[citansdnd] Re: D&D Essentials update (part 1)
- From: marbleminotaur@xxxxxxx
- To: citansdnd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2010 17:42:00 -0400 (EDT)
Aha! Okay, so I was wrong, you can BUY Uncommon items too! Here's an article
with a section about the new Magic Item rules:
http://critical-hits.com/2010/08/07/gen-con-2010-dd-new-products-seminar/
Quote from the article: "Common and uncommon items can be bought and created by
characters. Rare items can only be given out by a DM. Most items already in
existence are going to be retroactively classified as Uncommon, and almost all
items going forward in new books will be Rare."
So there we have it folks. Awesome. In other words, nothing is actually
changing at all.
-----Original Message-----
From: marbleminotaur <marbleminotaur@xxxxxxx>
To: citansdnd <citansdnd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sun, Sep 12, 2010 2:00 pm
Subject: [citansdnd] Re: D&D Essentials update (part 1)
I'm pretty pleased with all of these changes, although I was skeptical about
the Magical Item Rarity one at first. I had to go looking it up online, and I'm
pretty sure you misprinted what Uncommon means. I'm pretty sure Players can
CREATE Uncommon items as per the appropriate Rituals, they just cannot BUY
them. That's what the big article at WOTC seemed to be implying anyway. As far
as I can interpret the article, it's like this: Common items can be made and
bought by players. Uncommon items can be MADE by players, but not BOUGHT by
players. Rare items cannot be made nor bought by players. In general, if your
item has a magical property that's not just a flat Enhancement bonus, it's
probably going to be Uncommon at least. Uncommon and Rare items also sell for
more money, Rares going for full price and Uncommons I think going for 50%
instead of the meager 20%. Along side this, they completely removed the limit
to Item Daily Power usage, so now you CAN use more than one item's Daily power
a day, which is a very good thing.
If it's like this, honestly I can get behind it, since in my point of view
Magic Items on a whole are kinda getting out of hand. It makes certain magic
items more exciting to find during a game. Rather than just "Oh. Another Boots
of the Fencing Master. Thanks" it'll now be "Holy shit YES Boots of the Fencing
Master!". However, there are more than a few questions I have about this rule.
You obviously couldn't implement it into a campaign that's already running
without stripping your characters down and rebuilding them from the ground up.
On that note, there's nothing telling you how to assign items to a higher
levelled character yet, and I'm hoping they address this issue. Having Rare
items completely off limits to your character at character creation makes
truckloads of sense, but what about Uncommon items? It wouldn't make any sense
NOT to have access to Uncommon Items when creating a higher levelled character
because quite frankly, there aren't enough Common magic items to hand out for
each Level of Magic Item you're supposed to start with. Besides, if you're a
Ritual user and have Enchant Magic Item as a ritual, there's no reason why you
wouldn't have a few Uncommons to start with.
Lastly, and quite possibly the biggest hurdle about this new rule, is that they
will have to assign Common, Uncommon and Rare properties to EVERY ITEM EVER
MADE. There's what, like five billion of them now? We won't actually know what
items get assigned what property unless they specifically errata every single
item they have ever made in every book and somehow make it readily available
for EVERYONE to read. They better not just handwave this and say "Well, we'll
just update the character builder and you can look at it there" because I don't
use character builder and I will NEVER use character builder. Those lazy
assholes at Wizards are really getting obnoxious with not realising that not
everyone in the entire world has access to character builder. This is going to
be a giant headache for both GMs and Players alike until they have this sorted
out.
-----Original Message-----
From: warrl <warrl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: citansdnd <citansdnd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Fri, Sep 10, 2010 9:33 pm
Subject: [citansdnd] D&D Essentials update (part 1)
The update document for existing books, to cover the first volume of D&D
Essentials, is attached.
The discussion on the forums expects at least one and probably at least two
more updates of similar or larger size based on Essentials, as there are other
extensive changes in progress including a rewrite of how treasure gets
allocated to encounters. Also this update only covers PH1, PH2, Martial Power,
Arcane Power, Divine Power, and Dragon #381.
Stuff I spotted and thought noteworty:
* Assad will love the change to Sneak Attack. Now it is once per turn, not once
per round. This probably makes Rogues the high-damage melee characters in any
even mildly complex combat.
* Two Weapon Fighting now applies to both weapons.
* Weapon Focus is now strictly for weapon powers. It used to affect implement
powers also, if you were using a weapon of the selected type as an implement.
* Great Fortitude, Iron Will, and Lightning Reflexes used to be Paragon feats
which you would retrain out in Epic. Now they are Heroic feats that scale by
tier.
* Rapiers are now Military Light Blades. They still do 1d8 damage (yay, no
other Military Light Blade does that), and are not Offhand (drat).
* Visions of Avarice rewritten. One detail that is different is that now
Sustain Minor also has you make the secondary attack as part of the same action
- the old version takes a second minor action. There are other differences as
well.
* A number of Wizard powers now have Miss effects.
* A character with the Heal power (Divine Power page 40) can now target himself
if he likes.
* All existing magic items are now Uncommon, with the exception of a
surprisingly short list which are Common. What this means is not covered in
this document, but it's annoying: you can't make or buy Uncommon items, and
half the magic items you find will be Common. There's another category, Rare,
that doesn't get mentioned at all in this document, and goes beyond annoying to
downright nasty; your character will only receive one Rare item per tier. By
the way, a large majority of our party's magic items, exclusive of healing
potions, are Uncommon.
(The tradeoff for this rarity system is that you can forget the limit on the
number of item daily powers you can use per day. You can use every daily power
of every item you have, every day. If rumors turn out to be correct, this means
you'll be using item daily powers less often than you do now.)
* If you are proficient with any implement (weapon proficiency doesn't count),
you can use it with any implement power you have. This means, for example, a
paladin that acquires Magic Missile (even if not a hybrid) can use his holy
symbol as the implement for that wizard power and get full benefit. However,
there's a limited exception for weapliments depending on how you got the
implement proficiency.
* Melee Training got nerfed.
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