Uncommon Items 5 or More Levels Lower Than You...

[Kingreaper]

... are treated as Common items. What do people think of this as a house rule to fix item rarity?.

The main purpose of the item rarity system is so that you can't stock up on uncommon items of lower level, to take advantage of properties etc.

In addition, for items such as weapons/armor/neck slot you can upgrade them to the higher level version.

IMO your house rule makes the whole item rarity system kind of pointless.

So, no, it's not a good fix.


A better fix? Make items that should be common (such as, oh, say Claw Gloves) common.

 

[eamon]

My fix: dump the rarity system altogether: all uncommon items are considered common and rares don't exist (i.e. are unique) - this doesn't remove rule 0, of course, though I don't expect to ever have to use it. Dump the new char creation rules and instead new PC's get wealth equivalent to the item creation rules (more flexible).

There may be a few items with abusable daily item powers, but they aren't common, and you still need to carry em, swap em, or hold em somehow, so even those aren't easily abusable. Let me put it this way: I've never seen it actually be a problem, outside of theoretic builds.

 

[RLBURNSIDE]

wait a minute,

aren't you supposed to get 1 uncommon or rare per tier, when starting a new character at higher level? Claw Gloves are sweet, so grab those for your heroic tier option : problem solved. Any DM who force a druid to play without the item that makes his character viable in combat is not really being reasonable. "By the books" in this case, is another word for obtuse. (IMO)

ps why ban dual war axe builds? They rock. But they are far from the most damaging builds out there. Seriously, if my DM nixed my favorite mundane weapon in the game just because it has a d12 base damage die (i.e. axes), I'd come back and use a +3 1d10 bastard sword in each hand and call it a day. It does more damage overall, if you look at the numbers. Or is it rangers the problem? Spiked chain wielding rangers, or even short sword users, are seen way more often in optimized ranger builds than dual war axes. At least by me. I haven't seen a single person other than myself on the boards who favors such an option, simply because Con secondary is a suboptimal choice for rangers in general, and you need heavy armor to compensate for having a lower Dex. Dex-secondary builds have lots of side-benefits than just pure damage, and that's the choice you make when you pick waraxes over bastard swords of spiked chains (as 90% of dual wielders end up using, anyway)

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

I banned war axes more from party balance.. the group is mostly sub- to barely optimal builds... and then there was the ranger.

While it was fun for him, I kept having to defend his character as being legal while everyone looked only at his dpr, and ignored his oft near death experiences [due to low ac]
It did not help that the other striker failed to gain sneak attack regulary due to his tactical choices.

Sent from my SPH-M900 using Tapatalk

 

[RLBURNSIDE]

but that doesn't address the problem

of rangers getting easy DPR. Even with two battle axes, he's probably still doing way more than the rogue, who doesn't have the wherewithal to achieve CA and get his striker damage. Also, do you disallow Iron Armbands? How about frost cheese? Even without those options, I bet a well-played or well-built ranger still kicks butt in the DPR department, given the circumstances.

You could also tell him that favoring axes requires him to wear heavy armor. Does he have masterwork scale? There are ways to up the effectiveness of tactics. Only reward XP for good tactics. Have a training session to go up levels where the rogue, in order to pass, needs to achieve CA every round of the training in some way or another, and avoid getting hit. Sort of like a skill challenge. Once the rogue's DPR goes up because he learned how to play the game, you might want to revisit the war axe nerf, because +1 dpr over battle axes really won't do much. The extra feat can and should be spent in that case to increase his DPR in some other way, such as Lethal Hunter, Prime Punisher, or any of the other myriad ways to do it.

Ahhh, the fun of playing in a group with unoptimized/poorly played characters pointing fingers at each other, eh? hehe. I don't envy you, as a DM.

 

[Mika]

Claw Gloves would not present this problem if they either scaled up as many other magic items do or were common items. While you are at a level where you would not waste a magic item pick on a 4th level item, a 14th level improved version of this item would be another matter. Alternatively, since this item does not seem to present any of the problems that the rarity system was designed to handle, making it a common item would make it available to any shapechanging druid with the cash to spare for it.

 

[eriktheguy]

You can add me to the 'players ask the DM' boat.