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LibraryOgre
2022-09-08, 11:54 AM
So, I was thinking about something.

BTB AD&D, identifying items was a bit of a pain; you had only a couple spells that could do it somewhat reliably (the 1e Identify spell was a nightmare, and the 2e spell was only slightly better), and even potions required either a sip test or an Identify to truly name. You also had a fair number of cursed items, lending difficulty to finding and using magic items. Would this cloak let me fly, or devour me? Would it let me fly for a while THEN devour me? You were never sure, without taking some big risks, spending some big money, and taking some big time (qv Identify causing 8 points of Constitution damage each time you cast it, requiring days of rest). The other option was to pay to have it identify, which the P&P game made expensive and a bit rare (find a sage, give them money, come back in a month), but computer games made relatively easy (spend some cash at pretty much any store, "Improved Identify" of the SSI games, and even plain identify in the IE games). In 3rd edition and on, these were largely made the default.

But, I was thinking... is this one source of some folk's perception that the Exploration Pillar has become de-emphasized? It used to be, every magic item was a puzzle that had to be solved... a potential hazard. Now, magic items are loot... it might take a couple days and a chunk of money, but you'll know what every item you found is, and it's a lot less likely that they're going to try to murder you.

Now, I don't think we should necessarily go back to the days of difficult identification and cursed items... it made the game less fun, IMO. However, I do wonder if making it easy to identify the items made it less a matter of exploration.

KorvinStarmast
2022-09-08, 04:23 PM
Now, I don't think we should necessarily go back to the days of difficult identification and cursed items... it made the game less fun, IMO. However, I do wonder if making it easy to identify the items made it less a matter of exploration. I would use the term discovery rather than exploration. Finding the old tower was also exploration/discovery. Which leaves me with this thought:
Discover is the overarching pillar

Where is it?
What does it do?
Can I use it?
What is at the end of this hallway?

Are all sub elements of Discovery.

Drakevarg
2022-09-08, 04:59 PM
I'd definitely say that your typical D&D world feels safer and more under control with knowable magic items. As you said, they're just loot now. More candy for baby. I think the problem with this is less directly related to the difficulty in identification (though it could certainly be related), and more the attitude that magic items are a known, quantified, and expected element now.

A much bigger guilty party in that respect is the entire concept of a "magic mart." If magic items are just something you can buy in a store for X coins and reasonably expect to get your hands on, it has to be a known quantity, and the party (and the community at large) just takes it as a given that you can have these things. They're barely even magic anymore, they're just products.

If magic items are solely obtained from ancient tombs, mad wizards, and mysterious and unreliable traveling salesman, then that potion you found could be anything. If it's something you found at the neighborhood pharmacy, it is a product with quantifiable and known effects for a set price that you can find on a shelf. The vibes are entirely different. It has a name, its effects are known, and the wider community knows well ahead of time what to do with it. It seems a lot less taboo in modern editions for players to just go through the DMG and pick out what they want. Hell, in Pathfinder it's not even a separate book anymore. The curtain is officially pulled back and any obfuscation in-game just becomes the DM refusing to give you a straight answer (unless it's a custom item and you can't just Google it anyway).

Just for a personal anecdote, my first-ever magic item was an enchanted sword I got from a little girl I met in a dungeon, who told me the magic only worked once. I carried that sword for ten levels and across three campaigns before I actually tried using it, saving a party member by instantly flash-stepping across a battlefield to cut their attacker in half. Afterwards it turned into a chainsaw sword. That remains, to this day, the coolest weapon I ever had in a game and no store-bought +whatever sword of whosits is ever going to remotely compare.

Tohron
2022-09-08, 07:25 PM
I think the issue was that the 'discovery' part of magic items had a heavy element of "will this item try to kill me?" This pushed players not to use the loot they found, which wasn't fun. It would be more interesting if investigating magic items was more along the lines of uncovering additional features, i.e. if you say a command word, then your Cloak of Flying will let you fly at double speed for 1 round 3 times / day. That could make the process fun, rather than a cruel gotcha.

KorvinStarmast
2022-09-08, 09:04 PM
I'd definitely say that your typical D&D world feels safer and more under control with knowable magic items. That's a problem.


If magic items are solely obtained from ancient tombs, mad wizards, and mysterious and unreliable traveling salesman, then that potion you found could be anything. That makes discovery interesting.

Just for a personal anecdote, my first-ever magic item was an enchanted sword I got from a little girl I met in a dungeon, who told me the magic only worked once. I carried that sword for ten levels and across three campaigns before I actually tried using it, saving a party member by instantly flash-stepping across a battlefield to cut their attacker in half. Afterwards it turned into a chainsaw sword. That remains, to this day, the coolest weapon I ever had in a game and no store-bought +whatever sword of whosits is ever going to remotely compare. *applause*

Pauly
2022-09-08, 09:32 PM
There are a number of issues with the ‘discovery’ aspect as traditionally done in D&D.
1) The discovery is A to B. Once you know what the things is, you know everything about the thing.
2) Because of risk players will avoid using items until they are fully identified. Not just the risk of the item being cursed, but the risk of using sub optimal strategies.
3) Players feel cheated if they are on a quest find a unidentified magic item, and not use it against the end boss, only to find out when they finally identify it later that it would have been really useful in the boss fight.
4) Players generally don’t have a huge amount of attachment to a thing. If you have a trusty +2 longsword and find a +3 longsword in chest you immediately start using the new item and sell off the old.
Basically in D&D discovery is ‘t fun and is very transactional - “is it more useful than what I have now” “how much is it worth”.

I haven't seen it done in an RPG but I like the anime way of treating discovery with magic items, well at least major items for the main characters.
1) The discovery is a long process, sometime A to Z.
2) Partially identified items are still useful, you are just locked out of their higher abilities.
3) The mini quests to unlock the upgrades are fun, especially when they tie in to the main quest.
4) Characters create genuine attachments and relations to their items.
The anime method is much more story oriented and rewards players for getting involved in the story.

NichG
2022-09-08, 10:34 PM
I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...

There are so many items that could be amazing to have IRL but would have zero effect on the numbers that show up on a character sheet or in any dice roll that would ever happen during game. That gap has a lot of potential to be explored for ways to bridge it.

Mechalich
2022-09-08, 10:42 PM
I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...

That only works if you cannot turn said items into cash, which is tricky to justify since there's probably someone who will spend money on mystical curiosities at a rate that would be more valuable to the player than actually trying to figure out how to use such a thing.

Getting around the looter-shooter problem in a dungeon crawler is tricky. There's a constant urge to try and turn everything into increased abilities on the character sheet, whether it's items, money, or even food (ex. recent iterations of Final Fantasy have chosen to turn meals into significant buffs, so that being good at the fishing minigame impacts overall character power). This seems to be related to the single objective problem: everything is being assembled for the sole purpose of defeating the BBEG at the end of the campaign and therefore more or less all other considerations are tossed aside. I think that root problem (which many players and tables don't see as a problem) needs to be addressed first.

Tanarii
2022-09-08, 10:52 PM
I would use the term discovery rather than exploration. Finding the old tower was also exploration/discovery.
Agreed. Exploration is the act of making your way through the adventuring site, or possibly to/from the adventuring site if the outer world is wilderness.

Otoh, while exploration of that kind is definitely a form of discovery (and thus a subset), there's definitely different ... flavors of exploration discovery. Seeing what's there / finding loot is different from a seek and destroy mission against Team Evil or a specific BBEG.

And non-exploration discovery of what you find is separate from exploration. That part is what is supposed to evoke A Sense Of Wonder. What does this fountain do? What do these runes mean?

Identifying Magic Items has definitely changed from discovery fraught with peril that might give great power, to purely a reward. And for some folks, it's even viewed as an entitlement, that you're being punished if they don't get them in general. Or even fail to get the specific ones they want.

(Edit: the distinction between exploration discovery and discovery discovery is important to me, because I'm an advocate of modern D&D needing better exploration game structures.)

Mechalich
2022-09-08, 10:56 PM
Identifying Magic Items has definitely changed from discovery fraught with peril that might give great power, to purely a reward. And for some folks, it's even viewed as an entitlement, that you're being punished if they don't get them in general. Or even fail to get the specific ones they want.

If a game has strong gear/ability interactions, then access to items that provide the relevant synergies is quite often essential to build viability, and characters who don't receive said access are in fact being punished - at least to the degree of not being allowed to have their build operate properly. This can happen without 'magic' being part of the equation at all. For example, something as simple as making a sniper build and then the game refusing to allow the character to acquire a sniper rifle.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 12:59 AM
If magic items are solely obtained from ancient tombs, mad wizards, and mysterious and unreliable traveling salesman, then that potion you found could be anything.\

Unless the evil wizard is, indeed, entirely insane, why would his lair be filled with cursed items? Even if his particular brand of villainy was to trick people into using cursed items one would think that in his own lair they would be set aside.

Similarly, why would you bury someone with a cursed item? Unless it was done as an insult or the cursed item killed them and nobody else wanted to risk touching it? And in those cases wouldn't it be likely to be a matter of public record and/or local legend

Also, why wouldn't scrolls and potions be labeled in some way? Or rather, why would they be unlabeled by default? I could buy that when found in ancient places that any non-magical marker affixed to them may be long gone - a labeled ribbon around a bottleneck long since rotted away or a wax seal cracked to the point of illegibility or whatever - but the default in the old editions seems to have been that they just weren't labeled as a matter of practice, which simply doesn't make sense, especially if identification is difficult

EDIT:
Also, on a different note, a lot of magic items are command word activated, and guessing a command word simply isn't realistic. That would be equivalent to figuring out how to do something in the command prompt of a computer without any prior instruction. (Maybe even worse because in the magic item's case you have no guarantee that the command word will be a real word, or even an acronym based on real words.)

Satinavian
2022-09-09, 01:16 AM
BTB AD&D, identifying items was a bit of a pain; you had only a couple spells that could do it somewhat reliably (the 1e Identify spell was a nightmare, and the 2e spell was only slightly better), and even potions required either a sip test or an Identify to truly name. You also had a fair number of cursed items, lending difficulty to finding and using magic items. Would this cloak let me fly, or devour me? Would it let me fly for a while THEN devour me? You were never sure, without taking some big risks, spending some big money, and taking some big time (qv Identify causing 8 points of Constitution damage each time you cast it, requiring days of rest). The other option was to pay to have it identify, which the P&P game made expensive and a bit rare (find a sage, give them money, come back in a month), but computer games made relatively easy (spend some cash at pretty much any store, "Improved Identify" of the SSI games, and even plain identify in the IE games). In 3rd edition and on, these were largely made the default.
Now i only started D&D specifically (and not as my first RPG) with AD&D2, but we never used unidentified magic items. Those were always just carried back and identified in downtime.

