Anatomy of Failed Design: Magic Items

[Lago PARANOIA]

Magical items have been one of the fundamental building blocks of D&D since forever. It's also no secret that magical items by and large suck horse ass. Now while not everyone agrees that every single aspect of magical items suck, there's certain enough wrong with them in the abstract that nearly anyone can find something they don't like. So here we go, a list of issues/problems with magical items in no particular order of importance.

Sliding Scale of Lottery vs. Letter to Santa: At the lottery end of the scale, the players are at the complete mercy of the rules to give them magical items. At the most extreme end, there's absolutely no way for the players to get what they want or even know when they're getting it. At the Letter to Santa end, the players decide exactly what they want and the game gives it to them without much hassle. The Lottery system attempts to be balanced by forcing people to play it at certain breakpoints; for example, in 4E you're almost guaranteed to gain a magical weapon at least once every 5 levels. Regardless, in 1E and 2E the game was heavily on the 'Lottery' end of the scale, which created problems like players getting a +1 longsword when they had a +2 one already or a dwarven Axelord grabbing a Luckblade. D&D is pretty much the only system where magical items aren't explicitly selected by the players or inserted by the GM, so it might seem obvious to get rid of it.

However, some fans claim that playing the lottery is part of the fun. It adds excitement and prevents players from getting locked into a cycle where they grab nothing but Flaming Longswords and Shadowy Breastplates of increasing pluses.



Sliding Scale of Blingee: Some settings believe that characters should only get one or two magical effects that really matter. Others believe that characters should be decked out in magical gear until they literally have magic on their toes. Please note that how many magical effects a character has is in no way related to how many distinct pieces of gear they have. Iron Man has gear coming out his ass while Green Lantern only has the one ring, yet only a retarded system would give Iron Man a character tax or a discount just because he has jet boots AND a shoulder cannon.

3E D&D fucked up because they have quadratic costs for linear bonuses, such that players would go hunting for divine and competence bonuses to attack before they worked on their enhancement bonus. 4E at one point took the more sensible route and declared that only certain body slots could have certain effects attached to them, avoiding the problem of people searching for belts and hats of Bonus Attack; but then they fucked it up all over again by introducing untyped bonuses in the Adventurer's Vault. Sigh. But the idea that you could only have one non-stackable bonus to a statistie coming from an item was more-or-less sound.

But anyway, even if the Blingee Bonus problem was solved, it still leaves the issue of how many magical effects you should have on a character. Should magical items be like Stands, where you only get one or two berserkly powerful effects and that's it? Should it be like Batman's utility belt where you have an array of small, situational items but you have so many of them that at any one point it could be useful? Or what?



Magic Items and the Economy: Magical items are kept rare in settings (including D&D) for two reasons.
1) It's to keep magical items 'special' in the game setting. If everyone and their mother has +2 swords of lightning, what's so special about your +1 sword of plot advancement? Further, if peasants are easily able to get their hands on magical platemail, then the system of feudalism that D&D supposedly uses starts to break down.

2) Magical item costs are intentionally kept high to prevent players from grabbing Hackmaster +12s at level 1 and fucking shit up. In games using the Lottery system you only get the better prizes at higher level. In games using the Letter to Santa system, costs are generally kept greater than linear so that people will get a full suite of magical items rather than spending all of their money to get a +3 sword at the cost of being naked.

Fair enough. But anyone who has played D&D knows one of the biggest problems with this enforced scarcity: is that if you can get magical items by trading some in-world resource, like oxen or gold coins, players are going to spend most of their time grabbing oxen or gold coins. This has led to behavior like people stripping down dungeons down to their ladders and digging up corpses to get their equipment. Now while a setting like Warcraft or Dark Sun might actually want players to engage in looting and graverobbing, things break down if you want to introduce Prince Diarmund's Gold Palace in your adventure or if the players come across a diamond mine while looking for work. So several solutions have been proposed to deal with this.

1) Players can't willfully get magical items without the DM allowing them to. This is the system that 1E and 2E used; no matter how hard you tried you weren't allowed to do a dance to get the items you want. The problem with this is that it took a lot of player choice out of their characters. If you wanted to roleplay the Fire Swordsman, you needed a fire sword and if you didn't have a fire sword then you were fucked. If you just wanted to grab a gem to help you decipher some magical language, you couldn't.

