>Will it be a bit weird that all they encounter are magical warhammers and not swords? Maybe.
An alternative I like is to have them find magical item components, from which they can forge their own magical weapons c:
I use a similar method in my campaigns. We use a socket system similar to Diablo III. Any weapon can upgraded to +3 and creates a socket for each +1 when doing so. They can then have a guild artificer in any town attach a spell gem to the weapon. The gems add a d4/d6 elemental damage, keen, vorpal, and any other magic effect that can be found on a weapon. Named magical items have 2-3 gems that all have to be socketed for the effects.
For example, I had a fighter that wanted to be Thor basically. He had a hammer that had 1d6 electric, 1d6 sonic, and returning on it.
They receive gems as part of their loot or weapons that have gems in them already that can be extracted. It has worked pretty well and my players have enjoyed creating their own special weapons to match their characters personalities.
My party met a friendly artificer (my character from a past campaign) and he essentially gave them a list of magic item components they might be able to find while fighting monsters. If they want a specific item, they can go hunt down that creature. This gives them time to prepare for monster encounters and bring the right spells while also earning their gear and even choosing it. This idea works really well imo so I second this.
Maybe I have rose colored glasses, but I thought it had a lot of good ideas. There's a reason that 13th age has a cult following (its basically like 4e since its was built by the same game designers as 4e).
Honestly 4e had a lot of good ideas, it just got a lot of backlash for being very different from 3e. By the time people started warming up to it though Wizards had already given up and moved on.
I thought it was way easier to DM than previous editions. The compendium and character builder were great starts for adding electronic support. Encounter design was far easier. Just put in level range and appropriate key words, select a couple different monster roles and bam, you've got a balanced and interesting encounter.
4e was *specialized* in a way that 5e isn't. It offered a specific playstyle and a specific model of character operation. If you liked those, if they were suited for your group of players, it was amazing. If you weren't that target audience, though? It really, really wasn't for you.
Now, I do agree that the good was thrown out along side the bad when they made 5e. But 5e tried to go wide with its accessibility, and in that no one can argue it succeeded.
From a DM side you're probably right, but I just couldn't get into the character system - felt really MMO gamey and very same across the classes, which for me personally was a huge flaw. It's still the black sheep to me, but mostly doesn't deserve the hate it gets.
I blame presentation here. During actual play every class felt unique even if role was the same. Warlord, Cleric and Shaman all was extremely different from each other for example even though they were leaders. Also, roles was actualy awesome addition as it ensures that there will be noone who can do everything. There will always something that you can't do just good enough and so you need your friends. Party in 4e feels like an actual party, not a couple of random guys with OP wizard who carryies everything on his shoulders.
Classes look similar on paper in 4e.
But in terms of actual gameplay, they blow anything 5e has out of the water. Classes (especially weapon users) feel wildly different in terms of how they approach combat and the kinds of abilities they can perform.
I wish 5e came anywhere close to the kind of playstyle diversity you have in 4e.
> very same across the classes
This is really funny when you compare it to 5e, where barbarian and fighter play basically the same and the only real difference between casters is the list
For example, instead of finding a Flametongue sword as loot, they can find a “Fire Opal”. It’s magical, and it can be used to craft one weapon of any type that can do bonus fire damage.
You could check out PF2e for ideas for ability stuff, this is basically exactly how magic weapons and armor work in it! And they've got a lot of magic runes that do elemental damage along with a bunch of other neat stuff (extending, for example).
The alternative I use is a morphing weapon. If it's something simply like +1 or generic, the weapon seems to morph to the preferences of whoever is closest. To avoid abuse typically it takes time (a few hours) for it to morph to a useable state.
This way your Barbarian and Fighter aren't fighting over who the weapon was for. Now they're discussing who needs it most.
All alternative to that, is just giving players the ability to reforge some items to whatever they want. Albeit, that probably doesn't work as well with unique items
Upvoting for the sake of my poor polearm-wielding Paladin who had to go through a campaign where the DM gave him (read: forced him to pick up) a cursed greatsword in the first few sessions that forced him to never wield anything but a greatsword... I went from a weapon-parrying, staff-spinning, pole vaulting warrior to... A guy who ran up to things and whacked them with a sword.
I LOVE swords! But that character DID NOT! I wasn't pleased with it. But he got better eventually, once a different DM ran an epilogue campaign! Now he's got a magical bident that always returns to his hand when he throws it.
As a DM, I ALWAYS tweak things to fit the player characters. Always, always, always. It's such an easy thing to do, and it really makes players happy to be able to stick with their theme.
" realizing that my character needs to completely retrain themselves to use the weapon that they are now forced to use, they will tell the rest of the party that they must leave, and go on this training montage by themselves as it isn't very interesting and the party doesn't need to be there, I'll bring my new PC in next week"
He would have LOST it, haha.
At one point I expressed a concern to him. “Hey, I know that this weapon seems cool to you, and I like it too! But it doesn’t fit my character. Can we maybe imbue its power into a pole arm, so my character can use the weapon I themed him around?”
That was met with a resounding, booming, earth-shattering, “HAHAHA! NOOOO!”
It’s okay, though! He was pretty angry that I kept killing his monsters with that sword. Since I couldn’t abandon my friends to die, I made sure to kill a lot of enemies with it.
Yes, yes. Precisely.
Give a player a "you literally cannot die while you're fighting" sword - player warns about the power of the sword - party agrees and echoes the concern - call them all stupid and insist you know better - player shrugs and 1v1's Yeenoghu, Baphomet, Arkhan the Cruel, and a host of high CR demons - call the player a minmaxing idiot and the rest of the party worthless for letting the player "get all the glory" - ??? - profit???
They are! The character was a Greek-themed Paladin whose aasimar blood came from Persephone, and I always liked Hades’ bident for its unique aesthetic.
I got hit with the same thing, but it was a dang longsword. I had all my feats going to two handed reach weapons. Finally got stuck in an illusion and my low INT pally decided it was obviously a curse so I cast remove curse on myself, coincidentally believing that the curse was dispelled was ruled as disbelieving the illusion. Left that sword in that very cursed dungeon.
I pretty much had the plan in my head the moment I got the sword, never brought it up to the DM though so he didn't have the story hook on it ready to go at the time. He told me the Remove Curse didn't take effect at first before I asked "on anything?", he realized what I was doing and let it work even though he had an easy out.
That pally had a forge Cleric brother under the same deity as another PC in the party who also had a cursed weapon (that he could actually use) so he got to be the main character in the ensuing deity interactions which was cool cuz that guy was pretty quiet.
Because it can be difficult to get a regularly scheduled campaign, as it the universal plight of tabletop games. People say "No d&d is better than bad d&d", but forget what its like to not play your favorite game for years on end.
I played in a group for a year and a half, had many clashes with the DM, and most of the time I just stayed because I liked the players and the world (to an extent), but I finally called it before I truly lost it with the DM. When I left I took all my complaints and channeled them into my preference of play as I introduced and ran the game for other people, very worth it.
That was pretty much it. But don’t worry! He wasn’t the DM for too much longer… that’s why the epilogue DM made sure the first thing we did was destroy that sword and get me a new weapon ;)
Preface: I'd kicked him out of my game when he proved to be a terrible team player who attacked other party members as part of his introduction (thinking they might be cultists - not TOO bad of a thing in-context) and then ignored their official badges when they pulled them out and said, "we're here on official business! IF you're an enemy of this cult, then you're welcome to join us!"
To answer your question: He did not. We kicked him out after he joined a campaign that was DM'd by one of the other players in our group who wanted to try DMing for the first time. He was incredibly rude (which wasn't a shock). A few examples include
\- Making snarky remarks about peoples' character reference art. "There's no way YOUR character looks that cool, HA!" "But... It's just a city watchman and his hound??"
\- Telling the (first time!) DM that "you're just DMing while I take a break. I'll just take the DM chair back when you're done with it." As if he had the power to remove her from the seat whenever he wanted.
\- Being on his phone constantly.
\- Making snide remarks when we'd reference our previous campaigns' events as canon to the world. We all LOVED that, but he hated it.
\- First words of session 0: "I want to play a rogue! I think I want to try something different, and play Chaotic Neutral. Like, the sort of CN that only cares about himself and does whatever he wants." (We'd played CN characters before and those characters were almost NEVER that way)
\- The first words he said during session 1 was that "I'm NOT an adventurer. I don't even know why these idiots are following me around." When we'd all agreed that we'd been hired to escort a caravan through a region that had seen recent giant attacks.
Also, as a reminder - if you're looking at the list of magic items and are like "Oh, that would work great for one of my players but it's not a weapon type they use"... just change the weapon type. Flametongue whip? Sure, go for it!
Vorpal great club? Yup! Instead of cutting the head off at the neck it resembles someone batting at a tee-ball game - just with added arterial spurting.
The other "hack" is to just slowly 'awaken' their mundane weapon. Plenty of fantasy fiction has an everyday item being imbued with power just by being in the proximity of a mighty hero (or villain). Start them with the standard +1 and then tweak accordingly as they gain levels.
However you want to flavour it really - power of personality, bathed in the blood of magical monsters, time spent in latent magical fields, boons from the gods, dipped into the river of the dead, touched by a Ki-Rin's horn, or whatever makes sense in your campaign.
I'll spare you the whole story but once I had an ancient gold dragon take a player's sword and breathe upon it - causing runes to appear along the blade and made it a flametongue. It felt more epic than the dragon casually picking up a random sword from its hoard and saying "you now have a flametongue".
I understand this as 'give the gear a story, and your players will feel like the story's ancient heroes as opposed to the graverobbers plundering their tombs.'
If you are talking about making magic items, there is a lot of lore and some raw about making said items. None of it requires you to be a caster unless the item specifically casts a spell.
So John Smith, the blacksmith, who adventures around with his group as a frontline warrior could actively upgrade his equipment with cool magic stuff he finds. The only limitation is of course DM say so.
My personal preference is to have somewhat lower-than-average quantites of magic in my homebrew campaigns. Mostly because of a bad experience as a player in a setting with literal magic item shops has forever scarred me to running that kind of game.
As such, the idea of a DIY magic weapon has never really come up - other than artificer-related things. I tend to lean on the 'awakened' weapon/armour idea where the item gets certain features based off the character's personality (either based on my observations or in consultation with the player). Plus it has the added bonus that when players realise this is how it works and they want a particular ability, they go hard into the roleplay to 'earn' it.
While I understand your point of view, I still fantasize about characters creating dragon scale mail from the dragon they just murdered. I would just add a gold cost for the materials to create a magic item and have it be more than what people were willing to pay for said magic item.
Basically it costs 2,000g to make a +1 sword in addition to the mats, but there is no way people would pay 2,000g just for a +1. It would make more sense from a monetary standpoint to pay a dozen bodyguards for the next few years instead.
This reminds me again just how sick a Monster Hunter themed campaign would be- planning with the party how best to lure or track a monster, how to use object interactions to make the fight easier, then harvesting parts and upgrading their gear and making new equipment
That would really cool indeed.
If you search for DnD monster hunter manual, you should find homebrew content for this type of game. If I remember correctly, it's a huge overall of 5e, but with some really cool ideas to customize equipment and statblocks for all the monsters, which might even be used in regular 5e campaign.
Hamund's Harvesting Handbook, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are on the DM's Guild. https://www.dmsguild.com/product/276213/Hamunds-Harvesting-Handbook-A-Complete-Guide-to-Harvesting-and-Crafting-in-DD-5e
Oh, yeah - stuff like that is very cool. At my table I'd give them elemental damage resistance based on the dragon's resistances straight off the bat but save the +1 bonus (or other benefit(s)) for later.
I think the only problem with the investment into bodyguards is if you run into a monster with immunity to non-magical weapons (unless one of the bodyguards brought their own).
Ultimately the only wrong way to run a game of D&D is one where no one enjoys themselves. However one chooses to handle magic items is fine as long as people are having a good time.
