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hellmute wrote:

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Should staves then have a level limit placed on them like rings now do?

What, again, makes the rings so special that has them capable of holding these powers that other items cannot. Aside form the fact a design just thought it might be a cute idea?

I cannot find it, but in something I read, I am sure that abilites that can be given to weapons in 3rd edition could be commanded to function or not at the will of the weilder. This would be an at-will power. I see nowhere that I can find this again about creating magic items with these sort of propeties, but am sure I have seen it before. This would mean giving fire atributes to an attack are at the command to the weilder. Normal plusses to attack and damage, may not be able to be turned on and off as they are inherent to the items new natural qualities.

The best I can remember was the fire example and talking of a flaming sword. Maybe someone more knowledgeable of the edition can more readily find the material about it and confirm or correct me if I am wrong about it.

EDIT:



The flame is at the will of the weilder, and does do the elemental fire damage.

I would say just being named "flaming" does not grant the fire damaage, but being "sheathed in fire" is where the fire damage comes form, so an inactivated flaming weapon would not do the extra fire damage, and must be turned on in order to give this extra damage.

You continue to argue from the perspective of 3E.

Neither staffs nor wands are the charge holding items they where in 3E. They are magical foci.

DDXP Handout]+1 Frost Warhammer Level 3
This is a good for a fighter to wield
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls with weapon
Critical: +1d6 cold damage
Power(Encounter): Free Action. Activate when you hit with this weapon. The target takes the target takes +1d10 cold damage and is slowed until the end of your next turn. (Cold)

Taken from http://ddxp.tumblr.com/page/3

This item taken from a sheet at the DDXP suggests that such a flaming effect would only be usable once per encounter. Also of note, none of the items taken from those sheets have at will powers.

A ring might, if I am right, have a similar effect that adds damage, maybe +1d6 fire damage, to any attack at will. This would be more powerful and flexible than the effect directly applied to the weapon and thus worthy of a greater restriction than the weapon.

+1 Frost Warhammer Level 3
This is a good for a fighter to wield
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls with weapon
Critical: +1d6 cold damage
Power(Encounter): Free Action. Activate when you hit with this weapon. The target takes the target takes +1d10 cold damage and is slowed until the end of your next turn. (Cold)[/quote]
Taken from http://ddxp.tumblr.com/page/3

This item taken from a sheet at the DDXP suggests that such a flaming effect would only be usable once per encounter. Also of note, none of the items taken from those sheets have at will powers.

A ring might, if I am right, have a similar effect that adds damage, maybe +1d6 fire damage, to any attack at will. This would be more powerful and flexible than the effect directly applied to the weapon and thus worthy of a greater restriction than the weapon.

Maxperson]The problem is that your assumptions run contrary to WoTCs stated design goals. They said they are designing a game where PCs won't NEED magic items to fight monsters. If rings are truly that much more powerful, then WoTC MUST take that into consideration with any creature designed to face a party of 11th level or above. Those design considerations will put any party without such rings at a serious disadvantage, making rings needed in order to succeed.

My assumptions do not make rings uber, just more powerful than any item, other than a ring, of equivalent level.

Taking into account:

The problem is that your assumptions run contrary to WoTCs stated design goals. They said they are designing a game where PCs won't NEED magic items to fight monsters. If rings are truly that much more powerful, then WoTC MUST take that into consideration with any creature designed to face a party of 11th level or above. Those design considerations will put any party without such rings at a serious disadvantage, making rings needed in order to succeed.[/quote]
My assumptions do not make rings uber, just more powerful than any item, other than a ring, of equivalent level.

Taking into account:

Magic Item Slots]One of our goals in 4th Edition was to reduce characters’ wrote:

One of our goals in 4th Edition was to reduce characters’ reliance on magic items.

If they add a slot at 11th and 21st level they very well could expect you to use it. But again by assumptions do not make rings uber so I doubt it.

sooperspook wrote:

You're right about that. It's not fixing a problem. it's creating one.