2) Magical items can't be created or purchased without a special currency that can't be traded for real-world resources. This is really, really hard to do, since the universal currency in heroic fantasy is ass-kicking and if something can help you kick ass someone will put a price on it. Honestly, I don't know how to solve this problem right now.

3) Giving players everything they want. This isn't as crazy as it sounds. In a lot of Superhero games, especially at character creation, you're allowed to play Scrooge McDuck-style characters who own so much bullshit that they don't know what to do with it. If you put some other sort of limitation on the items you can just miracle up at any point (such a making any items gained by this way PL 9 while 'real' abilities are PL 13) it puts a halt to looting the game world. This of course requires ditching the paradigm that magic items make any character better, which is probably beyond the scope of this thread.

[Thymos]

Number 2 solution can be done if we make magic items a class feature.

[koz]

There's another option, Lago:

Magic items only advance your character horizontally: In plain-speak, it means that magic items don't actually amplify your ability to do anything in terms of making you better than your level would suggest at any specific thing, but instead, simply allow you to do more things. An example of a 'vertical' item is a +1 longsword; it makes it more likely that you will hit relative to a character of your level. An example of a 'horizontal' item would be boots of jumping which give you the jumping ability you would have had as a character of your level; this simply gives you a level-appropriate ability you could have taken, but didn't.

The latter option is a lot more balanced, as you don't have to worry about bonus creep. Additionally, if the number of items is capped (at, say, 8, for example), omnicompetence is not a concern either.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So what happens when King Arthur needs to go an emergency war meeting and accidentally leaves Excalibur out--and then a servant picks it up and decides to sell it on the open market?

What also happens when Travis Touchdown defeats Heavy Metal and decides that his sword is way cooler and thus wants to dual-wield them?

[Thymos]

Who are you asking those questions to Lago?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm asking them to you.

In 3E D&D, servants stealing legendary swords or asshole otaku looting corpses doesn't break the game. If Excalibur gets sold then King Arthur has egg on his face while he goes on an adventure to track it down. Anyone who actually manages to buy the sword (including the PCs) doesn't break the game because even if it's more powerful than bullshit they already have, the game adjusts by giving that character less treasure for awhile.

Travis Touchdown looting corpses for weapons doesn't even slow the game down a little bit in 3E. If he has the two-weapon fighting feats, then he has two beam sabers to inflict beatdowns on enemies. If after he beats Dr. Peace he wants to go gun and sword, then he does so. Or he leaves the gun on the ground. Or he sells it and gets something else.



In a game where magic items are class features, the game breaks down when servants steal from their masters or players play sword collectors, unless you play a system where the magic goes away if the right person isn't holding the weapon.

[Thymos]

Ah, you kind of answered it then. Just say it takes blue magic to wield a weapon, and that not only is it a class feature to have blue magic, but it's also only enough blue magic to work with one weapon.

That or require people to pay experience (or feats, or whatever resource they have that's a part of levels) for new magic items the acquire after they acquire them.

You said you don't know how to solve the problem, I'm giving you a direction to work in, not presenting a completed system for it here. Just trying to make suggestions. 8)

[koz]

Ah, you kind of answered it then. Just say it takes blue magic to wield a weapon, and that not only is it a class feature to have blue magic, but it's also only enough blue magic to work with one weapon.

That or require people to pay experience (or feats, or whatever resource they have that's a part of levels) for new magic items the acquire after they acquire them.

You said you don't know how to solve the problem, I'm giving you a direction to work in, not presenting a completed system for it here. Just trying to make suggestions. 8)

To expand upon this, making all magic items scale to the level of the guy using them would likely solve Lago's concerns. For artifacts, simply have them be keyed to specific individuals, requiring complex rituals to 'unbind' and 'rebind' them to new ones, which allows us to hand out non-scalars without breaking the game right the way in two.

Edit: Yay, post #339!

