Burning down the Christmas tree

[martixy]

Some off-hand remarks in the DM red flag (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?522235-Red-Flags-for-DMs/page27) thread made me ponder the Christmas tree effect.

I am not a big fan of it. Mind you, I don't want to present it as a problem. I don't have anything in particular against it either. It's a quirk of the system and a matter of subjective opinion. For me, I would like to mitigate its effect somehow.

One random idea I had is exempting some of the common item effects[see table, MIC p.234] from the multiple ability price increase and/or allowing them on detachable items - kinda like weapon crystals work. This eliminates some of the inflexibility of innate bonuses - say you find a headband with a cool new ability - instead of looking to enchant it with your old +2 Int bonus, you pop off the +2 Int crystal from your old headband and attach it to the new one. Admittedly it doesn't do much for the christmas tree, but it's a minor step in the right direction.

What more significant ways are there to cut down the tree?

[Gildedragon]

Have items grow in power (weapons of legacy style)
Make fusing 2 old items into a new one cheap
Increase the frequency of ability bonuses

[Pex]

Don't inflate the numbers. Don't have monster ACs be so high. Don't have DCs be so high. Don't have opposed roll skill modifiers be so high. Don't have monster attack modifiers be so high. Don't have monster saving throw bonuses be so high. When the PCs don't have to keep up with the monster Jones's, their need for lots of fiddly +1s and +2s to things will go away and so will their need of magic items that give them. Yeah, this sounds an awful lot like an advocacy of 5E's Bounded Accuracy. 3E/Pathfinder isn't built for that so as DM you'll have to work it in yourself. When the fighter player with only +3 Will finds he's still succeeding on a good number of Will saving throws and the rogue succeeds on hitting on a Natural 9 to get sneak attack, the players aren't going to be hunting for means to improve their odds.

[Manyasone]

I'm a big supporter of paizo's automatic bonus progression. So that helps in removing the neon from characters. I'm not a big supporter of the bounds 5th puts in the game. Gave up on wotc a long time ago. Might as well go playing 'meadows and bunnies'

[Grod_The_Giant]

The "big six" numerical bonus (magic weapons, armor, save boosters, ability boosts, and deflection/NA items) are easy enough to replace-- either use a bonus progression ("+1/2 level to AC, +1/3 level to attack, damage, and saves, and +2 to an ability score every ~3 levels, but not twice in a row" or something to that effect should get you pretty close) or do as Pex suggested and adjust the monsters directly. If nothing else, I do strongly suggest using something along those lines, because no-one really gets excited about another +2 Str.

It's the other stuff items do for you that's complicated. Things like needing magic weapons to affect certain monsters (DR/magic, or worse, incorporeal creatures). Or finding a way to fly. Or escaping grapples, or finding stealthy/invisible monsters, or dealing with mind control ,or all the other thousand-and-one problems that you kind of need magic to deal with. All of which hit low-tier characters the worst, for obvious reasons. Dealing with that is harder.

You can, of course, just stick to more potent classes. A Fighter and a Rogue might have trouble without magic items; a Warblade and a Factotum will be a lot better off.
You can continue to include non big-six items. I strongly support inventing Weapon of Legacy type items that grow in power as a character does and provide custom-tailored benefits.
I've seen the idea of "virtual WBL" before-- instead of earning gold in-game and buying items, you get an imaginary gold budget every level, which you spend buying/upgrading "magic items" that are actually just part of your character. You don't have a pair of Gauntlets of Ogre Strength and some Anklets of Translocation, you just have a +2 enhancement bonus to Str, and can teleport 2/day. That sort of thing.
Pulling in significant amounts of Incarnum, either via gestalting everyone with Incarnate or tossing out lots of bonus Shape Soulmeld/Open Chakra/Bonus Essentia stuff, should also work. It's a pretty big, flexible system, it's almost entirely passive, and it fills the same sorts of roles as magic items in a lot of ways. Especially the Incarnate list, which is heavily focused on skill boosters and defenses.
You can go nuts finding other ways to grant necessary capabilities-- hand out templates as rewards, grant SLAs, that sort of thing. That's what I did in my overhaul (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?357810-Chopping-Down-the-Christmas-Tree-Low-Magic-Item-Rules), at any rate.

[lylsyly]

You mean make it harder for players to win? SHOCKING!

