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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5023268" data-attributes="member: 3887">I'd say the 'problem' that 3e exposed was that quite a few players enjoyed commoditized magic items; which is to say they like having more control over designing their characters abilities. 3e is a hybrid class-based and point-buy system.Yes, just like Champions players are allowed and encouraged to spend their points to buy character powers. The difference is that Champions/HERO is upfront about being a point-buy system, and D&D 3.x kinda clouds the issue by referring to 'supplemental character build points' as 'gold'.Impossible? Horse-pucky! (should that be hyphenated?) A creative DM can make a commoditized 3.x item interesting (I did). Conversely, in the hands of a less-than-creative DM, scarce and non-commoditized pre-3.x items were uninteresting. I'm sure you've experienced this yourself, Cel. A lesson I learned from the classic 1e tournament modules. Also, while I hate to descent into tautology, but interesting things are interesting. Scarce things are not inherently interesting. And how does scarcity actually operate in fictional spaces anyway? A DM  might decree +1 swords are rare in his/her homebrew, but to most experienced gamers, they're commonplace. In and of themselves, how magical or wondrous can they be? (note you can replace '+1 sword' with any fantasy trope: dragon, elf, lost city, evil god, etc.). To an audience familiar w/the genre, virtually nothing is really scarce/rare. If you're going to impress them, it's going to come down to your presentation, your imagination. Accepting that's true --and you should, BTW-- the business of magic items becomes a non-issue. Magic will be as interesting as it's described, and in how creatively it can be used. Whether or not it had a price tag on it is irrelevant. In my experience, +1 swords were never cool, unless the DM went to great lengths to glom some non-canonical --ie, outside the rules-- coolness unto them, in which case, it wasn't the +1 sword that was cool, it was the DM's creative output.</blockquote>

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