The Core of Magic Item Design

[Aktariel]

Diablo II is a great game, but literally every single thing it does with magic items is bad for a table top role
playing game.

Can anyone elaborate on this for me? I can imagine a few things, like the obvious "paying for magic items" but what else? And why are they so bad?

Lets see... some things that DII does:
Socketed magic items
Totems
Health/Mana Potions
???

[Archmage]

It all depends on the game world style you're going for.

The problem with D2's magic items is that they do one thing: Give you bigger numbers. Damage, hit rate, maybe resistances to attack. That's not very exciting, especially when having a +3 sword is essentially mandatory for your character to function against level-appropriate challenges. D2's magic items don't give you any new options or more interesting tactical decisions to make.

If you're going to make a +whatever sword essentially required, you might as well give the same bonus away for free as a class feature and make magic items actually special in some fashion. That way they feel like magic instead of like video game power-ups.

[Quantumboost]

Items that don't scale, but rather have specific bonuses. You actually do go from an "magic sword" to "slightly more magic sword" a lot of the time, and even class-specific versions of the same change. This is pretty much *standard* in games, but it's also something Diablo did. It's bad because it causes characters to go for "slightly more magic sword" in order to keep up when they should be going for things like "magic sword that is also on fire" or "magical vision-boosting goggles that also shoot lasers"

Body slots. In a tabletop game, you can totally wear three magic hats and it isn't such a big deal - and it adds character concept space without making things particularly harsh on balancing or imagination.

[Thymos]

an anyone elaborate on this for me? I can imagine a few things, like the obvious "paying for magic items" but what else? And why are they so bad?

Wait, what? People used gold for anything but henchmen in D2?

Seriously in that game you don't pay for items, you grind your ass off killing bosses repeatedly while using bad magic find items.

D2 has items drop from monsters completely unrelated to what they are actually carrying.

Totems just downright don't work when you don't have an inventory system (and even in D2 they were kind of stupid).

Socketed magic items are fine, but kind of unnecessarily.

If anything they did health and mana potions right, people actually use them in the game.

One really bad thing is the sheer magic item dependency every class in that game has.

[Utterfail]

I've been thinking on the concept of scaling magic items some lately, the general concesus is that this is the 'goood' way to design items so that you dont end up in a magic arms race as you level up (like in D2, or any game ever). But frankly getting new magic items and trashing the old is very much a part of D&D. My thought is that there should be three types of magic items. Consumables, Minor Items, and Major items. Consumables are what they sound like, Minor items do something neat and probably give you a bonus to something but they dont scale, Major items do something neat give a bonus and scale. Minor items need not be worse than major ones, but you eventually outgrow them and replace them. A major item could be an effective part of your arsenal from level one. Combined with the [Tome] 8 item limit it would force characters to prioritize.

I think a system like that could capture the good part of the current 3.5 system (lets face it, its fun getting a new item) while getting rid of some of the "shopping for magic" problems.

Though I may of course be dead wrong.

[Grek]

Items should not give bonuses to activities that will produce more items. This means that if you kill people and take their items, those items should not allow you to get a better bonus to killing people and if you craft magic items, you should not be allowed to make magical items of bonus crafting.

[Quantumboost]

I've been thinking on the concept of scaling magic items some lately, the general concesus is that this is the 'goood' way to design items so that you dont end up in a magic arms race as you level up (like in D2, or any game ever). But frankly getting new magic items and trashing the old is very much a part of D&D.

Getting new magic items that potentially can replace the items you already have is definitely something that should happen at least some of the time. The weapons you have scaling to your level is also something that should happen.

The system in the Book of Gears accomplishes both of these already - even the most minor of magic items scales automagically to your level in terms of the bonuses they provide. But you also ignore those items later on, because they're seriously junk at higher levels as far as players are concerned even though they scale. That's because there are better items. Not better as in "+1 greataxe vs. +5 greataxe", but better as in "magic greataxe vs. greataxe that can deal fire damage instead if you want which also has the ability to cut open a gate to the plane of fire once per day". The former is stupid, the latter is stupid awesome. And with that sort of difference, the "autoscaling magic greataxe" really should be the rock-bottom baseline magic item, because doing otherwise is boring. And really if you want a straight +1 to-hit greataxe you can just have it be masterwork.

[shau]

The thing is people like videogame powerups. Heck, a lot of the fun in Diablo revolves around slowly collecting gear with slightly better bonuses.

I keep thinking that JRPGs actually have an item system that most people would like. You randomly get access to vendors who sell better gear just in time to have level appropriate equipment for each area. Although it costs money, you always have enough to buy anything and you don't have to resort to trying to rob him. Gear is classed based and grows exponentially like magic does so level 1 fighters are happy because they have scale mail and a greatsword and wizards don't and level 10 fighters get Doom swords and Dragon armor and wizards don't. Sometimes you find treasure which means a part of your equipment reaches the next tier earlier than normal but that just means you have a bonus until the next magic shop is reached.

