Color coding magic item rarity...why.

[Cylerist]

Anyone with impaired vision or some color blindness issues is going to have a hard time with red,orange,black and blue.

Not sure why this was thought to be a good idea instead or writing
common, uncommon, rare, unique before/after the level

[Xenocrat]

They already promised to abandon this in the final rule book.

[CrystalSeas]

Staff said

Vic Wertz wrote:

Nothing will rely exclusively on the presence of color-coding in the actual second edition. (That was one of the very first changes we committed to making, pretty much right as we were sending it to the printer.)

Staff said

Vic Wertz wrote:

Terminalmancer wrote:

Hmmm. Accessibility of the PDF is low, as expected--the icons don't have any text associated with them, so in the event you're using text-to-speech you can't tell what's an action, what's a reaction, and so on.

We are preparing a separate accessible version of the PDF that should be available soon.

And they want everyone to comment on this accessible version

Quote:

Yes. We'll need the community to treat the accessible version of the playtest PDFs as a playtest itself: We'll need your help understanding the issues it has so that we can improve on it with future products. We now have an opportunity to build this in from the start.

[Doktor Weasel]

I'm starting to think that the reason for this is possibly that it was a last minute change. So perhaps color was easier to do than add text which would change the layout more and require a lot more work. It's not a great solution. The magic items are kind of ok with this, but the special materials where it's the name of the material that has the rarity color, is really not optimal. But they have stated that it'll change for the final, so that's good.