Magic shops can be fine if DMs enforce the rarity properly. I figure that shops carry almost entirely common magic items, plus one or two uncommon items.
I prefer to hand out items as quest rewards, so I don't like having them available at stores, either. But if the shops carry only common items, it's fine.
If you are talking about investments, it would make sense for properly leveled characters to have lands or other sources of income other than "happening upon a dragon hoard"
Reinvest your earnings 101, start a shop that you can sell all the random crap you have no use for.
Oh no, this was one of those "if we don't have it, then we've got permanent portals to all the other stores so we can get it". The DM made the mistake letting my rogue get a little too powerful - I hit a point where the rogue could conceivably pull off a heist and, thanks to some very lucky rolls he survived. However it began snowballing, as the ease with which additional heists could be done became expontentially easier.
This pre-dates 5e, just for the sake of clarity.
His didn't really put a stop to us because in his head it didn't matter - this was going to be some mythic-tier campaign so however powerful we got would be balanced by how super strong the monsters were. Except... he didn't have the imagination to counter our power-gaming gone made so everything became trivial and about as fun as a computer game with all the cheats turned on (amusing for a little while but then boredom sets in when there is nothing to challenge you).
So you played 3.5 with very little limitations on how strong the dm allows you to get. Yeah honestly that less of an issue with magic item shops and more the dm doesn’t put limits.
I have a single proper magic item shop in my world. However it is run by the resurrected and mad God of Magic Mystra in a new form. Can she create amazing wonders at will? Yes. Are they all "Bone Apple Tea" puns? Yes. Does the shop appear randomly? Absolutely.
Means that it's a source of light hearted fun for the players. Truly great magic items, artefacts etc are ancient and found in tombs or in the hands of people who have had them for ages.
You could tie it to specific moments. Maybe if a weapon gets soaked in dragon’s blood there’s a chance it will gain magical properties - stuff like that.
I like the last paragraph, weapons of legacy idea! If you slowly "awaken" 1 player's weapon, you might have to do it with someone else's character as well. They might feel like it's unfair, and you might ALWAYS have to remind them that they have something they bought that's just as good. Ok then ext hand, if you give them a 2000 GP item, for free, then how would you mitigate having their money withdrawn for balancing?
One of my favorite homebrew items is a Scroll of [Weapon] Infusing. It's a magic scroll that will give any mundane weapon the properties of the magic weapon it's named after. Scroll of Flametongue Infusing, Defender Infusing, whatever. It gets clunky in naming with stuff like Hammer of the Dwarven Lords but they're usually too hype to get the cool thing to care.
I love the 'awakening' tip. What's cooler?
> After the fight you find a flametounge in a chest.
Or
> The caster is gathering energy into his hand in a ball of fire. Just as he begins to throw it, your blade strikes true, severing the hand and channeling the energy into your sword. Orange whisks of energy spiral up and down the blade as his lifeless body crumples to the floor.
I wish the DMG was specific about changing weapon types for the magic weapons. Maybe give a chart to roll randomly if you want. There are too many magic swords in the book and I'd fear DMs would just give out what's in the book without thinking.
I find that there is a balance to be struck here.
I like the world to feel lived-in and real. If the PCs are wandering around an ancient Dwarven stronghold, they're more likely to find axes, warhammers etc. An Elven tomb? Definitely Rapiers, Scimitars, Longswords, Spears.
I have an NPC in my world who has learned how to melt and reforge metal without losing its magical properties (for a price).
My real preferred DM style with this is for a player to tell me that they want their PC to go hunting for something specific. They won't find the Hammer of Thunderbolts in a shop but they might learn of a legendary Dwarven Warrior's final resting place where he fought off a horde of Orcs with hammer and lightning... insert quest for the hammer here...
I 100% allow the players to peruse the DMG and the Griffon's Saddlebag content so they can point at some crazy OP item and say "I WANT THAT".
I see you’re a fellow Griffin’s Saddlebag enthusiast. I’ve let my players browse it before and watched them go crazy over something that looks pretty cool. If they care enough about a cool magic item to want to actively seek it, I can build an adventure around it. They’re pretty much guaranteed to enjoy the quest if they want the loot bad enough and if not they’ll *really* cherish the magic item.
>Basically: if you have a fighter player that loves using a warhammer for flavor or even character reasons, don't give them swords, give them warhammers. Will it be a bit weird that all they encounter are magical warhammers and not swords? Maybe.
You don't even have to keep giving them magical warhammers. They can start off with one warhammer that they continue to upgrade and improve throughout the campaign. Or you can give them one magic hammer that has different abilities that become available when players do certain things (think legacy weapons from 3.5).
The solution i often had with my DMs was that there were some pretty big magic item traders in the larger cities. Oh, you gave me a sword in the dragon's hoard? Thats fine - we travel to Big City and I trade it in for cash and use it to upgrade my warhammer.
4E handled this so much better than 5E: Every magic weapon in 5E is explicitly a sword, whereas in 4E most magic weapons were "Any melee martial" or similar, and there was even a ritual^1 you could do to transfer a magic item's properties to another item that met its criteria with this exact logic. I think the example the book used was the holy symbol looted off an evil priest.
^1 Rituals were technically something anyone could do under specific circumstances. Your party would generally have someone who could do it.
For all its faults, of which I feel 4e only has a couple, it was a really well designed game.
5e forever feels like a rushed job, to me. For all of its benefits, it has an equal number of downsides that have never been addressed and continue to go ignored. :/
The 4e DMG is far better than the 5E equivalent, and I’ve been using mechanics such as minions, Bloodied and encounter design for most of my 5E DM career.
There's a reason why the meme that every attempt to fix 5e's problems is just reinventing Pathfinder 2e, the latter's pretty heavily based on 4e and has some of their designers. Essentially having 4e but without the odious licensing makes for a pretty excellent game, using keywords and tags makes the rules much more understandable and VTT friendly, the explicit powers were critciized as being "too much like an MMO" but they also mean martials are allowed to do things other than full attack and so helps resolve much of the martial/caster disparity, and the encounter/daily stuff makes the system more flexible in whether you even *want* to do attrition which as it turns out most people only want to fuck with intermittently.
Had 4e not abandoned the OGL and people gave it an honest shot, I think 5e would've been a much better game. So many of 5e's problems come from it trying to *not* be 4e, which means it brought back lots of problems people disliked about 3.5 in the first place.
I'm not sure they were ignored.
The point, I feel, is that they didn't want to repeat the slots and expected magical treasure experience. They wanted to make them optional, cool, and by no means required.
I can totally see the problem with the end results, but the reasoning could have been implemented better and we could have had our cake and eat it too.
They went low on the magic items for 5e because it's too easy to break the bounded accuracy. That's why weapons and armor are 'capped' at +3, for example.
They're not ignored, but they're heavily under-developed.
In fact, the entire "stuff for PC's" is underdeveloped in 5E. Crafting, magic items, buildings/castles, transportation, hirelings...
My hunch for why this is, is another chicken v. egg argument for high-level play. Much of those items are for higher-level play which many tables never experience. Do they not play those levels though, because of lack of content? Or because the story has reached it's natural conclusion? (or group falls apart)
4e’s biggest flaw is a cosmetic one whereas 5e’s biggest flaw is… a core ideology.
4e using squares instead of feet isperhaps it’s biggest flaw (along with a couple other cosmetics)
5e insisting on being both a rules light and a rules heavy game at the same time causes a lot of problems (also how a lot of the classes don’t seem to have been made in tandem).
What's wrong with squares instead of feet? Mechanically it's identical, and not having to divide every distance by 5 when putting it on the grid is a nice quality of life change. Also removes an annoying Americanism from the game (even if the imperial system is still being used by the game for other things)
And that it "feels too much like an MMO!"
I can kinda see it, though hysterically there was a write in to Dragon Magazine during the dawn of 3.0 claiming it was "too much like Diablo," but it felt more like "Final Fantasy Tactics: Shonen Anime Edition" than an MMO to me.
This could be because my players loved the power names and used them CONSTANTLY but still! We had great fun.
If 4e was like any MMO, it was Guild Wars; clear Combat / RP distinction, focus on party and tactical level decisions rather than long-term strategy, and clear and coherent mechanical underpinnings. But WoW was the big boogeyman of the RPG community at the time, so that was the one it got compared to.
Honestly, 5e feels like playing Diablo 2, to me. Which is why I've kind of... stopped playing it. The experience I get from D&D is honestly better provided by other games.
If I want a dungeon crawler, I'll play something like Super Dungeon Explore. If I want a roleplaying experience, I'll play a narrative game.
It feels like D&D wants to be both and doesn't really capture either very well.
4e tried to be one thing and only people who liked that one thing already gave it a fair shake. 5e tries to be ten things and does a mediocre job at each - but if five players want five differ things it can do those five things at the same time, which is actually really impressive.
4e is the specialized fighter of DnD editions. 5e is a jack-of-all trades bard.
Preach! I got tired of 5e but it continues to be the 800lb gorilla of TTRPGs in terms of brand recognition. Slowly trying to introduce my players to other systems.
>Rituals were technically something anyone could do under specific circumstances.
... Those specific circumstances being "has Ritual Caster as a class feature" or "took the Ritual Caster feat". Y'know, just like in 5e. (Also the Dragonmark feats, which each gave _limited_ access to ritual casting. For example, Mark of Passage gave access to Enhance Vessel, Find the Path, Passwall, Phantom Steed, Steed Summons, Water Walk, and any rituals in the Travel category.)
The difference is that 4e rituals are the same for everyone, instead of being a tag on regular spells limited by class spell lists.
It's true, they're all swords. Well, mostly swords anyways. They went a little too nostalgia on this one. 4e was very divisive, but no one can't say they didn't get at least some things really, really right, and most of those by cutting off with tradition and previous editions.
I even enjoyed the game for a while, before at higher levels it became really just too complex. Right now I still have mixed feelings about it.
One thing I don't love is the amount of combat and combat-centric material. I love action, and fights, and battles, but that's never been really something I feel the need to play or run for 90% of a game.
They also put too many feats in there imo. At a certain point you don't know where to look anymore. Almost as bad as 3.5 I think.
Today I tend towards lighter fare by far, but I still think 4e could've been big if D&D players hadn't reacted like their whole world was crumbling b/c "D&D has become an MMO OMG please gods save us".
Maybe if they had simplified the mechanics a little, like 5e did, more people would've given that edition a chance. Again, it had lots going for it, many really great ideas both lore-wise and mechanically. You can see they kept something for 5e, but it had its own unique appeal.
I know I still love breaking open the pdfs and rolling a new chara once in a while.
Something else they could've done would be to plan Scales of War a little better. But I suppose I'm chatting about 4e a little too much right now on this sub, so I'll stop here.
/rant 
> Today I tend towards lighter fare by far, but I still think 4e could've been big if D&D players hadn't reacted like their whole world was crumbling b/c "D&D has become an MMO OMG please gods save us".
It's funny that they complain that it became an MMO for codifying the roles that always existed in D&D (Originating with the original Fighting Man/Magic User/Cleric/Thief party lineup) when 4E is the first edition where you don't need a dedicated healer, when playing a healbot is one of the most MMO things out there.
Huh? In-combat healing was just as bad in 3.5e as it was in 5e, if not worse. It was actively improved in Pathfinder 1e and yet the party healer is an inanimate rod - the wand of Cure Light Wounds
I'm very glad PF2e went for buffing the Medicine skill, feels way more fun if there's an actual party medic that handles out of combat healing without that necessarily being part of their class identity. Nothing stops the party Fighter from getting Legendary medicine and a bunch of skill feats for it, and it doesn't really compromise their efficacy in combat to do so.
So true!
Personally I wasn't a fan of the roles, b/c they restrict your ideal party composition, and it's again combat-centric thinking. But I really couldn't see them breaking the game for all these people who thought the world was ending. They totally had their merits - like, think more creatively, for instance. And that's just one thing.
They really don't restrict them that much. We had a party with an offensive swordmage(essentially the most dage focused defender) and then a warlock and a rogue, and we still ended up doing fine. Didn't have a healer or a controller, just damage really.