We were even wandering what the point of all those cursed items in the book actually was. Surely no one would ever expose themself willingly to unknown magic, would they ?


And it took a very long time, only long after we stopped playing AD&D2 until i stumbled over the "sipping potion" idea. We always automatically assumed that that you either get the full effect of a potion or none at all if you drak part of it.

Pex
2022-09-09, 01:18 AM
I hated those days of hard identification. It contributed to the DM adversarial relationship 2E promoted. Sure, give players magic items, but never let them know what they do and don't forget to curse them sometimes! I'm quite happy such a thing is in the garbage bin of history. This has nothing to do with the exploration pillar. Exploration is search your location, finding stuff, learning stuff. Turning magic item identification into Russian Roulette is making the DM the players' enemy.

Drakevarg
2022-09-09, 01:33 AM
Unless the evil wizard is, indeed, entirely insane, why would his lair be filled with cursed items? Even if his particular brand of villainy was to trick people into using cursed items one would think that in his own lair they would be set aside.

Creation mishaps? Studying the nature of the curse? Maybe specifically to screw with potential thieves.


Similarly, why would you bury someone with a cursed item? Unless it was done as an insult or the cursed item killed them and nobody else wanted to risk touching it? And in those cases wouldn't it be likely to be a matter of public record and/or local legend

Perhaps the curse formed post-mortem. Plenty of items in folklore become cursed specifically because they were taken from a sacred place. Or to prevent someone from doing so. Mummy curses were part of popular culture long before D&D.


Also, why wouldn't scrolls and potions be labeled in some way? Or rather, why would they be unlabeled by default? I could buy that when found in ancient places that any non-magical marker affixed to them may be long gone - a labeled ribbon around a bottleneck long since rotted away or a wax seal cracked to the point of illegibility or whatever - but the default in the old editions seems to have been that they just weren't labeled as a matter of practice, which simply doesn't make sense, especially if identification is difficult

Maybe their color/shape was already distinctive enough for the purposes of whoever had it around. Or, like you suggested, they had a label and it just wore off centuries ago. Could be any number of reasons, it's the DM's job to answer those questions, not the book's.

NichG
2022-09-09, 02:22 AM
That only works if you cannot turn said items into cash, which is tricky to justify since there's probably someone who will spend money on mystical curiosities at a rate that would be more valuable to the player than actually trying to figure out how to use such a thing.


Then let them get turned into cash. The point isn't to railroad people into using the items.

But the 'more valuable to the player' bit, that part is not going to be true for an optimally cunning player who gets it. But if you've been running something that's primarily a numbers game, your players may not be able to easily see even really unsubtle opportunities outside the numbers. It's helpful if someone utterly breaks the game using one of those items and you demonstrate that they don't only get away with it, but that it's fully encouraged.

Someone who can only see numbers might find that the Time Trap is worth a +2 to hit on their attacks. Someone thinking in terms of the scenario can use it to capture the moment of a BBEG's victory and basically negate an entire plot arc from the other side of the planet.

I had a campaign where a pen with a nib that could write on any surface ended up being insanely powerful because someone got access to a demiplane whose properties were determined by words carved on a conceptual firmament.

Satinavian
2022-09-09, 02:35 AM
I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...
I actually don't think those topics are related.

Finding interesting uses for strange magic items is fun, but does require knowledge about what the item actually does.

Two of your examples (the bottle, the seed) seems to be one sue only and would be needlessly wasted when the players find out their function by experimentation. The stone might be a useful "sense sentient beings" item, depending what counts as "knowledge the wielder lacks", but might be always on, when the group is together. If anything, those are examples for why you should use identification magic instead of experimentation.




Also, while items you have to find creative uses for are fun to play with, they more often than not turn out to be pretty overpowered if such a use is discovered. Imho it is best to let them do only things that are similar to what the magic system allows otherwise. That makes it plausible how they were created and keeps the balance.

Yora
2022-09-09, 03:35 AM
This seems to be related to the single objective problem: everything is being assembled for the sole purpose of defeating the BBEG at the end of the campaign and therefore more or less all other considerations are tossed aside. I think that root problem (which many players and tables don't see as a problem) needs to be addressed first.

Are we even exploring when we are following a story?

When the campaign is laid out in a way where the PCs need to collect certain items and reach a certain level to progress past various specific points, are your explorations really accomplish anything or make any kind of difference for what lies ahead? Is there anything that could be missed that you would actually have to work for to find?

The problem with "exploration pillar" is that it's not really defined. Common perception seems to be "walking around in dungeon corridors". Of course that's a really bland experience.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 06:41 AM
Perhaps the curse formed post-mortem. Plenty of items in folklore become cursed specifically because they were taken from a sacred place. Or to prevent someone from doing so. Mummy curses were part of popular culture long before D&D.

That's fair enough, but really the magic item is really either the tomb or the body in that case. The items the party are removing are not cursed ab initio and thus should not register as magic until removed

GloatingSwine
2022-09-09, 06:59 AM
I'd definitely say that your typical D&D world feels safer and more under control with knowable magic items. As you said, they're just loot now. More candy for baby. I think the problem with this is less directly related to the difficulty in identification (though it could certainly be related), and more the attitude that magic items are a known, quantified, and expected element now.

A much bigger guilty party in that respect is the entire concept of a "magic mart." If magic items are just something you can buy in a store for X coins and reasonably expect to get your hands on, it has to be a known quantity, and the party (and the community at large) just takes it as a given that you can have these things. They're barely even magic anymore, they're just products.


That's because most D&D worlds are written with the assumption that magic in general is common. If wizards are sufficiently common that anyone who needs to find one can do so, then there's no reason magic items shouldn't also be common.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 07:06 AM
That only works if you cannot turn said items into cash, which is tricky to justify since there's probably someone who will spend money on mystical curiosities at a rate that would be more valuable to the player than actually trying to figure out how to use such a thing.

Well in that case you either get rid of the magic item mart type stores or else you double down on them and turn then imto proper stores that only sell things

Slipjig
2022-09-09, 08:39 AM
Unless the evil wizard is, indeed, entirely insane, why would his lair be filled with cursed items? Even if his particular brand of villainy was to trick people into using cursed items one would think that in his own lair they would be set aside.

Similarly, why would you bury someone with a cursed item? Unless it was done as an insult or the cursed item killed them and nobody else wanted to risk touching it? And in those cases wouldn't it be likely to be a matter of public record and/or local legend.

Maybe the items weren't supposed to be cursed, but are failed experiments. This is especially appropriate for items that provide both a benefit and a drawback.

Maybe the item started as a standard item, but the magic has "gone sour" over time, and the curse is a malfunction. If the item is powered by a bound spirit, maybe decades in a pitch black tomb have driven it mad.

Maybe the bottles are labeled, but in the mage's shorthand, possibly an abbreviation in a different language. Does "CLW" stand for "Cure Light Wounds" or "Curses, Lamentations, and Wailing"? Whoever created it would have known, but there's no particular reason she would have put in the extra effort to leave instructions for anybody else.

And, finally, maybe the items were cursed BECAUSE they are grave goods, to discourage tomb robbers. The Mummy's Curse predates DnD. Maybe the curse can be avoided or removed. Perhaps the curse only kicks in if the items are removed from the tomb, allowing the PCs to use an item for the duration of the adventure, but then leaving them with a choice of either abandoning the item or braving the curse.

LibraryOgre
2022-09-09, 09:09 AM
I haven't seen it done in an RPG but I like the anime way of treating discovery with magic items, well at least major items for the main characters.
1) The discovery is a long process, sometime A to Z.
2) Partially identified items are still useful, you are just locked out of their higher abilities.
3) The mini quests to unlock the upgrades are fun, especially when they tie in to the main quest.
4) Characters create genuine attachments and relations to their items.
The anime method is much more story oriented and rewards players for getting involved in the story.

On this, I think Earthdawn had a great way of doing things.

There were some relatively minor magic items that would just do things. But anything worth Naming could get weird, and you invested Legend Points (the equivalent of XP) into items to unlock more powers.

As to your point 4, that's something that I love, too. "This is my grandfather's sword" carries so much more meaning when you keep your grandfather's sword as you level, because it remains valuable in a mechanical sense.

NichG
2022-09-09, 09:15 AM
I actually don't think those topics are related.

Finding interesting uses for strange magic items is fun, but does require knowledge about what the item actually does.

Two of your examples (the bottle, the seed) seems to be one sue only and would be needlessly wasted when the players find out their function by experimentation. The stone might be a useful "sense sentient beings" item, depending what counts as "knowledge the wielder lacks", but might be always on, when the group is together. If anything, those are examples for why you should use identification magic instead of experimentation.




Also, while items you have to find creative uses for are fun to play with, they more often than not turn out to be pretty overpowered if such a use is discovered. Imho it is best to let them do only things that are similar to what the magic system allows otherwise. That makes it plausible how they were created and keeps the balance.

The relationship between the topics is to reconceptualize what identification is 'about' such that rather than a binary 'we don't know what this is'/'we no longer have to think about this', you have spaces where getting information about the function of an item doesn't end the messing around stage.

And I'd say the opposite about what magic items should do - they're interesting only if they cover fundamentally different bases than you can cover with controlled character build choices. Magic items are the opportunity for things found during play and sought during play to be more relevant than preconceptions that can be brought in before the game even starts. That's fundamental to what exploration and discovery are about.

How did those items get made then? Well, many explanations are available. Spellcasting itself could be far broader than adventuring spell lists suggest. Why not have spells exist to customize the fit of clothing, make materials softer, etc - billions of 'uses of magic' that are specialized and nonmechanically relevant, so there's no need to pre-list them. Secondly, and more in line with discovery as fundamental gameplay, item creation could be more like chemistry where the reagents and raw materials and environmental conditions used are fundamental to the outcome, rather than it all boiling down to feat+gold+spell.