[Gelare]

In looking at past discussions on the topic of magic items, I get the feeling that different people want different things (big surprise), and I'm not sure how many of them can be contained in a single system. If you want to make it so that a servant who picks up Excalibur doesn't suddenly gain superhuman fighting prowess because the sword isn't bound to him or whatever, that's fine. If you want to make it so that any random shmuck who picks up the Cursed Sword of Evil McDoomington is transformed into a raging, mindless badass who the heroes have to come put down, that's fine too. But those are two distinctly different things, and while you can stick them both in the same system, it's not entirely straightforward.

[Lago PARANOIA]

One idea I had was to make it so that magical items that used some form of chakra could be pre-paid. That is, while normally people other than Arthur using Excalibur don't get anything out of it, Arthur could also inject some chakra into it to let someone else get a full or partial bonus.

So when Sauron passes out his blingee rings, people who put them on gain special game effects, but when he puts one of the rings on he gets even bigger powers. Further, he could also arrange things such that people who are trying to use the ring without the chakra expenditure (such as hobbit peasants and such) would be subject to some negative effect as well. Domination, sickening, so-on.

Magical items are thus made fairly rare because most people don't want to take the chance of using some shiny sword they found on a knight's corpse on the side of the road--while it might give them superpowers, it might also cause them to flip out and kill their family if they're not strong enough. A samurai trying to use Murasama might have their vision dimmed and have a weakness to charm effects, but a peasant trying to use it would be struck with blindness.

[koz]

That's actually a very interesting idea, Lago. I might have to ragedesign it into a full system when I'm bored...

[Amra]

In the unlikely event that anyone cares, I have had some thoughts on this very topic. The below is an e-mail I sent to some friends over a year ago. I haven't done any significant editing so bits of it might seem irrelevant or just plain odd, but the overall gist was highly pertinent.

Oh yeah, and I'm too lazy to rewrite it for the purpose of this discussion

It all started because I was having believability issues with something that has produced a lot of debate on this forum... the notion of wealth being tied to character power.

And yes, I ripped bits of it from discussions on here (particularly Frank and K's treatise on D&D economy) because they said what I thought better than I could have. If it's any consolation, I attributed it and told my group where to find the originals

Anyway, apologies if this seems to start in the middle; that's because it does. I can't find the original right now so until I can grab it from work I'm forced to open with:


********

For clarity, my thesis is that:

a) no linear progression of item-costs-for-money can possibly work because rich characters/NPC's can just go and buy themselves a pocketful of kryptonite so long as the numbers are on the same scale as the rest of the economy

b) no exponential progression of item-costs-for-money can possibly work because the profit made on a single high-level item by an NPC wizard or merchant gives them enough money to buy everything non-magical on the planet

c) if you make the numbers for a linear progression big enough to stop a) from happening you're still in b)-style crazy town, and if you make the numbers for an exponential progression small enough to stop b) from happening, you're back in a) territory

d) the whole stupid concept sucks ass anyway. Being able to go into a shop and buy items of earth-shaking power is moronic and video-gamey, and doesn't fit with any classic fantasy stories

When it boils right down to it, I feel that d) is a good enough reason to change things all by itself. So...

[Editor's Note: I can't find the section with the Simple Approach in and can't remember what it was! I probably cribbed it from someone on here anyway...]

The Complicated Approach - I Want the Kind of Things That Money Just Can't Buy

With this approach, we may or may not pull the enhancement bonuses out of stuff and roll them into class abilities; it may no longer be necessary. It'd take an awful lot of words to describe a detailed system and any solo attempt I make is probably going to be broken and wrong on a first pass so I'll stick to the very high level description for now.

But first...

Here's something we haven't touched on properly up until now but is highly relevant to what comes next: the current magic item creation system doesn't make any sense in the context of being able to buy and sell stuff. I'm not even talking about the ludicrous fiscal cost of item creation; I'm talking about the fact that you have to burn your own life-force to do it.

Creating items costs experience. The more powerful the item, the greater the experience. In the case of high-end items, the only people powerful enough to create them have no use whatsoever for the money. These characters have more money than the gods. You could - literally - hand them an entire planet made of solid platinum that naturally comes away in your hand in convenient coins and bars and they would be no better off for it.