Get them to play by an earlier editions rules, then see what they say (oh wait, they won't do that, that's HARD).

/end rant

[Fizban]

If you search the phrase "Christmas tree" you'll find several past threads of systems meant to replace it, and there's more before that phrase became popular. Pathfinder has their own bonus progression as well.

In the end, the most effective replacement for the existing magic item system is the existing magic item system. The more detail you put into a replacement, the closer it moves towards a pool of points used to just buy whatever you want, which is the same thing as a pile of gold and a magic shop. So the easiest fix is to just give people virtual gold that buys virtual items that are innate abilities.

[Endarire]

My solution as GM was just to give PCs money and the ability to buy or craft what they wanted. That generally worked well.

No one cared to do anything abusive, like planar binding for wishes, though we did have some fun with a Deck of Many Things.

[Jay R]

In the long run, the level of optimization makes no difference at all. I'm going to send monsters at you that will be hard for your PCs to beat. Give all your PCs +6 to hit, damage, saving throws and AC? The monsters will have them too.

[I was in a 2e game once when one of the players was trying to pull off an over-powered idea. The DM ended it - instantly - by saying, "Go ahead, if you want, but the next enemy you face will be doing it too."]

[martixy]

Hm... I suppose a big part of the tree is the idea of propping up lower tier characters via items.

I suppose I've got that covered somewhat(most of the houserules I got is stuff that preferentially buffs mundanes).
And I tied a lot of stuff to BAB - it nets you bonus dodge AC, and bonus feats and proficiencies. Cut down on the feat taxes, etc.

@Grod, just not quite willing to go on the level of your overhaul though(it clashes with my design sensibilities).

I suppose the better question is:
What defines the christmas tree effect?

Like, just the big 6 bonus types. And the necessity of propping up lower tiers. And... what else?

Weapon and Armor crystals help with modularly adding ghost touch. Perhaps the idea can be extended to overcoming DR and other situationally useful properties. Or potions for weapons and armor, to borrow from the witcher - coatings, I suppose is a better term. Single-use duration effects that cover rare situations.

[Florian]

"Burning down the X-Mass tree" and "Make magic interesting again" go hand in hand.
I think it´s a good idea to take the whole boring but necessary stuff that only boosts numbers and cover that via Automatic Bonus Progression. That should handle around 50% WBL.

For the rest of the items, I´d strip anything that´s giving a straight bonus and only leave the special qualities. That makes a Frostbrand or Cloak of the Manta Ray interesting again.

[Grod_The_Giant]

In the long run, the level of optimization makes no difference at all. I'm going to send monsters at you that will be hard for your PCs to beat. Give all your PCs +6 to hit, damage, saving throws and AC? The monsters will have them too.

The monsters are already written with the assumption that PCs are getting bonuses to hit, damage, saves, AC, and so on from magic items. (For example, high level monsters have higher attack rolls, despite there being few mundane ways to boost AC.)

As for the original point... The "Christmas tree effect" refers to the tendency of high-level characters to be draped head to toe with a king's ransom of shiny magic items. I'd say that an automatic bonus progression goes a long way towards fixing that, especially if you include a few non-numerical defense boosts on there. (Rerolls, perhaps, or auto-recoveries). Then, as Florian said, you can only pass out interesting items, and you can depart more from the WBL tables without messing up balance.

[Manyasone]

"Burning down the X-Mass tree" and "Make magic interesting again" go hand in hand.
I think it´s a good idea to take the whole boring but necessary stuff that only boosts numbers and cover that via Automatic Bonus Progression. That should handle around 50% WBL.

For the rest of the items, I´d strip anything that´s giving a straight bonus and only leave the special qualities. That makes a Frostbrand or Cloak of the Manta Ray interesting again.

That is exactly the reasoning i used when first explaining it to my players. Why would you take some of the more interesting items like said cloak or rings or belts or what have you when you should be taking cloak of resistance, belts of ability boosting or all that rot. I've had it happen on more occasions than I can count. 'Cool item but if I wear it I lose my bonuses'. Drives me wild

[Jay R]

That is exactly the reasoning i used when first explaining it to my players. Why would you take some of the more interesting items like said cloak or rings or belts or what have you when you should be taking cloak of resistance, belts of ability boosting or all that rot. I've had it happen on more occasions than I can count. 'Cool item but if I wear it I lose my bonuses'. Drives me wild

This is a direct consequence of the rules of 3rd edition. People can buy or make any magic items easily. In that scenario, of course people will have the most effective combination. Anything else is foolish.