So the dwarves of Chimney Rock grow a certain fungus in still underground pools that through a combination of small amounts of dissolved mithril in the water and a nearby leyline, gains the ability to be refined down into a resin that causes magics used in the item creation process to become fused with the concept of recycling via consumption. A Winter Gap to the plane of ice nearby can be used to give the item it's potency. The item creator chooses to use magic missile as the base. The result is a rod that draws warmth from the wielder and sends it unerringly to a target in sight, allowing tiny things to be heated to incandescent levels in exchange for a mild chill, or to allow the user to keep themselves cool in hot weather, or to combine with a golem to make a perpetual motion engine, or ...

Drakevarg
2022-09-09, 10:28 AM
That's because most D&D worlds are written with the assumption that magic in general is common. If wizards are sufficiently common that anyone who needs to find one can do so, then there's no reason magic items shouldn't also be common.

That's a shift to match the magic-mart, not the other way around. This is particularly apparent if you look at early-edition D&D art compared to later editions. In the older art, everyone is wearing fairly basic-looking arms and armor, where in later editions everyone looks like a Final Fantasy concept artist vomited on them.

Magic items went from mysterious artifacts to mere loot, and the worlds written around them changed to match. A dozen magic items dangling off your outfit became a matter of course, the art changed to match, and the perception of how the world should look followed suit.

This wasn't some grand, unassailable artistic vision of how D&D should look. It was a justification for what kind of world would let you buy magic items at Wal-Mart.

Yora
2022-09-09, 10:52 AM
D&D isn't D&D.

There's no really clear cut to be made at any point, but 5th edition really has nothing to do with the original edition in terms of design. The table of contents for the Monster Manual perhaps, but from there they divert into completely different directions.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 10:53 AM
The dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomolies isn't really a fantastical world though, it's the dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomalies. What you're asking for is basically to take the kind of world that's more Call Of Cthulhu's schtick and present it as high fantasy.

Drakevarg
2022-09-09, 11:20 AM
The dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomolies isn't really a fantastical world though, it's the dark ages with a handful of very rare and mysterious anomalies. What you're asking for is basically to take the kind of world that's more Call Of Cthulhu's schtick and present it as high fantasy.

Or just, y'know, Lord of the Rings. Y'know, the yardstick by which all modern fantasy is measured.

GloatingSwine
2022-09-09, 11:30 AM
That's a shift to match the magic-mart, not the other way around. This is particularly apparent if you look at early-edition D&D art compared to later editions. In the older art, everyone is wearing fairly basic-looking arms and armor, where in later editions everyone looks like a Final Fantasy concept artist vomited on them.

Magic items went from mysterious artifacts to mere loot, and the worlds written around them changed to match. A dozen magic items dangling off your outfit became a matter of course, the art changed to match, and the perception of how the world should look followed suit.

This wasn't some grand, unassailable artistic vision of how D&D should look. It was a justification for what kind of world would let you buy magic items at Wal-Mart.

And yet the term "Monty Haul" also comes from the earliest days of D&D.

It's not really all that much of a shift, there were no halcyon days of magical scarcity, parties getting entire truckloads of magical gubbins has always been there.

Drakevarg
2022-09-09, 11:51 AM
And yet the term "Monty Haul" also comes from the earliest days of D&D.

It's not really all that much of a shift, there were no halcyon days of magical scarcity, parties getting entire truckloads of magical gubbins has always been there.

I suppose it changes from game to game. My first three campaigns - and the only one I ever played in 2e - were very fantastical, with everyone being part-Fae and plane-hopping just for fun, but the concept of a "magic mart" was never brought up. All of our magic items were found, gifted, or custom-made. Didn't stop us from accumulating a lot of stuff over the campaign but we never literally got to go pick them off a shelf.

Magical scarcity might be MY preference, but there's a difference between experienced explorers accumulating a plethora of strange keepsakes over a long career (a well-established fantasy trope in its own right), and them being normalized to the point that you can buy them at a store. It's kind of the same principle as an argument I often see presented for low-magic campaigns: the rarity or commonality of wizards in the lore doesn't really affect whether one of those wizards winds up a member of the party. Same applies to magic items. Just because you have a ton of magical items doesn't mean everyone else does. And IMO, it's the public availability that messes with the perception of the mystery to magic items, not the actual number you have.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 11:59 AM
Also, "buying magic items from walmart" is an exaggeration. D&D characters are generally pretty well-to-do by mid levels, so it's not that every schlub has a bunch of magic items, it's that the guy whose living room is filled with gold (https://i.redd.it/0a0d6zeo8wg11.jpg) has a bunch of magic items.

Even if something is rare and expensive it's not preposterous that a sufficiently rich person might have several. I read a news story one time about a guy who had about 93 rolls royces

LibraryOgre
2022-09-09, 12:01 PM
As a note, early adventures were chock full of magic items... B2 has something like 70 magic items in the hands of bad guys or as findable treasure, with only 15 of those being single-use consumables (potions, scrolls with only 1 spell). And this doesn't include stuff just dripping from people in the keep itself, including low-level guards.

Tanarii
2022-09-09, 12:36 PM
As a note, early adventures were chock full of magic items... B2 has something like 70 magic items in the hands of bad guys or as findable treasure, with only 15 of those being single-use consumables (potions, scrolls with only 1 spell). And this doesn't include stuff just dripping from people in the keep itself, including low-level guards.
Which is fine when you have to spend a precious spell slot on detect magic to even know something is magical.

When it's a ritual (like 5e) or just something magicians can detect naturally by being in its presence, or something anyone can detect while handling it ... and there is more of an assumption that a group of players will clear the adventure because it's linear instead of jaquayed and all the battles are level appropriate ... then it's more of an issue.

Drakevarg
2022-09-09, 12:55 PM
As a note, early adventures were chock full of magic items... B2 has something like 70 magic items in the hands of bad guys or as findable treasure, with only 15 of those being single-use consumables (potions, scrolls with only 1 spell). And this doesn't include stuff just dripping from people in the keep itself, including low-level guards.

I'll admit, giving magic items to the low-level guards kinda undermines my point more than the rest does. Hard to preserve any sense of mystery in basic magic items if Joe the Rent-a-Cop has three on 'im.

GloatingSwine
2022-09-09, 02:33 PM
It's all to do with the assumption that the party gets magic stuff as part of their progression curve.

It's built in, it's always been built in quite explicitly. Like back when there were monsters that could just no sell attacks from weapons that didn't have a certain level of enchantment. So the weapon-hitting guys were expected to get at least some in order to do their hitting.

And because many characters are quite specialised in what items will be good for them. If the Fighter has taken 5 pips in longsword proficiency eventually you need to give him a +1 longsword, even if he gets a different +1 weapon first and only uses it for a couple of encounters with things that refuse to be damaged by anything else so the DM can either give them a suspiciously useful spread of magic items, or festoon them with stuff on the understanding that somewhere in the stack of needles will be the piece of hay they wanted.

Or they can let them just go and get the ones they actually need from a shop and skip the step that kinda feels bad anyway because they don't get to use the thing they invested in properly.

icefractal
2022-09-09, 04:42 PM
I think that experimentation to discover the properties of magic items could be fun, but the OD&D style of items wasn't very suited to doing that, IME.

For that kind of exploration, you'd want items to:
1) Not be cursed. Note how the advice for foraging wild mushrooms is "Don't eat anything unless you're absolutely certain what type it is, because it could ****ing kill you." That applies to magic items too, if some of them are cursed.
2) Have unlimited uses (per day uses are fine though). No point figuring out what the item does if you wasted it in the process.
3) Have a plausible way to discover the properties - randomly guessing a command word is not a plausible way, unless there's some discoverable logic to those command words. Usually this means properties that can be discovered in stages.
4) Have a discovery method that's entertaining in the TTRPG medium. I once made (as GM) a magic Rubik's Cube, which had different effects based on how the runes were aligned. In RL or a video game where you could experience manipulating the cube, that would have been some tactile fun. In a TTRPG, it was just "Ok, I continue trying combinations according to this order until another effect happens, then note which combination produced that" - might as well have given them a box with as many buttons as there were effects.
5) Have an effect worth discovering, which isn't too niche. That sword story above was cool, but it would have been seriously anticlimactic if the result was "It's a +2 sword!" or "It's really great against undead, which this foe isn't."

But when you take #5 into account, you also run into a problem with the sheer number of items that most D&D games give out. Very few players actually want or will remember to use more than a dozen situational items. Especially if those are limited use. Every time we do a campaign with "typical" loot, we end up with a bunch of potentially-useful consumables which we record. And we never ****ing use them. They just sit there accumulating, and sometimes 2-3 sessions later we notice "Oh yeah, this one might have been useful in that situation."

Now you could say that's a flaw with our group, that we need to go to "RPG school" and learn to optimize our use of consumable items. But I don't agree. I think that we already have plenty of tactics and planning in the game, and adding extra via consumables simply isn't needed and would make the game experience worse rather than better.

Therefore, for magic items, I tend to prefer three types:
1) Consequential and frequently used. Not too many of these, probably don't want much more than a couple per person.
2) Niche, but so good at that niche that it's memorable. Like, say, a ring which lets you breathe underwater, use weapons and spells unhindered there, and swim quickly. It makes a big enough difference people will remember it when it's applicable. Again, there's a limit how many of these people want to keep track of.
3) Items which can be subsumed into the character sheet and mostly stop taking up mental space. Cloak of Resistance is actually a perfectly fine item. Is it exciting? No, but it doesn't need to be. It's useful, and once you get it you add the bonus to your saves and don't need to actively remember it. You can toss out as many of this type of items as you feel like, although without stacking limits they might cause the PCs to diverge considerably from their normal power level.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 05:52 PM
And, finally, maybe the items were cursed BECAUSE they are grave goods, to discourage tomb robbers. The Mummy's Curse predates DnD. Maybe the curse can be avoided or removed. Perhaps the curse only kicks in if the items are removed from the tomb, allowing the PCs to use an item for the duration of the adventure, but then leaving them with a choice of either abandoning the item or braving the curse.

Ok, that's fair.

I had been working under what I now realize was a very narrow definition of "cursed" which didn't include things that were haunted. I also assumed that they grabbed the item because it detected as magical*. And so between these two assumptions I overlooked this possibility.



*(I'm here making a further assumption that whatever spirit haunts the tomb or whatever magical ward protects it, the curse isn't going to fall on any particular item until that item is disturbed. It seems more likely that any curse or haunting that would be triggered by merely entering the tomb would fall upon the tresspasser personally)

gbaji
2022-09-09, 06:27 PM
I think there's generally a distinction to make between a "cursed item" and "being cursed".

