When I started on this article, the plan was to talk to you about the magic item system in D&D 3rd edition, and let’s put a pin in the word ‘system’ there. But engaging with it meant looking at a place in history and a realisation of how I’m not just talking about stuff from an earlier edition of D&D I’m talking to you about an earlier version of myself.
As long as there has been an online, it seems, I have wanted to make things and put them on there.
In 3rd edition D&D, the game presented magical items as a major way your characters got better. This was so important that a level 20 character buck naked and a level 10 character fully and properly geared could be reasonably comparable threats and capable of handling similar things. Even a wizard, one of the more powerful buck-ass naked characters could benefit immensely from their budget being spent on stuff, like good and convenient spellbooks and more spells and the time to scribe them into your spellbook. Gear was so important to the game’s math that many early character options were just embarrassing ‘armour, but a little bit better’ and ‘weapons, but a little bit better.’
This presents us with Gear Complaint #1: Gear is too powerful and important.
Hold on, this gets weird.
Now I am somewhat poisoned by 4th edition and its wildly different gear system, but 3e’s items had some real problems. For a start, the typical item was only to be imagined as something looted from an opponent, which meant any given enemy had to have items comparable to yours. This created a lot of economic inflation pretty fast – when you were at a level when you could swing +3 swords, most enemies would have +1 swords to keep up with you, and that meant that every mook was holding a few grand in just their gear, which meant it was worth your time to strip them down for parts but also, because the items were just +1 swords, they weren’t interesting, they were never going to do anything or be better than your +3 sword, which in turn just meant you wound up travelling between encounters with a sack full of unused, bloodstained equipment from whatever you fought last.
Okay, that means complaint #2: Gear is boring.
And then in the hatrick triplicate of this, because everything has gear, magic items that did interesting things had a pricing structure, in the rulebook, with formulas, so that if you wanted to, you could create custom magical items that, provided they followed very specific rules, could achieve weird and seemingly overpowered effects, because this entirely unseeing system worked by looking at the spell system. You could have permanent, ongoing magical effects of spells, if you paid the right price for them. You could have items that cast a spell a certain number of times a day, if you paid the right price for them. You could have items that represented a host of small, minor, niche application spells, if you paid the price for them.
Which means we get to complaint #3: Gear is so complex it rewards character calculus.
I’ve talked about character calculus before. It’s not actually calculus, it’s much more like citations, where you take all the ‘legal’ books and crossreference all the referential material to make a case to your DM that this feat and this feat and this feat and this spell all interact with the same part of the system and therefore I can do this thing that’s probably broken. After all, you’re not doing anything as powerful as the Wizard is, so what’s the harm? It’s one of the most rewarding things you can do in 3e D&D, of finding the way all these puzzlebox pieces can slot together, where no level is wasted or inferior to another, better chosen level of class or prestige class, where no feat is being used where a niche improved variation works, and where every piece of gear is spending the character budget down to the last few gold coins.
Where the spell’s effect was directly comparable to some other combat effect – bonus damage or bonus to hit or bonus armour class – that could be priced per those effects. Thing is there were a lot of things you could do with a spell that were hard to price like that. Even just some annoying things were really powerful to have on things like an on-hit weapon attack. A level 1 Command spell only added 2,000 GP to the price of a sword, but if you’re attacking with it three times, that’s three chances for your enemy to roll a natural 1 and hit the deck. Some spells designed to resist specific negative effects like mind control were very low level, and therefore could just be jammed on magical items for a small increase in budget.
I can’t get over this; There were tables. There were tables for doing math on this stuff. You could reduce prices by adding ‘curse’ effects, by percentages. A use-activated 3/day stick of Knock costs something like 1,800 GP, which is to say, a pittance for a mid-level adventurer, and it completely makes a joke out of any lockpicking skill any given rogue has developed. It isn’t just that wizards displace Rogues, they can displace rogues in parties they don’t even join.
Anyway, fun system to dick around with. Lots of numbers. If you bother to read every spellbook and look for every unique magical effect or every possible use of a summon you could have a lot of fun just… making things.
And I did.
Back in the day on USENET, which was kind of like a forum with very little central control or moderation but which was also mostly only for text-only gigadorks who liked to argue about which Babylon 5 episode was the second best, and that included the showrunner, I posted for … a while? A weekly set of magic items. I would come up with a central theme, I would do the math on how they should exist, I would write a little blurb and I posted them on to Usenet.
I got told by people – many people older than me – that these items were good.
I went to look for these articles. The articles that I drew pictures for, and included links to the pictures, in the USENET posts. The articles that were written before I had a blog, and for an audience thrown out into a general space for anyone who wanted them to see.
It’s very strange to see a website timestamp a post you know you read, at the time, with ’20 years ago.’
D&D 5e is being rolled up and updated. There is a new edition war looming on the horizon; either this edition revision just becomes an accepted blip or the game fractures again, as it did around 3.0, 3.5, 4, and 5. And there are signs throughout our literal history of the places I have been, in the strata of this hobby like tree rings.
I miss USENET a lot. I miss knowing there was a place I could put anything I wanted and maybe someone would see it, and, probably, call me an idiot if it wasn’t very good. But that newsgroup, the D&D newsgroup, was a shockingly civil, pro-creative place that didn’t tell me to stop bothering or yell at me about my magic items with their lore. Some recommendations were made about power level, some arguments about whether I was justifying my math right.
But I-
I’ve always been doing this.
I have never not been posting, I guess.