# Game Design 109: The Importance of Items



## delericho (May 13, 2013)

One thing I like about most superhero games is that they consider the "character who gets power from his items" as a valid archetype alongside the internally-powered characters. And so, Iron Man is as valid a character as the Hulk.

Actually, this is something I wish D&D would adopt - it took some baby steps in that direction with the Artificer class (and the Alchemist in Pathfinder), but in 3e the Artificer was built on the broken item creation rules, in 4e the Artificer was just an Arcane class, and in 5e they've barely mentioned the class. But it does seem to plug a hole in the rules, while also dealing with much of the "wealth by level" debate.

For almost all the other games I run (that is, anything but D&D), I tend to take a very laissez faire attitude to equipment - either I or the player will note down a few iconic bits of gear for the character, but for most general items we'll assume that if it's sensible to assume the character has it then we'll assume the character has it. Which seems to work pretty well - most games seem not to be as gear-dependent as D&D.


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## Radiating Gnome (May 13, 2013)

Actually, the D&D Next magic item stuff does some pretty cool things with magic items.  I really like the tables of origins & special details you can give to items.  

In our home game I've given the part a +1 battleaxe and a wand of magic missiles so far. Pretty dull stuff.  But the battle axe is a Celestial War Leader battleaxe, and the wand of magic missiles is a Loud Dwarven Wand (built more like a pipe bomb than a wand, indestructible, and makes a loud bang noise when it's used). 

Those are a lot more fun, and have a lot more personality, while still being fairly mundane from a pure mechanics point of view. 

At the same time, the rules are written so that the items aren't a mechanical requirement for game balance -- that, I find interesting.  I am looking forward to seeing how it works -- can they really be a non-issue, especially at higher levels?


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