You could hand-wave that away if they gained experience for making the items and therefore slowly grew more powerful without the need to expose themselves to personal danger; that I would understand and it makes for a great barmy-wizard-who-never-leaves-his-tower NPC concept. Asking for sums of money that make your abacus explode would hence just be a way of preventing an endless stream of requests from riff-raff; they'd really be doing it because they want the experience that comes from making them. Locking yourself in a castle full of spellbooks and magical toys and experimenting with them for a century should make you better at what you do... but in D&Dland, it makes you worse.

You spend six months researching and recreating the Mighty Sceptre of Arghazd-Shar, which can level cities and control armies, and at the end of the process you are less good at it than when you started. Eventually you reach a point where losing any more experience would drop you to the next level down and the rules say you simply can't make so much as a potion until you've got "spare" life force (experience, power, whatever) to spend. The only legitimate way of regaining that power is to go out into the world and find really dangerous creatures to stab in the face, which is not a healthy lifestyle. This is true to the point where in 3.x you actually gain no experience whatsoever for killing something that doesn't pose you a significant threat. And then you... um... use that perilously-gained increase in your personal power to make items for strangers in exchange for money that you have no use for.

So... what are they doing? Really, just what are these NPC jokers playing at?

And so...

From here on in, potions, scrolls and other ephemera, you can still buy for money fairly readily. They're not exactly cheap - a peasant is going to have to fork out a year's wages for the least of them - but you can get them if you can pay. The reason you can get them is that now, making minor magic items earns you experience and money both. It doesn't earn you a lot of experience - the sort of scale I'm thinking of is that you gain a level every year or two if you do nothing but make stuff - but at least you're slowly getting more powerful without running the risk of being eaten, disintegrated or cursed to spend eternity as a bowl of vampiric petunias.

This helps to explain an awful lot of things, like why every monster on the planet hasn't been killed for experience by clerics and wizards centuries ago. Moreover, it explains why an NPC spellcaster would bother to have potions and the like just sat around on his shelves, pre-made. It's because doing so makes them better at doing it, like every other activity I can think of, and so they will do exactly that. It also means that adventuring spellcasters are different and special. They're proper heroes (and villains of course) who are getting out into the world and reshaping it in their own image because they're just that cool (or impatient), not because if they don't they'll never get further than Page 5 in the Silver Libram of Blowing the Shit Out of Things.

Major magical items (and I'm aware that we'll have to work on the definitions a bit) work somewhat differently.

I need a Hero...

The majority of items - rings, cloaks, carpets, rods, staffs, pocket universes and so on - henceforth are imbued with magical force but are worthless to you unless you know how to use them. For the sake of argument, we're arbitrarily dividing the different powers that items might have into a number of types; for illustration purposes, let these be Air, Dark, Earth, Fire, Light and Water. Each item will have one or more of these attributes, associated with a numeric value which represents the maximum strength of power you can use with it.

As a character levels up, they get to choose (by class) certain powers that they can use with magical items. Call it Essence points, or make it a feat-based system, or however you want to represent it; I honestly don't know what the best approach is.

Items have scaling powers. A ring of the shadows [Air 3, Dark 3] might grant you blur and darkness once per day as a low-level character, whilst a higher-level character who has invested enough training (essence, feats, whatever) into using items of Air and Dark gets the full monty; Greater Invisibility for ten rounds a day and Shadow Walk once per day. That same character can also use the ring's minor powers at will.

Also, perhaps a Dark Adept (or Air Adept or whatever) - that is to say, a character with more than a certain amount of training in a particular attribute - can always get a little something extra out of an item. Maybe they can use Clinging Shadow Strike in melee (or better yet, something that doesn't suck ass but you get the idea) or have any ranged attack they use act as a low-key enervation whenever they're possessed of an item that has the appropriate property. I'm thinking that you should probably be able to "retrain" your ability to use items of particular attributes in the same way that you can retrain other class features.

