Hey everyone!

As a DM, I struggle a lot with juggling all the various things the party should get and receive. One of my greater shortcomings has been dealing with magic items.

So to help myself deal with that, I’ve been working on a little system to approach magic items differently. The basic idea is that instead of only letting players loot, be rewarded with or buy magic items, the dungeon master could go and enchant the equipment that the characters already have.

This could mean taking a magic item that exists and applying those effects to what they have through various means or creating effects that are fully tailored to not just the character but also the player.

The enchantments could come from external sources or even the pure power of the character who carries it.

Here’s the blog post going into some depth on it all and including some examples: https://impheim.com/2023/09/magic-items-in-ttrpgs-embrace-enchantments/

And here’s the little video I made on the topic: https://youtu.be/GSnCd2Mbr9U

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions!

  • @[email protected]
    2•1 year ago

    In PF2e, this is how a huge amount of magic items, particularly weapons, are handled. Almost all magic weapon effects come from runes, which can be easily transferred from one weapon to another during downtime. So if you find some cool new magic weapon, but you like the aesthetic/effects of the weapon you already have, you can buff up your own weapon instead. Things like the Flametongue, Frostbrand, Dagger of Venom, Mace of Disruption, etc. aren’t specific magic items but instead are runes that can be applied to any weapon.

    • @ImperorOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      That’s definitely a very good additional approach of how to get the magic effect onto what the character already has!

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        Indeed. It works especially well for PF2e because, unlike D&D, there is a huge amount of mechanical variety in weapons. There are a lot of things to consider when choosing between eg. a longsword, greatsword, battleaxe, and greataxe. The system has so many different weapons, it would have been far too limiting if they had said that all those cool effects were only tied to specific weapons.