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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1692550" data-attributes="member: 812">One of the primary reasons for the focus on items in D&D is because it's SIMPLE. One part of the fun of playing this game is watching your character get more powerful, and acquire new abilities (or improvements to old abilities) -- these give you more options in play as the game goes on.Rules on making items customized for individual characters will be more complicated than a simple list of progressively more powerful items. It's easier to just hand out +1, +2, +3 weapons than it is to come up with a weapon personalized to a character and figure out how THIS one is going to increase in power.I'm not saying it's impossible (heck, that's exactly what I do), but it's more work. And for lots of people, it's a bunch of work that is tangential to what's fun about the game.Items are simple way to "power-up". They're a finite bunch of slots that a player can plug new abilities into. They're a measurable, discrete way for DMs to hand out new goodies.Items are good for lots of games. You can pretty easily come up with logical holes in a setting that includes lots of them, but okay, if you can't tear logical holes in ANY fantasy setting, you aren't really trying. For lots of people, the magic item holes aren't very important.Not all games need the "power-up" mechanic, and even those that do can find other ways of going about it.I went low-magic for Barsoom in a couple of ways. There are almost no magic items on Barsoom. Those that do exist are artifact-level power, and generally in the possession of really powerful individuals. Likewise, there are almost no spellcasters -- one of the key conceits of Barsoom is that the best course of action for any spellcaster is total paranoia. Kill every other living thing that knows anything about magic, and you become unstoppable. So such spellcasters as exist are extraordinarily powerful (on a par with deities in other campaigns), and usually completely insane to boot.The result is a campaign that's sort of a cross between Edgar Rice Burroughs, with swashbuckling action that depends more on derring-do than magic assistance, and HP Lovecraft, with massively powerful forces that care nothing for "mere mortals".With the PCs squarely in the middle of it all. They hate me.</blockquote>

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