obsess over the cloak of resistance, ring of protection...gah. I'd rather see some items that give you cool effects, modify the battlefield, etc.

 

[green slime]

I agree about the "must have" stat bump items. How boring is it to always obsess over the cloak of resistance, ring of protection...gah. I'd rather see some items that give you cool effects, modify the battlefield, etc.

Agreed. Its not the number of items per se, but certain items commonality

It would be far, far more interesting to see a greater variety of items, rather than have 6 characters all decked out with essentially identical items.

 

[Fobok]

I, personally, like magical items, and like to have them in my games. Usually, by level 20, every character in a group will have at least one very major item. But I totally agree on the 'pure stat boost' items. I'd like to see a wider variety of effects that can be used to build more interesting magical items, and having the game balanced so you don't need pure stat boosts to be effective.

 

[IceFractal]

Likewise, I be happy if they just factored the "must-have" items into the rules. Stat-boosting items? Just make the stat gain from levelling higher. Cloak of Resistance? Bump of base saves a bit.

Leave the magic items for things you couldn't normally do, like breath water or walk on walls.

 

[gizmo33]

A question though: how would you model something like Excalibur? Excalibur doesn't do anything unusual as far as I know, it just simply does what it does better. Granted, 50 such "Excaliburs" for each DnD character statistic is the stat boost problem that has existed. Maybe a rule that says that you can only have one enhancement bonus in play at a time. That, and increasing the magic item market prices (since the costs to create are circularly defined as being a function of the market value) would naturally reduce the number of items that characters would have.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Leave the magic items for things you couldn't normally do, like breath water or walk on walls.

Yes, this is exactly how I hope to have items in 4E. I do get so sick of magic items improving the invisible parts of a character like saves, ability scores, and giving stat bonuses.