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General Tabletop Discussion
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Two suggestions for handling magic items in 5e. (I'm sure these have all been said before but I haven't been keeping track.)
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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6163276" data-attributes="member: 1465"><p>But It could also be said that "it'd feel lame if you had this rare and powerful magic sword that was only +X and was otherwise identical to a mundane sword". There is no reason why a weapon must have both a bonus and some other special abilities (and keep in mind, that many - perhaps most - magic weapons in D&D actually have at-will abilities, not dailies), this is one possibility, but 3e strictly required a magic weapon/shield/armor to be at least +1 before having other properties, and 5e doesn't strictly require it but the list of example weapons still follows this idea for the majority of cases. Just like there are weapons with a + but no special abilities, there are weapons with special abilities but not a +. A weapon that deals e.g. an extra damage dice of a damage type, or that triggers something special on a crit, already IS better than a mundane sword, whether it has a bonus-to-hit or not.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The proportions are certainly important, I was about to post a similar comment to yours in my previous post, but then I didn't because it's probably more complicated than that... Because that +5 against +20 (from class) is on one hand 1/4th only, but on the other hand the whole game scales up somewhat, and it's still a bonus against a d20 roll.</p><p></p><p>I don't want to derail the thread on discussing this, but IMO that bonus-to-hit is (like you say) quite more valuable in 5e's bounded accuracy than it used to be in previous editions. This is another reason why IMHO they should really try to avoid so many examples of weapons that offer special abilities and <em>also</em> a bonus. You don't need that bonus in 5 as much as you needed it in 3.0 (where the game assumed everyone got +N weapons at certain levels) to "make the game work as intended", but at the same time having a bonus-to-hit would be more valuable, so I'd be as stingy as possible with them.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 6163276, member: 1465"] But It could also be said that "it'd feel lame if you had this rare and powerful magic sword that was only +X and was otherwise identical to a mundane sword". There is no reason why a weapon must have both a bonus and some other special abilities (and keep in mind, that many - perhaps most - magic weapons in D&D actually have at-will abilities, not dailies), this is one possibility, but 3e strictly required a magic weapon/shield/armor to be at least +1 before having other properties, and 5e doesn't strictly require it but the list of example weapons still follows this idea for the majority of cases. Just like there are weapons with a + but no special abilities, there are weapons with special abilities but not a +. A weapon that deals e.g. an extra damage dice of a damage type, or that triggers something special on a crit, already IS better than a mundane sword, whether it has a bonus-to-hit or not. The proportions are certainly important, I was about to post a similar comment to yours in my previous post, but then I didn't because it's probably more complicated than that... Because that +5 against +20 (from class) is on one hand 1/4th only, but on the other hand the whole game scales up somewhat, and it's still a bonus against a d20 roll. I don't want to derail the thread on discussing this, but IMO that bonus-to-hit is (like you say) quite more valuable in 5e's bounded accuracy than it used to be in previous editions. This is another reason why IMHO they should really try to avoid so many examples of weapons that offer special abilities and [I]also[/I] a bonus. You don't need that bonus in 5 as much as you needed it in 3.0 (where the game assumed everyone got +N weapons at certain levels) to "make the game work as intended", but at the same time having a bonus-to-hit would be more valuable, so I'd be as stingy as possible with them. [/QUOTE]
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Two suggestions for handling magic items in 5e. (I'm sure these have all been said before but I haven't been keeping track.)
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