Farnaby
November 14th, 2020, 20:43
This is not a complaint, this is meant to provoke discussion.
So I submitted a bug report about an adventure where magical items had a unidentified name that gave away they were magical.
E.g. +1 chain mail would have an unidentified name of magical chain mail.
I said that this gave away that it is magical and requested that the word magical be removed.
I received this answer:
I'm not sure that I would classify this as a "bug" so much as a style difference between GMs. You obviously don't want your players to be able to tell the difference between a magical quality breastplate and a normal non-magical breastplate, for instance. Nor do you want them to recognize darkwood as being a different wood than normal wood. Some GMs will argue for their games, the differences are obvious, even if they cannot identify the specific magical nature.
I would also argue that the mere fact that a breastplate, for example, is "not identified" and missing most of its information due to being in a "not identified" state will clue in 99.9% of players that that item is not truly a mundane breastplate. They will then just cast the Detect Magic cantrip to see that it is magical.
Given that this is a style thing, if it is changed, there is a good chance that one or more people will report it as a problem to change it back. I can see some GM's and players then being upset that not distinguishing the "not identified" magic items may be harder to see in the party list because they are not tagged (or the GMs will have to go to the extra trouble of then writing "magical" in front of the item. So, as you can see, that can go both ways depending on the GM who runs the game.
I'll kick it around with the team to see which direction makes most sense: changing it as you suggested, or keeping it consistent with the previous standard that was used for all AP modules.
[snip]
This is very true but perhaps we need a different solution e.g. a flag on a normal item that only the GM can see and turn on/off? Then we wouldn't need ID/no-ID.
Or an ID/no-ID flag on every single item and the same name for both states for mundane equipment?
I don't know, I'm only throwing a couple of ideas out there, but I think we GMs need a better way we can hide a +1 sword without having the players having to metagame.
My question for all of you GMs is how do you do it with the current system and what change could you envision that would make the system easier?
So I submitted a bug report about an adventure where magical items had a unidentified name that gave away they were magical.
E.g. +1 chain mail would have an unidentified name of magical chain mail.
I said that this gave away that it is magical and requested that the word magical be removed.
I received this answer:
I'm not sure that I would classify this as a "bug" so much as a style difference between GMs. You obviously don't want your players to be able to tell the difference between a magical quality breastplate and a normal non-magical breastplate, for instance. Nor do you want them to recognize darkwood as being a different wood than normal wood. Some GMs will argue for their games, the differences are obvious, even if they cannot identify the specific magical nature.
I would also argue that the mere fact that a breastplate, for example, is "not identified" and missing most of its information due to being in a "not identified" state will clue in 99.9% of players that that item is not truly a mundane breastplate. They will then just cast the Detect Magic cantrip to see that it is magical.
Given that this is a style thing, if it is changed, there is a good chance that one or more people will report it as a problem to change it back. I can see some GM's and players then being upset that not distinguishing the "not identified" magic items may be harder to see in the party list because they are not tagged (or the GMs will have to go to the extra trouble of then writing "magical" in front of the item. So, as you can see, that can go both ways depending on the GM who runs the game.
I'll kick it around with the team to see which direction makes most sense: changing it as you suggested, or keeping it consistent with the previous standard that was used for all AP modules.
[snip]
This is very true but perhaps we need a different solution e.g. a flag on a normal item that only the GM can see and turn on/off? Then we wouldn't need ID/no-ID.
Or an ID/no-ID flag on every single item and the same name for both states for mundane equipment?
I don't know, I'm only throwing a couple of ideas out there, but I think we GMs need a better way we can hide a +1 sword without having the players having to metagame.
My question for all of you GMs is how do you do it with the current system and what change could you envision that would make the system easier?