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Message: <blockquote data-quote="brassbaboon" data-source="post: 4970622" data-attributes="member: 66114">Heh, for whoever it was that suggested a discussion of the power of an item is not on topic for a thread about banning items, I can only say "wtf?" Isn't that the whole point of putting something on a banned list? How is it off topic to say "hmmm. you want to ban this, based on its power, I don't get that?"For those of you who think it is your "perogative" as a DM to ban things YOU find unfun, with no regard to what the PLAYERS find fun, I would suggest that you might be misinterpreting the FUNDAMENTAL responsibility of the DM role. Hint: It's not about YOU.Sure, I understand there are lots of opinions on this subject. I think I understand most of them (outside of "I'm the DM, I get to decide what is fun for my players.") I just fundamentally don't agree with the "I ban them because they are boring" argument. If the item bored the PLAYER, they wouldn't pick them. I think that's a sort of self-evident statement.I do find it interesting to hear the argument that magic items should be very limited in power because that makes the game more interesting and provides for better balance and more "options" for the players. From looking at the magic items Wizards created, I would have to say there is a powerful argument to be made that Wizards intentionally nerfed magic items for precisely that reason. But for some reason they slipped some reasonably powerful items into the mix. It should have been obvious to them and their play testers that doing so would make all their hard work in creating magic items with "interesting" but weak daily powers instantly obsolete, or else lead to DMs simply banning the new items. Again, I see this as a failure of the game design team, not the players or even the DMs.I can even appreciate the argument that the game is more "interesting" if three melee strikers each have armbands with encounter or daily abilities that give a limited but situationally useful boost so that one might add a 1d6 to an attack, another might make their attack electric and a third might get to shift as part of an attack. You could argue that such items provide opportunities for players to have to think tactically.That's all fine. My immediate argument back is that there is no reason the magic items can't do that AND be reasonably powerful.When you are at level 9 fighting solo monsters with 400 hit points, a set of arm bracers which provide a single daily or even encounter +1d6 to damage aren't "interesting," they are "asinine." If I were the enemy I'd laugh in the striker's face. "Ooohhh 3.5 more damage on your attack. I'm so scared!"This is why I think magic items are irredeemably screwed in 4e. They don't really "fit" into the whole 4e paradigm, which is built really around encounter and daily powers. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to come clean here and say I think the whole at-will, encounter and daily power mechanic is completely ridiculous and arbitrary, but that's what drives the game now).The trap Wizards is in with magic items is that they have "balanced" the game so precariously on the at-will, encounter and daily powers, along with the extremely limited sorts of feats (feats have their own problems, but that's for another thread I suppose), that introducing magic items at all creates a monstrous game mechanic problem.No matter what you do, if magic items have any real impact on the game whatsoever, that precarious balance you created is instantly unbalanced. I have no doubt that the game designers went to great pains to create mathematical models for all the classes and all their powers to balance them as well as they could. Not only against each other, but against the monsters you fight as well.So since a POWERFUL feat is one that grants a +1 to something (attack, damage, attribute, etc), then any magic items that provides even a +1 to something is instantly as powerful as a feat! OMG! So now what do you do? Well, you have to create magic items that aren't that powerful, so you create one-shot magic items which do daily effects. But OMG! Now you've given a character another daily power! That totally unbalances things! So you have to nerf even that. But what does that do? OMG! Now you've added another encounter power!...No matter what your magic item does, it screws your game balance all up.My guess is that this issue was a major bone of contention with the game designers, where people fell into camps, and those camps were probably the same camps you see in the players. There was the "make them powerful but rare and expensive camp" and the "make them as interesting as possible, but keep them limited" camp, and there was no doubt the "Crap, we screwed this up and there's nothing we can do about it now, so we should just make some that are fun" camp.As I said, I think the whole mechanic is screwed up and the reason magic items look so bad is because they expose the fundamental underlying faults in the overall game design. The idea that a simple set of bracers that give a +2 to damage on an attack could lead to this sort of hand-wringing and arguing is just obvious proof of the fundamental fragility of the system.ESPECIALLY when you realize that a major component of Wizard's marketing scheme is to constantly release new content with new magic items. It was INEVITABLE that the system would start unraveling. I would be willing to bet that there are huge battles inside Wizards where some of the game designers are saying "You're breaking the game just to sell more books!" While the marketing team is yelling back "You were supposed to create a system that was DESIGNED to allow us to sell more books full of magic items!"I'll continue to play 4e because I more or less have to. But if you don't realize that a game which can't handle the introduction of a magic item that demonstrably doesn't even affect the outcome of a single encounter significantly is a game which is fundamentally unsound, well, I'm not sure what to say.I would never have released this version. As soon as I saw it my immediate reaction was "those idiots have created an unmanageable, unscalable system that will break itself."</blockquote>

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