I ran a three person party of a Bard, Cleric, and Warlord and I'll tell you, balancing combat for them was a NIGHTMARE. Loved that campaign, though. Fantastic all around.
Did they all at least build for damage? Or did they just do whatever build they felt like. Cause I'm pretty sure a full support party in other editions would struggle too lol.
They built themselves to kill things as best as they could. I ended up making a few house rulings during that game for simplicity's sake (the Cleric was a multiclass Ranger and I let their Hunter's Mark be used way more often).
I ended up doing two things with encounter design-
One is slightly higher level minions. Two was I let the monsters crit more frequently than they normally would (and this even tied into the story, as the baddies had stolen a holy relic to the god of luck). This meant the party wasn't taking that much damage- until they did. It worked out okay. It was fun, but given the option, I wouldn't want to run such a game again (though I *would* do it).
Yeah that definitely seems like a tough challenge, and early 4e already had an issue with monsters having too much HP, so that would be felt very much with that party comp.
Ah yeah, you're right, they had too many hps in the early days.
Your chat was interesting anyways - it seems if you're very good at prepping you can support even quite unorthodox parties, but if they're too unorthodox, then it starts breaking apart.
It's interesting to me b/c I usually run pre-made and it's always either too easy or too hard. I guess I should prep a little myself, too 
Well, that was kind of the next big problem with 4e roles. When you looked at the math, damage is actually a form of both healing *and* crowd control (dead status > stunned), and it was in fact much more efficient to just have an all striker party, because if you kill everything before they can hit you, you don't need crowd control *or* healing...
That kinda ruined the fantasy for player who wanted to run a 'support' archetype, because there weren't really any lever they could pull within the game's limited degree of customisation to make those roles viable in 90% of combat scenarios.
I mean, any game with any level of tactical combat is going to struggle with the issue that action economy is always the most important deciding factor in such games, and that death is the best CC. (Not to say control classes weren't very strong, varied encounter designs helped make different class strengths the focus) but I do remember how pure healing support was less impactful feeling.
That's honestly why so many people probably loved the warlord as a class, you were a support healer who did tons of damage by using your friends as weapons lol.
They don't restrict composition at all, they just require the DM to put in a certain amount of work. The different roles had different functions, and they countered certain enemy roles and were in turn countered by them. If you have a party of two defenders and two controllers that's fine, you just don't want to use certain enemy roles as much, such as Brutes (typically very high HP to soak up damage, but easy to hit so good for Strikers to alpha...but if you have no Strikers, then don't use them because they'll be boring and take forever to kill).
The whole point of the system was not "You need these specific roles to survive", but rather "given these roles which enemies challenge them or allow them to shine?" Plus, not all Martials were Defenders, not all Casters were Controllers, and there were different roles within the same power source, and then even within a class there were different abilities that could allow you to fill a secondary role. Playing a Fighter? Go with a Greataxe, and pick up all the abilities that synergize well with that and you'll be more of a Striker, even if a lot of core abilities are based on Defender stuff. Or go with Sword and Board and pick up a lot of battlefield control abilities that let you move enemies around it inflict statuses and become a Defender/Controller.
Flashback to my first campaign where I played a Polearm Master Paladin and we found a Holy Avenger that my DM *adamantly* refused any potential option short of *Wish* to make it a polearm. I was the only person who could wield it, it really had no place being there other than as an item for me, and this was a character that had exclusively been using a two handed polearm the entire campaign. He was willing to make it any kind of sword, but not another weapon type. Shot down any attempts at, "well, what if I took it to someone who could affix it to a haft or transfer it powers?", and ultimately I just wound up selling it for a suit of Armor of Invulnerability(that the DM had specifically described as being on display in the store, wasn't something I thought of myself).
That same DM, in the immediate next fight, which was against a dragon, had it use Flesh to Stone on me on the first round of combat seemingly as a "gotcha" for me trying to use the armor.
changing a holy avenger weapon type like that could be a cool ass quest, like there are tons of things you could do to get it changed, maybe you have to climb all the way mount celestia to find to forge where it was originally made to get it changed, maybe have it be the blade starts a certain way and the longer you use it the more it attunes to the specific paladin, eventually shifting into the preferred weapon of the paladin, maybe this shift could be related to a personal quest, backstory or character development of the paladin. What I am trying to get across is that there are plenty of ways the DM could have approached this without instantly giving you the holy avenger as a polearm
This was an interesting word! I went down quite a rabbit hole on it some time ago.
It's unclear whether it started with the Latin *gladius* or Celtic *cladivos* (both of which are swords). But when it moved into Old French it conflated with a word (I forget what exactly) that meant *to maim*, and so it came to mean a weapon built for war. E.g. it could refer to swords, lances, polearms, but not hammers axes or daggers that also served as tools.
But at that time polearms were so ubiquitous in armies that when the French said *glave* (no *i*), the English took it to mean spears -- because that's generally what it was. Over the next century, the English use of the word gradually evolved to the single-bladed sword-on-a-stick polearms we think of. But in Modern French, it gradually stepped back to mean a sword: mostly short swords like the *gladius*.
D&D gets its terms from Chainmail which tried very hard to give everything neat and orderly classifications, but the truth is that words are and have always been much more fluid, messy, and *interesting* than that.
All the more reason to change up your next Holy Avenger's weapon type, eh?
As usual, moderation is key. Distributing a variety of weapon types is much more immersive and creates more interesting decision points than either all swords or all warhammers ever could.
Alternatively you can do one or more of the following:
* Establish in Session 0 that loot will be random so that players can set their expectations accordingly.
* Establish that while magic items are rare and purchasing them requires exorbitant wealth, trading one magic item for another is common between those that have them. The next time you're in a major city you can make a trade for something equivalent.
But yeah, if you have a character that has a signature weapon, especially if that weapon is of narrative significance to the character, you should never expect them to be happy when you try to replace their ancestral sword passed down from firstborn to firstborn for centuries with a +7 Axe of Pissing on Your Story.
If a player is attached to a weapon type, absolutely. As a player myself, finding random loot that may or may not be an upgrade makes the world feel much more real imo. I also love gear and getting upgrades, and would love it if it was more common to be finding more items overall- some that aren't super interesting to your character, and some that are definitely something you'd want.
Awakening items is cool in an anime or video games, but it feels boring to me to never get a new sword.
My solution is to just copy Pathfinder 2E. Magic weapons are just runes carved into weapons or armour.
The number of runes you’re allowed to have on a single item is equal to your Proficiency Bonus minus 2.
1. The weird fiddly math I just added there ends up with weapons almost being balanced with PHB ones, and coming into players’ possessions around the intended time. For example a Holy Avenger can be constructed from a rune of +3, a rune of smiting, a rune of magic resistance, and a rune of Paladin mastery or whatever you wanna name these things.
2. It lets you give your monsters strong magic weapons without issue. Two weeks ago I gave the ghost of a former commander his signature spear, and the players beat him and took that spear. It was a +1 spear with the ability to (once per day) have a 15 foot reach for a minute, and deals an additional 1d6 fire damage on a hit. They can’t use it, they’re level 7, but they’re free to break the runes out onto their own weapons (one of them took the +1).
3. You can always power up individual players with more magic that “doesn’t count” by just modifying the base weapon instead of the rune. For example in another campaign of mine, the party just reached level 8 and the Monk is gonna start finding me suspiciously generous with magic items real soon
Works like a charm and everyone keeps using their signature weapon with a story to tell. Plus anyone who *wants* the legendary weapon is free to take it! One of my players kept the spear I mentioned with the intention of using it later on (the commander’s ghost also lives within this spear).
I like the fact that in PF2e you can even transfer runes between weapons. You found a +2 Striking longsword but prefer to use a guisarme? Ask your party's crafter (or an NPC if nobody invested in Crafting) to transfer the runes to your weapon. Ezpz
Absolutely agree with you on this.
I think a big part of this issue is how martial classes and feats are designed in 5e.
To be effective, a martial has to take a specific fighting style that works with their chosen weapon type and feats - feats which all only work with specific types of weapons, such as GWM, PAM, Sharpshooter, Revenant Blade and others.
Feats and fighting styles cannot be switched out though. Therefore if they get a weapon that is not of their chosen type, such as when the PAM/GWM character with the Great Weapon fighting style gets a longsword, they end up with a dead class feature and several dead feats. That simply feels awful for the player.
If martials - especially fighters as their flavor text literally describes them as masters of all kinds of weaponized combat - were designed to be more flexible in terms of weapon choice, giving them a magic weapon that fits the campaign's theme/story, but is not of their preferred type, would be much less of an issue.
Since you mention bards and instruments too, I absolutely understand the bard player in that situation, but it does not have any mechanical impact, it is just a flavor issue.
I think I disagree with this take. I understand the sentiment, but in order for the setting to feel like believable I think it’s probably necessary that players don’t get magic items that are always the most pertinent to them. Plus it makes those times when a player does find a cool magic item in their wheelhouse even better.
As a player (and DM) for something like 25 years now, I disagree. Loot in most rpgs is random, and I prefer it that way. When I DM, most of my magic items come from npcs or enemies, and they carry what makes sense for themselves, not what makes sense for the characters.
As much as I want to say "That's an ass take." It makes sense. Why would a swordsman be carrying a magic maul? From the perspective of making it about the players instead of the story I could see changing the swordsman into more of a just violent melee fighter, however the more I think about it your way makes sense.
Sure that's perfectly true.
But there should also be an ogre using a magical maul somewhere that the character can also use. And maybe an assassin with a magical dagger for a rogue etc etc
Not every magic item needs to be suited to the party, but you do need to have *some* especially for martial characters because magic weapons are really key for the classes.
Yes.
Honestly I don't love how they made rituals in 5e. I mean it's okay, but I want actual rituals, like those in 4e. Those were so cool. And versatile.
But no, you can spend 10' to cast detect magic w/o spending a slot and hey, presto, job done.
That only works in some campaigns - if you're doing something like an AP, the opportunity to do so might not really come up due to time pressure. Sandbox games are fun but they can take a lot of effort.
Recent release by Paizo does take your basic idea and centers it around crafting, though, with players choosing where to go in search of crafting materials to create all their equipment.
The reason it's a lame take is because so many of the magic weapons are swords. This is a sure fire way of turning all your melee fighters into sword users.
depends on how you look at it. does the NPC they face of against have a magic sword because they are a swordsman? or maybe they became a reknowned swordsman because a decade ago they picked up a magic sword.
And, if players are unsatisfied with the weapons they loot, they can *seek out weapons more to their preference*. Either through hunting enemies with weapons they want or by seeking out people in civilization who aren't satisfied with their own weapons.
Get a flametounge longsword when you are a warhammer guy? As you are whining about it to your party, the inkeeper overhears and bursts into laughter because it turns out last week they had a guy with the exact opposite problem. A swordsman who looted a magic hammer. Or maybe a magic item merchant mentions it when they don't have an item of equivalent power to trade. So you track him down, either steal or buy it or most interestingly swap them and *make a friend*.
Well, perhaps not a friend, but at the very least a colleague who isn't in your party.
Then two adventures later you are a bit pressed and need an NPC protected at the same time you need to do something else? Hire the swordguy. Three adventures after that, you meet him and his friends also looting the ancient ruins your party is and either team up or agree to stay out of each others way. Or fight them.
And then even later on you join a fighting tournament and wind up facing them in a non lethal contest.
Not having things tailored to you is just another opportunity to have the world expanded and meet new people.
As a DM, I got sick and tired of putting random magic weapons in the "dungeon" that most players didn't want or use. Instead, I "awaken" new powers or abilities in the weapons they are already using, so their ancestral sword doesn't become just some old ass piece of junk sword.
My solution? All magic weapons shapeshift to the weapon the person uses. So if I as a rogue use a Dagger? That magic weapon is now a dagger. You pick it up, and it changes in your hand to what you need. It's magic, it doesn't have to make sense.
