PDA

View Full Version : Easily identifiable magic items



dr_venture
November 25th, 2014, 01:59
My quick suggestion for the day: I would *love* a simple 3-position checkbox for inventory items with 3 settings:

* Non-magical (default setting for all items)
* Magical - undetected (used for magic items that have not yet been identified as being magical)
* Magical - detected (used for magic items that *have* been identified as being magical)

Any item set to "Magical - detected" would be displayed in blue text or otherwise clearly marked in the Inventory page.

Looking for magic items is such a common thing to do in all the games I've played, it's frustrating how hard it is to find such items in FG character sheets -- at least the ones based off of CoreRPG. This would allow the players to easily scan through their character sheet to find potions, scrolls, items, etc. that might be of use in handling a situation. In the case of C&C (dunno if other Core-based rulesets have this functionality or not), this new toggle would pair *really* nicely with the "ID" functionality, so that when wizards cast Detect Magic on inventory items, and the GM can mark the items as "Magical - detected" and causing them to be hilighted as magical in the inventory... but if the item has not had a Identify spell cast on it, the "ID" setting will still cause the name to appear as "Beautifully made longsword" as opposed to "Longsword +2."

Anyway, seems like a fairly straight forward implementation proposition, and would be enormously helpful, so I figured I'd float the idea for comments. Also, I'll put a link to this in Moon's idea list.

Griogre
November 25th, 2014, 08:55
Personally I have my player's put *Location/Type in the location field of the magic item and that makes it "float" to the top of inventory, IE Long Sword +1 location field would be *Weapon and use others like *Armor, *Arm, *Hands, *Wondrous and so on. I have my players this do this for normal items as well at low levels.

I'm not a big fan of the toggling magic items since that would typically give away an item is magic even if they don't detect it. At least if you put the right bonus to hit in or bonus to AC and if you don't put in the bonus then you don't need the magic item until they actually figure out if out, if ever.

dulux-oz
November 25th, 2014, 09:18
The CoreRPG Inventory List automatically sorts on the name of the Item, so what I get my Players to do (similar to Griogre) is name the Item such as "Potion - [name]" or "Magic [name]" (for a Magic Sheild or Magic Longsword, etc) or something similar for other items.

Obviously this is the ID's Items' name.

This way all of the ID'd Potions (for eg) are all grouped together in the "Ps".

To use Dr.V's example, record the "Longsword +2" as "Magic Longsword +2" or "Magical Longsword (+2)" or something of that ilk.

I've said it before (in other Threads) and I'll paraphrase it here: Don't get the design-functionality mixed up with the use-functionality. :)

Cheers

dr_venture
November 28th, 2014, 16:31
I understand that it is possible to use sorting tricks to group items, be they magical or whatever... and I'm glad that solution works well for you guys. Personally, I really don't want to have to do that. This seems like a simple solution to address a functionality related to the majority of fantasy RPGs.

I'm guessing that the resistance here might be due to an unfamiliarity with the C&C ruleset.

Grigore, I don't understand your concern about the toggle flagging that items are magical before they've been IDed as such to players... the whole idea is to do the opposite. Perhaps this is functionality that is specific to the C&C ruleset, but there are text controls that show up for GMs in the Items window that do not show up for the player... this toggle would be one of them. Players looking at Items in their inventory would not be able to see the toggle, and thus determine anything about the item. Only when the GM toggled the item to "Magical - detected" would there be any effect the player could see, as the item's title would then show up as blue, or have a little icon, or whatever.

Also, in C&C, items can be IDed or not -- another toggle control that the players cannot see. each item has two title fields and two description fields -- thus my example above, where a magical long sword has a non-IDed title of "Beautifully made longsword" and an IDed title of "Longsword +2" ... the IDed toggle determines which title the player sees. If you wanted to be even more obscure to the players, you could give it a non-IDed title of "Longsword" and they would have no way of telling it was different from any other longsword in their inventory. When a wizard casts Identify on the item, the GM simply switches the tittle from non-IDed to IDed, and the player can then see the real title ("+2 Longsword") and it's value.

So what I'm proposing is a solution to magic items that is almost the same as the one already in place for identifying items. This solution also resolves the case I've run into where items have Detect Magic cast on them, but not Identify. When the players find the magic sword, the item's toggles are set to "non-IDed" and "Magical - undetected." When the wizard casts Detect Magic on the items in the area, the GM changes the sword's "magical" toggle to, "Magical - detected" and thus it's title of "Beautifully made longsword" shows up as blue in the inventory, just the way the spell works by making magical things glow... "this beautifully made longsword is glowing - clearly it's magical." But the players still don't know exactly what the items does. They cast an Identify on it, and the GM toggles the item to "IDed," and thus the item's blue title changes to "+2 Longsword."

Very similar to existing functionality, easy implementation, useful functionality that is core to most Fantasy games, extremely easy for the GM to use during game play, makes finding magic items far more convenient for both players and GMs... seems like a perfect solution from both a usability and programming perspective... unless this is too core to the C&C, in which case this thread should probably have been posted over there.