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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5023290" data-attributes="member: 4937">That may well be true, but to the extent that is true then they shouldn't complain that the magic items don't feel magical.  Those players and DMs made a choice - player choice over a magic as magic.Indeed.  The thing that bothered me about this is that one of the things that bothered me about 1st edition was the gold=XP mechanic pretty much required high level characters to find enormous staggering sums of treasure to advance.  When they removed this idea, I was a little upset to find that  they had replaced it in many players minds (and ultimately within the game balance itself) with the idea of gold exactly as you put it, as required 'supplemental character build points'.Ok, impossible was a bit too strong of a word, but in my defense I did qualify the statement with 'under these conditions'.  My guess is that you are making a commoditized item interesting by somehow departing creatively from the default conditions.   I agree.  And if you built your campaign on the back of 1e tournament modules and 1e 'adventure paths' (which by necessity force leveled the participants), then yes, you'd have much the same problem.If you'll permit me to descend with you, the answer is 'balance'.It is if it is fungible.  It wouldn't matter how much flavor you attached to something, if you hang a price tag on it and allow it to be traded away, all that creativity is just fuel for the auctioneer and its value is simply what its exchange rate for bonuses is.   It's not the price tag, but the ability to transform the item into something else.  You run the risk of creating complex items that the characters simply want to trade away for things of narrower scope and greater marginal utility.  Under the 1st edition rules, in the Henchmen loyalty table, one of the easiest ways to ensure that your retainers and henchmen would fight to the death for you was to bestow on them magical gifts.  You could use this gift to counter the fact that you often treated retainers as expendable, thereby under the rules of the game ensuring their loyalty.  This was one of those things the resident rules laywer made sure I was familiar with.  And if your retainers/followers survived, then you had one of the worlds only forces (per RAW) of magically armed mercenaries which mattered a good deal in battlesystem (if you did that sort of thing).  I'm not sure what part of that counts as 'DM's creative output'.</blockquote>

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