In all versions before 3e, you used the cool cloak or ring or belt because that was the only magic cloak or ring or belt you had.

Give people a choice between two cloaks, they will - and should - choose the more effective one. If you want them to use something else, don't make the more effective one easily and universally available.

You can have widely available magic shops. Or you can have people using unusual items. You cannot reasonably expect to have both,

So make your choice, and accept the consequences of it.

[Telok]

Something my group has run into over the years is that at a certain point +1 weapons and rings replace gold as currency because they're both more portable and actually worth something instead of being yellow lead that fills up multiple bags of holding.

One thing that I've done is to run more humanoid/classed opponents in addition to removing permanent item magic shops. The actual monsters become rarer and a bit more interesting, plus oddly more beatable because you usually know when you're going to go up against one and can prepare. It takes players a bit to adjust to being able to buy lots of potions or weird scrolls and then they have to bring themselves to do it instead of 'saving' for another +1. Waiting a couple months for a commissioned item to be made doesn't come naturally to people weaned on WotC versions of D&D either.

[Fizban]

Something my group has run into over the years is that at a certain point +1 weapons and rings replace gold as currency because they're both more portable and actually worth something instead of being yellow lead that fills up multiple bags of holding.
Heh, I moved towards a similar thing when working out how to convert everything to a Dark Souls esque currency system. In-character it would be silly to have people counting this instinctively felt energy down to an exact 2,000 "souls," but if they can feel the weight of how much is in a magic sword they could measure out a "sword's worth" or simple fraction thereof.

You can also use the diminishing value of multiples of the same item to mess with the sale values. For flat bonuses or continuous, be they sword or cloak or other item, every duplicate which a PCs gets past the first is actually worth 0gp towards WBL because they already have one (unless they need to arm minions or something). In DnD the standard price adventurers get is 1/2 what a merchant would sell it for, but in real life pawn shops don't give you nearly that good of a deal (for what I'm aware of anyway).

If you only give the players say, 1/10 the market price for selling such "common" items, you can use 5x the usual amount of flat bonus items on your NPCs, which will make them a lot more comparable to the players. This also lets you stealth buff weapon wielding classes, since a greater variety of magic weapons which you aren't pressured to sell means they're more likely to have the specialized equipment people like to assume they always have, and it also lets the DM have fun putting together and dropping nonstandard magic weapons that the PCs would never buy or even consider keeping around. There are lots of items you can tell are well priced because they're not strong enough you'd necessarily buy them for full but they're worth more to you than half that, flat (no uses per day) magic weapons almost never fall under that category but a lot more will if you drop the threshold to 1/10.

Of course that latter point is institutionalizing the golf bag of weapons fighter rather than burning down the Christmas tree, but if you're using innate bonuses you can still use reduced sale prices as part of re-writing the wealth expectations. You can also just extend it to all items if you really want to de-incentivize selling them while still allowing cash to buy whatever the PCs want, so they have to rely at least partially on whatever the DM is giving out, and you can easily control how much cash vs magic items they find.


This is a direct consequence of the rules of 3rd edition. People can buy or make any magic items easily. In that scenario, of course people will have the most effective combination. Anything else is foolish.

In all versions before 3e, you used the cool cloak or ring or belt because that was the only magic cloak or ring or belt you had.

Give people a choice between two cloaks, they will - and should - choose the more effective one. If you want them to use something else, don't make the more effective one easily and universally available.

You can have widely available magic shops. Or you can have people using unusual items. You cannot reasonably expect to have both,

So make your choice, and accept the consequences of it.
This is all true, but the caveat is that the DM still controls how widely available magic items shops are. Even without altering sale prices, limiting the conversion of one item to another is as simple as saying it's not available for purchase, weather that's because there are no cities big enough for the purchase limit, or there are no NPCs who could have made it, or who are willing to do business with you, and even if you craft it yourself you still have to buy the materials which again runs into the purchase limit and spends significant amounts of time which can easily limit you to between adventures (where the DM can make the next adventure taking the new item into account).