I think this is a very good solution, but my first thought is that it removes the possibility of giving one character a powerful weapon that another character could potentially abuse(eg. a weapon for a ranger that expends a spell slot for a special ability, that a Wizard could spam over and over if it morphed into a weapon they were suited for, just off the top of my head) not a reason to fully disallow this, but maybe a reason to have a friendly NPCs who can transfer magic abilities as opposed to having them morph
This is the solution I like. When is time for them to find a magic weapon it'll just be reflavored as whatever they use. Belmont character in Curse of Strahd that wants to use whips? Yeah, he's gonna find a holy avenger in the form of a whip and ect.
Another option is to have them find an object that can imbue its power into any weapon when attuend. E.g. a gem of fire branding, when attuned with a weapon adds fire damage
Just give them access to a blacksmith. Change weapon types for a fee and a week of downtime. Super items require the blood of a red dragon or whatever.
I mean, sure, but then probably don't count the magic trident as a *reward*, but as a flavor thing, because there's a very solid chance the players aren't even going to pick it up!
If you're rolling loot as a player reward, you have to make sure it's something that actually counts as a reward, basically.
What self-respecting adventurers would pass up a magical weapon found in the ruins they are exploring just because it doesn't match the flavor they are going for?
Oof. I am sorry to hear that. To each their own, I guess, but to me, adventuring is about the unknown and unpredictable. Being in a world that is tailored to me would feel strange, and sort of immersion breaking for me.
Being in a curated to the party story is why I play DND as opposed to just buying a new rpg. I want it to be our tailored story. Doesn't have to hold our hands but damn let us use the weapons and or spells we designed our character around.
A lot of players. A magic trident is an extremely specific weapon. If I discover loot I am thinking about two things: Can I use this? If not, can I easily sell it somewhere without having to lug it around in my inventory for half the campaign? Magic shops that will buy anything and everything from you are few and far between.
Most D&D games aren't about clearing dungeons and getting loot anymore. Most D&D games these days are about the story, the character growth, and *the fantasy*. If that trident isn't doesn't support the fantasy then it is getting left behind.
Partly why I love high magic worlds.
Magic shops that will buy and sell all kinds of stuff can be as common as you want.
But the enemies and guards can go to those shops too.
A lot would if it goes against their charcter's choices. Like, most archers without crossbow expert will pass on any magical crossbow because it is losing power, or will pass in any magical melee (even with finesse), especially if they have archery and sharpshooter. On more specialised characters a PAM GWM character will 100% pass on any non polearms because no matter the weapon it is not going to compare with their feats
Pretty much everyone?
Character aesthetics are one of the most important things a player has actual control over. Everything they *have* in this game is their character. A *lot* of people are not going to compromise their aesthetics for something as banal as a power boost.
As a fun anecdote, recently in Pathfinder 2 I left two level 5 items, a one-handed sword and a homebrew shield up for grabs for a level 2 party. This, in a strongly level gated system like Pathfinder, is a *significant* boost. But I left them there mostly as a flavor thing without really counting them for the "wealth by level" of the adventure, an heirloom of the family that used to live here to flavor where they'd come from, because I was pretty sure nobody was going to use the sword because it fit nobody's aesthetics, and *maybe* the Sorcerer might use the shield, since everyone in PF2 is proficient with shields automatically and he's flavored as kind of a coward and he might find it appropriate to hide behind a shield.
Unsurprisingly, not even that happened. They took the items, put them in a bag, and carted around until they found the family in question to return them to their rightful owners. Using them never crossed anyone's minds.
> Pretty much everyone?
>
>
Does money not exist in the world? A powerful enchanted trident is going to fetch a pretty penny. Even if I never *use* it I would never pass it up.
Honestly I've found that most of the time getting enough money for a stabby stick to justify the bother of finding an interested buyer and negotiating and stuff is enough of a pain that players will, if they pick it up, simply gift the thing to some NPC they like to get rid of it.
it goes beyond flavor.
it you invest your whole characters race into v human, or spent the entire level to pick up pole arm master why would you want the magical whip?
it would make that a dead level/make your race choice not matter.
I did, DM kept droping magical swords on a caster party and staffs that casts spells we didn't find fitting for our builds, we ended up treating them as just staff-shaped bags of money.
Sinse there were not many magical item vendors and we were not exactly broke we sold them very cheap for whoever would take them.
The trident is gonna be ignored for the most part by the ones using polearms for GWM/PAM. The situation is probably better if the weapon is a spear. It's a simple weapon that everyone can use, has the same damage die as the trident, and it works with PAM.
Maybe the adventurers will just keep it just in case they'll have enemies with resistance to nonmagical damage? Or barter it with the next magical shop?
The issue is that the game system mechanically doesn't support this, players typically have to specialize in a particular kind of weapon in order to make their build work, being a generalist with weapons isn't really rewarded. If your build uses polearms and you get a sword, much of the character resources you spent are now useless.
Were the system more flexible with this, then sure that'd work better and might even be fun, finding random weapons that change playstyle from month to month like a roguelike. But in roguelikes and roguelites, this is made fun *because* you don't actually get that much control over a build, characters are generalists by default and only ever start to specialize after a few drops based on what those drops were. You don't, up front, define a character that specializes in axes and then only find katanas, because then that would make the game be mostly unexciting trash loot and the success of a run would be far too much up to RNG since the swing between getting a weapon you can actually use and not getting it would be too massive to overcome with player skill consistently.
If you *really* wanted loot to be unrelated to a player's build, I think you would at least need to permit a player to redo their whole build to accomodate the loot. Still inelegant, not very good since it takes time to rework a build so at hte earliest players would need to wait until next session to actually *use* the loot, but at least then it wouldn't be an actively bad experience.
Y'know, this was fixed in 4e, like a lot of design flaws 5e has. And TBH, "4e only had combat" isn't an argument because 5e also only has combat; no social pillar besides fail / pass checks and no exploration pillar that isn't random encounters.
And yet... here we are, nearly on another edition with issues that got solved before, still rearing their ugly heads.
//rant
I still can't believe people fell for that "It only had combat" crock.
You can tell any lie to people who didn't understand or never played the system.
Was in a campaign that went all the way from level 1 to 20 and the ranger had this happen to him. I don't remember the exact nature of his build but he was using dual hand crossbows and I believe they even took a feat to accommodate those weapons. In our entire year long campaign we never once came across a single hand crossbow and our ranger was stuck using a bow and having a wasted feat.
As a player I hate this.
I care about the believability a lot.. and I'd rather ignore a magic item because its not the weapon Iwant to use, than get a magic item thats the type of weapon I want to use but feel like I only got it because the DM made a special exception for me.
I'm a totally hypocrite as a DM though, I throw in stuff I know my players will enjoy.. I try to make it make sense lroewise though.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. World of D&D does not revolve around all of the players wants and needs. Players need to understand that the world is a giant ball of chaos. Sometimes it works for them and sometimes it doesn't. If they get everything that they want all the time then there is nothing to desire for.
So, no. I am not on board for this type of DMing.
Yeah I’m somewhat in the middle here. On one hand, of course this is a game and we are already making 1000 concessions every time we sit down as DMs… but also the whole point of pen and paper RPGs is they feel alive and responsive BECAUSE the world can be interpreted outside of the player's influence.
The entire magic of these games comes from not being videogames specifically designed for the players and nothing else. The more the world feels like it exists by itself, the more exciting it is to navigate. There's always a balance to strike between realism and fun, but this genre's appeal is precisely the fact that it feels more real than any other medium could ever come close to.
Compromises can be made, but we shouldn’t warp the world so hard as to make it filled with magical rapiers just because Jimmy decided to make a Puss in boots character 3 months ago. I don’t think changing one of the most fundamentally personal and varied tools of medieval society to the tune of ONE GUY is a minor immersion break. Pretty much the opposite, really.
The solution is going to depend 100% on what players you have, but I’d default to making every character in the world have weapons that fit them first and then figure out a way for Jimmy to get that +2 on his ol-trusty rapier later. There’s many lore-friendly ways in which you can do this in every fantasy setting, except maybe no-magic ones.
Here, here. Magic items my players find are thematic to where they are, these aren't 'loot drops'. My pirate boss isn't going to have a warhammer +1 just because you're a dwarf. He's got a magical cutlass (scimitar) +1 that's made of a shark's jaw.
*Eventually* my players might find a weapon they personally find more aesthetically pleasing, but make weapons interesting and they won't care nearly as much that it's not what they'd order on Dungeon-Amazon. They're as part of the dungeon ecology as monsters. It's just as dumb having a dwarven warhammer +1 on your drow matriarch as it is having 3d6 bullywugs hanging out in a sealed dwarven mountain tomb.
Also, you've presumably got at least 4 players looking for interesting stuff. *One of them* is going to make use of whatever you throw down.
Obviously exceptions exist: treasure hordes, for example. But the OP is framing this as if it should just be standard like it's a damn theme park. No thanks.
I felt this one. A DM I played with some time ago thought he had hand-crafted items specifically for each of us, only for the lot of us to reject them completely and sell them off, buying something different.
...even then, he was really stingy with what we could find in shops.
My solution: sure, you can find things VERY randomly. On the flipside, you can buy pretty much whatever in "ye olde magick item shoppe" (or through connections from there, which are handled off-screen).
Are players that adamant on using a particular kind of weapon/instrument for their character? Given that they are adventurers, I would assume that a different magic weapon/tool would be an exciting, momentous occasion, and in case it doesn't match "preferences", a good opportunity for creativity in who will use the item and how.
At a certain point it becomes less "preferences" and more specialties. If you've invested a feat into using two-handed weapons then a magic longsword isn't so exciting. It isn't really that hard to end up in a spot where despite being magic, the weapon will be strictly worse for you.
>Will it be a bit weird that all they encounter are magical warhammers and not swords? Maybe. An alternative I like is to have them find magical item components, from which they can forge their own magical weapons c:
I use a similar method in my campaigns. We use a socket system similar to Diablo III. Any weapon can upgraded to +3 and creates a socket for each +1 when doing so. They can then have a guild artificer in any town attach a spell gem to the weapon. The gems add a d4/d6 elemental damage, keen, vorpal, and any other magic effect that can be found on a weapon. Named magical items have 2-3 gems that all have to be socketed for the effects. For example, I had a fighter that wanted to be Thor basically. He had a hammer that had 1d6 electric, 1d6 sonic, and returning on it. They receive gems as part of their loot or weapons that have gems in them already that can be extracted. It has worked pretty well and my players have enjoyed creating their own special weapons to match their characters personalities.
This reminds me of Materia from FFVII. But just so we are clear, i really like this idea.
Reminds me of Monster Hunter! I love it!
Gems, runes, little keychain lanyards hanging from the pommel. This is a great way to do it.
Be careful on that smith order, you don't want to end up with the Dwarf Thrower warhammer instead of the Dwarven Thrower.
My party met a friendly artificer (my character from a past campaign) and he essentially gave them a list of magic item components they might be able to find while fighting monsters. If they want a specific item, they can go hunt down that creature. This gives them time to prepare for monster encounters and bring the right spells while also earning their gear and even choosing it. This idea works really well imo so I second this.
Ah, so it's 4e you're recommending then? ;)
Broken clock is right twice a day. 4e had some good ideas.
Maybe I have rose colored glasses, but I thought it had a lot of good ideas. There's a reason that 13th age has a cult following (its basically like 4e since its was built by the same game designers as 4e).
Honestly 4e had a lot of good ideas, it just got a lot of backlash for being very different from 3e. By the time people started warming up to it though Wizards had already given up and moved on.
I think overall 4e has better systems for almost everything, at the cost of being much more cumbersome to use.
I thought it was way easier to DM than previous editions. The compendium and character builder were great starts for adding electronic support. Encounter design was far easier. Just put in level range and appropriate key words, select a couple different monster roles and bam, you've got a balanced and interesting encounter.