With a cursed item the object itself has some horrible negative effect on the character when picked up, and usually also includes some difficulty in getting rid of it. These are the items I tend to avoid putting in my games, despite being a staple of old school RPGs, simply because conceptually they are silly. Why would anyone expend resources to make such things? You'd be much better off expending those resources making objects that benefit you and your allies in some way. I always follow the rule that people make items that are actually useful to *them* or the intended user. Of course, this does not preclude such objects having effects that a player character may not appreciate though. And there is also an allowance for magical mistakes, items that have been damaged in some way and the magic is malfunctioning, unintended/unexpected side effects, etc.

Being cursed is an effect that is placed on the character, usually via some spell or ritual, but could also be the result of some triggered action. So breaking into the tomb and stealing stuff from it might trigger a curse (with some horrible negative effect), but the curse isn't on the object(s) the character took. The action of taking them triggered the curse. You need do so something other than just taking off the item to remove it. And from a gaming point of view, this can also provide potential for retaining the items stolen if you can figure out how to remove the curse (of course, removal may require returning the items, which can lead to a whole side adventure if say someone steals one of them from you). If the objects themselves are cursed, you can't do that sort of "consequence examination" story. Also, objects can absolutely be used as a delivery system for a curse, but that still doesn't fall into the same category as the classic "cursed item". Snow White's apple cursed her (or poisoned her? kinda both). The object delivered the effect, but we don't care about the apple once it's done its job. Once again, the effect is on the person once delivered/triggered, not on an object.

Quertus
2022-09-09, 07:10 PM
is this one source of some folk's perception that the Exploration Pillar has become de-emphasized? It used to be, every magic item was a puzzle that had to be solved...

Exploration is my greatest source of fun in RPGs. But the change in the way Magic items are treated? No, that’s not a cause of any problems for my fun. It is, however, a symptom of a larger underlying problem that is detrimental to Exploration fun.

So, let’s start by… beating around the bush, by vaguely defining the problem space, with examples of what is and isn’t beneficial / harmful to my Exploration fun, to get a clearer picture of what we’re talking about here.

If it’s just handed to you (“no matter which way the PCs go (yes, even back the way they just came from, apparently), they will come across the Secret Grove”), if it feels like anyone (or even just anyone in their position) would automatically have unlocked the same achievement, it doesn’t feel like an Exploration achievement. (You wouldn’t believe how many educated software-adjacent people didn’t get this concept when I tried to explain to them that giving the exact same ribbons / awards to everyone was just a progress meter, was a suboptimal use of such a system).

Exploration is fun, because it involves thinking and creativity. It inherently involves and invokes outside the box thinking, because true Exploration is definitionally “outside the box”.


We’re now “trapped” on the elemental plane of Nilbog, where every action has the opposite effect. The only way we’ve figured out to kill enemies is with healing spells. We’re getting hungry, but the more we eat the hungrier we get. We’ve no idea how to get out. What do?

Extreme example is extreme. It doesn’t have to be that exotic - any time that the new or unknown present puzzles is an opportunity for Exploration. New terrain (“Uh, guys? The map says we’re in a ‘mooshroom biom’. Anybody have any idea what that means?”), new climate, unexplored territory, new culture. Any time where your established script may not apply (even if it does - see “Overlord”), you’ve got an opportunity for Exploration.

“Classic” magic item identification? As I told NichG in another thread (note to self: include link), what I experienced of that activity was antithetical to Exploration. It was like… Data in that classic “holodeck” episode of Star Trek, where he failed at being Sherlock Holmes, at understanding the very concept of thinking through problems. Rather than exploring the unknown, it was just idiots going down their lists of known items, clueless as to their own cluelessness. It was painful. 0/10, would not recommend.

Can discovering what an item does be a fun Exploration minigame? Yes. But I don’t think I’ve seen a single person in either thread post a good example thereof (pardon my senility if I prove to be wrong). For example,



Just for a personal anecdote, my first-ever magic item was an enchanted sword I got from a little girl I met in a dungeon, who told me the magic only worked once. I carried that sword for ten levels and across three campaigns before I actually tried using it, saving a party member by instantly flash-stepping across a battlefield to cut their attacker in half. Afterwards it turned into a chainsaw sword. That remains, to this day, the coolest weapon I ever had in a game and no store-bought +whatever sword of whosits is ever going to remotely compare.

This may be an excellent example of when to use an item of presumably known capabilities. Kudos on carrying the sword “for ten levels and across three campaigns”. I agree that no “product” will ever match something truly Mag ical. But that moment being special was not dependent upon ignorance of the item’s function or activation sequence.



I had a campaign where a pen with a nib that could write on any surface ended up being insanely powerful because someone got access to a demiplane whose properties were determined by words carved on a conceptual firmament.

This may be an excellent example of exploring what one can do with a (defined) item, but that’s a different minigame from trying to figure out that the BBEG’s armor allows them to write on any surface (and that that, plus access to the mentioned deplane, is part of their master plan / the secret to their power / whatever).

“What can we do with this?”? That makes for a fun Exploration minigame. Like 4-12 PCs with randomly rolled stats, made with no communication between the players, meeting for the first time, trying to figure out “how do we make this party work?”.

Did that make you cringe? How about this one: random magic items, no item shops, trying to figure out how to make this collection of abilities useful, wondering if any of the random **** the GM just rolled would be useful as “your share”. (And, sure, you can sell items for coin… but good luck using that coin to buy items, let alone specific items you’re looking for.)

To put it in MtG terms, the death of Exploration came when people started to prioritize the constructed “build” (like mox lotus channel fireball), of “But I want to play this”, over the Exploration of opening packs and wondering what you’ll get, and trying to figure out how to use it. (I personally much prefer the Expression of constricted to the Exploration of sealed / draft in MtG, btw) When the concept of planning your build before you took your first level became a requirement for basic competence. When “level appropriate” and “my game time is too valuable to…” became part of common parlance. That’s when things with unknown outcomes, that didn’t fit into neat rows that could be planned around, to (try to) engineer games that felt more like war games or single-author fiction for their predictability, fell out of favor.

Was that too abrupt? Let me step back and beat around the bush some more.



I would use the term discovery rather than exploration. Finding the old tower was also exploration/discovery. Which leaves me with this thought:
Discover is the overarching pillar

Where is it?
What does it do?
Can I use it?
What is at the end of this hallway?

Are all sub elements of Discovery.

This? As written? Boring snoozeville, wake me up when it’s my turn to roll dice. For Exploration, I want questions with more “how”, like
How do the PCs try to find it? Do they buckle down for research in the libraries of Gondor? Do they exhume the corpse of a former owner, and interrogate the dead for useful information / who took it / whatever? Do they make a pact with the fiend / deity who hates the relic, to allow them to implant a hidden weakness in the item in exchange for their help? Do they create a new breed of insect that is drawn to the item’s specific magical signature?
How do they attempt to determine what the potion does? Do they scour the lab / kitchen / whatever it was made in, examining stains and remaining ingredients, then comparing to the potion’s color, viscosity, translucency, and odor, to determine the components used? Do they create a custom spell to let them analyze the dwoemer on the liquid, and cross-reference “Quertus’ guide to spells: identifying dwoemers”? Do they draw straws for who drinks it, then gets shoved backwards in time to get an “undrunk” potion back? Do they use Astral Projection cheese to drink a copy? Do they find and Speak with Dead the corpse of the potion’s crafter? Do they say, “**** this!”, and hack the potion to do what they want it to do?
How do the PCs get to the end of the trap-filled hallway to defeat the Beholders? Do they all rush down the hall, hoping some of them will make it, or does just the tank charge? Do they let the Rogue slowly search for and disarm the traps, knowing that the beholders could turn from “anti magic” to deadly rays at any moment? Do they attempt to pelt the beholders with arrows, casters holding actions to fling spells should the central eyes close to allow sphere boy optical retaliation? Does the Wizard pull the Barbarian around the corner for some bonus snogging, or to Dimension Door them behind the beholders (or both?)?
How do they explore the walkway they’ve been teleported to? Do they use Detect Magic? Tap on it? Attempt to break off a piece? Evaluate the stone cutting? Structural analysis? Look for footprints? Dust? Other leaving? Pull out chalk to mark their version of “we were here”?


Exploration should present a puzzle for the PCs to solve, a challenge for them to overcome, not just “oh, I get a sticker because I listened to the GM read to page 42”.

And Rule of Three thinking applies here. Not just “the GM should be able to think of three ways”, but “the players should be able to think of at least three ways” to go about this task. We’re in the Arctic wilderness, freezing cold - do we tunnel into the snow, use our cloaks for shelter, try to build something from the natural resources, or set the Barbarian on fire for warmth?

Exploration flourishes in environments where the party can set their own pace, decide what they want to do and how they want to do it; Exploration flounders when the feat chain prerequisites and required mentors for the party’s Prestige classes strictly dictate where they need to be when. Exploration thrives in environments where “sure, let’s spend half a season playing around with loot we don’t understand” is greeted with enthusiastic nods; Exploration gets kicked to the wayside alongside calls to “get back to the adventure”.

If everyone wants to hurry along the path (whether it’s the GM’s path or the plan created by the players), and don’t want to stop and smell the roses, collect the morning dew by hand, and find some way to crystallize butterfly dreams for that magic item they want to build, then “what’s over that hill doesn’t matter, if it’s not part of The Plan.

If every group of players trapped on the deserted island end up escaping by lassoing sea turtles using rope made from human hair, was this island really the “strange unknown”, or was it just another checkbox on their list? If there was one group that didn’t escape the prescribed way, because they didn’t know Jack about the island? Then they were Explorers, they were actually in unknown territory.

Have I beat around the bush enough to kinda paint a picture of what I mean when I talk about enjoying Exploration?

Exploration occurs when you are off the map, outside the box, and forced to evaluate what moves might do what, or to create new moves. What happens if you try to start a fire on the elemental plane of gasoline? Can you fall asleep in Dream? The infinite plane of Mechanus has infinite gears… will anyone miss this one?

To be an Explorer, you have to be willing to Explore the possibilities, rather than demand level-appropriate, 4-encounter-per-day, cookie-cutter expectations about what an RPG is.

Or, well, that’s the mindsets I think are related.