[Ice9]

I do like one thing about Diablo gear, which is the random extra qualities an item could have. Instead of just having a shield of +defense, it'd also give you a fire aura, or protect from poison, or increase speed, or all of the above. I think a system that used that, but without the +2 -> +3 -> +4 grind, would be pretty interesting. Most items would probably have one primary quality and several weaker qualities.

[Koumei]

I liked just forming a party (in multiplayer) that focused on the tactic of "Let enemies stab me until they die". Spiked armour/shields with skulls socketed in and aura enhancements, Iron Maiden curse (paired with Bone Cage), Iron Golems made from items that already had the "lol you take damage for hurting me" effect, Aura of Thorns...

Anyway, I think magic items should be done like Disgaea, except that no-one wants to actually go through a ten-floor murderthon for each of their items, just to boost the power levels of those items.

[Sunwitch]

Pretty much, it's the stacking of a bunch of small, entirely mathematical and largely flavourless abilities on top of each other to get weapons that are mechanically better and more useful but not really any more interesting in the "my sword is on fire" or "my sword shoots lasers" way. Which is usually the better idea in tabletop RPGs.

It's like how Tome stuff recommends just leaving boring +2 or +3 enhancement bonuses to weapons to Greater Magic Item or some class features so that you can spend money on stuff that's actually cool, like setting your sword on fire or making it act as a boomerang.

[Kaelik]

I liked just forming a party (in multiplayer) that focused on the tactic of "Let enemies stab me until they die". Spiked armour/shields with skulls socketed in and aura enhancements, Iron Maiden curse (paired with Bone Cage), Iron Golems made from items that already had the "lol you take damage for hurting me" effect, Aura of Thorns...

I had a friend who asked me to make a thorns Paladin to join him, because he had a zeal paladin with some much life steal that he could stand there adjacent to diablo and his health bar wouldn't move as long as he kept attacking. When he stopped, it started dropping like a bitch. And that one stun attack, he just barely had enough life to take the damage and diablo's attacks until he unstunned. Then he would work his way back up to full HP in a few seconds.

I made a Thorn Paladin and we went around killing everything really really fast with 1000-3000% damage back and such.

[RandomCasualty2]

Honestly I never really found Diablo 2 all that fun to play, as it made basically all the wrong game design decisions. Instead of getting interesting abilities, you just buffed up an ability, trying to max it out. Meaning that in the life cycle of your character going up to like level 80 you were only going to get like 4 different abilities.

The game was based around just spamming those abilities to death.

The gameplay and tactics could be pretty much handled by an FF12 gambit script.

Honestly, I never saw what made those games so fun to people. After an hour, I'm bored out of my mind.

[Koumei]

Oh, I hated Diablo 2 after... not very long. But the character creation/strategic side of it was interesting. Just not the part where you play the game.

[Thymos]

Dude, Diablo 2 is a wonderful wonderful game.

Items incrementing in bigger bonuses only works in a game where most of the time your in combat and the combat works incredibly fast compared to PnPrpgs.

The fact of the matter is that table top rpgs cannot do grind. Everyone isn't just sitting down to grind for better items for 4 hours (at least I hope not). We all sit down to cooperatively tell a story and play a game.

If we do magic items right they shouldn't even have bonuses. Instead they should just grant other options.

+1 Sword is no good as a ttrpg item. Sword of fire is a good one.

Any bonuses that players should be expected to have due to their items should just be rolled into their classes so we don't have to do the math twice and can simply use whatever the table tells us from the get go.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Diablo II magic/rare/unique/set items:
[*] Give out lots of small bonuses (does not apply to "magic" items)
[*] Multiply a character's power by a huge amount
[*] Require lots of grinding to get [the good ones]
[*] Come in specific, predetermined slots (there are no magical pants or earrings in the world of D2, and good luck wearing three rings)
[*] Are often class-specific (I consider this bad design; YMMV)
[*] Set items require some finesse in D&D

[Koumei]

[*] Are often class-specific (I consider this bad design; YMMV)

All gear is hunter gear!

[ibanez]

Gear in Diablo 2 isn't all pluses. The most obvious item would be the rune word Enigma which literally is a game changer, giving any class the ability to teleport which is a pretty big deal. There's also the Chaos runeword which allows Asssassin's the ability to whirlwind like a barbarian or Wolfhowl helmet which allows Barbarians to shapechange. There are all kinds of weapons that grant you aura's you wouldn't normally or proc skills you can't normally do. There are entire builds based around the abilities certain items give you (dual dream paladin).

