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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7388004" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, since the OP has stated he had intentions for the thread, and since I fully empathize with starting a thread on EnWorld hoping to provoke vigorous discussion and instead basically getting crickets, I'll try to inject some controversy into the thread.There are two things that make a magic item special.  The first is that it is unique.  That's actually in my opinion a fairly low bar, and it surprises me how infrequently DMs attempt to jump over that bar.  It's very easy to come up with unique and flavorful magic items, and I strongly encourage any DM to do that.  They don't have to be particularly complex.  You just combine a couple of minor abilities into the same item, give it some sort of unique appearance and you're done.   Any DM that can dress a dungeon should be able to make unique magic items.The second thing that makes a magic item special is as difficult as the other is easy: making a magic item feel magical.  In 30 years of playing around with what that means and how to achieve it, I came to the conclusion that the heart of making a magical item feel magical was the word 'numinous', which means both "having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity" and (although having a spiritual quality is not unrelated) even more aptly to this discussion "mysterious and awe-inspiring".   And, after some playing around I discovered I could instill the numinous magical feeling in the player by putting together two things, the uniqueness mentioned above and the presence of the unknown.   In other words, magic is this sense of some unknown unique quality to the thing.   That is conceptually easy.  All you have to do to achieve it is create some unique item and then in some fashion hide all the information about the item from the player for a lengthy or indefinite period of time.   During that period, the item will feel magical to the player.  The problem is that conceptions are easy but implementations are hard.  After creating a system for this and trying it out, it's almost impossible to pull off in traditional D&D play because hiding information from the player involves putting the burden of responding to the game state created by that information wholly on the DM.  So you can imagine that about the time everyone in the party has at least one and maybe a couple such "magic" items, the mental burden that this puts on the DM to keep track of what all those objects do whether actively or especially passively is just too high.  Instead of relying on the player to modify his character sheet and his resolution rolls accordingly or call out the presence of the item for you, you have to remember at all times what he's got in his pockets or what hidden powers his weapon has.  You probably could do that for one player in a campaign with relative magical scarcity, but even when you try to limit the magic items to a couple per character with parties of 6 or so it becomes impossible and any benefit you gained is lost in slowed play and mistakes in resolution by the DM.So what I do know is try to limit the number of magical items that I'm actively trying to make magical to just a couple per party.  But even that can be problematic in play.  Although I'm fairly happy with the current situation in my campaign, I do admit that the presence of a couple of these big magic items as story elements do unfairly draw spotlight to the players that have them and you have to be careful to not let those magic items take over play too much or create too much envy or other friction in the group.</blockquote>

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