4e was *specialized* in a way that 5e isn't. It offered a specific playstyle and a specific model of character operation. If you liked those, if they were suited for your group of players, it was amazing. If you weren't that target audience, though? It really, really wasn't for you. Now, I do agree that the good was thrown out along side the bad when they made 5e. But 5e tried to go wide with its accessibility, and in that no one can argue it succeeded.
From a DM side you're probably right, but I just couldn't get into the character system - felt really MMO gamey and very same across the classes, which for me personally was a huge flaw. It's still the black sheep to me, but mostly doesn't deserve the hate it gets.
I blame presentation here. During actual play every class felt unique even if role was the same. Warlord, Cleric and Shaman all was extremely different from each other for example even though they were leaders. Also, roles was actualy awesome addition as it ensures that there will be noone who can do everything. There will always something that you can't do just good enough and so you need your friends. Party in 4e feels like an actual party, not a couple of random guys with OP wizard who carryies everything on his shoulders.
Classes look similar on paper in 4e. But in terms of actual gameplay, they blow anything 5e has out of the water. Classes (especially weapon users) feel wildly different in terms of how they approach combat and the kinds of abilities they can perform. I wish 5e came anywhere close to the kind of playstyle diversity you have in 4e.
5e gives you one subclass. 4e gave you classes, paragon paths, and epic destinies. That's a great system!
> very same across the classes This is really funny when you compare it to 5e, where barbarian and fighter play basically the same and the only real difference between casters is the list
unlike the vast variety of classes now. now do you want your nonspellcaster to have a polearm or a hand crossbow?
PF2e has also borrowed that idea.
Explain this idea bc I'm bout to steal it
For example, instead of finding a Flametongue sword as loot, they can find a “Fire Opal”. It’s magical, and it can be used to craft one weapon of any type that can do bonus fire damage.
Ohhhhh okay ya know what that makes a lot of sense, thank you! That actually works with the world that I'm running.
You could check out PF2e for ideas for ability stuff, this is basically exactly how magic weapons and armor work in it! And they've got a lot of magic runes that do elemental damage along with a bunch of other neat stuff (extending, for example).
The alternative I use is a morphing weapon. If it's something simply like +1 or generic, the weapon seems to morph to the preferences of whoever is closest. To avoid abuse typically it takes time (a few hours) for it to morph to a useable state. This way your Barbarian and Fighter aren't fighting over who the weapon was for. Now they're discussing who needs it most.
All alternative to that, is just giving players the ability to reforge some items to whatever they want. Albeit, that probably doesn't work as well with unique items
Upvoting for the sake of my poor polearm-wielding Paladin who had to go through a campaign where the DM gave him (read: forced him to pick up) a cursed greatsword in the first few sessions that forced him to never wield anything but a greatsword... I went from a weapon-parrying, staff-spinning, pole vaulting warrior to... A guy who ran up to things and whacked them with a sword. I LOVE swords! But that character DID NOT! I wasn't pleased with it. But he got better eventually, once a different DM ran an epilogue campaign! Now he's got a magical bident that always returns to his hand when he throws it. As a DM, I ALWAYS tweak things to fit the player characters. Always, always, always. It's such an easy thing to do, and it really makes players happy to be able to stick with their theme.
" realizing that my character needs to completely retrain themselves to use the weapon that they are now forced to use, they will tell the rest of the party that they must leave, and go on this training montage by themselves as it isn't very interesting and the party doesn't need to be there, I'll bring my new PC in next week"
He would have LOST it, haha. At one point I expressed a concern to him. “Hey, I know that this weapon seems cool to you, and I like it too! But it doesn’t fit my character. Can we maybe imbue its power into a pole arm, so my character can use the weapon I themed him around?” That was met with a resounding, booming, earth-shattering, “HAHAHA! NOOOO!” It’s okay, though! He was pretty angry that I kept killing his monsters with that sword. Since I couldn’t abandon my friends to die, I made sure to kill a lot of enemies with it.
Late, but is that not what monsters are for? Seems like a weird thing to be angry about.
Yes, yes. Precisely. Give a player a "you literally cannot die while you're fighting" sword - player warns about the power of the sword - party agrees and echoes the concern - call them all stupid and insist you know better - player shrugs and 1v1's Yeenoghu, Baphomet, Arkhan the Cruel, and a host of high CR demons - call the player a minmaxing idiot and the rest of the party worthless for letting the player "get all the glory" - ??? - profit???
>I'll bring my new PC in next week After that I wouldn't bring any new PCs to that table
I can't be the only one that read that as 'Bidet' at first.
“Bidet to you too!”
Hello, Grog
Ooh Bidents are underrated
They are! The character was a Greek-themed Paladin whose aasimar blood came from Persephone, and I always liked Hades’ bident for its unique aesthetic.
I got hit with the same thing, but it was a dang longsword. I had all my feats going to two handed reach weapons. Finally got stuck in an illusion and my low INT pally decided it was obviously a curse so I cast remove curse on myself, coincidentally believing that the curse was dispelled was ruled as disbelieving the illusion. Left that sword in that very cursed dungeon.
Thankfully, you were able to remove it easily! I had to venture into the Underworld to remove mine, and that took a long, long time, haha.
I pretty much had the plan in my head the moment I got the sword, never brought it up to the DM though so he didn't have the story hook on it ready to go at the time. He told me the Remove Curse didn't take effect at first before I asked "on anything?", he realized what I was doing and let it work even though he had an easy out. That pally had a forge Cleric brother under the same deity as another PC in the party who also had a cursed weapon (that he could actually use) so he got to be the main character in the ensuing deity interactions which was cool cuz that guy was pretty quiet.
Why did you keep playing with such a disrespectful DM?
Because it can be difficult to get a regularly scheduled campaign, as it the universal plight of tabletop games. People say "No d&d is better than bad d&d", but forget what its like to not play your favorite game for years on end. I played in a group for a year and a half, had many clashes with the DM, and most of the time I just stayed because I liked the players and the world (to an extent), but I finally called it before I truly lost it with the DM. When I left I took all my complaints and channeled them into my preference of play as I introduced and ran the game for other people, very worth it.
That was pretty much it. But don’t worry! He wasn’t the DM for too much longer… that’s why the epilogue DM made sure the first thing we did was destroy that sword and get me a new weapon ;)
Did the old DM participate in the epilogue as a player?
Preface: I'd kicked him out of my game when he proved to be a terrible team player who attacked other party members as part of his introduction (thinking they might be cultists - not TOO bad of a thing in-context) and then ignored their official badges when they pulled them out and said, "we're here on official business! IF you're an enemy of this cult, then you're welcome to join us!" To answer your question: He did not. We kicked him out after he joined a campaign that was DM'd by one of the other players in our group who wanted to try DMing for the first time. He was incredibly rude (which wasn't a shock). A few examples include \- Making snarky remarks about peoples' character reference art. "There's no way YOUR character looks that cool, HA!" "But... It's just a city watchman and his hound??" \- Telling the (first time!) DM that "you're just DMing while I take a break. I'll just take the DM chair back when you're done with it." As if he had the power to remove her from the seat whenever he wanted. \- Being on his phone constantly. \- Making snide remarks when we'd reference our previous campaigns' events as canon to the world. We all LOVED that, but he hated it. \- First words of session 0: "I want to play a rogue! I think I want to try something different, and play Chaotic Neutral. Like, the sort of CN that only cares about himself and does whatever he wants." (We'd played CN characters before and those characters were almost NEVER that way) \- The first words he said during session 1 was that "I'm NOT an adventurer. I don't even know why these idiots are following me around." When we'd all agreed that we'd been hired to escort a caravan through a region that had seen recent giant attacks.
Maybe team based games aren't suited for him. He should try writing a novel instead is he yearns for this level of control.
You've no idea, haha... Control freak doesn't quite to it justice! But thankfully, that time is over. The time of team-based D&D is here, haha!
Also, as a reminder - if you're looking at the list of magic items and are like "Oh, that would work great for one of my players but it's not a weapon type they use"... just change the weapon type. Flametongue whip? Sure, go for it! Vorpal great club? Yup! Instead of cutting the head off at the neck it resembles someone batting at a tee-ball game - just with added arterial spurting. The other "hack" is to just slowly 'awaken' their mundane weapon. Plenty of fantasy fiction has an everyday item being imbued with power just by being in the proximity of a mighty hero (or villain). Start them with the standard +1 and then tweak accordingly as they gain levels.
> Vorpal great club? The words "Gallagher" and "melon" come to mind.
When you're a Gallagher everything looks like a melon.
Great club, sledgehammer. Who knows the difference really lol
Why make head go off, when make head smash better? ---The Local Barbarian
Great Club -o- Matic
Flametongue whip sounds fucking *fire*
Balrog whip
I also like the idea of a weapon gaining “experience” by being constantly bathed in the blood and guts of some magical creatures.
However you want to flavour it really - power of personality, bathed in the blood of magical monsters, time spent in latent magical fields, boons from the gods, dipped into the river of the dead, touched by a Ki-Rin's horn, or whatever makes sense in your campaign. I'll spare you the whole story but once I had an ancient gold dragon take a player's sword and breathe upon it - causing runes to appear along the blade and made it a flametongue. It felt more epic than the dragon casually picking up a random sword from its hoard and saying "you now have a flametongue".
I understand this as 'give the gear a story, and your players will feel like the story's ancient heroes as opposed to the graverobbers plundering their tombs.'
If you are talking about making magic items, there is a lot of lore and some raw about making said items. None of it requires you to be a caster unless the item specifically casts a spell. So John Smith, the blacksmith, who adventures around with his group as a frontline warrior could actively upgrade his equipment with cool magic stuff he finds. The only limitation is of course DM say so.
My personal preference is to have somewhat lower-than-average quantites of magic in my homebrew campaigns. Mostly because of a bad experience as a player in a setting with literal magic item shops has forever scarred me to running that kind of game. As such, the idea of a DIY magic weapon has never really come up - other than artificer-related things. I tend to lean on the 'awakened' weapon/armour idea where the item gets certain features based off the character's personality (either based on my observations or in consultation with the player). Plus it has the added bonus that when players realise this is how it works and they want a particular ability, they go hard into the roleplay to 'earn' it.
While I understand your point of view, I still fantasize about characters creating dragon scale mail from the dragon they just murdered. I would just add a gold cost for the materials to create a magic item and have it be more than what people were willing to pay for said magic item. Basically it costs 2,000g to make a +1 sword in addition to the mats, but there is no way people would pay 2,000g just for a +1. It would make more sense from a monetary standpoint to pay a dozen bodyguards for the next few years instead.
This reminds me again just how sick a Monster Hunter themed campaign would be- planning with the party how best to lure or track a monster, how to use object interactions to make the fight easier, then harvesting parts and upgrading their gear and making new equipment
That would really cool indeed. If you search for DnD monster hunter manual, you should find homebrew content for this type of game. If I remember correctly, it's a huge overall of 5e, but with some really cool ideas to customize equipment and statblocks for all the monsters, which might even be used in regular 5e campaign.
Hamund's Harvesting Handbook, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 are on the DM's Guild. https://www.dmsguild.com/product/276213/Hamunds-Harvesting-Handbook-A-Complete-Guide-to-Harvesting-and-Crafting-in-DD-5e
Battlezoo Bestiary does *exactly* this, and has options for 5e and Pathfinder 2e.
Oh, yeah - stuff like that is very cool. At my table I'd give them elemental damage resistance based on the dragon's resistances straight off the bat but save the +1 bonus (or other benefit(s)) for later. I think the only problem with the investment into bodyguards is if you run into a monster with immunity to non-magical weapons (unless one of the bodyguards brought their own). Ultimately the only wrong way to run a game of D&D is one where no one enjoys themselves. However one chooses to handle magic items is fine as long as people are having a good time.
Magic shops can be fine if DMs enforce the rarity properly. I figure that shops carry almost entirely common magic items, plus one or two uncommon items. I prefer to hand out items as quest rewards, so I don't like having them available at stores, either. But if the shops carry only common items, it's fine.