Or, to hit my favorite punching bag, imagine the mindset necessary to turn an RPG into a tactical war game, to remove the Exploration pillar in favor of pure combat. Slowly dial that back, and see what behaviors you find, and whether they match what I associate with the death of Exploration.

Making items trivial to identify may be on the path, but afaict, it’s an effect, not a cause.

gbaji
2022-09-09, 07:33 PM
Lots of stuff you wrote Quertus, but I'd point out that while the "how" is absolutely important from the player perspective, "who", "what", "why", and "where" all have to be first determined (usually be the GM) for that question to be asked in the first place. Dismissing them as boring somewhat misses the point that someone, somewhere, had to come up with the thing are you so interested in exploring.

Unless you run around exploring a 100% randomly generated world, where you just make "how" decisions for your character, roll dice to determine results and then rinse-repeat, I suppose. But that would truly be boring.

From the GM's perspective, unfortunately, there is no "outside the box", or "off the map".

icefractal
2022-09-09, 08:23 PM
From the GM's perspective, unfortunately, there is no "outside the box", or "off the map".Not really true, IMO.

Admittedly, "off the map" can only be true in advance, because by the time they're exploring it you've created it. But still, if the players went somewhere totally unexpected that I hadn't yet created, I'd call that "off the map". And then create it before the next session.

Outside the box, however, is entirely possible. That's like, the main advantage of having a human GM, that they have a brain and can extrapolate from unexpected input. There have been numerous occasions where the PCs came up with a plan that I'd not even slightly expected, often using elements that I hadn't considered being combined. And while technically you could say that by the time I started describing the result, I'd mentally created the content, it was for all practical purposes outside the box.

Telok
2022-09-09, 09:20 PM
Can discovering what an item does be a fun Exploration minigame? Yes. But I don’t think I’ve seen a single person in either thread post a good example thereof (pardon my senility if I prove to be wrong).

Try looking up 1st/2nd ed. Gamma World. There was a decent, for the time at least, item figuring out mini game for your post apocalypse characters to play with old sufficently advanced tech.

Bohandas
2022-09-09, 10:21 PM
I think it helps if you normalize having most magic items actually be non-mechanics-based. If you have a rope that moves towards you when it's name is called, a stone that glows 'in the presence of knowledge the holder lacks', a bottle that can 'capture a single moment from the stream of time and store it', a seed that grows into a copy of the last living thing it touched before being planted, etc, then part of the exploration/discovery bit is figuring out how to get a use out of those things. Even something like a mug that preserves the temperature of it's contents absolutely or furniture that shapes itself to the body of anyone sitting in it to be comfortable, whatever that takes...

There are so many items that could be amazing to have IRL but would have zero effect on the numbers that show up on a character sheet or in any dice roll that would ever happen during game. That gap has a lot of potential to be explored for ways to bridge it.

Plus it'sone of the things that a tabletop rpg can do that a computer rpg can't do (or can't do well, in the case of AI Dungeon)

Drakevarg
2022-09-09, 11:09 PM
This may be an excellent example of when to use an item of presumably known capabilities. Kudos on carrying the sword “for ten levels and across three campaigns”. I agree that no “product” will ever match something truly Mag ical. But that moment being special was not dependent upon ignorance of the item’s function or activation sequence.

Just got back from game night so I'm too tired to address everything at the moment, but I just wanted to clarify that the entire time I carried that sword around, I had absolutely no clue what it did. Only that it was a single-use enchantment and the activation phrase ("Starsha is cool," because the sword was given to me by what was essentially a preteen demigod). I carried it for as long as I did out of sheer unwillingness to waste a single-use enchantment on anything less than a do-or-die scenario.

And if I'm being totally honest, I have no doubt the DM had entirely forgotten what the enchantment was supposed to do as well (I carried that thing around for real-life years before activating it), and just came up with the outcome on the spot. Which does lend to one convenience of unidentified magic items: Schrodinger's Enchantment. Until identified/activated, a magic item could potentially do anything, and if it takes long enough to find out the DM can simply tweak the enchantment to be something useful to the current situation.

False God
2022-09-10, 12:48 AM
So, I was thinking about something.

......

But, I was thinking... is this one source of some folk's perception that the Exploration Pillar has become de-emphasized? It used to be, every magic item was a puzzle that had to be solved... a potential hazard. Now, magic items are loot... it might take a couple days and a chunk of money, but you'll know what every item you found is, and it's a lot less likely that they're going to try to murder you.

Now, I don't think we should necessarily go back to the days of difficult identification and cursed items... it made the game less fun, IMO. However, I do wonder if making it easy to identify the items made it less a matter of exploration.

Short answer: no.
Slightly longer short answer: On it's own, analyzing magic items depends heavily on how prevalent magic items are in your game.
Are they rare and powerful?(This is the Black Sword of the Abyss, wielded by Asmodeus himself, it's location is a mystery!)
Common and simple?(This is a +1 sword, every guard has one)
Common and powerful?(This is a +5 sword, you can buy them at Swordman Joes)
Whacky and unpredictable? (This is a cursed sword, on Wednesdays, if it's sunny, but not warm, and twice as bad every other full moon, but only if you roll a 6 on Monday.)
Straightforward? (This is a cursed sword, it will give you -2 strength)
The usefulness of magic analyzing spells and abilities and resources will depend heavily on what sort of magic items are in your game and how regularly they feature. Which plays heavily into the style of game you're running. I'm going to disagree that harder magic-item-analysis makes for less fun, unless you're running a game where you want your players to have cool magic stuff to run around with. Many games benefit from difficult magic item analysis, especially games featuring less combat, and darker and grimmer themes (but not necessarily grittier ones).

Long answer: Kinda.
The Longer Long Answer: The ease of magic item analysis is reflected in other elements of the game, what is a forest but an object to be analyzed with certain skills or abilities? What is a murder mystery but a thing to be analyzed with other skills and abilities? What is a king but an object to be analyzed with yet other skills and abilities?
D&D in particular has always lacked solid rules for all 3 pillars. Combat? It's got that nailed down. Everything else? Kinda iffy. There are certainly skills and abilities and spells that address it, but nowhere near the same degree. To this end, these elements are often "hard", because there is no clear-cut approach such as "Roll a d20+strength to attack with your sword." to many of the situations. Sometimes it is more about the player asking the right questions, an IRL skill they may not have, rather than simply rolling the die and getting a result.
So D&D has, over the years, made these areas "easier", but hasn't necessarily made them more clear-cut. Which is ultimately the real issue here. There's still no clear-cut, repeatable approach to every social or exploration situation. Many of the newest rules even go as far to say as "You ignore this situation." (I'm looking at you 5E ranger favored terrains!)
On the flipside, there has been a general loss of granularity. Many things are either "on" or "off" now. Magic items are either "identified" or "unidentified". A lack of subtlety makes things easier, but it doesn't necessarily make them better or more fun.

TLDR: Magic items are a specific example of a number of non-combat areas of the game that have been turned into binary situations. "On" or "Off" makes for simplicity and ease of play, but it does not necessarily improve the game, and it actively prevents DMs and players from using a "dimmer" to find their preferred style and difficulty of play.

Quertus
2022-09-10, 08:10 AM
Lots of stuff you wrote Quertus, but I'd point out that while the "how" is absolutely important from the player perspective, "who", "what", "why", and "where" all have to be first determined (usually be the GM) for that question to be asked in the first place. Dismissing them as boring somewhat misses the point that someone, somewhere, had to come up with the thing are you so interested in exploring.

Unless you run around exploring a 100% randomly generated world, where you just make "how" decisions for your character, roll dice to determine results and then rinse-repeat, I suppose. But that would truly be boring.

From the GM's perspective, unfortunately, there is no "outside the box", or "off the map".

Serious question: why are you bringing up the GM’s perspective wrt Exploration / Discovery, if, as you claim, the GM lacks an Exploration component to their play?

I’ll take this bit

the "how" is absolutely important from the player perspective as agreement with my point, but add that my enjoyment as GM is in not knowing what path the PCs will take, not knowing ahead of time how they will resolve a scenario.


Try looking up 1st/2nd ed. Gamma World. There was a decent, for the time at least, item figuring out mini game for your post apocalypse characters to play with old sufficently advanced tech.

Wasn’t that one of those… lost the word… “incoherent to reality”, “lots of rolls to transition state” “state based map” things? If so, I’m not a fan.


Just got back from game night so I'm too tired to address everything at the moment, but I just wanted to clarify that the entire time I carried that sword around, I had absolutely no clue what it did. Only that it was a single-use enchantment and the activation phrase ("Starsha is cool," because the sword was given to me by what was essentially a preteen demigod). I carried it for as long as I did out of sheer unwillingness to waste a single-use enchantment on anything less than a do-or-die scenario.

And if I'm being totally honest, I have no doubt the DM had entirely forgotten what the enchantment was supposed to do as well (I carried that thing around for real-life years before activating it), and just came up with the outcome on the spot. Which does lend to one convenience of unidentified magic items: Schrodinger's Enchantment. Until identified/activated, a magic item could potentially do anything, and if it takes long enough to find out the DM can simply tweak the enchantment to be something useful to the current situation.

lol, I figured. :smallbiggrin:

Imagine what that scene would have looked like, had you carried the sword around “for 10 levels and across 3 campaigns”, only to have wasted it because it was a melee effect. Or if your have tried to use it, but it had done nothing, because you didn’t know the activation sequence.

But (and I’m just guessing) I doubt that the GM forgot what the sword did. It may well have been “Schrodinger's Enchantment”, as you suggest, or even (functionally, and more charitably) “Starsha invested the sword with 69 points of ‘attack’ power, that will manifest in a way appropriate to the scenario and intent in/with which the user calls upon / involves her coolness.”


TLDR: Magic items are a specific example of a number of non-combat areas of the game that have been turned into binary situations. "On" or "Off" makes for simplicity and ease of play, but it does not necessarily improve the game, and it actively prevents DMs and players from using a "dimmer" to find their preferred style and difficulty of play.

Great post, I think this bit in particular deserves repeating. What makes a game “easy” isn’t allays the same as (and, often, is antithetical to) what makes a game “fun”.

“Roll to see if you win chess” just isn’t the same as actually playing chess. Just like there isn’t a “roll to win D&D” or “roll to win combat” roll, either. The fact that it isn’t so trivial is a prerequisite to its fun. Also, to give an opportunity for roleplay.