If you're justifiably all of a muddle right now in terms of what on earth I'm going on about, this is an example of how I could see it working "cinematically":

***

The door to his mother's study had been left unlocked for the first time he could remember. The small boy looked carefully around him from his hiding-place beneath the stairs, but no shadows moved in the sunlight streaming under the kitchen door into the passageway. He listened intently for several seconds for signals of his parents' approach, but heard nothing except the sound of his heart pounding in his chest. Stealthily, he crept toward the door, making no more noise than might a feather landing on the parched earth outside...

Pushing open the study door - carefully, carefully - he crept into the room. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, pierced only by slanting shafts of dusty sunlight emerging between the slats of the shuttered windows, his sense of apprehension gave way to disappointment. The room was lined with shelves, holding old, heavy-looking books; their titles in a lettering he couldn't begin to read. Bor-ing.

Then he saw it: a glint of sunlight on metal in the corner of the room. That was more like it! A sword!

Forgetting in his excitement that he was trepassing where he had been absolutely forbidden to go, he swished the sword about him and laughed in delight as it trailed complex patterns in the dust-laden air. Take that! And that! Back, foul beast! Ha! As he leapt and twisted, the beams of sunlight reflected oddly from the blade, creating strange images that lingered in the back of his eyes. He ceased his fencing with imaginary dragons and grasped the blade for a closer look.

Ouch! The razor-sharp edge of the blade had sliced a little way into his finger, drawing blood.. but what was this? Around the edge of the cut, a blister was forming, as though he had held the wound in the flame of a candle. He winced, and sucked his hurt finger.

A cough from behind him caused him to spin around, the sword clattering to the floor, and he saw - with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach - that someone was watching him from shadows of the doorway.

"You've learned a lesson today, it seems," said the boy's father in the gravest tones he could muster, managing with some difficulty to keep the mirth from his face. "Swords are dangerous in the hands of the untrained."

With three quick steps, the man crossed the room and scooped the sword from the floor, hefting it with a practised ease. The boy's eyes opened wide with astonishment; within seconds of resting in his father's calloused grip, the sword had burst into flames!

"Of course," said the man, an irrepressible grin finally twisting the corner of his mouth, "in the hands of the trained, they're much more deadly."

"Showing off, Kyle?" came a woman's voice. The boy looked past his father to where his mother was entering the room, her face grim. His heart sank; his father tended to see the humour in things, but his mother? Never, ever; not when he'd done something wrong.

"I, er, thought maybe he was about old enough..."

"Really?" said the child's mother, an eyebrow raised. She stepped forward and took the sword from her husband's unresisting hands and then, to the boy's utter and lasting astonishment, winked at him as she held the sword aloft and tensed her arms "Then he's old enough to know that there's 'trained'..."

With a penetrating hiss, the flames along the length of the blade increased tenfold in intensity, glowing white-hot in an instant. Tendrils of searing flame arced down from the sword to wrap themselves around his mother's body like a cocoon, enveloping her in a raging fire so bright that the boy could scarcely look upon it. He was just drawing breath to scream in horror, when he realised that his mother was standing unharmed at the centre of the conflagration, smiling serenely.

"...and then there's trained!"

***

So whilst the same sword of fire channeling [Fire 6] doesn't give anything to our unnamed young protagonist other than a fluff-text clue as to its nature, it gives his dad (a bit of a generalist in the items stakes with maybe a couple of Fire 2 powers) the flaming and flaming burst properties when he uses it, whilst mum (a Fire Adept) gets flaming, flaming burst, actinic fire shield and - like as not - firestorm once per day and scorching ray at will.

So far, so hoopy.

How do these things get made in the first place? That's totally up for discussion and I don't pretend to have in any way solved it. My ideas so far:

- You can't buy most permanent magic items and there are lots of reasons why that could be, depending on what mechanics we use for creation

- Items are "imbued" in a fairly standard ritual; possibly we even open this up to non-casters

- The powers one person can imbue an item with are dependent upon their own level of facility with a particular attribute type

- Cooperative creation is possible; for instance, the wizard imbues the sword with magic at relatively minimal cost to himself whilst the character it's intended for has to hug it and love it and squeeze it and call it George. Or, you know, concentrate on it and use it and stuff.

