NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6016669" data-attributes="member: 996">It's hard to get away from, though, since it's endemic to classic D&D.  Classes used to be fixed progressions with very few choices, character development was often little more than the magic items you picked up.  Pick up a Helm of Brilliance and a Flaming Sword and you're very different from the guy with a Cloak of the Manta Ray or the one with the Ring of Invisibility and Boots of Elvenkind.  3e just moved that character development more to the player side, with more coherent make/buy rules, even though it gave players a lot more choice in creating and leveling their characters.  4e did make items less central to character development - they were baked into the math, but they didn't define your character and you tended to cycle through them - and caught flack for it, leading to the 'character defining' 'rare' items in Essentials.Nod, but it's also endemic.  A fighter needs a hundred pounds of armor and weapons and the wizard just needs to be able to speak.  /Magic/ gear, even more so.  D&D magic is overwhelmingly powerful and available - far more so than in genre - and to keep up with what casters can do with their spells to any degree at all, the non-caster needs to be festooned with minor (and not so minor) magic items.While 4e with inherent bonuses comes pretty close to that, even it still used different weapon/armor proficiencies to help differentiate classes, and that kept the old problem of some classes being too armor-dependent, for instance.  :shrug: That is, it'd be possible to make such a game, but it would be even more "not D&D" than 4e was, and 4e was so "not D&D" as to require euthanasia for the good of the line.</blockquote>

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