Telok
2022-09-10, 01:40 PM
Wasn’t that one of those… lost the word… “incoherent to reality”, “lots of rolls to transition state” “state based map” things? If so, I’m not a fan.

Probably. I only experienced it as a player 30+ years ago and the DM was good about keeping stuff interesting. I don't know if he ran it RAW, but he didn't run it monotone & dull, there were some decisions and suspense involved.

I'm not saying its a perfect ur-example of awesome rules-ness. I'm saying 30+ years ago there was something more interesting than "i castd idendify and know all teh things lol" available in at least one game that was directly compatable with D&D. It would be a decent starting point for anyone in the past 20 years who wanted more thsm basically auto-identification of merchandisable "magic" items.

To be fully blunt, something like a +3 sword, gun, or armor isn't "magical". Its just slightly* better than the junk gear random mooks carry by default. An indestructible sword or armor that becomes strongly magnetic on command are magical and interesting.

*"slightly" as in D&D terms where the +3 sword is +15% to hit and about +25% damage on a base average around 65% hit rate and 3 to 5 hits to take down a mook.

Drakevarg
2022-09-10, 02:09 PM
It's all to do with the assumption that the party gets magic stuff as part of their progression curve.

It's built in, it's always been built in quite explicitly. Like back when there were monsters that could just no sell attacks from weapons that didn't have a certain level of enchantment. So the weapon-hitting guys were expected to get at least some in order to do their hitting.

And because many characters are quite specialised in what items will be good for them. If the Fighter has taken 5 pips in longsword proficiency eventually you need to give him a +1 longsword, even if he gets a different +1 weapon first and only uses it for a couple of encounters with things that refuse to be damaged by anything else so the DM can either give them a suspiciously useful spread of magic items, or festoon them with stuff on the understanding that somewhere in the stack of needles will be the piece of hay they wanted.

Or they can let them just go and get the ones they actually need from a shop and skip the step that kinda feels bad anyway because they don't get to use the thing they invested in properly.

One thing I've always wondered why it's never been more than an optional side-concept is the idea of magic weapons designed to grow with you. In most of fiction, your typical hero will go through... maybe two main weapons over their adventure. The one they start with/obtain at the end of the first act, and the one they get in the mid-to-late story to culminate their maturation. King Arthur never threw away Excalibur to get Ultracalibur, the Master Sword is never sold because Link found the Grandmaster Sword, Narsil only had to be reforged into Anduril once.

Meanwhile in RPGs you toss aside your shiny magic sword for an even shinier magic sword every few levels. Why not instead, normalize the use of magic weapons that gradually unlock more of their hidden potential in a roughly commiserate rate to the character's own development? Be it from closer attunement to the user, or by presenting periodic opportunities to stick it into some mystical energy source and absorbing a new power, or just from "oh hey I never noticed this button before." Would make for a much closer relationship between a player and their equipment than just the newest shiniest bludgeoning-stick.


Not really true, IMO.

Admittedly, "off the map" can only be true in advance, because by the time they're exploring it you've created it. But still, if the players went somewhere totally unexpected that I hadn't yet created, I'd call that "off the map". And then create it before the next session.

Outside the box, however, is entirely possible. That's like, the main advantage of having a human GM, that they have a brain and can extrapolate from unexpected input. There have been numerous occasions where the PCs came up with a plan that I'd not even slightly expected, often using elements that I hadn't considered being combined. And while technically you could say that by the time I started describing the result, I'd mentally created the content, it was for all practical purposes outside the box.

You mean y'all don't plan your sessions like this as a matter of course? My plotlines are all rough sketches until like a session or two before the players get to the content, because I just assume that they'll do something I didn't intend along the way. Unless the player discovery is imminent or it's a closed area where they could discover it at any time, I typically don't bother.


Imagine what that scene would have looked like, had you carried the sword around “for 10 levels and across 3 campaigns”, only to have wasted it because it was a melee effect. Or if your have tried to use it, but it had done nothing, because you didn’t know the activation sequence.

But (and I’m just guessing) I doubt that the GM forgot what the sword did. It may well have been “Schrodinger's Enchantment”, as you suggest, or even (functionally, and more charitably) “Starsha invested the sword with 69 points of ‘attack’ power, that will manifest in a way appropriate to the scenario and intent in/with which the user calls upon / involves her coolness.”

Since you keep putting the phrase in quotes, I suppose I'll elaborate what I mean by 'across three campaigns': The character was my first-ever D&D character, back when I was like... ten or twelve. The DM was the park caretaker at the daycare I was at, and he ran the campaign for a number of kids. The first campaign was relatively brief and pretty much consisted of a single dungeon crawl, during which I got the sword.

Second campaign was run by another kid from that game, who also had the books and whose dad was apparently an acquaintance with Gygax (or maybe Arneson, I forget which). I got permission to just reuse my character from the first campaign, and the game lasted a bit longer but the only thing I actually remember from it was that I got a permanent race change from elf to lizardfolk.

Third campaign, admittedly the only one that could really be called a 'campaign,' was back with the first DM and again I got permission to reuse my original character. This one lasted for years, up to level 14, and was in large part a sort of high-magic 'plane-hopping for fun' kind of adventure. Somewhere along the line it was established that the entire party were part-Fae, most of us being children of Oberon and thus royalty of the Seelie Court. One of us was instead a child of Titania and thus Unseelie, while I was the only one who was a pure-blood child of both. This still being over 15 years ago, most of the specific events are still a blur to me (I've spent much of the last day racking my brain to remember what the name of our no-nonsense nanny-type character was), but the sword finally got used in some kind of sea cave against giant crab-things. Me fighting one and my 'sister' being cornered by another across the map, prompting me to finally use the enchantment. I had indeed only expected it to be a melee enchantment of some kind, something that would let me get past the thing I was fighting so I could rush to my sibling's aid, but I certainly wasn't complaining when I flash-stepped across the entire battlefield instead.

The main reason I suspect the DM completely forgot what the enchantment was is because it turned into a chainsaw sword after that. In all likelihood had I used the sword within a level or two of getting it like a sensible person might, it would've done something cool and then went back to being a normal sword, as implied by the whole "single-use" clause. But I think the DM felt that no matter what the enchantment wound up being, there's no way it could be reasonably balanced against (particularly a young child) keeping it in reserve for literal years. So as a compensation... chainsaw sword.

Quertus
2022-09-10, 09:06 PM
@Drakevarg - in case you don’t know, that story’s cool, no matter how many times or ways you retell it. :smallbiggrin:

Drakevarg
2022-09-10, 09:20 PM
@Drakevarg - in case you don’t know, that story’s cool, no matter how many times or ways you retell it. :smallbiggrin:

I do know that sarcasm is hard to pick up on over text and that I'm enough on the spectrum to over-share, so I'm unsure if I'm being "cool story bro"-d or not.

JNAProductions
2022-09-10, 09:35 PM
I do know that sarcasm is hard to pick up on over text and that I'm enough on the spectrum to over-share, so I'm unsure if I'm being "cool story bro"-d or not.

I think that was sincere.
I find the story cool, at least. :)

Mechalich
2022-09-10, 11:00 PM
One thing I've always wondered why it's never been more than an optional side-concept is the idea of magic weapons designed to grow with you. In most of fiction, your typical hero will go through... maybe two main weapons over their adventure. The one they start with/obtain at the end of the first act, and the one they get in the mid-to-late story to culminate their maturation. King Arthur never threw away Excalibur to get Ultracalibur, the Master Sword is never sold because Link found the Grandmaster Sword, Narsil only had to be reforged into Anduril once.

Meanwhile in RPGs you toss aside your shiny magic sword for an even shinier magic sword every few levels. Why not instead, normalize the use of magic weapons that gradually unlock more of their hidden potential in a roughly commiserate rate to the character's own development? Be it from closer attunement to the user, or by presenting periodic opportunities to stick it into some mystical energy source and absorbing a new power, or just from "oh hey I never noticed this button before." Would make for a much closer relationship between a player and their equipment than just the newest shiniest bludgeoning-stick.

This has a lot to do with the influence of D&D and how D&D is built around adventuring and one of the core pillars of adventuring is the acquisition of loot.

Characters in D&D acquire stuff, heaping piles of stuff, and it's boring if they never use any of that stuff except to turn it into cash (consider, for example, video games that have 'junk' items that are only used for sale, does anyone ever pay attention to the descriptions of that stuff, of course not). That means some of the loot has to be stuff the characters will actually use, and it can't all be disposable use items because in many cases players will either never use those or blow through them as fast as they possibly can. So there has to be some chance of the acquisition of permanent new gear.

A game can avoid this, but in order to do so it mostly has to avoid the whole 'phat loots' aspect of gameplay entirely. Which is fine, there are plenty of systems where it makes little sense, but the D&D- based DNA embedded in a lot of game design means this is simply assumed to be the case for most dungeon crawlers.

InvisibleBison
2022-09-10, 11:02 PM
One thing I've always wondered why it's never been more than an optional side-concept is the idea of magic weapons designed to grow with you. In most of fiction, your typical hero will go through... maybe two main weapons over their adventure. The one they start with/obtain at the end of the first act, and the one they get in the mid-to-late story to culminate their maturation. King Arthur never threw away Excalibur to get Ultracalibur, the Master Sword is never sold because Link found the Grandmaster Sword, Narsil only had to be reforged into Anduril once.

Yes, that's because traditional fiction isn't built around the idea of characters' capabilities being represented by known numerical quantities that can be boosted by magical equipment, and RPGs for the most part are. RPGs and single-author fiction are different things that work differently; you can't simply transfer concepts from one to to the other and expect them to keep working.


Meanwhile in RPGs you toss aside your shiny magic sword for an even shinier magic sword every few levels. Why not instead, normalize the use of magic weapons that gradually unlock more of their hidden potential in a roughly commiserate rate to the character's own development? Be it from closer attunement to the user, or by presenting periodic opportunities to stick it into some mystical energy source and absorbing a new power, or just from "oh hey I never noticed this button before." Would make for a much closer relationship between a player and their equipment than just the newest shiniest bludgeoning-stick.

Why would a game push a player to have a close relationship with their equipment? That seems like the sort of thing that should be left to happen only for the people who are interested in it, with perhaps some optional rules to facilitate it if necessary.

Drakevarg
2022-09-10, 11:11 PM
Yes, that's because traditional fiction isn't built around the idea of characters' capabilities being represented by known numerical quantities that can be boosted by magical equipment, and RPGs for the most part are. RPGs and single-author fiction are different things that work differently; you can't simply transfer concepts from one to to the other and expect them to keep working.

