Wondrous items are boring

I’m constantly having troubles with visualisation of how various wondrous items work. Ring of invisibility? Ok, I totally understand the oldschool version (you put it on – you vanish from sight), and I can beat the command-word version without too much struggle. Sword+1? Plain boring. Amulet of Health +2? Same shit. Belt of Giant Strength? I’m stuck. Seriously, how does a person with a Belt of Giant Strength on look like? More buff, you say? Why? How? Hello, I’m playing the game of imagination here, so I have to imagine things to play it. “You put it on, nothing changes, but you’re stronger now” doesn’t cut it for me – I want wondrous items to be truly wondrous, exciting, impressing, stunning, awesome! Carpet of Flying is cool. Crystal Ball is cool. Bottled Whirlwind is cool. The hell, Holy Avenger is cool. Club+5 and Pale Blue Ioun Stone are not cool. They are plain, bold and boring.

One of the ideas besides banning stupid combinations I came up with to fix this problem in my next game is to make the groups of magic items accessible on each tier. For example, on valiant tier (that’s my substitute for D&D4’s heroic tier – I use it because I want to reserve the word “hero” as a synonym for “character”) you can have magic weapons with various battle qualities and magic armour – so, Bracers of Archery is still acceptable, while Boots of Levitation ain’t. On paragon tier, weapons start to have magic sheathes (remember Excalibur – it was not only a vorpal blade, its sheath granted regeneration!), worn items start to have exceptional qualities, priests can have special holy symbols, mages have rings with constant effect. On epic tier, all weapons are intelligent, all armours are artefact and made from special materials, mages have staves (real ones, from AD&D, with various thematically compiled spell-like abilities in one item), priests’ holy symbols can be unique, and worn items have unique forms too (crown instead of a helmet, flying board instead of a pair of boots, blindfold instead of a pair of goggles). Plain bonuses will be reserved to amulets only (I’m willing to give in to the good old “it’s magic” here), and plain multi-charge repetitive effects for wands.

Unification is overrated

Many years ago I decided to make a perfectly balanced weapon system for my campaign. With respect to rules, I was using something between AD&D2 and D&D3 with speed factors, critical threat ranges and a bunch of other modifiers – a lot of space for parametrising. So, being a math maniac, I easily composed a mathematical model of combat, implemented it, ran automated simulations and derived the perfectly balanced values that were distributed among the weapon types according to my common sense. In this way, for instance, an axe would do more damage than a knife, yet the knife will be quicker and easier to aim, leading to exactly the same long-term DpS modulo rounding errors. The table was quite long and complicated, but I’ll spare you the details.

Then I read a couple of well-known articles by a knowledgeable exotic weapon expert with PhD in Korean history, known in blogosphere as Makkawity. He was saying lots of small interesting things here and there, as he always manages to do, yet one thing struck me more than the rest: in reality, weapons ain’t equal at all. It might seem trivial to you, but it was not that obvious to me at the time. So if even in the real prototype it wasn’t the case, why again is it that we are trying to introduce this property in the model (rules set is a model)? After some thinking I realised that it is a good thing that a PC with a knife is less effective in combat – perhaps (s)he wanted to be less effective in order to focus on other areas.

Don’t be misled into thinking that this is all about the Holy Grail of Game Balance. It’s not. It’s also about unification of other parts of a game system: character classes, special abilities, magic and whatnot. D&D4 shows that its developerts thought it is kinda a bug that the rules for “magic-users” are so far off from the ones for “fighting men”, if you pardon my D&D1 terminology. It’s not a bug, folks, it’s a feature. Fighters fight, they brawl and swing their swords and axes around as much as they bloody like. Wizards have special powers that have one-time effects far greater than a sword swing could ever dream of, at least if we’re still talking fantasy and not shounen. Psionicists can pound all their reserves into one power use. Priests pray for granted powers (well, they are supposed to, but that’s a different story). It’s cool that they all even use different mechanics in some editions of D&D. It’s all for the better.