D&D 5E Trail and error item identifying
- Thread starter slobo777
- Start date
Patryn of Elvenshae
First Post
Absolutely all of this.Trial-and-error can be fun. Occasionally. Maybe the first three or four times. After that, it just gets old, IME.
Things I don't want nowadays...
If we can avoid that? Groovy. Otherwise, it's just not fun as a default way of dealing with new stuff.
- Remembering on my end to add +X to attack and damage while keeping it mysterious from the player
- Keeping track of unknown magic items and telling players to refer to them as "Magic Sword you found in Room 17 of The Cupcake and Pastry Dungeon"
- Spending half an hour in a game of 20 questions every time the party finds a magic doodad
- Spells requiring 100 gp pearls and/or a wizard in order to be able to tell basic information I'd rather not keep track of.
-O
I view identifying magic items by trial and error as a page from the same book that has "Standard Party Procedures When Encountering A Door." It was fun while I was writing it, the first time, but eventually it just gets old and formulaic.
At this point, it's very old and formulaic.
From the big book of "Gotcha!" DMing, naturally, next to the Cloaker, the Mimic, and those living walls and ceilings that crushed you.
"Hey that treasure that I presented as treasure and that you had every reason to believe was treasure? Wasn't treasure. Have fun with that!"
Mattachine
Adventurer
A little bit of "Gotcha" is fine, a very little bit . . .
D&D is a game for me, and the players get to know more information than the PCs. So, if they pick up magic armor or weapons, then I simply tell the player the "plus".
If the magic item is simply treasure, a little flavor text and description should be enough for the PCs to figure out what it does. If you try it on, then you magically know what the magic item does. That makes sense to me.
Only if the item's properties form an interesting mystery (such as part of an adventure) or make a specific plot point, would I bother hiding those properties.
The good thing about D&D is that each group (DM and players together) can decide how rules like item identification will play out.
It's kinda like folks that play Monopoly by RAW, and those that put money under Free Parking.
D&D is a game for me, and the players get to know more information than the PCs. So, if they pick up magic armor or weapons, then I simply tell the player the "plus".
If the magic item is simply treasure, a little flavor text and description should be enough for the PCs to figure out what it does. If you try it on, then you magically know what the magic item does. That makes sense to me.
Only if the item's properties form an interesting mystery (such as part of an adventure) or make a specific plot point, would I bother hiding those properties.
The good thing about D&D is that each group (DM and players together) can decide how rules like item identification will play out.
It's kinda like folks that play Monopoly by RAW, and those that put money under Free Parking.
Roger
First Post
Exactly! If a DM wants to discourage a certain behaviour, all he has to do is provide some disincentive. If he wants to discourage the identification of items by trial-and-error, for some reason, all he has to do is throw in a cursed magical item.
Cheers,
Roger
ZombieRoboNinja
First Post
Anecdote: One time someone in our group found an enchanted, sentient bastard sword. That particular DM never told us the details of what powerful magical items did, even with an Identify spell, so the player spent an entire campaign fighting with (and against) the sarcastic, whiny blade. When the campaign ended, the DM told us that the bastard sword's magic was just that it was kind of a bastard.
...ANYWAY, I think the 100g Identify spell is pretty lame. I think the Detect Magic spell along with an Arcane Lore check is the way to go - just scale the DC to the item quality for anything below Legendary. Legendary items and artifacts, of course, are revealed in exactly the manner the DM finds most convenient, but unless they're being especially sneaky or subtle anyone who can detect magic can probably tell they're exceptionally powerful.
...ANYWAY, I think the 100g Identify spell is pretty lame. I think the Detect Magic spell along with an Arcane Lore check is the way to go - just scale the DC to the item quality for anything below Legendary. Legendary items and artifacts, of course, are revealed in exactly the manner the DM finds most convenient, but unless they're being especially sneaky or subtle anyone who can detect magic can probably tell they're exceptionally powerful.
Yeah, but at that point the behavior the DM is disincentivizing is TRUSTING THE DM. The DM put the ring in the treasure chest/pockets/whatever. The ring had no obvious signs of cursing, or other clues the PCs might use to identify it. The PCs try and identify it. SURPRISE!
Do this a few times, and you'll find your campaigns dragging to a halt as PCs refuse to trust NPCs, ignore plot hooks as dangerous, refuse to go grab whatever crystal they're searching for since "it's probably cursed" and take dungeon exploration as an excuse to use overkill on every surface around.
It's not a good idea to get into "Gotcha!" DMing and adversarial relationships with your players, unless you really know what you're doing (perhaps some sort of one-shot clearly labeled as "Evil DM").
Always be a trustworthy DM.
GameDoc
Explorer
That's Epic.
tlantl
First Post
Trial-and-error can be fun. Occasionally. Maybe the first three or four times. After that, it just gets old, IME.
Things I don't want nowadays...
If we can avoid that? Groovy. Otherwise, it's just not fun as a default way of dealing with new stuff.
