Simple legacy weapons fix

[Elves]

Legacy items are widely disliked mostly because of their personal costs. It doesn't feel good for your special item to make you worse. As a game design element, the idea seems to be that the personal costs offset possessing a more powerful item than you would normally have at your level. At the same time, most legacy weapons are significantly underpriced (based on their ritual costs) compared to what the item would cost with the typical magic item formulas. Probably this is, again, so that a lower-level character than normal can afford them.

So we see that the personal costs are actually offsetting the item's low price, not its powers per se. An obvious solution emerges: let people pay full price for the item in order to avoid the personal costs.

Now we get a system that works for everyone. Anyone can wield the weapon and gain its powers, but if you haven't performed its rituals, you suffer its personal costs. The rituals have their gp cost bumped up to be in line with the normal cost of the item. At any point, you can perform the rituals to fully "earn" the item and remove its personal costs.

This fulfills the goal of letting the item be given out at a lower level than normal. Later, if you want, you can pay it off to rid yourself of the penalties.


Addendum -- I also think it would be cool to play with personal costs that are more unique: for example, a heedless axe could impose –1 AC and prevent you from fighting defensively or using total defense while you wield it. But unlike the general penalties of the current system, these make it easier to pick an item with a personal cost that doesn't affect you, so they shouldn't be used as a serious balancing factor.

[Benji8070]

My personal fix for them is that the penalties only apply while wielding that particular weapon. Also, the feats aren't mandatory but, if taken, they remove the costs for a period of levels depending on the feat taken. I feel that the feat tax is much more of a penalty than the actual penalties.

The tricky part that I found was changing them so that they were desirable, but still felt like unique weapons. My original fixes made them feel just like artifacts which, while good, wasn't the aim at all.

[Tzardok]

There isn't a feat tax for legacy weapons. The feats are bonus feats, gained automatically when doing the proper ritual.

[Gorthawar]

I've not had any problems with giving one of my players a legacy weapon based on shishi-o without any penalties. As a daring outlaw he can do with the help in a party with a cleric, druid and wizard. It's just about the balance of the game. If you're allowing players to create their own legacy items it can always get unbalanced.

[Curbludgeon]

I've been fiddling with a legacy champion build, and have a question. Do the penalty tables which lower caster/manifester level affect eligibility in prestige classes which expressly list caster/manifester level as a prerequisite? Weapons of Legacy states the penalties have no bearing on the spells a character can cast, only on the level dependent variables. I could see an argument for either interpretation, but wondered if there was ever anything else written on the subject.

As far as a quick and dirty fix, making the legacy feats require slots instead of being a bonus granted via ritual, but after which penalties don't apply seems workable enough. Casters usually have better options to take, and many tables won't let the legacy champion "+1 of existing class features" apply to classes like hellfire warlock or fiend of possession, so making things better for 3.5 martials is more often than not welcome.

[Elves]

There isn't a feat tax for legacy weapons. The feats are bonus feats, gained automatically when doing the proper ritual.
Another reason WoL flopped is that many ppl didn’t understand this.

I think this is the fault of how the books are written. Any of the books that introduced new subsystems should have begun, right away, page 1, with an extremely clear and simple description of how the system works.


I've not had any problems with giving one of my players a legacy weapon based on shishi-o without any penalties.
If you remove the penalties outright you have to bump up the price of the item for it to be balanced. This fix is identical to doing that — while preserving the ability for the item to be obtained before the player could traditionally afford it, if they are willing to suffer the personal costs.

If you don’t bump the price, they can only be given through fiat, so they’re just artifacts.


As far as a quick and dirty fix, making the legacy feats require slots instead of being a bonus granted via ritual, but after which penalties don't apply seems workable enough.
Yes, you could give the option to buy off the penalties with feats as well as with gold.

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Btw, my actual opinion on WoL is that scaling magic items is a great idea to avoid the item treadmill and be more like stories where people have one item they keep for their career. I think scaling items should just be a normal thing not its own subsystem with a special book. But the idea in this thread is a minimally invasive fix to the system as it is.

[Benji8070]

There isn't a feat tax for legacy weapons. The feats are bonus feats, gained automatically when doing the proper ritual.

Welp. I've been playing it wrong for a long time then... Still, I think using the feats/rituals as methods of getting rid of the penalties still works.