- There is an exponential "cost" to creating items that have abilities possessing more than one attribute. Pulling the numbers straight out of my hat, characters with Fire 3 can imbue an item of Fire 3 with powers they know up to that total, but creating an item that holds Fire 3 and Dark 3 powers means you've got to have someone around who has at least Fire 6 and Dark 6 to their name. Designed properly, this will put a hard limit on the combination of really freaky powers a single item can have whilst still allowing for some very entertaining stuff to happen.

- Something that falls very neatly out of this system is how "epic" items work; you could safely say that something requiring Dark 6, Earth 6 and Water 6 before it does anything at all is definitely an epic item simply because a non-epic character can't possibly qualify to use it, without having to make a special category of "epic" stuff.

- I can't make up my mind whether or not we should keep the concept of certain types of power being confined to certain types of item; it may not be needed under this system.

- We make item creation abilities - whether that's feats or some other system - "cheaper" in class feature terms (because they'll need to be) and more generally accessible

- We DO need some system by which permanent magical items that "just work" for whoever picks them up can be made, for plot-device purposes if nothing else. However, this should be very expensive; the equivalent, at least, of burning a feat per item - or maybe even more punitive. These items will be the "artifacts" of our game world; the very rare and special ones that someone has made an enormous personal sacrifice to create in such a way that anyone can use them. That is not something you'd ever do lightly.

I could bang on at great length about potential advantages and disadvantages, but frankly this e-mail is already too long and the idea is so open-ended and undeveloped that it'd be pretty speculative. What do you think about it as a principle?"

********

And then we discussed it for about a week before getting completely distracted by something else we were never going to finish

[Fuchs]

I prefer Number 3), amended to "Players get what they want, with DM approval/veto". Fluff is done as preferred (PCs can find, or get as a reward, or commission, or craft or accidentally create the item), and with a caveat of "the majority of a PC's power should not come from gear unless that's the specific concept (like artificier)".

[angelfromanotherpin]

Let's not forget that some magic items just are not a big deal. I once began a game by just handing the low level characters a big ol' bag of holding and a folding boat - shattering the wealth by level limits - and while they thought it was cool as all get out, the net effect on the game was very small.

[violence in the media]

Let's not forget that some magic items just are not a big deal. I once began a game by just handing the low level characters a big ol' bag of holding and a folding boat - shattering the wealth by level limits - and while they thought it was cool as all get out, the net effect on the game was very small.

I've done similar things in the past. It's a problem stemming from all magic items being measured in the same currency. Sure, there are things you can do with a Bag of Holding that you can't do with a donkey and a cart, but it ultimately isn't enough to justify the 100-fold difference in price between the two.

[Lago PARANOIA]

On the subject of magical items:

1) How many magical items do you think that a person should have, period? I personally think that the system shouldn't provide for more than seven unique items: two weapon sets, armor or cloak, two pieces of jewelry, and two oddball ones like potions/flying carpets/etc. Anything more than that risks making PCs omnicompetent or having to track too much bling.

2) Should characters be required to grab magical items to begin with? If magical items provided horizontal advancement rather than vertical advancement like Mister Sinister suggested then your PCs could still do things that are impossible in D&D like stage jailbreaks or infiltrate the castle disguised as servants.

3) Magic item lottery. Yay or nay?

[erik]

1) No limit per se on ownership. Having your vault of trophies and magic items is cool. However a limit on how many you can use at once perhaps.

If you limit the bonuses/buffs so that they are not stackable, that will cut down on most of the insanity. I hate the +bonuses of armor and weapons anyway and I'd love to be rid of those entirely as they tend to break the fourth wall in any game I have ever played in.

2) If you want magic items to be meaningful then you will definitely be nerfed without them. Can't avoid it. However if you cut down on the stacking of bonuses then they aren't as critical to your power and you aren't as severely weakened when going naked. You should be able to fight grendel naked if you wanna, but it will be obvious that you'll have a much easier time when you wear your magical armor (or any armor) and wield your magical sword (or any sword).

3) I like the lottery to some extent. Sometimes the most fun and cool magic items are the luxuries that you wouldn't have thought about buying or searching for. No harm in throwing a bone to the players every now and then though with pre-selected items in the treasure that you know they will need/want.

