Stock magic items are not special

[Crothian]

If there are 4+ players who "act like this" and have a good time, and one DM who acts some other way and is miserable, who's ruining what for whom?

Well, now we are just setting up specific examples to get a specific answer. In the end it doesn't matter who irt ruining it for whom, all the matters is that the group realize they either need to talk it out to fix the problem or disban.

 

[Pbartender]

Tales of "the Beast of Borgonia" that stands 10' tall, wields a tree for a club, and demands a toll from all who pass along its road kind of falls flat when the PCs kill it like any other ogre. But when that ogre shrugs off the fireball they tossed at it, the *Players* are as impressed and worried as their characters are.

Remind me sometime to tell you about the time my players ran across a Pseudonatural Giant Squid.

Description can go a LONG way to startling players. It's a trick I often use... Keep the mechanics for a spell or monster exactly the same, but describe it in a completely different manner. For example, here's a verbatim account of something that happened at my gaming table a few months back:

My players once ran across an orc shaman. While the characters tangled with his bodyguards, the shaman pulls out his ceremonial dagger, looks at the party fighter and swipes the knife through the air in front of him. On the other side of the battlefield, more than eighty feet away, the fighter can feel a long knife cut open up on his chest, beneath his armor... With no visible marks on his armor at all! A roll of the dice says the fighter just took 15 hit points of damage.

"Don't I get a saving throw?" the fighter's player asks.
"Nope."
"But you didn't roll a ranged touch attack," another player puzzles.
"That's right."
"From eighty feet away."
"Yep."
"And it went right through his armor."
"You got it."
Everyone looks a little worried.
"Wow," the wizard's player decides, "I've got to find out what that spell is and get a copy of it to scribe into my spellbook."




Little did they know that it was just a 7th level Sorcerer casting a Magic Missile spell. At the time, though, they were truly and thoroughly amazed.

 

[TemplarSaint]

Little did they know that it was just a 7th level Sorcerer casting a Magic Missile spell. At the time, though, they were truly and thoroughly amazed.

That is so evil. And brilliant! I can't wait to do something like this to my group.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I guessed it was Magic Missile by the third sentence. Then again, I had plenty of context. Knew it must be some commonplace low power effect.

 

[Doug McCrae]

In a typical D&D game I'd say the PCs have too many magic items to bother making them all special. I mean once you have a +4 adamantine flaming greatsword, a +1 greatsword really isn't particularly special. Why pretend it is?

 

[wingsandsword]

Yeah. I play in the FR, where this is very true. I like making some items more interesting than that anyway, I just can't do it all the time.

Here's a story like that from my game. I was randomly generating treasure for an orc lair, and I came up with a +3 Merciful Greatsword (quite a find for a 8th level party). I definitely equip the creatures with the treasure in their lair, if it's appropriate. However, a Merciful sword was definitely out-of-style for some Orcs. I figured they would try and use it when they found it, find out that it is magic, and then think it's cursed or defective because it doesn't really kill anything. So they cast it into their hearth in disgust (fortunately, a +3 sword is pretty hard to damage with fire), and when the PC's cleared out the mess hall full of orcs and used the obligatory Detect Magic, they find that something is poking out of the ashes in the fireplace that detects.

Rooting around, it's greatsword with the symbol of Ilmater (God of Mercy) on it's hilt, a handle wrapped in red cords, prayers in Celestial inscribed up the blade, and the ends are strangely blunt and rounded. They know something is up, so the party bard wonders if she has ever heard of anything like this, and rolls a 20+ on her Bardic Knowledge check.

So, I make up a bit of a story. This is the sword Ilmater's Grace, forged by the Warrior-Priest Eltharis the Kind 300 years ago so that he wouldn't have to kill to protect his monastery from marauding orcs. The sword was lost when his monastery was overrun by a band of rampaging orcs from the Stonelands (where the orc lair was) 250 years ago.

The PC's had a lot of fun with the story, and even though it was "only" a +3 Merciful Greatsword they remember and treasure Ilmater's Grace far more than any random magic item they have.