No good. Try actually citing a problem that it creates.

Except that it isn't 'clever' nor does it make magic rings 'more interesting'. And I've always thought magic rings were interesting to being with.

*shrug* Clever is relative, as is "more interesting", though I wonder what you consider especially interesting about magic rings that are functionally indistinguishable from magical gloves.

If this is not true and a ring works the same way as other magic items then your correct and this is a dumb change but I personally doubt that this is the case.

Doesn't anyone read my posts completely anymore?

Let me cite this quote from the item slots article.

Secondary Slots

These items don’t have enhancement bonuses. That makes them essentially optional. You could adventure with no items in your secondary item slots and not see a huge decrease in your overall power. Take what looks cool, but don’t worry about having empty slots.

Of which rings fall under this category. Yes, the optimizer in me will likely still seek to fill all my secondary slots anyways (since a marginal benefit is still better than no benefit at all), but if an epic PC can be expected to be more or less indifferent between wearing 2 rings, and not wearing any at all, the rings cannot possibly be all that great as to be worth all the fuss it supposedly generates.

A ring might, if I am right, have a similar effect that adds damage, maybe +1d6 fire damage, to any attack at will. This would be more powerful and flexible than the effect directly applied to the weapon and thus worthy of a greater restriction than the weapon.

I don't see how this makes the ring so powerful as to warrant extra damage. It is just +3 extra damage on average, and considering that iterative attacks are out in 4e, much less useful than say, in 3e.

My assumptions do not make rings uber, just more powerful than any item, other than a ring, of equivalent level.

Which should in turn be balanced out by a higher market price. So say, instead of purchasing your more powerful ring, I could be buying 2-3 "lesser" non-ring magic items instead. At the end of the day, I would not be any better or worse off, because the benefits granted by each group is roughly equivalent in power.

If a PC wants to burn a large chunk of his wealth towards owning one, at the expense of leaving his other slots empty, I see little reason to stop him, even if it results in his owning a ring prior to lv11. Alternatively, I could just reslot the ring to fit say, the glove slot instead, or heck, combine the 2 together (so I now have gloves with the combined properties of my original glove and whatever the ring is supposed to do anyways). I can't see 4e having a hard and fast rule saying that I can never ever have an alternate magic item slot. Really.

What makes the breakpoints (lv11, lv21) so special? This seems more flavour related (because you reach paragon at lv11, and epic at lv21) than rules-related, which I feel sucks, because I believe that flavour should never ever be used to balance out mechanics, since the former has absolutely no impact on gameplay whatsoever.

hellmute wrote:

so my one pound of rings has sold for only 1/2 the 320gp value, 160gp.

160gp (value of 1 lb of 20gp rings when sold) - 50gp (value of 1 lb. of gold coins) = 110gp profit from that one pound of treasure carried.

As I said, so long as the one pound of rings sells for more than one pound worth of gold coins (1gp = 1/50th pound ergo 50gp = 1 pound), I will choose the rings over the coins.

Even getting 5gp for each 20gp valued ring would give me (5*16=80-50=) 30gp profit. This only takes into account weight, as I have never really seen a working system for D&D that dealt with the volume of items carried by PCs. In some instances I have seen or heard of PCs carrying around tens of thousands of coins, and doing so while climbing, etc. It boggles the mind to know how this happens. I guess that added realism would detract formt he game when people have to figure how to fit things into open spaces. Oddly the bag of holding has a weight and volume capacity. This leads me to think the bag of holding was created to quickly and easily fix the problem of size of some things caried to make the game quicker and less accounting to do with items.

But this is all a bit of sidetrek based on a small part of what making rings so special with this ring rule could mean, and implacation that other aspects of the game could change a lot from such a simple thing as the ring rule.

I love how you completely ignored that converting the gold to platinum makes the coins much better than the rings, and went on to write paragraphs of material trying to show how I was wrong.