Enhancement Items break the game.

[Walter Leeuwen]

I do read a lot of topics about characters being out of control, of have too high an AC or doing so much damage that they are killing everything in one round or worse.

I think that the main problem is that characters always have access to the items they want and thus maximizing their potential.
I my games I try to minimize enhancement items to a max of +1, but like with weapons and armor, the items get a secondary power, making the items more specific (eg a Frog Totem amulet of Natural armor +1 NAC, +5 Jump skills)

This way characters get more diverse and less about maximizing their AC, Damage etc…

Limiting access to items also always gives way to roleplaying opportunities. Ye Olde Magic shoppe is not always available. And yes the Barbarian wants the Belt of insanely high strength, but he will not be streetwise enough to find the item in a big city, chances are that he will be ripped of his valuable money for something that looks like the thing he want (like he even knows that these things exist). He will have more change of getting a witch to make him something like that, be she wont be interested in money, she might just want him to perform an upspeakable act…

Therefore rethink crafting and selling items. Don’t treat magic items like common goods…

[Blackstorm]

I don't think that's a solution. The group wizard get scribe a scrolls, paladin, magus and inquisitor gets their weapon magical without magic objects, to not speak of spells. Yeah, a lot more resource expense, but my magus can deal about 60 damage in one round at 5th, paladin in our group is on an average of 20 damage power hit. And we do it even without rely on magic items. If you lower magic items affordability, it seems to me that you go to increase the gap between pure combat classes and caster / semi-caster classes.

[Kimera757]

Walter Leeuwen wrote:

I do read a lot of topics about characters being out of control, of have too high an AC or doing so much damage that they are killing everything in one round or worse.

I think that the main problem is that characters always have access to the items they want and thus maximizing their potential.
I my games I try to minimize enhancement items to a max of +1, but like with weapons and armor, the items get a secondary power, making the items more specific (eg a Frog Totem amulet of Natural armor +1 NAC, +5 Jump skills)

This way characters get more diverse and less about maximizing their AC, Damage etc…

Limiting access to items also always gives way to roleplaying opportunities. Ye Olde Magic shoppe is not always available. And yes the Barbarian wants the Belt of insanely high strength, but he will not be streetwise enough to find the item in a big city, chances are that he will be ripped of his valuable money for something that looks like the thing he want (like he even knows that these things exist). He will have more change of getting a witch to make him something like that, be she wont be interested in money, she might just want him to perform an upspeakable act…

Therefore rethink crafting and selling items. Don’t treat magic items like common goods…

I think that's not a good attitude for Pathfinder. The system is built on having certain items at certain levels. Take a look at the iconic PCs for NPC Codex, now freely available in the PSRD. They have high bonuses, and those are the PCs that the internal playtesters used.

You're not just damaging game balance, you're damaging it in a bad way. Casters need items less than noncasters, and not just because they can craft items cheaply or replicate them with spells. One big deal is AC. Most PCs have no way to boost AC beyond magic items (enhancement bonuses to armor, natural armor, and ring of protection), but their attack bonuses increase organically. This, plus shield modifiers, is the main reason why inherent bonus campaigns work better in 4e than in 3.x or Pathfiner.

The barbarian example is a poor example. The barbarian isn't going to go shopping for magic, he'll give his share of loot to the wizard, and the wizard can go to the magic shoppe (teleporting once they reach level 9, so distance is no longer relevant) and buy the item for them. (Chances are the barbarian will go anyway. Nobody wants to be ambushed on a shopping trip. Plus he might want that girdle fitted, in a purely RP/non-metagame context.) I can't imagine a group that refuses to work together, they won't last long enough to buy such loot.

[Crosswind]

A less incorrect statement from the OP would read like:

"Magic Items allow non-casters to keep pace with casters in direct ways up through the early stages of casters being overpowered."

-Cross

[Aelryinth]

Exactly. Limiting magic items hurts non-casters and classes that can't easily make magic items. Casters aren't hurt by such things at all...they just retask spells that could have been used to help the party to buff themselves, instead.

==Aelryinth

[Crosswind]

I think the following causes less experienced GMs trouble:

By and large, when you have a save-or-#@$%'d caster in the game, you only have one (or, let's say, one caster per save, ref/fort/will).

So the way to deal with him is easy: buff the monster's saves when you want it to not get SoD'd. Nobody else is affected, combat proceeds apace.

However, most groups have at least 2, sometimes 3 or 4 people who attack. So if you have one character who is more optimized, it's tough to give enemies a high AC without screwing the other characters in the party.

The solutions to this puzzle are a bit sparse (debuff that guy with NPCs, give treasure to the other PCs to even it out, etc), so it confuses people, and they come up with incorrect conclusions, like the above.

-Cross

[Claxon]

Yeah, this is a terrible solution to game balance. For the reason Aelryinth and others have mentioned. The only thing that keeps martial PCs in the game is magic items.

[Taason the Black]

To the OP: That was the approach that Dragonlance took...low magic items and gear. Spellcasters became gods.

Now if you made the world where there wasnt DR and just had orcs with character levels, ogres and such, then you could pull it off. Once you throw in demons and such...it becomes lost because the melee just cannot damage the targets enough to survive the fight.

[Matthulu]

I don't think he meant all magic items just the enhancement bonus ones. The barbarian in his example could probably stand to lose a point or two off of his strength belt to get some other kind of ability from it give a little more variety.
Also, I think that spell resistance does a similar thing to spellcasters that DR does to warrior types. Besides, there are so many ways around both that they are minor annoyances at best.

[Scavion]

Yes, DR is such an annoyance to that poor rogue who didn't get his sneak attack this round.

Skill challenges are trivial at the higher levels anyways. That poor barbarian could have had a another +2 to hit and +3 to damage AND +2 to all his STR based skill checks, but nooo his DM made him get a +5 to swimming for their travels in the plane of fire.

If OP had read the thread that had been going for awhile about combat, he'd find that most encounters end in 3-4 rounds.

[Catastrophe]

(ignores horrible stereotyping on classes in main post)

I don't think anyone ever said that magic items were common goods. That said, if you put in the work to find them, you should be rewarded for doing so (as opposed to just assuming that the shop has it).

One of the ways to do this is to roll a percentile every time you look for said item. So if the Barbarian is after a belt of giant strength +2, he might have a 95% chance to find one in the trading capital of the world, a 75% chance to find one in the largest city of the world (which has a fairly well-sized marketplace), a 50% chance to find one at any other major city, and only a 10% chance to find one in a small town.

However, if talks to the local merchants on his way out of the small town (that he'll be returning to within a couple of weeks), that percent might increase to a 30% chance of them having it. If he tries to track down one of the more well-known merchants in the world, and makes a serious effort, his % for anything he looks for from that merchant might increase by 20 or more.

+5 Longswords and +5 Full Plates don't have to grow on trees - but making them unobtainable in exchange for some more "versatile" bonus just seems like a bad idea.

[ZanThrax]

Any time a DM decides to make his game "low magic" by severely limiting the availability of magical gear, all that winds up happening is that the players gravitate more to casting classes since reducing magic item availability below the standard RAW levels just exacerbates the power difference between casters and martials.

[Kydeem de'Morcaine]

ZanThrax wrote:

Any time a DM decides to make his game "low magic" by severely limiting the availability of magical gear, all that winds up happening is that the players gravitate more to casting classes since reducing magic item availability below the standard RAW levels just exacerbates the power difference between casters and martials.

Absolutely true. Meaning you have to also change something with the casting classes. Increase casting time, spell failure, recovery time, caster damage, etc... There are many potential possibilities.