Spells and Magic (2E AD&D) Magic Items?


Prerelease Discussion


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IN early 3E I liked how you could easily make magic items. Towards the end of it I had a page of house rules mostly of banned stuff, but I experimented with taking magic items out of the players hands and goin back to AD&D ways of making them *except you do not lose a point of con).

Basically once you reach a certain level you get the item creation feats for free BUT you can't craft anything you want as you might need power component. Think Damascus steel- you need to get specific ore from a specific location and in a D&D world you might need the blessings of a solar and quench he forged blade in a sea of holy water and use the breath of an angel to make a holy avenger.

5E kind of went back to AD&D magic items (under the DMs control), but the magic item rules for creation are not the best.

AD&D also had advice in regards to buying and selling magic items. Don't. Doesn't get much simpler than that.

This doesn't mean you do not get powerful magic items, AD&D adventures often had things like +3 intelligent weapons you could get before level 8 but you could not mix and match them with feats etc. For example in 3.0 you could use improved critical+keen on a scimitar and crit on a role of 12+ (roll to confirm).

3.5 toned that kind of silliness down and Pathfinder inherited it. At the time I thought Pathfinder was better than 4E but that was 10 years ago and 18 since 3.0 landed which I was an early adopter of.

I do not miss THAC0 and do not use it when I play 2E anymore but AD&D in hindsight got some thing right? Why create new rules and complications such as resonance when another potential solution as per EGG came up with is right there.

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