Magic Items and the Exploration Pillar

[LibraryOgre]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

@Drakevarg - in case you don’t know, that story’s cool, no matter how many times or ways you retell it.

[Drakevarg]

@Drakevarg - in case you don’t know, that story’s cool, no matter how many times or ways you retell it.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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?