[Kobajagrande]

Magic items only advance your character horizontally:

This. Not actually needing magical items makes them both rare enough as most people want them to be, and you can have freedom designing them, since, suddenly, people can actually pay attention to those funny things in DMG like... You know, stuff we all read but never used and forgot it by now.

[erik]

Anything that boosts mobility is not horizontal and I would hate to purge that stuff.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The number of magic items that any individual person walks around with in mythology is not that many. Herakles had his lionskin and his poison arrows. Perseus had the sickle-sword, the winged sandals, and the hat of invisibility; and later the gorgon's head. I think Cuchullainn went his whole career with just the Gae Bolga. Arthur had his magic sword, and for a while had a magic scabbard to go with it.

Going into pre-D&D fantasy, you don't see much more. Gandalf goes around with a sword, a ring, and a horse. Conan tends to have at most one enchanted item at a time, and not for very long. Wizards from the Dying Earth stories seem like they might have a large number of magic items lying around their workshops, but tend not to go out carrying more than one or two.

Even post-D&D fantasy tends not to go hog-wild with the magic items.

In superhero comics Dr. Strange has his Cloak of Levitation and the Eye of Agamotto. The Sandman has his helmet, sandbag, and Ruby.

Can anyone come up with a character who routinely carries more than, say four items at once?

[Korwin]

Cheap shot, an D&D book (Drizzt, etc)

Not so cheap shot, Harry Dresden has
1. Duster,
2. Staff,
3. fire rod,
4. sometimes potions (or other one shot items),
5. kinetic rings

more than 4, if you count potions.
But Harry is an Wizard, and I had to stretch to go over 4.

[virgil]

Batman, Blue Beetle, Inspector Gadget, Big O's Roger, some ninja depictions and the entire gadgeteer genre is the technological equivalent.

Mandarin, Iron Man's nemesis, has ten magic rings. This is before you start including whatever item he's got hanging around.

Odin had the head of Mimir (wise and held the future), the spear of Gungnir (never misses), the ring Draupnir (makes gold rings), two magic raven spies (Huginn and Muninn), an awesome eight-legged horse (Sleipnir, son of Loki), a pair of attack wolves (Geri and Freki), and the super-scrying throne Hlidskjalf. Then there's his own martial prowess, wisdom, knowledge of runes, shape-shifting, godhood, etc.

Solomon had a flying carpet, an animated throne, a magic ring of demon command, a magic key, & a magic table.

For Harry Dresden, you're list is a little off. He has his duster, his staff, his rod, his shield bracer, his kinetic rings, his mother's pentacle amulet, and whatever one-shot item he's got hanging around. Now, it's still a cheap shot, because he's a prop-based wizard. His only true magic items are the kinetic rings, the one-shot potion, and the duster (maybe the shield bracelet). The rest are tools that would be useless if given to a non-wizard, or rather, their absence doesn't forbid him from performing their function.

I think there's some Eastern tales that might hold a few characters with more than a handful of magic items that they carry around, but I'd have to research some more.

[virgil]

Oh, forgot something else. Doctor Strange has more than four items
* Cloak of Levitation
* Eye of Agamotto
* Orb of Agamotto
* Wand of Watoomb
* Book of the Vishtani

[Korwin]

Ups

[angelfromanotherpin]

Oh, forgot something else. Doctor Strange has more than four items
* Cloak of Levitation
* Eye of Agamotto
* Orb of Agamotto
* Wand of Watoomb
* Book of the Vishtani

Dr. Strange owns an astonishingly large array of items stashed in his house and the Ancient One's temple. But most of them stay stashed. He almost never leaves home with more than the first two on that list. As in, I've read a number of Doctor Strange stories, and I've never seen him actually carry any but the first two. Except for the arc where he traded the Eye of Agamotto for the Wings of Needless Sorrow; but that was a trade, he didn't carry both.

Odin is actually in a similar position, in that he owns this large number of things, but read any or all of the stories he's a character in, and how many does he actually carry and use in any one story?

And, to be clear, I wasn't trying to say that there aren't characters with many items (though certainly I couldn't think of any at the time), but that they are outliers.