[3.5] House Rule - Item Attunement Time

[Thurbane]

So, in my group (depending who's DMing) there's occasionally a rule introduced where any constant-effect worn item needs time to attune to it's wearer, before the benefits kick in. Sort of similar to how a Ring of Sustenance needs to be worn for a week, but for general items it's usually rules as 24 hours.

The idea is to not have people hand around stat/save/skill check boosters (and other similar items) between party members willy-nilly.

Myself, it's not something I usually bother about. If someone wants to hand across their gauntlets of Ogre Power for another PC to force a door open, I really don't mind.

But it got me wondering - what are the kick-on effects from this house-rule? Does it reinforce caster supremacy?

Bear in mind we are a pretty low-op group, no one uses Divine Metamagic Persists or anything like that. A fair chunk of our games are core-only, as well.

Thoughts? Comments?

Side question: are there other published items similar to the Ring of Sustenance where they require an attunement time?

Cheers - T

[Gorthawar]

The only time something like that came up in my games was when a player needed to make his save against poison or level loss and everyone gave them their best items to help with it. Casters have a better chance to negate the issue however so you might be right that the rule could be harsher on mundanes.

There are a bunch of items in the MIC that require attunement. Mostly to stop abusing using multiple of the same kind for x per day uses (Bracers of quick strike, the chronocharms and cloak of elemental protection, desperation chain, mind vault, ring of master artifice, scarab of invulnerability and surge crystal are the ones I could find).

[pabelfly]

Attunement also stops people from trying to stack the same item. Does stacking Nightsticks work for a DMM Cleric? Certainly not now with attunement houserule in effect.

[redking]

Attunement time is great to prevent mechanical abuse, but it kills the trope of some young man or woman discovering a magical device, accidentally activating it, and with the newfound powers, the beginning of an adventure. I think it's a bad trade off.

[Biggus]

I don't apply it to all items, but I find it useful for specific items to prevent abuse. For example, Anklets of Translocation only cost 1,400GP and give you short-range teleport twice a day as a swift action, and they don't need to be able to move or cast spells to use it, just speak. A PC can afford several of them even at quite low levels. It means that grappling becomes completely useless and casters don't have to worry about casting defensively even if the enemy has a reach weapon among other things. So rather than ban them I put a 24-hour attunement time on them.

Edit: runestaffs (MIC) require attunement to prevent Sorcerers from buying a bunch of them and completely ignoring their spells known limit.

Edit 2: the "surge" weapon special abilities in the MIC (holy/unholy, energy, stunning, and defensive) have a different type of attunement; once one person has used them, they can't be activated by anyone else until the following day.

[Elkad]

I do it.

And yes, I handwave away the bit about it activating when you first pick it up. Assume it has an excess of mana stored up from all that time in a treasure chest, or got a burst of power from the departing soul of the bad guy you just took it off...

But in general? No, you can't buy 7 Healing Belt(s) and swap them after every encounter. Or hand around the only Boots of Levitation to get up the cliff - use them to take a rope up for your party members, and keep using them to Aid Another on their climb checks. (for that I'd probably just skip the rolls and say it works).

[Telonius]

It would cut down the usefulness of magic items found in the course of adventuring. You can't just defeat the dudes and immediately use their stuff.

5e formalizes attunement - you can attune any item by using a "short rest" (exactly how long that is, is a source of some debate; depending on what alternate rules you use, it's anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour). You have a limited number of items you can attune, but not every magic item requires attunement. I'm not sure I'd want to port over the whole thing to 3.5, where needing multiple magic items is the norm.

The abuse the attunement rule (in 3.5) is intended to prevent seems mostly limited to a few specific items. I don't see how being able to put on, say, a Cloak of Elvenkind and having it work right away is gamebreaking, abusive, or breaking verisimilitude. So maybe make "attunement" a rule - but only for those potentially-abusable items. Limit attunement so you can only have up to three items at a time attuned (this is the usual limit for 5e too). Require some amount of time (an hour, a day, whatever) to do it.

[False God]

It could result in your party taking more time off after a haul to figure out what magic item in question they want to use and then attuning to it. This could turn out well, in that this downtime happens only after a significant dungeon crawl, more likely, your players will hold up in a small cave or room within the dungeon and tell you "We do nothing for the next 24 hours so Bob can attune to this new item." If players don't coordinate their downtime to attune, you'll end up with a lot of "15 minute work days" punctuated with a lot of "we do nothing for 24 hours".

Personally as a DM, I'm inclined to make attunement more variable, but I custom build a lot of items, so a sword that immediately takes to its owner because it can sense their "true potential in their heart of hearts" can be interesting and immersive, as much as a sword that takes a long time to unveil its full power. Perhaps "static bonus" weapons that simply add +1 damage require no attunement, but weapons with special magical properties do.

