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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5023286" data-attributes="member: 58197">I've never seen anyone say this. Speaking as somebody who has in the past complained about the Expertise feats, my complaint is simply that the feat should have been built into the system from the beginning; we shouldn't have needed a feat-fix.Given that it wasn't built into the system from the beginning, a feat-fix was probably necessary.Back to the main topic of the thread: I don't think commoditized magic items are the problem with 4E, at least not by themselves. If the rest of the system were built differently, commoditized magic items could be left up to individual DMs to allow or not as they chose. Unfortunately, the problems in the system are greatly exacerbated by commoditization.The problem is magic items having a direct and substantial impact on the core math of the game. This means the core math has to account for those items. This in turn means:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The "best" magic items, the ones players agitate for, will always be the boring vanilla ones. Anything that boosts your core numbers is going to be strongly favored over quirky situational stuff.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Magic items have to come at a fairly well-defined rate and have a fairly well-defined power level, which imposes an extra burden on the DM to hand out loot in accordance with the system's needs. Furthermore, the items the DM is required to hand out (or provide money to buy/create) are the boring vanilla ones.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">To the extent that the system incorporates commoditized magic items, prices in the game economy will be dictated by the need to keep high-level items out of the hands of low-level players. Thus the ludicrous prices for epic-level items, which make it very difficult to set reasonable prices in other sectors of the game economy. (For instance, they had to implement a clunky fix to the component cost of the Raise Dead ritual, to compensate for the fact that what's difficult and costly for a Heroic-tier character is a minor expense at Paragon and chump change at Epic.)</li> </ul></blockquote>

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