D&D didn't spring whole-cloth from nothing. The basic premise of the game is to live out your own fantasy adventure, and practically every single core ruleset published has suggested looking to fantasy media for inspiration. Acting like the two have nothing to do with each other is patently absurd.


Why would a game push a player to have a close relationship with their equipment? That seems like the sort of thing that should be left to happen only for the people who are interested in it, with perhaps some optional rules to facilitate it if necessary.

Why would a game push a player to stick to arbitrary character archetypes like wizard or barbarian by strictly limiting their selection of skills and class features, rather than making everything a grab-bag and only giving optional rules to build to a particular archetype?

Because it suits the fiction the game wants to simulate, and puts characters into roughly predictable party roles. Just because a game is already doing a thing doesn't mean it's the right approach and just because it isn't doing the thing doesn't mean that it's a bad idea.


This has a lot to do with the influence of D&D and how D&D is built around adventuring and one of the core pillars of adventuring is the acquisition of loot.

Characters in D&D acquire stuff, heaping piles of stuff, and it's boring if they never use any of that stuff except to turn it into cash (consider, for example, video games that have 'junk' items that are only used for sale, does anyone ever pay attention to the descriptions of that stuff, of course not). That means some of the loot has to be stuff the characters will actually use, and it can't all be disposable use items because in many cases players will either never use those or blow through them as fast as they possibly can. So there has to be some chance of the acquisition of permanent new gear.

A game can avoid this, but in order to do so it mostly has to avoid the whole 'phat loots' aspect of gameplay entirely. Which is fine, there are plenty of systems where it makes little sense, but the D&D- based DNA embedded in a lot of game design means this is simply assumed to be the case for most dungeon crawlers.

This is getting a bit more into vidjagame design than tabletop (though it can just as easily apply to both), but two approaches I've seen to keep loot relevant that I quite like:

a) Worldbuilding. A well-designed situational loot table can make digging through dusty ruins quite a lot of fun even if it isn't anything you can turn around and hit someone with. I've played characters whose entire job was just salvage, because I liked having an excuse to break into some derelict ship, loot it for valuable components, and explore how it wound up where it is. I loved the collectibles in the more recent Tomb Raider games for the same reason; it provided no in-game benefit beyond completionism, but getting little snippets of history and culture through the artifacts was a lot of fun for me. Quite a bit moreso than shooting another dozen random mercs in the face, certainly.

b) Crafting. Perhaps a bit overused in vidjagames right now, but if the game is gonna give you a hundred useless longswords/guns to drag back to camp, sometimes the best thing to do with them is pull them apart for scrap. Might work particularly well in a game that actually gives a damn about spell components. Maybe you don't need another hundred thousand coins to Scrooge McDuck around in, but that idol with the diamond eyes might come in pretty handy if you ever need a resurrection spell.

Quertus
2022-09-11, 07:06 AM
I do know that sarcasm is hard to pick up on over text and that I'm enough on the spectrum to over-share, so I'm unsure if I'm being "cool story bro"-d or not.


I think that was sincere.
I find the story cool, at least. :)

Yeah, completely serious.

Or… to be pedantic, what I typed and what I meant aren’t exactly the same, in that, say, if you posted the story every post, 100x per day, yeah, I imagine it’d lose some of its charm.

I was just saying that I enjoyed the story, and… hoping to encourage you to use it as an example in any future thread where it might come up as relevant, without sweating the details about getting it across exactly right?

EDIT: or, to put it another way, I didn’t want “picking over the details the story” to make it feel like the story was unappreciated.

Satinavian
2022-09-11, 08:24 AM
And I'd say the opposite about what magic items should do - they're interesting only if they cover fundamentally different bases than you can cover with controlled character build choices. Magic items are the opportunity for things found during play and sought during play to be more relevant than preconceptions that can be brought in before the game even starts. That's fundamental to what exploration and discovery are about.

How did those items get made then? Well, many explanations are available. Spellcasting itself could be far broader than adventuring spell lists suggest. Why not have spells exist to customize the fit of clothing, make materials softer, etc - billions of 'uses of magic' that are specialized and nonmechanically relevant, so there's no need to pre-list them. Secondly, and more in line with discovery as fundamental gameplay, item creation could be more like chemistry where the reagents and raw materials and environmental conditions used are fundamental to the outcome, rather than it all boiling down to feat+gold+spell.
This is the general Roleplaying section.

And all the system i have recently played at all don't have any distinction for adventurer magic and non-adventurer magic. Their magic system covers the magic of the setting, including what NPCs use for their craft. Also PCs are not prohibited from learning that if they want. I played a magical tailor for years and it was quite fun.


Now the D&D magic system is at best a bad excuse for one and operates on "anything goes" anyway. It is only concerned with putting a price tag on magical effects and sort them for power. And these would be the only limits to magical items as well, when applying the principles outlines.

Drakevarg
2022-09-11, 11:41 AM
Yeah, completely serious.

Or… to be pedantic, what I typed and what I meant aren’t exactly the same, in that, say, if you posted the story every post, 100x per day, yeah, I imagine it’d lose some of its charm.

I was just saying that I enjoyed the story, and… hoping to encourage you to use it as an example in any future thread where it might come up as relevant, without sweating the details about getting it across exactly right?

EDIT: or, to put it another way, I didn’t want “picking over the details the story” to make it feel like the story was unappreciated.

Fair enough. Appreciated. Sincerity and passive-aggression can be hard to tell apart over text.

NichG
2022-09-11, 11:48 AM
This is the general Roleplaying section.

And all the system i have recently played at all don't have any distinction for adventurer magic and non-adventurer magic. Their magic system covers the magic of the setting, including what NPCs use for their craft. Also PCs are not prohibited from learning that if they want. I played a magical tailor for years and it was quite fun.


Now the D&D magic system is at best a bad excuse for one and operates on "anything goes" anyway. It is only concerned with putting a price tag on magical effects and sort them for power. And these would be the only limits to magical items as well, when applying the principles outlines.

Then what's your issue with items going outside of what characters can do without items? In many other systems, those have literally no connection. Syrneth artifacts in 7th Sea aren't expressions of any of the bloodline magics. Nemurenai in L5R aren't packaged Shugenja spells. Stuff you can do with items in say Exalted don't reflect particular charms or sorceries. Treasures in Changeling don't correspond at all to particular Arts. Items in Numenera/The Strange are the bulk of 'effects' and are totally separate from what you can get as character abilities. In sci-fi games, just because you can buy a spacecraft with an FTL drive doesn't imply that 'FTL drive' must be a character ability first.

It's mostly D&D 3.5 that actually wants items = spell effects that I'm aware of, thus why I assumed that's where you were coming from. And it's D&D that refers to exploration as a 'pillar ' and has this recent conflict between mandatory numerical bonus items vs weird stuff.

Bohandas
2022-09-11, 11:50 AM
One thing I've always wondered why it's never been more than an optional side-concept is the idea of magic weapons designed to grow with you. In most of fiction, your typical hero will go through... maybe two main weapons over their adventure. The one they start with/obtain at the end of the first act, and the one they get in the mid-to-late story to culminate their maturation. King Arthur never threw away Excalibur to get Ultracalibur, the Master Sword is never sold because Link found the Grandmaster Sword, Narsil only had to be reforged into Anduril once.

Point taken, but counterpoint Luke Skywalker had at least two lightsabers, and Finn Mertens went through like a dozen different swords before Adventure Time was over. And in the Epic Battle Fantasy games Matt carries a bunch of different swords that are similar in power but all have different elemental properties

Also, most of the heroes in your examples are facing off against threats that are relatively uniform in power. With leveling up in D&D, and the corresponding higher level adventures, things are more similar to a show like Power Rangers, where they have to upgrade their equipment at least once a season to keep pace with the villains (and even though this is a contrivance driven by the producers'* desire to sell new action figures and robot toys, it's ultimately not more contrived and unrealistic than leveling up is)


*or to get really technical, driven by the desire of the producers of the show that the producers of Power Rangers buy their stock sci-fi combat footage from to sell new action figures and robot toys

Drakevarg
2022-09-11, 12:03 PM
Point taken, but counterpoint Luke Skywalker had at least two lightsabers, and Finn Mertens went through like a dozen different swords before Adventure Time was over. And in the Epic Battle Fantasy games Matt carries a bunch of different swords that are similar in power but all have different elemental properties

Luke was actually one of the specific examples I had in mind with "maybe two main weapons over their adventure. The one they start with/obtain at the end of the first act, and the one they get in the mid-to-late story to culminate their maturation." The green one represents his maturation as a character and the forging of his own path, instead of the one handed to him.

As for the other two, never seen the latter, and Finn the Human is pretty much literally a D&D character. On the other hand, most of those swords were indeed directly tied to his character development; it's just that the show was such a fantasy-explosion-rollercoaster that he went through those kinds of arcs a lot. So that kind of thing can certainly work if that's the kind of story you're telling. But I'd say there are at least as many campaigns where the story is one continuous epic as there are campaigns where it's just a wacky sequence of mini-adventures.


Also, most of the heroes in your examples are facing off against threats that are relatively uniform in power. With leveling up in D&D, and the corresponding higher level adventures, things are more similar to a show like Power Rangers, where they have to upgrade their equipment at least once a season to keep pace with the villains (and even though this is a contrivance driven by the producers'* desire to sell new action figures and robot toys, it's ultimately not more contrived and unrealistic than leveling up is)

I can kinda see where you're going with the comparison, though with Power Rangers I'm pretty sure literally every single episode has had a monster selection of "disposable goons -> boss goon -> kaiju." So the need for upgrades is pretty much just on paper, to justify the new toys as you said.

Counterpoint though, a lot of shonen give their characters mid-season upgrades not in the form of new gear, but in the form of unlocking new powers for their own gear. Bankai, all the random powers that got stuffed into the Tetsusaiga, etc. Both approaches are equally valid in fiction, even in stories with continually-escalating threats.

InvisibleBison
2022-09-11, 12:36 PM
D&D didn't spring whole-cloth from nothing. The basic premise of the game is to live out your own fantasy adventure, and practically every single core ruleset published has suggested looking to fantasy media for inspiration. Acting like the two have nothing to do with each other is patently absurd.