[A Hammer]

Diablo II magic items
[*]Are distributed entirely at random, which means that streaks of bad luck can and will screw individual characters over.
[*] Are in general more valuable to some characters than to others, which goes together with being randomly generated. Lack of gear is generally speaking much more crippling to an Amazon than to a Sorceress, for example.
[*]Do not actually interact with the setting. Your chances of finding a sword when fighting demonic swordsmen are exactly the same as when you're fighting giant spiders, and gold doesn't really do anything - it's just an arbitrary score meter that can be spent in non-intuitive ways to boost a character's power.
[*]Are vague, and in some cases flat-out incorrect, when describing what benefits they give to a character. Actually understanding which items you should look for requires knowledge of game mechanics that are never explained or presented to the player.

[Archmage]

Another problem is that monsters in D2 are all essentially magic trinket-stuffed piñatas, and you end up with tons and tons of magic items that are essentially vendor trash. By some point you're leaving piles of magic swords strewn all across the land because the time it takes to throw them in your backpack and sell them to an NPC isn't worth the reward. You'd be better off using that time to kill more flayers and hope one of them was hiding a wand of blood golem up his ass.

Depending on your desired playstyle, while you might not want players stripping the gold off the front of the Magic Castle or trying to haul the lich king's diamond throne back to town, you also don't want them treating items that are supposed to be special like worthless junk.

[shadzar]

Diablo II is a great game, but literally every single thing it does with magic items is bad for a table top role
playing game.

Can anyone elaborate on this for me? I can imagine a few things, like the obvious "paying for magic items" but what else? And why are they so bad?

Lets see... some things that DII does:
Socketed magic items
Totems
Health/Mana Potions
???

Memory don't completely fail me now!

I am drawing a blank on the multiple Diablos....can't remember which was which.

Any time you have a video game type "magic mart", then there has to be enough people buying and selling magic items to make a market of them. This brings in the fact that the players in a TTRPG are less than special because odds are people in the world have long since had more powerful stuff than they can handle.

Some people can live with that, others cannot.

Mana is cute, but I have never seen it work in TTRPGs. The closest I ever saw to it was psionics with the points in AD&D and Rifts. Still didn't do very good, and was akin to the vancian casting anyway. You get X allotment of "spells" while a melee class can swing his sword all day long.

4th edition goes to far in giving magic to casters with at-will magic missiles, that make a sword swing seem silly, unless it is magical. Here brings back to the magic mart in that a starting level character would need magic.

The more magic you can acces through a store, then odds are others can get it also, so tougher things you will face.

Such is the failing of a magic mart, unless you are looking for high magic games with no boundaries on the amount of magic items that can be used.

Socketed and totem, are escaping me as to their meaning for Diablo right now.

[Hicks]

Socketed items were things like gems, runes, and skulls that can be placed into a compartment of your armor/shield/weapon/boots/hat/belt; doing so provided a bonus to your character (such as increasing your health or manna, granting your weapon the lifestealing property, or a whole assload of other things unique to each type gem, rune, and skull). The larger the item, the more maximum number of sockets it possessed (e.g: Greatswords could get up to 4 sockets, armor and tower shields 6, but the lowly dagger only got 2).

3ed Edition stole the idea wholesale when they introduced "weapon crystals" in the Magic Item Compendium, with a slight twist in that you could switch out a weapon crystal for another as a move action or some such.

Totems were introduced in a patch to Diablo II, and exist to take up inventory squares (from 1 to 4) and provide a passive bonus to your character, such as an increased chance to hit, or fire resistance, or provide a bonus skill point to your skills, or provide a not in calss aura, or your mom.

Since D+D tracks items by weight and not volume, and the fact that you can increase your carring capacity through size and strength increases, they are kind of pointless; Although an analoge would be the "Luckstone" out of the DMG (+1 luck bonus on every roll just because it in on your person.)

[Koumei]

3ed Edition stole the idea wholesale when they introduced "weapon crystals" in the Magic Item Compendium,

And Diablo (given Blizzard are used to stealing shit by now) stole it from FF7's Materia. Your point?

And yeah, Totems could be thought of as Ioun Stones, except instead of a crystal it's a shrunken head or half a tree.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Weapon crystals are actually a great idea when used in the right way: you take all of the magic normally attributed to a weapon and put it in the crystal. You do this for every magic weapon. You no longer have to worry about characters throwing away their hand-me-down weapons, and you no longer have to worry that no one will be able to use the oversized +4 great club of disruption that the hill giant was using.

Those are the benefits. The drawback is that maybe you prefer (aesthetically) to have the magic in the damn' sword instead of materia. The advantage of pen & paper is that you can then be fallacious in the Oberoni sense, hand-balance the weapons you distribute, and restrict ancestral weapons to feats and class abilities.

Charms as an item type really have no special place in the Tome magic system, which is based around a limited number of functional items rather than a limited number of places on the body.

[Hicks]

Your point?

Socketed and totem, are escaping me as to their meaning for Diablo right now.

Nothing malicious. I never said that weapon crystals or ioun stones were bad; just trying to help a denner out.