Making Magic Items More Magical
I’d like to expand on a comment I left on Jeff’s post about how D&D magic items are sometimes presented in less than magical ways by the rules. What is presented in a fantasy literature or film as a wonderous sword often boils down to Sword +1 in many game sessions. An imaginative DM and players can work around that and act like the sword is more special than the system makes it – but the overt math in the system does have the affect of taking some of the “magical” out of a magic item.
Instead of a bonus to damage a magic sword might do something like allow the player to reroll their damage dice if they want – although they would need to weigh the odds of doing so as they would need to keep the second result even if it were lower.
A magic shield or armour might allow a player to reduce the size of the dice being rolled for damage against them. An attack with a sword might only use a d6 instead of a d8, for example.
Some magic weapons might give the player the option to choose to do the average damage for that dice type instead of rolling. So a player could choose to roll a d8 with their Sword, or choose to just do 5 points of damage instead.
Focusing more on secondary effects of the items, or having them work differently in various circumstances is another way to add a bit more “magic” to the standard +1 weapon… and a little less math too.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of lots of math in my games. Something I am a fan of is the different types of Polyhedral dice people use for many tabletop roleplaying games. Noodling around with this led to the parallel development of a dice-step system that I was pleased to discover a few other recent games have adopted as well (although not in quite the same way).
That’s something I’m planning on posting more about in the near future…
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I’ve found that doing something as simple as asking the PC to 1) give the magical item a name (if that makes sense) and 2) describing it in detail makes many magical items more unique. So in stead of just a dagger +1 he’s got The Dragon’s Tooth, a curved dagger with an intricate design on the hilt that depicts a dragon’s mouth. It’s still just a dagger +1 from the math point of view, but now the PC really feels it’s truly magical.
This post along with the ones on weapons and shield are great. If I can get a classic d&d campaingn off the ground I will be using your ideas. Thanks!
Thanks! I’m glad I could help, and hope you get your campaign off the ground.
This is an element of 4e that isn’t executed with ‘fantasiticism’.
I like these kinds of tweaks. After all, Bilbo didn’t strike fear into goblins’ hearts with ‘+1 dagger’.
A nice way of making a weapon like Sting a more fearful item for Goblins is to make it’s magical effect be “always does maximum damage to Goblins”. While it might normally do d6 damage, Goblins (with 1-7 hit points) are really going to fear that consistent 6 points of damage on a hit!
Stuart, this is a great article. I’m about to start off a new D&D 4e campaign and I love the ideas of expanding magical effects beyond simple stat mods. I also like how in 4e you can keep balance by use frequency. Nothing cooler than a magical sword that lights the hallway and expends its charge to create a magical silence or something like that. Thanks.
I used to go onto “wall-hanger” sites like BudK and grab pictures of fantasy-looking swords, then make weapon cards, with the abilities of the weapon–both mechanical and flavor text–on one side, and the photo on the other. When players have a picture of their new toy and flavor text to go with it, the item seems for more distinctive and “magical”
@djkester: Thanks!
@Jason: That’s a great idea – I’m a big fan of making custom cards and other stuff like that.
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