The Magic Item Compandium guidelines for equipping characters are great!

[Klaus]

I will be running a solo game for a friend, and he wants to play an adventuring archaeologist. So it'll be set in Eberron, and he'll be playing a Rogue (trading sneak attack for Fighter feats) with the Educated feat (all Knowledge skills are class skills). When time came to equip him, I turned to the recent Magic Item Compandium. And y'know, that book is great! The new way of equipping a higher-level character (the character gets 2 items of each level all the way down to 1st) works like a charm, and encourages one to take items beyond the tried-and-true stat boosters, rings of protection and cloaks of resistance.

As an example, here's what the equipment list looks like for the Rogue 6 I statted up (some come from Dungeonscape):

+1 easy travel studded leather armor, masterwork shortsword, light crossbow, masterwork thieves’ tools, Heward’s Handy Haversack, dust of dryness, healing belt, bracers of quick strike, replenishing skin, everlating rations, acid (2), acid neutralizer (1), antitoxin (3), collapsible pole, silk rope (100 ft.), hammer, 5 iron spikes, crowbar, superior hacksaw, climber’s kit, holy water (2), rubbing kit, twine (50 ft.), torch (5), lantern, oil (8), sunrod (2), 50 gp.

Kudos to the designers of the MIC.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Sounds good, and it looks like it addresses my biggest beef with how people view the wealth-by-level stuff.

 

[Agamon]

I love it. One of the best things about a great book.

 

[Remathilis]

Its taken some getting used to...

Mainly, I think its getting the notion that the normal "+1" items are higher level than I previously thought. I had no qualms of handing out +1 weapons to 3rd level PCs before. Now, thats a 6th level item! However, it makes more sense than I gave it thought for (and to be fair, a third level PC CAN still get a +1 sword, he just needs to beat a CR 6 challenge to get it!).

What I DO love is the speed of it. I've combined it with the Standard Adventurer's Kit (tm) from PHB2 and its made outfitting HL PCs a snap. Double so if you allow item conversion (2 lower = 1 higher). It also allows me to hand out some neat trinkets ever-so often that PCs wouldn't normally buy...

 

[Klaus]

For the example above I swapped quite a few higher-level items for lower level ones, and had a 3rd-level item open. I eyeballed a gp value for that, and started filling that with items taken from the "kits" in Dungeonscape.

 

[Henry]

I think the biggest shock, as Remathilis noted, is the toning down of the amount of magic the book advocates, and the assumptions of quantity over quality -- that is, lots more magic items, but the items themselves are a bit less powerful. Most DMs I've played with assumed up to HALF wealth on any one item - with about a quarter of the rest on support items, and the rest on potions, scrolls, Quaal's tokens, etc.

With this, it seems to assume that no more than 1/8th your wealth is in one item, and there's just lots more persistent items to have. Works for me, because, strangely, using these rules options would almost turn back the clock to the levels of magic I was handing out to my 1E and 2E groups...

 

[BOZ]

absolutely, the aspect of the book that first caught my eye!

 

[Kae'Yoss]

In general, the tables and other stuff at the end are almost better than all those magic items in it.

Treasure tables are so much better than the DMG ones, for example.