- Remembering on my end to add +X to attack and damage while keeping it mysterious from the player
- Keeping track of unknown magic items and telling players to refer to them as "Magic Sword you found in Room 17 of The Cupcake and Pastry Dungeon"
- Spending half an hour in a game of 20 questions every time the party finds a magic doodad
- Spells requiring 100 gp pearls and/or a wizard in order to be able to tell basic information I'd rather not keep track of.
-O
I guess that's the beauty of D&D if you don't like it or aren't in the mood to deal with it then don't.
Just tell them what the darned thing is and get on with it, but there might be days when it would add some color to an otherwise boring or routine adventure and could spice things up a little.
Sort of like salt, used sparingly it makes things taste better.
Roger
First Post
Only if they try to identify it using the method that we apparently really don't want them to use: trial-and-error.
Absolutely every other solution at their disposal to identify the cursed ring leads to no Gotcha at all.
I guess this could lead to the PCs deciding to never trust anyone again, but that seems like an overreaction.
Cheers,
Roger
It leads to the PCs learning "If we do things the DM doesn't expect/like we get punished." Then the game becomes less about "figuring out how to solve problems" and more about "figuring out what solutions the DM would approve of."
If you want to discourage them from solving the problem in a creative way you don't like, remove the problem and let all magic items be instantly identified. Don't give the players a problem, then punish them when they take a solution you don't like, ESPECIALLY if that's your idea of "teaching them." Ye gods. Talk about betraying your players.
Libramarian
Adventurer
These are pretty closely related when the DM is making up the problems.
So if your players come up with a solution you would never in a thousand years have thought of, what do you do?
Libramarian
Adventurer
Reward if it makes sense, punish if it doesn't.
Of course it's not actually punishment in the moral sense, because it's just a game. A better word is "penalize".
I think you should try looking at the positives of DM judgement, rather than just the negatives.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Numbers added in quote below, for reference...
Party finds a magic ring of unknown purpose. You note it as item #87 on your DM's treasury list, along with what it does; whichever of the players is keeping treasury notes it on her list as #87 - Ring. Then when a player reminds you "Hey, I'm wearing ring 87" you can quickly look it up and remind yourself what it does, if you've forgotten. The players can also put on their list any field-testing results they get e.g. "not flight or speed, not water-walk, might be water-breathe but nobody really wants to test".
For 3, above, most parties eventually develop a testing procedure once they've encountered various things items can do; this to me is no problem.
4 is used back in town when 1-3 fail.
That was 15 years ago, and the player still hasn't lived it down.
Trial-and-error field testing for the win!
Lan-"years ago I, in character as a so-called dumb Fighter, wrote our group's field-testing guide"-efan
For 1 and 2 above, item numbers are your friend.
Party finds a magic ring of unknown purpose. You note it as item #87 on your DM's treasury list, along with what it does; whichever of the players is keeping treasury notes it on her list as #87 - Ring. Then when a player reminds you "Hey, I'm wearing ring 87" you can quickly look it up and remind yourself what it does, if you've forgotten. The players can also put on their list any field-testing results they get e.g. "not flight or speed, not water-walk, might be water-breathe but nobody really wants to test".
For 3, above, most parties eventually develop a testing procedure once they've encountered various things items can do; this to me is no problem.
4 is used back in town when 1-3 fail.
In my game it was a feather bed, deep in a dungeon, that would not fit out the door of the room it appeared in.slobo777 said:
That was 15 years ago, and the player still hasn't lived it down.
Trial-and-error field testing for the win!
Lan-"years ago I, in character as a so-called dumb Fighter, wrote our group's field-testing guide"-efan
And what are the positives, exactly?
The players start to act more like how the DM wants, rather than in ways that they ENJOY?
This does not seem like a win.
Obryn
Hero
My point wasn't that I don't know how to do this. My point was that I don't want to do these.
-O
Roger
First Post
I agree. Entirely.
But, as far as I'm concerned, this thread is pretty much "Hey the PCs are doing something I don't approve of; how can I, the DM, make it so they don't?"
It may well be that I've misunderstood the OP and that isn't actually the question he's trying to ask; I'd be happy to hear some clarification from him.
Cheers,
Roger
Yes, that's the gist of it. But it would be good to have a solution that steers back to fun and genre-relevence, as opposed to player/PC punishment.
As a DM, I guess I don't enjoy "we've found some treasure, now let's do chicken impressions" in the same way as I don't enjoy "lets pause the game for a 15 minute discussion of WoW and Monty Python". Both are fun things to pass the time, but neither are really playing the game I want to play.
Magic items with a little mystery are good for me. So is simply allowing game mechanic or automatic identification (in 4E I just give players the item cards after a Short Rest).
5E seems to like the mystery idea by default, which is cool. It was definitely a fun thing to do in the first few years of play. However, as a jaded player/DM of over 30 years, I'll forgo the mystery element if there's a good chance of it turning to farce.
The question from the OP could be phrased as - what approaches are there, other than the slightly ridiculous example in the playtest document, to keep some genre mystery around magic items, and still allow for serendipitous discovery of item powers?
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