Another method of balancing equipment

[User3]

Under the system I'm proposing, the consequences of breaking equipment is small. Signature items can be fixed relatively easily, and non-signature stuff can be repurchased at a nominal cost in something you don't care about (money or craft checks).

By having a limit to the number and power of items you can "attune" at one time, you maintain some play balance. You could have a cohort crafter who builds and maintains magic items for you, and the game won't fall apart.

[Username17]

Under the system I'm proposing, the consequences of breaking equipment is small.

...but still permanent in some cases and therefore uacceptable.

Regardless, even if you make it so that the consequences are not permanent under ay circumstaces and therefore playable, that still doesn't have any bearing at all on how difficult or easy it is to destroy equipment.

Destroying equipment can be easy or hard and it's not going to balance the game either way. Basically your premise that increasing the rate at which magic items enter and leave the system is somehow going to balance anything is simply puzzling.

Increasing the rate at which equipment returs to the system makes item destruction events manageable at all, but making the item destruction events themselves common or uncommon does not itself balance the game.

-Username17

[The_Hanged_Man]

Aren't those two sides of the same coin?

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Frank, why is MJD cool, while sundering isn't?Mordenkainen's Disjunction is easier to use and can break everything in one round instead of needing several rounds like Sunder does. Either way it deprives players of valuable equipment that they don't get back, and infact, MJD is worse because even if you could sunder Headbands of Intellect, Rings of Spell Storing and Boots of Striding and Springing (Iffy at best under the rules), any combatant with a shred of tactics is still going to sunder weapons and armor first, and will probably die before getting that far.

-Desdan

[Username17]

Frank, why is MJD cool, while sundering isn't?

Sundering is cool - provided that you don't have to keep track of the fact that it happened the next time you game.

Temporary set-backs are fun, permanent set-backs are no fun.

-Username17

[Maj]

So maybe sundering and MDJ should supress the abilities of whatever you're doing them to for a certain number of rounds/minutes/hours/days/whatever instead of destroying them...?

Or maybe sundering breaks something, but you can actually use Make Whole or something on it...?

[User3]

Under the system I'm proposing, anything can be repaired. Sure, it may take a mage to fix it after its been sundered, but as long as you're not playing a survialist game with no mages or clerics in the party and no access to NPC casters, that's not too hard. Signature items can be repaired with simple craft checks.

Broken non-sig items would have to be cheaper to repair than making new versions (by several factors). Since my system uses a "cash or craft checks, not XP" system, there really is no permanent loss to anyone.

I think its a better system that any thats been proposed so far.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Yeah, but the difference between signature and non-signature is entirely metagame. I'm against any system where the undead hunter's +2 Undead Bane Mace of Disruption is more expensive to fix than the +2 keen vorpal scimitar he pulled off of the BBEG of his last mission.

-Desdan

[User3]

In my sytem, signature weapons are harder to break and easier to fix, and might also grow in power with the wielder or count as an extra "magic item slot" in the equipment per level system I'm thinking about.

If its going to cost a feat slot to get a signature weapon, it should be good.

[Username17]

Since my system uses a "cash or craft checks, not XP" system, there really is no permanent loss to anyone.

Bullshit. You lose GP. Basically you've just bought into the whole annoying second XP system of the RPGA where you have a running tally of gold - which is supposedly going to be drained out of the players at some inherently uneven rate.

It's basically just a second XP system, one which uses the Gygaxian model of "My girlfriend gets twenty thousand, the rest of you get five" rather than any kind of standardized progression. That's annoying. And stupid.

-Username17

[User3]

My system also includes craft checks, so its more of a "time vs money" system. PC downtime can be used to make/repair items, or money can be used as an expedient during adventures.

The fact that the number of items you can attune at one time is level dependant means that power becomes, in fact, quite standardized.

Sure some people mght get screwed after an encounter when an inportant chunk of equipement is broken, but then how is this different from the times when a character is level drained, ability drained, curse, turned to stone, made dead, or any other number of conditions? No one has ever complained before.