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I'm making this thread to discuss whether the game would be better if magical items gave access to lots of casting options for all characters, not just casters. I find the idea intriguing, but I'm not sure if it would result in a healthier game.
I spit balled some ideas in another thread about how we could backpedal from the game relying on magic item bonuses. The post is located below, for those interested.
1)Move skill items, skill feats, and other skill boosters to skill chapter. The idea it that if you want to be good at a skill, you need to read just that one part of the book to have 90% of the ways to improve it. Parsing the general feats chapter is a little overwhelming. Moving the skill feats from one big clump of general feats to being next to the associated skill you are interested in might be GREAT for this. (Only issue I can name would be multi-skill feats like Quick Identify, but those can be left in the general skill chapter and you can just cite a page number in the skill list for the relevant skills.)
I don't know that magic skill items need to be moved to the skill chapter per se, but I think what they should absolutely have a table in the skill chapter like page 160 has for skill feats. An issue with magic items is that it isn't easy to realize these magic items exist in the first place. (Or don't exist, as Deadmanwalking has illuminated.) The treasure level tables are pretty helpful for seeing what treasure you can get your hands on, but item names listed don't necessarily tell me "Oh, I should consider this Demon Mask if I want to be good at intimidate."
2)Cut back on magical item bonuses and have more special Resonance activated abilities. Drastic I know, but hear me out. Paizo has already been making it so that pretty much every bonus granting magic item also packs an additional Activated effect. Why not lean into this for what items do? It pushes Resonance into something that lets all characters interact with magic more freely and universally, which might let you ditch charges on staffs for example.
Also, while there are some pretty intuitive magic items out there, some feel questionable as a mandatory part of building the optimized character. If I want to be the best swordsman possible, I want an awesome magic sword. Checks out. But if I want to be the scariest person possible, I'm always wearing this demon mask...? Not so much. I don't like the idea that I'm wearing this mask all the time in polite society on the off chance I need to coerce someone. But if I don it when I want to cast a fear spell on someone? Much more reasonable.
Main reason I'm not advocating for removing item bonus to skills entirely is because I LIKE mundane item quality adding bonuses. (I wish we leaned further into it, TBH, and quality was the only thing that added to hit while magic weapons simply increased damage for example.) But I'm not sure every skill can plausibly have a mundane item, at least not for all purposes. So it miiiight be OK to have some very minor item bonuses so that your party face can get an equivalent bonus to the rogue getting expert thieves tools, for example.
But if we ax item bonuses, you say, aren't we drastically altering the game's math engine and making all the character's more samey? Not if we introduce a new bonus type...
3) Every skill feat now adds a +1 cumulative "feat bonus" to its skill. This is a biggie. Magic items making the skill DC math run is problematic because it assumes your player will have access to said items, and folks have cited lots of reasons why that might not happen. But everyone gets skill feats, and gets them at predictable intervals. It is incredibly intuitive that the more skill feats you invest, the better you are at a skill. It also further boosts the importance of proficiency indirectly, because those new skill feats you unlock also add to your math.
And I think the basic math might work pretty well. The item skill bonuses seem to cap at around +4. If you assume a +4 item in the 3 legendary skills as the norm, that's a total item bonus of +12. Most characters get 11 skill feats, which adds up pretty nicely. Now, it doesn't account for "hand me down" items that boost skills you wanted to just leave at trained. But I think a much more modest set of item bonuses could help account for that.
Thinking about it a little further, I guess you'd need some way to cap the bonus and keep folks from over-investing into a single skill, especially rogues. Maybe the bonus is capped by the proficiency level to the skill? So having a skill feat in a expert skill gives you an additional +1 feat bonus, two skill feat in a master skill gives you +2, and three skill feats in a legendary skill gives you +3? Leave a +1 magic item bonus in and we are looking pretty good.
You'd have a few narrow areas where an item bonus could take that higher. But does anyone think the game's will be hurt if folks have a Legendary Crowbar that adds +3 to open doors? Most of the mundane item bonuses seem pretty to be too specific to cause real problems, and tend to cover "gate keeping" options that you don't really want the party to fail anyway, like "can we open this door" or "can we find our way with this compass" or "can we disguise ourselves well enough to get into this party."
Finally, there are fringe benefits to creating a "feat bonus." Make class feats that grant conditional or circumstance bonuses into feat bonuses, and you've reduced the odds that someone's build choice is going to lock them out from benefiting from the Inspire Courage their bard buddy just used. Yeah, I know we want to make this a little less Mathfinder, but I think having just Circumstance and Conditional bonuses is making it more confusing because so much overlaps and prevents stacking. Circumstances can grant circumstance bonuses. Conditions can grants condition bonuses. Your specially selected items can grant item bonuses. And your feats grant feat bonuses. Bam.
Anyway, that's a wall of text, and I'm sure smarter people than me can pick apart those ideas. But it seems worth floating for them to do so!
One idea I touched but didn't really expand on was that PF2 has started making even number boosting items grant various activated effects. I suggested that Paizo leaned further into this. I think that idea might be worth exploring.
For an example of what I'm talking about, let's consider the Cape of the Mountebank. It grants you a +3 item bonus to Deception and once per day let's you cast Dimension Door. Pretty cool! But there's various reasons why needing specific magic items to keep skills competitive isn't desirable. What if that item bonus went away, and instead your only limitation for Dimension Door was Resonance?