I never said they have nothing to do with each other, I said they are different, that is not completely identical. Gear treadmills happens to be one of the ways in which typical RPG mechanics and typical storytelling conventions don't align.



Why would a game push a player to stick to arbitrary character archetypes like wizard or barbarian by strictly limiting their selection of skills and class features, rather than making everything a grab-bag and only giving optional rules to build to a particular archetype?

Well, for one thing there are plenty of games that don't push players to stick to arbitrary character archetypes. And even in more archetype-focused games, it's generally not the case that the archetypes are so narrow as to require everyone who makes a certain kind of character to incorporate a specific, rather niche, narrative trope. So I ask again: Why should games push players having a close relationship with their equipment? What is it about that specific trope that makes it essential for all characters?

Tiktakkat
2022-09-11, 12:38 PM
As a note, early adventures were chock full of magic items... B2 has something like 70 magic items in the hands of bad guys or as findable treasure, with only 15 of those being single-use consumables (potions, scrolls with only 1 spell). And this doesn't include stuff just dripping from people in the keep itself, including low-level guards.

This and then some.
A lot of old-timers (of which I am one) have conveniently subjective memories when it comes to the raw amount of magic items that were present in the early adventures, and not merely the ones converted from tournament rounds, that they try to use as a club against later iterations. Despite the "guidelines" in the DMG1E, adventures routinely featured enough magic treasure to outfit a party of 8 with 3 henchmen and 2 hirelings each, which was good because that many people would be needed to haul away the mundane loot.


As for the original question, for me it comes down to what you want the players exploring, not to mention what the players want to explore, with the system requirements modifying it.
Clearly making identification easier takes away that element of challenge, but is it an element that you want or need, and can the system support it?

As above, with magical gear hardwired into character power by level, requiring identification actively works against the rules system itself, and quickly becomes an excuse to hamper players. This is going to be made worse based on the length of the adventuring "day". Basic D20 with 4 and done it is not that much of an issue. Modified D20 reverting to enough encounters to level and maybe more before resting, which is quite common in PF1, is quite a bit different.

On an individual campaign basis, are the magic items and their backstories that relevant that players should be required to go through another step to employ them? Are they that powerful to justify it?
Weapons of Legacy required significant effort above and beyond a mere identify spell to use such an item. Would every player enjoy that for a simple sword that does not scale, never mind a potion that is used and gone?

Between the two, the raw resource requirement should also be considered. How many 100 gp pearls for identify are readily available? How much of the wealth gained per level is required to identify everything? Does an artificer's monocle (which converts a detect magic into an identify) become a default wealth tax?

Perhaps that suggests a variable system, with common items being identifiable with a mere skill check or detect magic, more specialized items requiring several or more difficult skill checks and something not-quite-as-expensive as an identify, and really unique, campaign items requiring mini-games to unlock, all with a focus on what game the DM wants to run and the players want to play and how friendly the core rules are to such a plan.

Drakevarg
2022-09-11, 12:43 PM
So I ask again: Why should games push players having a close relationship with their equipment? What is it about that specific trope that makes it essential for all characters?

Nothing is essential for ALL characters. I just think it should be presented as an equally-valid option to the loot train, rather than an obscure optional niche mechanic.

Satinavian
2022-09-12, 02:20 AM
Between the two, the raw resource requirement should also be considered. How many 100 gp pearls for identify are readily available? How much of the wealth gained per level is required to identify everything? Does an artificer's monocle (which converts a detect magic into an identify) become a default wealth tax?
Oh, yes. I remember 3.x games where pearls and magic markets where not guaranteed and players simply stopped looting unlabeled potions because they would not waste a pearl on them or use them without identification.
And i know that once artificer's monocle appeared in print pretty much every group bought or crafted it as soon as possible.

Silly Name
2022-09-12, 04:11 AM
Identifying magic items per se isn't technically part of the exploration pillar. However, it can definitely enhanche it. It can help build up a mystery and then give answers: why was this item here? Who put it there?

The main trouble D&D encounters when dealing with the question of "how do I learn what this thing does?" is that it often tries to give an universal answer. Identifying a +1 sword uses the same process as identifying a holy avenger, which I feel is somewhat wrong.

"Common" magic items should be easy to identify, or at least provide enough context clues about their intended purposes and origins that players can correctly guess. I color-coded potions in my 3.5 games, so eventually over the course of a campaign players learnt that "sanguine red" is for cure wounds, "light blue with white streaks" is for haste, "bright yellow and fizzling" is a oil of magic weapon, etc. It made the players feel smart and like they were learning about the world.

Another aid was doing away with "random loot", or at least random loot generated on the spot. If you're in a wizard's abandoned laboratory, you aren't going to find a +3 breastplate of fire resistance unless there's a reason for the wizard to have made that item, in which case it's likely that by looking around the laboratory you can find information on why the wizard made it, and thus learn about its magical properties...

Stuff like a holy avenger should demand specific conditions to reveal its true properties - this is already somewhat present in the rules for the holy avenger specifically, in that its full power is accesible only by paladins. However, anyone can learn that that sword is a holy avenger. I feel that undersells how special such items are: in my ideal campaign, a holy avenger would look like any other sword until it's drawn by a righteous paladin in need, shining with divine light and revealing its full glory.

So, how do you make finding and identifying magic items fun and part of the exploration side of the game?

1. No magic marts. This is a rule in all my games: you can't buy magic items except in rare occasions or at incredibly great cost from specific individuals. Only exception is potions of cure wounds, which can be made by any apothecary/alchemist (albeit usually in limited quantities).

2. No random loot. Everything is there for a reason - treasure tables are useful, but they need to be used to pregenerate the items you'll find, so that you have time to come up with a reason as to why that item is there.

3. Clues! From the looks of the item, to hints and descriptions lying around where you found it, to straight-up tales from locals ("they say that the wizard who used to live in that tower could summons spirits of fire from a brazier..."), players ought to feel like they're figuring things out themselves, instead of rolling dice or just casting a spell to ask the DM what this shield is.

4. If players just don't manage to solve the puzzle, do let them research their magic items during downtime. Libraries, laboratories, temples and schools is where they have to spend time, and perhaps resources and money, to analyse an item in a more "academic" manner, but it shouldn't be the default answer.

Bohandas
2022-09-12, 11:21 AM
If you want to match fantasy fiction it shouldn't be "no magic marts", it should be "no permanent magic marts". In the stories, that store is just suddenly there one day, and the next week it's gone (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday). A little bit like Halloween Adventure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Adventure). But unlike Halloween Adventure, nobody remembers the store having been there after it leaves, and if the characters go back to the lot it was on it will appear to have been abandoned for years.

EDIT:
Or "no magic marts" with the qualification that they should be magical pop-up stores instead

Silly Name
2022-09-12, 12:49 PM
If you want to match fantasy fiction it shouldn't be "no magic marts", it should be "no permanent magic marts". In the stories, that store is just suddenly there one day, and the next week it's gone (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLittleShopThatWasntThereYesterday). A little bit like Halloween Adventure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Adventure). But unlike Halloween Adventure, nobody remembers the store having been there after it leaves, and if the characters go back to the lot it was on it will appear to have been abandoned for years.

EDIT:
Or "no magic marts" with the qualification that they should be magical pop-up stores instead

Oh, I've definitely done the "mysterious shop run by a mysterious seller that then disappears" thing a couple of times! For example, once in a 5e game an Autognome Monk went into one such shop and said he wanted to become stronger, so the old guy running the shop told them to drink a certain potion... And the monk woke up a few hours later in a completely empty shop looking like nobody had been there in years, a pair of Guantlets of Ogre Power melded to their arms (in reality, the character could have removed the attunement whenever he wanted, but it would have been described as painfully removing the inserts). The "payment", unknown to everyone, was that the Guantlets were enchanted so that the mage (secretely a villain) could scry on the party through them.

But when people talk about "the magic-mart", the assumption is that it is stable, easily accesible and doesn't pull such tricks: you get what you paid for.

gbaji
2022-09-12, 05:57 PM
Serious question: why are you bringing up the GM’s perspective wrt Exploration / Discovery, if, as you claim, the GM lacks an Exploration component to their play?

Maybe I'm confused about what you were trying to say, but it sounded like KorvinStarmast listed a set of determinations from the GM POV that involve item/environment creation steps that the players then explore. You called that a "boring snoozefest" and listed a set of "how" questions you wanted players to make that were fun and part of exploration. Ok. Great. But that seems like you're focusing entirely on the player side and ignoring that the GM has to first create the things that players explore, and that this involves answering questions like "who, what, when, where, and why", just as KorvinStarmast indicated.

I was just pointing this out. Those other questions have to be answered too, or there's nothing to explore. I brought it up because you seemed to be over-focusing on one aspect of the issue at hand. Yes, you do have to consider how players may deal with anything you put into your game, but that's not part of your own "exploration" as the GM. You aren't making those decisions. You're planning content and perhaps speculating what may happen (and at the least making sure there are ways for the PCs to deal with said content), but that should be the extent of that process.


I’ll take this bit
as agreement with my point, but add that my enjoyment as GM is in not knowing what path the PCs will take, not knowing ahead of time how they will resolve a scenario.

I absolutely agree. But (again unless I just completely misread what you wrote), you seemed to be saying that the GM should focus on the "hows" of player actions instead of the who/what/when/where/why of "things in the world that I created" (ie: the GMing process). The danger as a GM of getting too far into the "how" question is that you may start scripting things, which leads to railroading when the players don't follow the script, which leads to hate, then anger, then the dark side (or maybe I got those out of order).

And for the record, while there is enjoyment in seeing how my players decide to approach or solve (or hilariously fail to solve) something in my world, it's not really the same enjoyment as true exploration. It's why I said "unfortunately" in my earlier post. As the GM you don't really get to explore anything. Even if it's written just ahead of the players and in response to their own actions, you're still "writing" and "creating" the content. It's why I enjoy immensely when I get to play as a player instead of as a GM. I get to sit back and enjoy someone else's content, when I don't know what's around the corner, and don't get to decide that either. I get to "explore" the unknown. That's very fun. And it's something you don't get as a GM.

While you still get surprises as a GM, they are never the result of your own choices and actions and then seeing what happened, but always the players directing that process. You already know what exists in the room/town/wherever. You know what the PCs have on their sheets. You know the game rules. The only thing you don't know is what strange thought processes are bouncing around inside the player's heads. And that's not really the same as exploration IMO.