How to make identifying magic items more fun
Not the magic item the players had in mind.
The bedraggled adventuring party crawls through a hewn stone caverns deep below the temple of the Sanguine Herald. They are wounded, tired, and suffering. They search for some kind of salvation; a way out, an ally, a miracle. The rogue happens across a false wall hidden by a powerful magic illusion; a strange cache concealed by a powerful magic user long ago. In this dusty chamber, the party finds a glowing potion bottle. The cleric, still barely walking under his own power takes a swig of the drought, hoping it will bring him some relief.
The DM says, “Make a save against poison”.
The Problem
D&D operates under the assumption that when players find a magic item, it isn’t always obvious that the item is magical, and even if it is, it’s not readily apparent what powers the item possesses. In OSE (my favorite flavor of classic D&D), there are 3 methods for figuring out what a magic item does
- Self-testing - You play with it and see if you can figure out what it does.
- Testing with retainers - You use your retainers as guinea pigs
- Pay someone - Pay a high level NPC to identify the magic item for you.
In practice, none of these methods provide a satisfactory game play experience for me.
As a DM, in order to keep the identity of the magic item a secret from players, I have to maintain records about the item. When I give a player gold or a mundane dagger, they write it on their character sheet and I don’t need to track that information anymore. When I give them an unidentified magic item, I now have another piece of information to track. Who has the magic dagger? Is it equipped? What effect is it having on the game-play right now? All of that is more work that I am willing to do when I am also dealing with the mental burden of running the rest of the game.
Then, when players use the item (in self testing or testing with retainers), I need to retrieve this ‘hidden state’ from my notes and make sure I am adjudicating the effects of their weapon correctly, and letting them know what happens as they test.
Finally, the PC’s can just pay someone to identify magic items for them. This also requires that I, as the DM, track this hidden state of an item in the PC’s packs. It also represents an unusual gold taxes on magic items.
And let us not forget about cursed magic items! Players, knowing full well that cursed items exist, will opt-out of self-testing at all and just get any items identified before doing any testing.
All of these leads to game play that isn’t interesting. Players get magic items they can’t use until they pay money for them, and cursed items are just duds.
Other Systems
Other game systems (later versions of D&D, and the game I’m currently playing Worlds Without Number) allow the players to have spells that identify magic items. While this does get rid of the gold-tax issue, its a different tax altogether (spell slots).
The Identify spell, and its cohorts also allows users to quickly identify whether a magic item is cursed, and what it’s effect might be, allowing players to use the item immediately upon getting it.
I like the identify spell because it does address the main issues I have (gold tax and inability to use items right away). But it still requires players to sacrifice a spell slot so that they can play the game from what I think should be a base-line.
Design Goals
I have a strong dislike for this unspoken mini game of identifying magic items. I prefer to run, and play in, games where players have a lot of information. The fun comes not from hiding mysteries from players, but from players constantly peeling back new layers of information and making fun choices based on their newfound information. This abundance of information should apply to the players information about their magic items. With this in mind, I have the following design goals for replacing the magic item identification
- I want players to be able to use their magic items immediately when they find them in the dungeon, and I don’t want them to be taxed unfairly in order to do so.
- I don’t want to have to track the state of specific items in players inventories.
- I don’t want player to have to pay gold in order to use a new found magic item.
- If possible, I want cursed items to still be a threat, but a threat players can plan for and mitigate.
First Iteration
My first approach to fixing this problem was to just tell the players outright what their magic item did as soon as they acquired it. This is a perfectly acceptable solution that accomplishes many of my design goals, and I have been using this house-rule for the past few years.
However, this approach backfired in my last campaign. A magic user player in the game actually took the identify spell, thinking it would be useful. I neglected to tell them this little house rule and outright told the players the effects of a magic item they had acquired. This left the player with a wasted spell slot.
The other downside to this approach is that there is no way to allow cursed items to be a threat. Players always know when their item is cursed. This isn’t a terrible outcome, since they can then use these items as tools in their shenanigans. Cursed items are also a lot like bad traps. Traps can be fun if the players have some agency in how they deal with them, but a bad trap doesn’t allow for any player counter-play and can be infuriating.
If you want a simple solution to the problem of identifying magic items, this approach works. Just make sure you tell the players before they memorize spells for the day.
Making Identify more useful
Just outright telling the players what a magic item does is great, and so I’m keeping that rule in-tact for the next iteration of this. However, the remaining problem lies with the identify spell (or other means of identifying magic items).
So my solution is to just make the identify spell much more useful. Here is the new rule as written…
Whenever you would identify a magic item, instead, re-roll the item or its properties on the appropriate magic item table. This can only be done once for any magic item.
This requires some adjudication by the DM, and possibly some suspension of disbelief. First, you need to be playing a game system with robust tables for magic items. The ‘appropriate’ magic item table is highly subjective here, and may require some improvisation by the DM. This isn’t the case for all games, but in OSE, we are spoiled. This rule also works especially well with Worlds Without Number since magical effects on items are just properties of armor or weapons.
This rule works great with re-rolling magic armor, swords, etc. But for wonderous items, requires a little imagination on the part of the players. Imagine the party gets a Helm of Telepathy, and then re-rolls Drums of Panic. How did the party not know that the Helmet was actually drums? My current explanation is that magic items can sometimes conceal their true form (hand-wavy-magic!), and that the magic item identifying process forces it to it’s true form.
This technique also leaves the threat of cursed items in tact, but less as a whammy on the PCs themselves, but more as a foil for their greed. Inevitably, players will try to reroll that +1 dagger to try and get something better. With cursed items as a slim possibility in magic item tables, the players may leave well enough alone.
6 Ways to explain the effects of casting Identify.
- Retcon the events of the story to support the new item.
- The item was polymorphed into a different form.
- The original form of the item was a magical illusion or mundane disguise.
- The party was inspecting the wrong item. The magic item was hidden over there!
- The item is actually concealed inside another item.
- Reroll any result that truly cause incredulity.