I like attunement as a DM as a way to avoid stacking issues, but I think just saying "you can't stack the magical effect of two of the same items(exceptions apply" is an easier way to do this. I've also never found a satisfactory way to balance how many items someone can be attuned to in a way that feels natural and not some arbitrary game limit.

Personally as a player, I'm not very inclined to wait 24 hours for an extra 1d6 fire damage only on a crit. I've been known in some of my groups to dump magic items that have strange properties, weird requirements and so on simply because I, as a player, don't want to bother for what often turns out to be a frankly very minor or situational bonus.

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At the end of the day I think it really depends on your group. Any obstacles between magic items and people who'd potentially use them tends to affect magic-item users harder (like fighters, rogues and other martial types) than magic-item producers, since they aren't typically item-dependent for increased effectiveness. If you don't have a lot of magic-item dependent characters (say you've got a Druid, a Cleric, a Wizard, a Sorcerer and a Bard) attunement probably won't impact your group much. If you've got say, a Druid, Wizard, Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian they'll probably see much more impact from item attunement requirements, and you'll see much more attunement-related downtime.

It also depends on the availability of magic items "back home". If the party finds a bunch of loot, how easily can they take that back to town and trade it in for stuff they'll actually care about investing time in?

Because ultimately, you're asking your party to invest time into something, which means they'll (probably) expect compensatory value in return. How valuable is 24 hours to your players? Is this asking a lot, or a little of them? In a crunch(like a dungeon crawl), time is exceptionally valuable. How reactive is the world? Will monsters reinforce their positions? Run away? Carry off the loot? How valuable you make the time within your world will go a long way to determining how harsh of an impact making players wait to use a potentially useful item may be.

[rel]

Attunement time is great to prevent mechanical abuse, but it kills the trope of some young man or woman discovering a magical device, accidentally activating it, and with the newfound powers, the beginning of an adventure. I think it's a bad trade off.


It would cut down the usefulness of magic items found in the course of adventuring. You can't just defeat the dudes and immediately use their stuff.


An alternative approach might be to make items require an UNattunement or DEattunement time. You can pick up and use whatever you want, but once you use it, it's bound to you, perhaps physically, until a certain time period has passed.

That way the fighter can still pick up and use the flaming sword they just disarmed off the vampire king, but the party can't trade it around to use it's fire resistance to cross the burning moat.

[Crake]

Attunement time is great to prevent mechanical abuse, but it kills the trope of some young man or woman discovering a magical device, accidentally activating it, and with the newfound powers, the beginning of an adventure. I think it's a bad trade off.

This can be solved by frontloading the attunement, to be a cooldown to equip something else, so instead of saying “it takes 24 hours to attune to this item” its “it takes 24 hours to UNATTUNE from this item and allow you to equip a new one”. That effectively means the first item in each slot is free of attunement, but each following one has its whatever attunement time

[Gruftzwerg]

for Initiator classes the Crown of White Raven (and its variants) could be abused to quickly get another maneuver.

[Mnemnosyne]

After playing 5th Edition for some time, attunement is one of the rules I despise the most. I can see some upsides in a few situations, but the downsides are far more problematic. Trying to prevent people from passing around a magical item is exactly part of the problem. It always, always feels like a gamey restriction to prevent useful things from being used. Now, for things like nightstick stacking, yeah, that can be an issue perhaps. But better handled by making specific exceptions of those items that are actually a problem, where those particular items don't stack, rather than trying to limit items in general in a way that feels gamey and manipulative, and restricts players in awkward ways.

[Darg]

I like attunement as a DM as a way to avoid stacking issues, but I think just saying "you can't stack the magical effect of two of the same items(exceptions apply" is an easier way to do this. I've also never found a satisfactory way to balance how many items someone can be attuned to in a way that feels natural and not some arbitrary game limit.

If you need rules for it, bonuses from the same source don't stack. Nor do bonuses need to be declared bonuses or apply to a die roll to be considered a bonus. You can see this being the case for spell focus and proven in greater spell focus.

[False God]

If you need rules for it, bonuses from the same source don't stack. Nor do bonuses need to be declared bonuses or apply to a die roll to be considered a bonus. You can see this being the case for spell focus and proven in greater spell focus.

Right, that's usually my go-to solution to stacking issues.

[Troacctid]

I wouldn't anticipate any significant second-order effects beyond a.) making it more difficult to share items between party members and b.) making it more difficult to swap between multiple worn items in the same slot. If those are the intended goals of the houserule, I think it will do a good job of accomplishing them without causing unwanted side effects.

(I wouldn't consider creating a delay between finding an item and using an item to be significant. To me, having to wait to get the item identified in order to learn what it does and how to activate it is just the norm.)