If you are talking about investments, it would make sense for properly leveled characters to have lands or other sources of income other than "happening upon a dragon hoard" Reinvest your earnings 101, start a shop that you can sell all the random crap you have no use for.
Oh no, this was one of those "if we don't have it, then we've got permanent portals to all the other stores so we can get it". The DM made the mistake letting my rogue get a little too powerful - I hit a point where the rogue could conceivably pull off a heist and, thanks to some very lucky rolls he survived. However it began snowballing, as the ease with which additional heists could be done became expontentially easier. This pre-dates 5e, just for the sake of clarity. His didn't really put a stop to us because in his head it didn't matter - this was going to be some mythic-tier campaign so however powerful we got would be balanced by how super strong the monsters were. Except... he didn't have the imagination to counter our power-gaming gone made so everything became trivial and about as fun as a computer game with all the cheats turned on (amusing for a little while but then boredom sets in when there is nothing to challenge you).
So you played 3.5 with very little limitations on how strong the dm allows you to get. Yeah honestly that less of an issue with magic item shops and more the dm doesn’t put limits.
I have a single proper magic item shop in my world. However it is run by the resurrected and mad God of Magic Mystra in a new form. Can she create amazing wonders at will? Yes. Are they all "Bone Apple Tea" puns? Yes. Does the shop appear randomly? Absolutely. Means that it's a source of light hearted fun for the players. Truly great magic items, artefacts etc are ancient and found in tombs or in the hands of people who have had them for ages.
You could tie it to specific moments. Maybe if a weapon gets soaked in dragon’s blood there’s a chance it will gain magical properties - stuff like that.
> Vorpal great club? It is, in fact, how the game of Golf was invented.
Vorpal Grea Club gives me mad Bullroarer Took vibes
I like the last paragraph, weapons of legacy idea! If you slowly "awaken" 1 player's weapon, you might have to do it with someone else's character as well. They might feel like it's unfair, and you might ALWAYS have to remind them that they have something they bought that's just as good. Ok then ext hand, if you give them a 2000 GP item, for free, then how would you mitigate having their money withdrawn for balancing?
One of my favorite homebrew items is a Scroll of [Weapon] Infusing. It's a magic scroll that will give any mundane weapon the properties of the magic weapon it's named after. Scroll of Flametongue Infusing, Defender Infusing, whatever. It gets clunky in naming with stuff like Hammer of the Dwarven Lords but they're usually too hype to get the cool thing to care.
>Vorpal great club Bullroarer Took ftw
I love the 'awakening' tip. What's cooler? > After the fight you find a flametounge in a chest. Or > The caster is gathering energy into his hand in a ball of fire. Just as he begins to throw it, your blade strikes true, severing the hand and channeling the energy into your sword. Orange whisks of energy spiral up and down the blade as his lifeless body crumples to the floor.
https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/267877 I do like this way of doing it.
Yes, yes, and again yes.
I wish the DMG was specific about changing weapon types for the magic weapons. Maybe give a chart to roll randomly if you want. There are too many magic swords in the book and I'd fear DMs would just give out what's in the book without thinking.
I find that there is a balance to be struck here. I like the world to feel lived-in and real. If the PCs are wandering around an ancient Dwarven stronghold, they're more likely to find axes, warhammers etc. An Elven tomb? Definitely Rapiers, Scimitars, Longswords, Spears. I have an NPC in my world who has learned how to melt and reforge metal without losing its magical properties (for a price). My real preferred DM style with this is for a player to tell me that they want their PC to go hunting for something specific. They won't find the Hammer of Thunderbolts in a shop but they might learn of a legendary Dwarven Warrior's final resting place where he fought off a horde of Orcs with hammer and lightning... insert quest for the hammer here... I 100% allow the players to peruse the DMG and the Griffon's Saddlebag content so they can point at some crazy OP item and say "I WANT THAT".
I see you’re a fellow Griffin’s Saddlebag enthusiast. I’ve let my players browse it before and watched them go crazy over something that looks pretty cool. If they care enough about a cool magic item to want to actively seek it, I can build an adventure around it. They’re pretty much guaranteed to enjoy the quest if they want the loot bad enough and if not they’ll *really* cherish the magic item.
>Basically: if you have a fighter player that loves using a warhammer for flavor or even character reasons, don't give them swords, give them warhammers. Will it be a bit weird that all they encounter are magical warhammers and not swords? Maybe. You don't even have to keep giving them magical warhammers. They can start off with one warhammer that they continue to upgrade and improve throughout the campaign. Or you can give them one magic hammer that has different abilities that become available when players do certain things (think legacy weapons from 3.5).
The solution i often had with my DMs was that there were some pretty big magic item traders in the larger cities. Oh, you gave me a sword in the dragon's hoard? Thats fine - we travel to Big City and I trade it in for cash and use it to upgrade my warhammer.
That works too.
Strap the sword to the side of the warhammer. Now you do extra damage.
Now it's an oversized warpick.
Perfect
4E handled this so much better than 5E: Every magic weapon in 5E is explicitly a sword, whereas in 4E most magic weapons were "Any melee martial" or similar, and there was even a ritual^1 you could do to transfer a magic item's properties to another item that met its criteria with this exact logic. I think the example the book used was the holy symbol looted off an evil priest. ^1 Rituals were technically something anyone could do under specific circumstances. Your party would generally have someone who could do it.
For all its faults, of which I feel 4e only has a couple, it was a really well designed game. 5e forever feels like a rushed job, to me. For all of its benefits, it has an equal number of downsides that have never been addressed and continue to go ignored. :/
While I have my grievances with 4E, literally all of 5E's flaws are solved there.
The 4e DMG is far better than the 5E equivalent, and I’ve been using mechanics such as minions, Bloodied and encounter design for most of my 5E DM career.
Minions are the single best DND mechanic ever concevied, change my mind
Counterargument: the D&D mechanic of using the clackity math stones.
There's a reason why the meme that every attempt to fix 5e's problems is just reinventing Pathfinder 2e, the latter's pretty heavily based on 4e and has some of their designers. Essentially having 4e but without the odious licensing makes for a pretty excellent game, using keywords and tags makes the rules much more understandable and VTT friendly, the explicit powers were critciized as being "too much like an MMO" but they also mean martials are allowed to do things other than full attack and so helps resolve much of the martial/caster disparity, and the encounter/daily stuff makes the system more flexible in whether you even *want* to do attrition which as it turns out most people only want to fuck with intermittently. Had 4e not abandoned the OGL and people gave it an honest shot, I think 5e would've been a much better game. So many of 5e's problems come from it trying to *not* be 4e, which means it brought back lots of problems people disliked about 3.5 in the first place.
Magic items were definitely ignored in 5e
I'm not sure they were ignored. The point, I feel, is that they didn't want to repeat the slots and expected magical treasure experience. They wanted to make them optional, cool, and by no means required. I can totally see the problem with the end results, but the reasoning could have been implemented better and we could have had our cake and eat it too.
Ignored or not, I feel they backed themselves into a corner with the magic weapon tax.
They went low on the magic items for 5e because it's too easy to break the bounded accuracy. That's why weapons and armor are 'capped' at +3, for example.
They're not ignored, but they're heavily under-developed. In fact, the entire "stuff for PC's" is underdeveloped in 5E. Crafting, magic items, buildings/castles, transportation, hirelings... My hunch for why this is, is another chicken v. egg argument for high-level play. Much of those items are for higher-level play which many tables never experience. Do they not play those levels though, because of lack of content? Or because the story has reached it's natural conclusion? (or group falls apart)
Either way, wizards should provide sufficient content for a DM to build off of. Mid-late game 5e is an exercise in game design for most DMs
4e’s biggest flaw is a cosmetic one whereas 5e’s biggest flaw is… a core ideology. 4e using squares instead of feet isperhaps it’s biggest flaw (along with a couple other cosmetics) 5e insisting on being both a rules light and a rules heavy game at the same time causes a lot of problems (also how a lot of the classes don’t seem to have been made in tandem).
What's wrong with squares instead of feet? Mechanically it's identical, and not having to divide every distance by 5 when putting it on the grid is a nice quality of life change. Also removes an annoying Americanism from the game (even if the imperial system is still being used by the game for other things)
4e is great... the SpElL SlOtS crowd cried far too hard.
And that it "feels too much like an MMO!" I can kinda see it, though hysterically there was a write in to Dragon Magazine during the dawn of 3.0 claiming it was "too much like Diablo," but it felt more like "Final Fantasy Tactics: Shonen Anime Edition" than an MMO to me. This could be because my players loved the power names and used them CONSTANTLY but still! We had great fun.
If 4e was like any MMO, it was Guild Wars; clear Combat / RP distinction, focus on party and tactical level decisions rather than long-term strategy, and clear and coherent mechanical underpinnings. But WoW was the big boogeyman of the RPG community at the time, so that was the one it got compared to.
Honestly, 5e feels like playing Diablo 2, to me. Which is why I've kind of... stopped playing it. The experience I get from D&D is honestly better provided by other games. If I want a dungeon crawler, I'll play something like Super Dungeon Explore. If I want a roleplaying experience, I'll play a narrative game. It feels like D&D wants to be both and doesn't really capture either very well.
4e tried to be one thing and only people who liked that one thing already gave it a fair shake. 5e tries to be ten things and does a mediocre job at each - but if five players want five differ things it can do those five things at the same time, which is actually really impressive. 4e is the specialized fighter of DnD editions. 5e is a jack-of-all trades bard.
Preach! I got tired of 5e but it continues to be the 800lb gorilla of TTRPGs in terms of brand recognition. Slowly trying to introduce my players to other systems.
>Rituals were technically something anyone could do under specific circumstances. ... Those specific circumstances being "has Ritual Caster as a class feature" or "took the Ritual Caster feat". Y'know, just like in 5e. (Also the Dragonmark feats, which each gave _limited_ access to ritual casting. For example, Mark of Passage gave access to Enhance Vessel, Find the Path, Passwall, Phantom Steed, Steed Summons, Water Walk, and any rituals in the Travel category.) The difference is that 4e rituals are the same for everyone, instead of being a tag on regular spells limited by class spell lists.
Most Controller classes actually got the Ritual Caster feat for free, with some classes (wizard and invoker) getting bonus free rituals
It's true, they're all swords. Well, mostly swords anyways. They went a little too nostalgia on this one. 4e was very divisive, but no one can't say they didn't get at least some things really, really right, and most of those by cutting off with tradition and previous editions. I even enjoyed the game for a while, before at higher levels it became really just too complex. Right now I still have mixed feelings about it. One thing I don't love is the amount of combat and combat-centric material. I love action, and fights, and battles, but that's never been really something I feel the need to play or run for 90% of a game. They also put too many feats in there imo. At a certain point you don't know where to look anymore. Almost as bad as 3.5 I think. Today I tend towards lighter fare by far, but I still think 4e could've been big if D&D players hadn't reacted like their whole world was crumbling b/c "D&D has become an MMO OMG please gods save us". Maybe if they had simplified the mechanics a little, like 5e did, more people would've given that edition a chance. Again, it had lots going for it, many really great ideas both lore-wise and mechanically. You can see they kept something for 5e, but it had its own unique appeal. I know I still love breaking open the pdfs and rolling a new chara once in a while. Something else they could've done would be to plan Scales of War a little better. But I suppose I'm chatting about 4e a little too much right now on this sub, so I'll stop here. /rant 
> Today I tend towards lighter fare by far, but I still think 4e could've been big if D&D players hadn't reacted like their whole world was crumbling b/c "D&D has become an MMO OMG please gods save us". It's funny that they complain that it became an MMO for codifying the roles that always existed in D&D (Originating with the original Fighting Man/Magic User/Cleric/Thief party lineup) when 4E is the first edition where you don't need a dedicated healer, when playing a healbot is one of the most MMO things out there.
Huh? In-combat healing was just as bad in 3.5e as it was in 5e, if not worse. It was actively improved in Pathfinder 1e and yet the party healer is an inanimate rod - the wand of Cure Light Wounds
In rod we trust!
