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One of the best things about 4E was the separation of character power from Magic Items.

In a 3E campaign I had characters lose a fight, but instead of killing them I captured them,stripped them of their gear, and set them up on a lumber mill under the eye of a group of ogres. Even with the ogres being 5 levels lower than the PCs they were pretty much useless. The minute a fight started two of the players said the game was unplayable without their magic items - and the biggest issue is they were right.

The same encounter in 4E had the characters with clubs and no armor, and ogres the same level, and it was a fight the characters won, though it was a hard won victory.

If you can write encounters because the system prevents you from doing so, like 3E does when you take magic away from characters, then the system is too limiting.

Apr 12, 2012 -- 5:51PM, rampant wrote:

Especially because in 3e the gear dependency was heavily skewed towards the warrior classes, mages were nowhere near as dependent upon magic items as fighters.

Well if you don't count the spellbook then I'd definitely agree.  The spellbook though was pretty much the entire wizard.  Remove it and you are done as a wizard.

many magic items were designed for fighters to receive. If I was a game designer, I would assume something like the following:

+1   Fighter 4-9
+2   Fighter 10-13
+3   Fighter 14-19
+4   Fighter 20-23
+5   Fighter 24+

These bonuses would exist at least once in the fighter somewhere on his or her person. It might be a shield, or armor, or a hammer, or whatever, but it would be there. The basic premise is Weapon Immune creatures. This is not the same as assuming a fighter has +5 armor, +5 shield, and a +5 sword they are specialized in. That's being excessive. In real games, you often end up with enchanted equipment you can't even use properly, but keep it because you might need something sufficiently enchanted to strike some weird extraplanar creature. That's sort of normal to fantasy stories too - you end up using some weapon type you don't know or like to kill the rare monsters. I liked kensai because they didn't have this flaw, but they also got screwed with no access to armor, trading one flaw for another.

When doing main villain calculations vs. damage and THAC0, you could assume the above bonuses appear at least once. So if you had magic armor +4, you might not have a +4 sword at all, so you factor in the idea that a higher level warrior would have either a solid negative armor class, or a solid Negative THAC0, or a modest +2/+2 in both.

If you design your games around the assumption of lots of magic items, then you might as well put in no magic items at all.