 

[Darkness]

I guessed it was Magic Missile by the third sentence. Then again, I had plenty of context. Knew it must be some commonplace low power effect.

Same here. Then again, I had plenty of context and have also done similar things before many times.

Here's a story like that from my game.

That's pretty neat.

 

[arscott]

In a typical D&D game I'd say the PCs have too many magic items to bother making them all special. I mean once you have a +4 adamantine flaming greatsword, a +1 greatsword really isn't particularly special. Why pretend it is?

Yeah, but do you make the +4 adamantine flaming greatsword special? Is it Dragon's tongue, forged long ago by the elder dwarven artificers to peirce the icy crystal heart of the frost jotun king? Or is it just a magic sword that lights on fire and overcomes hardness?

Magic swords common enough that your standard mooks have them don't need to be special. But if a magic item iss good enough that your players will covet it for mechanical reasons, they ought to covet it for story reasons too.

 

[BSF]

I guessed it was Magic Missile by the third sentence. Then again, I had plenty of context. Knew it must be some commonplace low power effect.

Yep. Like Darkness, I have also done similar things. Description goes a very long ways. Maybe it's that HERO system training in which the player had to come up with all the special effects and the mechanics were what you bought?

One of the more fun items I backstoried was a broken sword. The PC's found it in a tomb, buried with the (wight) leader that bore it until it was sundered and he fell. Althfang was the name of the sword and it was attributed with any number of powers through myth and legend. The party never identified it. But they did debate trying to repair it. In the end though, they decided to sell it to an established NPC that they knew collected unusual weapons. They took most of the sale and turned it into spell components for the inevitable PC Death down the road. .

You know, I don't recall any of the players in that campaign ever griping about their magic items. Most of them ended up with +1 or +2 equiv items by the end of the campaign, at 15th level. A few had +3 items. They all appreciated that the items had a name, and a history and they felt special for it.

 

[nameless]

Remind me sometime to tell you about the time my players ran across a Pseudonatural Giant Squid.

Description can go a LONG way to startling players. It's a trick I often use... Keep the mechanics for a spell or monster exactly the same, but describe it in a completely different manner. For example, here's a verbatim account of something that happened at my gaming table a few months back:

My players once ran across an orc shaman. While the characters tangled with his bodyguards, the shaman pulls out his ceremonial dagger, looks at the party fighter and swipes the knife through the air in front of him. On the other side of the battlefield, more than eighty feet away, the fighter can feel a long knife cut open up on his chest, beneath his armor... With no visible marks on his armor at all! A roll of the dice says the fighter just took 15 hit points of damage.

"Don't I get a saving throw?" the fighter's player asks.
"Nope."
"But you didn't roll a ranged touch attack," another player puzzles.
"That's right."
"From eighty feet away."
"Yep."
"And it went right through his armor."
"You got it."
Everyone looks a little worried.
"Wow," the wizard's player decides, "I've got to find out what that spell is and get a copy of it to scribe into my spellbook."




Little did they know that it was just a 7th level Sorcerer casting a Magic Missile spell. At the time, though, they were truly and thoroughly amazed.

I love this description! I might be in the minority, however, but many times this frustrates me. I have personally never seen a magic missile spell, so I have no idea what it looks like. My 7th level character has quite likely seen and experienced a few of them, it's only fair if he understands a bit more about what happened than I do. It probably calls for a spellcraft check, but unless the bad guy has a mechanical reason for having his spell be unidentifiable, the flavor should stay flavor and mechanics should stay mechanics.

I'm mostly peeved when it happens with templated monsters... a fiendish ogre still looks like an ogre, even though it's got weird skin or horns or whatnot. It's not a hulking brute that the PCs have never seen, it's a variation on something they've seen many times. I firmly fall into the camp that knowledge equals power, and it's not fair to take knowledge away from characters by making the player knowledge supercede character knowledge.

Sorry, rant mode off.