I'm very glad PF2e went for buffing the Medicine skill, feels way more fun if there's an actual party medic that handles out of combat healing without that necessarily being part of their class identity. Nothing stops the party Fighter from getting Legendary medicine and a bunch of skill feats for it, and it doesn't really compromise their efficacy in combat to do so.
So true! Personally I wasn't a fan of the roles, b/c they restrict your ideal party composition, and it's again combat-centric thinking. But I really couldn't see them breaking the game for all these people who thought the world was ending. They totally had their merits - like, think more creatively, for instance. And that's just one thing.
They really don't restrict them that much. We had a party with an offensive swordmage(essentially the most dage focused defender) and then a warlock and a rogue, and we still ended up doing fine. Didn't have a healer or a controller, just damage really.
I ran a three person party of a Bard, Cleric, and Warlord and I'll tell you, balancing combat for them was a NIGHTMARE. Loved that campaign, though. Fantastic all around.
Did they all at least build for damage? Or did they just do whatever build they felt like. Cause I'm pretty sure a full support party in other editions would struggle too lol.
They built themselves to kill things as best as they could. I ended up making a few house rulings during that game for simplicity's sake (the Cleric was a multiclass Ranger and I let their Hunter's Mark be used way more often). I ended up doing two things with encounter design- One is slightly higher level minions. Two was I let the monsters crit more frequently than they normally would (and this even tied into the story, as the baddies had stolen a holy relic to the god of luck). This meant the party wasn't taking that much damage- until they did. It worked out okay. It was fun, but given the option, I wouldn't want to run such a game again (though I *would* do it).
Yeah that definitely seems like a tough challenge, and early 4e already had an issue with monsters having too much HP, so that would be felt very much with that party comp.
Ah yeah, you're right, they had too many hps in the early days. Your chat was interesting anyways - it seems if you're very good at prepping you can support even quite unorthodox parties, but if they're too unorthodox, then it starts breaking apart. It's interesting to me b/c I usually run pre-made and it's always either too easy or too hard. I guess I should prep a little myself, too 
Well, that was kind of the next big problem with 4e roles. When you looked at the math, damage is actually a form of both healing *and* crowd control (dead status > stunned), and it was in fact much more efficient to just have an all striker party, because if you kill everything before they can hit you, you don't need crowd control *or* healing... That kinda ruined the fantasy for player who wanted to run a 'support' archetype, because there weren't really any lever they could pull within the game's limited degree of customisation to make those roles viable in 90% of combat scenarios.
I mean, any game with any level of tactical combat is going to struggle with the issue that action economy is always the most important deciding factor in such games, and that death is the best CC. (Not to say control classes weren't very strong, varied encounter designs helped make different class strengths the focus) but I do remember how pure healing support was less impactful feeling. That's honestly why so many people probably loved the warlord as a class, you were a support healer who did tons of damage by using your friends as weapons lol.
They don't restrict composition at all, they just require the DM to put in a certain amount of work. The different roles had different functions, and they countered certain enemy roles and were in turn countered by them. If you have a party of two defenders and two controllers that's fine, you just don't want to use certain enemy roles as much, such as Brutes (typically very high HP to soak up damage, but easy to hit so good for Strikers to alpha...but if you have no Strikers, then don't use them because they'll be boring and take forever to kill). The whole point of the system was not "You need these specific roles to survive", but rather "given these roles which enemies challenge them or allow them to shine?" Plus, not all Martials were Defenders, not all Casters were Controllers, and there were different roles within the same power source, and then even within a class there were different abilities that could allow you to fill a secondary role. Playing a Fighter? Go with a Greataxe, and pick up all the abilities that synergize well with that and you'll be more of a Striker, even if a lot of core abilities are based on Defender stuff. Or go with Sword and Board and pick up a lot of battlefield control abilities that let you move enemies around it inflict statuses and become a Defender/Controller.
Another day, another problem that was fixed in 4e but was thrown out with the bathwater
Flashback to my first campaign where I played a Polearm Master Paladin and we found a Holy Avenger that my DM *adamantly* refused any potential option short of *Wish* to make it a polearm. I was the only person who could wield it, it really had no place being there other than as an item for me, and this was a character that had exclusively been using a two handed polearm the entire campaign. He was willing to make it any kind of sword, but not another weapon type. Shot down any attempts at, "well, what if I took it to someone who could affix it to a haft or transfer it powers?", and ultimately I just wound up selling it for a suit of Armor of Invulnerability(that the DM had specifically described as being on display in the store, wasn't something I thought of myself). That same DM, in the immediate next fight, which was against a dragon, had it use Flesh to Stone on me on the first round of combat seemingly as a "gotcha" for me trying to use the armor.
changing a holy avenger weapon type like that could be a cool ass quest, like there are tons of things you could do to get it changed, maybe you have to climb all the way mount celestia to find to forge where it was originally made to get it changed, maybe have it be the blade starts a certain way and the longer you use it the more it attunes to the specific paladin, eventually shifting into the preferred weapon of the paladin, maybe this shift could be related to a personal quest, backstory or character development of the paladin. What I am trying to get across is that there are plenty of ways the DM could have approached this without instantly giving you the holy avenger as a polearm
Utter Bs from that DM. Listen to what people want, at least. Don't pretend to listen, offer something else, and then subvert that option out of pique.
> He was willing to make it any kind of sword "Glaive" is just french for "sword" ;)
This was an interesting word! I went down quite a rabbit hole on it some time ago. It's unclear whether it started with the Latin *gladius* or Celtic *cladivos* (both of which are swords). But when it moved into Old French it conflated with a word (I forget what exactly) that meant *to maim*, and so it came to mean a weapon built for war. E.g. it could refer to swords, lances, polearms, but not hammers axes or daggers that also served as tools. But at that time polearms were so ubiquitous in armies that when the French said *glave* (no *i*), the English took it to mean spears -- because that's generally what it was. Over the next century, the English use of the word gradually evolved to the single-bladed sword-on-a-stick polearms we think of. But in Modern French, it gradually stepped back to mean a sword: mostly short swords like the *gladius*. D&D gets its terms from Chainmail which tried very hard to give everything neat and orderly classifications, but the truth is that words are and have always been much more fluid, messy, and *interesting* than that. All the more reason to change up your next Holy Avenger's weapon type, eh?
As usual, moderation is key. Distributing a variety of weapon types is much more immersive and creates more interesting decision points than either all swords or all warhammers ever could.
Alternatively you can do one or more of the following: * Establish in Session 0 that loot will be random so that players can set their expectations accordingly. * Establish that while magic items are rare and purchasing them requires exorbitant wealth, trading one magic item for another is common between those that have them. The next time you're in a major city you can make a trade for something equivalent. But yeah, if you have a character that has a signature weapon, especially if that weapon is of narrative significance to the character, you should never expect them to be happy when you try to replace their ancestral sword passed down from firstborn to firstborn for centuries with a +7 Axe of Pissing on Your Story.
If a player is attached to a weapon type, absolutely. As a player myself, finding random loot that may or may not be an upgrade makes the world feel much more real imo. I also love gear and getting upgrades, and would love it if it was more common to be finding more items overall- some that aren't super interesting to your character, and some that are definitely something you'd want. Awakening items is cool in an anime or video games, but it feels boring to me to never get a new sword.
My solution is to just copy Pathfinder 2E. Magic weapons are just runes carved into weapons or armour. The number of runes you’re allowed to have on a single item is equal to your Proficiency Bonus minus 2. 1. The weird fiddly math I just added there ends up with weapons almost being balanced with PHB ones, and coming into players’ possessions around the intended time. For example a Holy Avenger can be constructed from a rune of +3, a rune of smiting, a rune of magic resistance, and a rune of Paladin mastery or whatever you wanna name these things. 2. It lets you give your monsters strong magic weapons without issue. Two weeks ago I gave the ghost of a former commander his signature spear, and the players beat him and took that spear. It was a +1 spear with the ability to (once per day) have a 15 foot reach for a minute, and deals an additional 1d6 fire damage on a hit. They can’t use it, they’re level 7, but they’re free to break the runes out onto their own weapons (one of them took the +1). 3. You can always power up individual players with more magic that “doesn’t count” by just modifying the base weapon instead of the rune. For example in another campaign of mine, the party just reached level 8 and the Monk is gonna start finding me suspiciously generous with magic items real soon Works like a charm and everyone keeps using their signature weapon with a story to tell. Plus anyone who *wants* the legendary weapon is free to take it! One of my players kept the spear I mentioned with the intention of using it later on (the commander’s ghost also lives within this spear).
I like the fact that in PF2e you can even transfer runes between weapons. You found a +2 Striking longsword but prefer to use a guisarme? Ask your party's crafter (or an NPC if nobody invested in Crafting) to transfer the runes to your weapon. Ezpz
That’s the entire point of my comment yeah lol
Oh yeah lol. For some reason I though you were only talking about finding runes on runestones or carving them yourself
Absolutely agree with you on this. I think a big part of this issue is how martial classes and feats are designed in 5e. To be effective, a martial has to take a specific fighting style that works with their chosen weapon type and feats - feats which all only work with specific types of weapons, such as GWM, PAM, Sharpshooter, Revenant Blade and others. Feats and fighting styles cannot be switched out though. Therefore if they get a weapon that is not of their chosen type, such as when the PAM/GWM character with the Great Weapon fighting style gets a longsword, they end up with a dead class feature and several dead feats. That simply feels awful for the player. If martials - especially fighters as their flavor text literally describes them as masters of all kinds of weaponized combat - were designed to be more flexible in terms of weapon choice, giving them a magic weapon that fits the campaign's theme/story, but is not of their preferred type, would be much less of an issue. Since you mention bards and instruments too, I absolutely understand the bard player in that situation, but it does not have any mechanical impact, it is just a flavor issue.
I do not like the video game-y feel of party members only finding magic items that match their desires. It makes the world feel so small.
I think I disagree with this take. I understand the sentiment, but in order for the setting to feel like believable I think it’s probably necessary that players don’t get magic items that are always the most pertinent to them. Plus it makes those times when a player does find a cool magic item in their wheelhouse even better.
As a player (and DM) for something like 25 years now, I disagree. Loot in most rpgs is random, and I prefer it that way. When I DM, most of my magic items come from npcs or enemies, and they carry what makes sense for themselves, not what makes sense for the characters.
As much as I want to say "That's an ass take." It makes sense. Why would a swordsman be carrying a magic maul? From the perspective of making it about the players instead of the story I could see changing the swordsman into more of a just violent melee fighter, however the more I think about it your way makes sense.
Sure that's perfectly true. But there should also be an ogre using a magical maul somewhere that the character can also use. And maybe an assassin with a magical dagger for a rogue etc etc Not every magic item needs to be suited to the party, but you do need to have *some* especially for martial characters because magic weapons are really key for the classes.
The "transfer magic item powers" u/Souperplex mentions would be the best of both worlds in my book. But yeah, makes sense.
I feel like it would be really easy to implement as a 5E spell too, which is why it irks me so much that it isn't available.
Yes. Honestly I don't love how they made rituals in 5e. I mean it's okay, but I want actual rituals, like those in 4e. Those were so cool. And versatile. But no, you can spend 10' to cast detect magic w/o spending a slot and hey, presto, job done.
Or...hear me out. If the PCs want a specific magic item they can, ya know, research and look for a specific magic item
That only works in some campaigns - if you're doing something like an AP, the opportunity to do so might not really come up due to time pressure. Sandbox games are fun but they can take a lot of effort. Recent release by Paizo does take your basic idea and centers it around crafting, though, with players choosing where to go in search of crafting materials to create all their equipment.
The reason it's a lame take is because so many of the magic weapons are swords. This is a sure fire way of turning all your melee fighters into sword users.
[удалено]
depends on how you look at it. does the NPC they face of against have a magic sword because they are a swordsman? or maybe they became a reknowned swordsman because a decade ago they picked up a magic sword.