Lots of items follow this pattern of once per day uses. Some don't have that limitation, but those seem to be higher level stuff like the potency items. What if that became the norm at lower levels? Not everything I'm talking about needs to cast an existing spell per se, but they should have effects that feel appropriately magical.
And since we already know Resonance is being reworked; since it won't be needed for consumables anymore I think we need something for it to do.
Under this model, I think wands would no longer have charges, and instead would functionally just run on Resonance. Staves would be like wands but with added benefits. (I am unsure if they should remain locked to casters or not, TBH.)
Pros:
*Helps alleviate fewer spell slots.
*Functionally expands repertoires for spontaneous caster.
*Gives martials more access to many of the narrative tools that casters enjoy.
*Cuts back on book keeping; no more once per day pools!
*Makes these items extremely exciting.
Cons:
*Huge spike in power and flexibility for parties. Being able to spam dimension door multiple times a day might be broken.
*In particular it is a jump in narrative tools which can make it harder for a GM to plan. But it is probably a little easier to control for your players getting their hands on items that do this rather than just picking spells that do it.
*Level+Charisma might wind up being too much Resonance if each point is this powerful and flexible.
*Could make Charisma into a god stat.
*Increased cognitive load could be problematic, though I'm not sure if it would be any worse than having these items stay once per day. Deciding whether you should blow your once per day ability in the moment is rarely easy.
*Not everyone wants mundanes to become this magical.
One final idea: what if we collapsed spell points and Resonance into one pool, and powers used up Resonance as well? We'd really just have the one pool at that point. It would curb spell item spamming and also give people a little more use from their Powers, which feels a little limited for my liking right now. Big issue would be making every caster need charisma just to use their powers would hurt various casters, especially wizards.
Anywho, that's my thoughts on the matter. What do y'all think?
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tbh when they first described resonance. i thought this was what it's intended use. that instead of getting charges and 1 perday uses we would have a single pool of magic that decided how many times we could use "on demand" magic items
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I like the idea generally. My main concern is that it ties the game's power to its loot distribution in a way that would be really difficult to undo. It's currently difficult to assess spell access due to on use items and their uncertain presence in the game and that problem would be made worse by this system.
There's also the issue of spell slots and use items competing directly. A sorcerer, for instance, knows level*1.5 spells and can cast level*1.5 spells per day. Someone with unaugmented resonance would have 2/3rds that resonance, but could have a wand that allowed them to use all their resonance on much higher level spells than the sorcerer could, as sorcerer spells are locked to level. You could fix this somewhat by increasing resonance cost and gain exponentially, but you would have a near infinite number of low level spells. I'm not sure that's a bad thing really, but casters would need to be adjusted to the same benefit as well.
You'd also be in a position to convert some spell casters to a spell point system, which is probably not a bad thing either. I feel like this may have started out as the plan, but accommodating folks who can't add weight required not giving people 400 resonance or requiring people to square the level of a spell to determine its cost.
I'd like to add some more musings on item bonuses. In fiction, there aren't a lot of examples of items which seem to passively make you better at a specific skill. There are items which make you stronger, faster, even smarter. But I don't know of many items that make you better at climbing, sans providing full blown spider climb. Or items that make you generically sneakier, as opposed to having an invisibility or active camouflage effect. I can't think of items that make you better at lying, but there are items which cloud the senses of people you talk to. There are items which provide knowledge in very specific fields... but those are more common in sci-fi settings anyway where such knowledge can just be installed like a computer chip.
This also applies to magic weapons. Having a weapon's balance and craftsmanship affect how well you wield it is a time honored trope. How magic the blade is, not as much. It makes it seem like your blade is sentient or fighting for you. Sentient and self-fighting weapons exist in fiction, but not to the degree suggested by potency runes as they currently exist.
I love potency runes adding to damage, and item quality adding to hit. That's all very thematic. But potency runes adding to hit feels like a misstep. I also like potency runes adding to AC and saves-- that checks out for me.
Now, I know items providing +X to a skill are kind of a staple in pathfinder/3.5. But I think it might be worth examining how much they are actually needed. I think there's room to at least scale back passive +X item bonuses to skills, and have more magical items you can use for specific effects.
Eberron did this already. Called an artificer.
But in this case, everyone would be an artificer.
In my ABP variant thread, I scaled item bonuses down to +1/+2 for this exact reason - passive bonuses are very little fun and create mechanical issues with the game's math (small bonuses have a big impact, so imagine a +5).
I'm sure more can be done, but yeah... Fully approve of the theme of this thread.
Thanks for this post, lots of great ideas.
Yeah, I see no reason for item bonuses to d20 rolls at all.
Skill boosting items should be like you say, have active effects that boost your use of that skill in non numerical way.
Demon mask could give you an activity to intimidate everyone around you.
An item to block your scent.
Expert weapons giving an item bonus to hit makes them too valuable. A +1 item bonus to damage would be better in that it still has an appreciable effect, but it's not so all important as a to hit bonus.
Magic weapons could have cool active effects like a lightning sword shooting a lightning bolt. Or a sharp sword causing bleed damage, or a vampire sword that drains life.
Magic armor could have properties like resistance or active abilities like granting flight.
If you want items to give bonus to skills they should be active effects that give conditional bonus.
Why should magic from a spell and magic from an item be considered differently.
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... Or items that make you generically sneakier, as opposed to having an invisibility or active camouflage effect.I would claim that the elvish cloaks in Lord of the Rings would qualify here.
They allow you to hide or sneak without concealment :p
* Rubberstamp *