What is everyone's opinion about magical item body slots? For example, the DMG lists the CLOAK of resistance while I saw an NPC wearing a RING of resistance in the latest AoW installment. I've always thought that it is important to keep magical bonuses strictly tied to the body slots that the DMG lists. Like, wouldn't a 20th Paladin with a +5 ring of resistance be practically immune to anyththing that allows a save? I thought that the resistance item is a cloak because it clashes with the Cloak of Charisma, thereby preventing the invincible paladin situation. But then again, the monk has all good saves and has no need for a charisma boost...while bards and sorcerers surely wouldn't be overpowered with cloaks of resistance. As a DM, have you ever had PC invincible monk/paladins or bard/sorcerers that can't last 2 adventures without being resurrected because of failed Fort saves? What is your opinion on this specific example and the item slot situation in general?
There are a number of other protective rings, so this seems perfectly fine as a ring. The problem is not with the ring, it's with open-ended "add your unlimited nonstandard bonus no matter how big it is" abilities existing in the first place. Especially at low levels, like the monk's wisdom AC bonus or the paladin's charisma save bonus.
The real problem with item slots is, why isn't there a pantaloons / leggings slot and a legbands / anklets slot? ;) And those would be separate slots too, if you can have a separate shirt slot and bracers slot!
the Rules Of The Game articles over at the WotC site delve deeper into the philosophy behind these slots and making nonstandard magic items. Essentially it boils down to different areas of the body being more in tune with magic items of different kinds which is a cool enough concept. Its also useful in terms of balancing magic items. One of the bigger dangers for munchkinism would be an item of some type which the player then got two rings and boots of and a headband of and bracers of and a shirt of and a cloak of etc. The item might be perfectly balanced if one was around and might survive two versions of but go totally out of wack with that many.
For the sake of example think of an item that allows a player to make one attack against him miss. More or less fine if one has just one magic item like that - its potent and all but it can only be used once and then some kind of a time limit is imposed so now the PC is vulnerable. Now your PC goes out and gets 10 versions of this item - all of a sudden no big baddies main attack will ever hit him again - totally unbalanced really.
Anyway apparently the rules for making nonstandard items (headbands of Protection etc.) really just boil down to the items being much less common and actually costing more to create even though they have exactly the same effect - strikes me as a pretty good compromise really.
Keep in mind that you can't get both a ring of resistance and a cloak of resistance and make them both work. Named bonuses don't stack. The issue of having 10 different items of the same type rarely comes up. Even if you have multiple items all providing different kinds of bonuses to AC (armor, deflection, natural armor, luck, etc), for instance, that's not only taking up item slots you could be using for other things but some of those items are likely suffering the effects of being more expensive than normal because their effect is out of tune with the spirit of their slot.
Thank you all for your input. I took a look at the Rules of the Game at WotC and was surprised at the possibility that certain basic items (like amulet of mighty fists) are listed in the DMG in non-basic slots. I suppose that I feel the personal need to have everything set out simply and straight forward.
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