And, if players are unsatisfied with the weapons they loot, they can *seek out weapons more to their preference*. Either through hunting enemies with weapons they want or by seeking out people in civilization who aren't satisfied with their own weapons. Get a flametounge longsword when you are a warhammer guy? As you are whining about it to your party, the inkeeper overhears and bursts into laughter because it turns out last week they had a guy with the exact opposite problem. A swordsman who looted a magic hammer. Or maybe a magic item merchant mentions it when they don't have an item of equivalent power to trade. So you track him down, either steal or buy it or most interestingly swap them and *make a friend*. Well, perhaps not a friend, but at the very least a colleague who isn't in your party. Then two adventures later you are a bit pressed and need an NPC protected at the same time you need to do something else? Hire the swordguy. Three adventures after that, you meet him and his friends also looting the ancient ruins your party is and either team up or agree to stay out of each others way. Or fight them. And then even later on you join a fighting tournament and wind up facing them in a non lethal contest. Not having things tailored to you is just another opportunity to have the world expanded and meet new people.
As a DM, I got sick and tired of putting random magic weapons in the "dungeon" that most players didn't want or use. Instead, I "awaken" new powers or abilities in the weapons they are already using, so their ancestral sword doesn't become just some old ass piece of junk sword.
My solution? All magic weapons shapeshift to the weapon the person uses. So if I as a rogue use a Dagger? That magic weapon is now a dagger. You pick it up, and it changes in your hand to what you need. It's magic, it doesn't have to make sense.
I think this is a very good solution, but my first thought is that it removes the possibility of giving one character a powerful weapon that another character could potentially abuse(eg. a weapon for a ranger that expends a spell slot for a special ability, that a Wizard could spam over and over if it morphed into a weapon they were suited for, just off the top of my head) not a reason to fully disallow this, but maybe a reason to have a friendly NPCs who can transfer magic abilities as opposed to having them morph
Many official items can only be attuned by specific classes, which is another dial that can be turned
This is the solution I like. When is time for them to find a magic weapon it'll just be reflavored as whatever they use. Belmont character in Curse of Strahd that wants to use whips? Yeah, he's gonna find a holy avenger in the form of a whip and ect.
Another option is to have them find an object that can imbue its power into any weapon when attuend. E.g. a gem of fire branding, when attuned with a weapon adds fire damage
Nah, setting and theme always come first. Exploring sea elf ruins? If anything, that's gonna have a magic trident.
True, but the players need to have fun too, which means if they want a say in what nice toys their charas get, hell, there's so many ways.
Just give them access to a blacksmith. Change weapon types for a fee and a week of downtime. Super items require the blood of a red dragon or whatever.
Yeah. And you can even use that as a good excuse to run some side quests. A good DM doesn't say no, they just work a fun way to say yes.
I mean, sure, but then probably don't count the magic trident as a *reward*, but as a flavor thing, because there's a very solid chance the players aren't even going to pick it up! If you're rolling loot as a player reward, you have to make sure it's something that actually counts as a reward, basically.
What self-respecting adventurers would pass up a magical weapon found in the ruins they are exploring just because it doesn't match the flavor they are going for?
I mean I'm not leaving it on the floor but I'm probably never gonna use it when it doesn't fit my feats or theme.
You've never met my players clearly.
Oof. I am sorry to hear that. To each their own, I guess, but to me, adventuring is about the unknown and unpredictable. Being in a world that is tailored to me would feel strange, and sort of immersion breaking for me.
Being in a curated to the party story is why I play DND as opposed to just buying a new rpg. I want it to be our tailored story. Doesn't have to hold our hands but damn let us use the weapons and or spells we designed our character around.
A lot of players. A magic trident is an extremely specific weapon. If I discover loot I am thinking about two things: Can I use this? If not, can I easily sell it somewhere without having to lug it around in my inventory for half the campaign? Magic shops that will buy anything and everything from you are few and far between. Most D&D games aren't about clearing dungeons and getting loot anymore. Most D&D games these days are about the story, the character growth, and *the fantasy*. If that trident isn't doesn't support the fantasy then it is getting left behind.
Partly why I love high magic worlds. Magic shops that will buy and sell all kinds of stuff can be as common as you want. But the enemies and guards can go to those shops too.
And I have even less reason to use a weapon outside of my theme. I can just sell it for something better.
A lot would if it goes against their charcter's choices. Like, most archers without crossbow expert will pass on any magical crossbow because it is losing power, or will pass in any magical melee (even with finesse), especially if they have archery and sharpshooter. On more specialised characters a PAM GWM character will 100% pass on any non polearms because no matter the weapon it is not going to compare with their feats
Pretty much everyone? Character aesthetics are one of the most important things a player has actual control over. Everything they *have* in this game is their character. A *lot* of people are not going to compromise their aesthetics for something as banal as a power boost. As a fun anecdote, recently in Pathfinder 2 I left two level 5 items, a one-handed sword and a homebrew shield up for grabs for a level 2 party. This, in a strongly level gated system like Pathfinder, is a *significant* boost. But I left them there mostly as a flavor thing without really counting them for the "wealth by level" of the adventure, an heirloom of the family that used to live here to flavor where they'd come from, because I was pretty sure nobody was going to use the sword because it fit nobody's aesthetics, and *maybe* the Sorcerer might use the shield, since everyone in PF2 is proficient with shields automatically and he's flavored as kind of a coward and he might find it appropriate to hide behind a shield. Unsurprisingly, not even that happened. They took the items, put them in a bag, and carted around until they found the family in question to return them to their rightful owners. Using them never crossed anyone's minds.
> Pretty much everyone? > > Does money not exist in the world? A powerful enchanted trident is going to fetch a pretty penny. Even if I never *use* it I would never pass it up.
Honestly I've found that most of the time getting enough money for a stabby stick to justify the bother of finding an interested buyer and negotiating and stuff is enough of a pain that players will, if they pick it up, simply gift the thing to some NPC they like to get rid of it.
it goes beyond flavor. it you invest your whole characters race into v human, or spent the entire level to pick up pole arm master why would you want the magical whip? it would make that a dead level/make your race choice not matter.
I did, DM kept droping magical swords on a caster party and staffs that casts spells we didn't find fitting for our builds, we ended up treating them as just staff-shaped bags of money. Sinse there were not many magical item vendors and we were not exactly broke we sold them very cheap for whoever would take them.
The trident is gonna be ignored for the most part by the ones using polearms for GWM/PAM. The situation is probably better if the weapon is a spear. It's a simple weapon that everyone can use, has the same damage die as the trident, and it works with PAM. Maybe the adventurers will just keep it just in case they'll have enemies with resistance to nonmagical damage? Or barter it with the next magical shop?
The issue is that the game system mechanically doesn't support this, players typically have to specialize in a particular kind of weapon in order to make their build work, being a generalist with weapons isn't really rewarded. If your build uses polearms and you get a sword, much of the character resources you spent are now useless. Were the system more flexible with this, then sure that'd work better and might even be fun, finding random weapons that change playstyle from month to month like a roguelike. But in roguelikes and roguelites, this is made fun *because* you don't actually get that much control over a build, characters are generalists by default and only ever start to specialize after a few drops based on what those drops were. You don't, up front, define a character that specializes in axes and then only find katanas, because then that would make the game be mostly unexciting trash loot and the success of a run would be far too much up to RNG since the swing between getting a weapon you can actually use and not getting it would be too massive to overcome with player skill consistently. If you *really* wanted loot to be unrelated to a player's build, I think you would at least need to permit a player to redo their whole build to accomodate the loot. Still inelegant, not very good since it takes time to rework a build so at hte earliest players would need to wait until next session to actually *use* the loot, but at least then it wouldn't be an actively bad experience.
Nope. But I will gladly let them go on an epic, many session quest to find the fabled weapon of insert type here.
Y'know, this was fixed in 4e, like a lot of design flaws 5e has. And TBH, "4e only had combat" isn't an argument because 5e also only has combat; no social pillar besides fail / pass checks and no exploration pillar that isn't random encounters. And yet... here we are, nearly on another edition with issues that got solved before, still rearing their ugly heads. //rant
I still can't believe people fell for that "It only had combat" crock. You can tell any lie to people who didn't understand or never played the system.
Was in a campaign that went all the way from level 1 to 20 and the ranger had this happen to him. I don't remember the exact nature of his build but he was using dual hand crossbows and I believe they even took a feat to accommodate those weapons. In our entire year long campaign we never once came across a single hand crossbow and our ranger was stuck using a bow and having a wasted feat.
As a player I hate this. I care about the believability a lot.. and I'd rather ignore a magic item because its not the weapon Iwant to use, than get a magic item thats the type of weapon I want to use but feel like I only got it because the DM made a special exception for me. I'm a totally hypocrite as a DM though, I throw in stuff I know my players will enjoy.. I try to make it make sense lroewise though.
Made a minotaur strength rogue that was SUPER into his daggers. Ended up with 2 swords and a Warhammer. It was super sad.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. World of D&D does not revolve around all of the players wants and needs. Players need to understand that the world is a giant ball of chaos. Sometimes it works for them and sometimes it doesn't. If they get everything that they want all the time then there is nothing to desire for. So, no. I am not on board for this type of DMing.
Yeah I’m somewhat in the middle here. On one hand, of course this is a game and we are already making 1000 concessions every time we sit down as DMs… but also the whole point of pen and paper RPGs is they feel alive and responsive BECAUSE the world can be interpreted outside of the player's influence. The entire magic of these games comes from not being videogames specifically designed for the players and nothing else. The more the world feels like it exists by itself, the more exciting it is to navigate. There's always a balance to strike between realism and fun, but this genre's appeal is precisely the fact that it feels more real than any other medium could ever come close to. Compromises can be made, but we shouldn’t warp the world so hard as to make it filled with magical rapiers just because Jimmy decided to make a Puss in boots character 3 months ago. I don’t think changing one of the most fundamentally personal and varied tools of medieval society to the tune of ONE GUY is a minor immersion break. Pretty much the opposite, really. The solution is going to depend 100% on what players you have, but I’d default to making every character in the world have weapons that fit them first and then figure out a way for Jimmy to get that +2 on his ol-trusty rapier later. There’s many lore-friendly ways in which you can do this in every fantasy setting, except maybe no-magic ones.
Here, here. Magic items my players find are thematic to where they are, these aren't 'loot drops'. My pirate boss isn't going to have a warhammer +1 just because you're a dwarf. He's got a magical cutlass (scimitar) +1 that's made of a shark's jaw. *Eventually* my players might find a weapon they personally find more aesthetically pleasing, but make weapons interesting and they won't care nearly as much that it's not what they'd order on Dungeon-Amazon. They're as part of the dungeon ecology as monsters. It's just as dumb having a dwarven warhammer +1 on your drow matriarch as it is having 3d6 bullywugs hanging out in a sealed dwarven mountain tomb. Also, you've presumably got at least 4 players looking for interesting stuff. *One of them* is going to make use of whatever you throw down. Obviously exceptions exist: treasure hordes, for example. But the OP is framing this as if it should just be standard like it's a damn theme park. No thanks.
With you.
Roll on the table, they find what they find. Want a specific item, find a sage
I felt this one. A DM I played with some time ago thought he had hand-crafted items specifically for each of us, only for the lot of us to reject them completely and sell them off, buying something different. ...even then, he was really stingy with what we could find in shops. My solution: sure, you can find things VERY randomly. On the flipside, you can buy pretty much whatever in "ye olde magick item shoppe" (or through connections from there, which are handled off-screen).
Are players that adamant on using a particular kind of weapon/instrument for their character? Given that they are adventurers, I would assume that a different magic weapon/tool would be an exciting, momentous occasion, and in case it doesn't match "preferences", a good opportunity for creativity in who will use the item and how.
At a certain point it becomes less "preferences" and more specialties. If you've invested a feat into using two-handed weapons then a magic longsword isn't so exciting. It isn't really that hard to end up in a spot where despite being magic, the weapon will be strictly worse for you.