Identifying Magic Items in Old-School Fantasy RPGs

Imagine you are refereeing a session of your fantasy tabletop RPG of choice. At the table, one of your players says the following:

·         “I try to figure out what the magic item does.”

·         “I search the room for traps.”

·         “Does this room have any secret doors?”

How do you respond to that statement from a player? Do you ask for more details about what their character does? Do you ask for a dice roll? Maybe you do neither, assume they are successful, and provide them with all the information you have?

Put a pin in that. 

Let's look at another scenario.

Rewind.

Imagine that, before your player ever said one of those above things, you simply provided them with the information outright. That would look like:

·         “Upon searching the paladin’s corpse, you find he was wearing a suit of +2 plate armor.”

·         “You walk down the hall. You notice there’s a pressure plate on the floor and a slot in the wall for a blade to slide out. It’s a trap!”

·         “Upon entering this room, you see a section of brick on the east wall looks different from the surrounding brick. It is likely a false wall.”

You may balk at reading some of the above statements, but are those statements not what the “Passive Perception” skill of 5e encourages (perhaps excluding the one about magic armor)? Perhaps also the “taking 10” on Perception checks in Pathfinder?

Passive Perception gives a numerical value by which to judge whether characters have access to information about the game world. Passive Perception also assumes the character is aware and searching, even if the player does not directly state so.

If a player character’s Passive Perception is higher than the DC to notice a trap or secret door, wouldn’t you tell them information that indicates the trap or secret door – even if the player did not directly state they were searching for such?

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I started thinking about the above issue when thinking about a seemingly unrelated topic: how to handle magic item identification in the games I run. I promise the above issue is related to the problem of magic item identification, and I promise to explain that connection at the end of this article. However, before moving on to talk about the solution I settled on, let’s imagine another problem.

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Let’s “switch gears” and instead think about a gap between player skill/knowledge and character skill/knowledge. Let’s imagine two scenarios:

·         A first-time player has a character who is a magic-user; their character’s background involves the study of magic items at the local Arcane Community College.

·         A veteran player and former referee plays a character who is a barbarian from Backwatersville; their character actively avoids magic due to superstition, but the player has read descriptions of all the magic items in the rulebook.

Now, let’s imagine those two players come across the same magic item, the Silky Slippers of Spryly Springing.

In the first scenario (the newbie player with the magic-user character), the player would not recognize the Slippers, but there’s a significant chance the character would. How do you adjudicate that situation, when the character probably knows more about something than the person playing them?

Conversely, in the second scenario (the veteran player with the ignorant character), the player might recognize Slippers, but the character likely wouldn’t. Would you expect that player to “play dumb?” Stay silent? Even if you rule the character can’t take actions that assume knowledge of the magic item, how would you react if the player shared their knowledge of the magic item out-of-character with other players at the table? What if one of those other players was the newbie with the magic-user character?

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I posed the situations above because I think they speak to the fundamental issues at stake when it comes to rules for magic item identification in fantasy tabletop RPGs. Those issues are:

·         Access to information – when do you provide information to players, how, and why?

·         Action adjudication: When a player’s character tries to obtain information in the game world / a player asks you a question, how do you adjudicate their action / answer their question, and why?

·         Player knowledge v. character knowledge – how do you handle a situation where a character has access to more information than the player? How do you handle a situation where a player has more access to information than their character?

I don’t think there is a right solution to the problems or questions above. The “right” solution depends on the kind of game you want to run. When it comes to handling the identification of magic items, I think there’s three factors to consider when answering the above questions:

• The nature of magic items within your game’s campaign setting
• The core engagements you want to provide with your game
• The rules system you use to adjudicate player character actions

Speaking to the first point, it makes more sense for identifying magic items to be difficult in a campaign setting where magic items are rare and unique. Conversely, in a relatively high-magic setting (such as Golarion for Pathfinder), it makes little sense to have player characters not recognize a potion of healing when they find one. Therefore, the more common magic items are in your campaign’s setting, the easier magic item identification should be.

Secondly, the way characters identify magic items should depend on the core engagements you want your game to provide. If you want your game to be about kicking down doors, kicking tail, and chewing bubble gum, puzzle-solving by investigating magic items gets in the way. In that kind of game, simply telling players the magic items they find when they come across them makes sense. For players looking for abnegation in their game, having a magic item you can’t figure out and use is no fun. Similarly, a high-fantasy game about epic adventures and heroic quests to save the world wouldn’t suit a “mini-game” of futzing about to identify magic items.

Identifying magic items through puzzle-solving and experimentation best suits a game about solving new, unprecedented problems with creative solutions – not murder-hobo-ing or high-fantasy-epic-questing.

The third point, about how the identification of magic items depends on the rules system you use, is perhaps the most mutable. I think every tabletop RPG recognizes the right of the people playing them to alter the rules to their tastes. So, you reserve the right to change the rules to suit the first two points (your campaign setting and the core engagements you want to provide).

However, what the rules say about identifying magic items is important to consider. For example, if running D&D 5e rules-as-written, it’s hard to offer engagement involving the “discovery of magic items through experimentation” when a player character has access to the identify spell as a ritual.

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All of that being said, here are the rules I plan to use for my table. Our game is a fantasy role-playing game based off early D&D. Therefore, the setting is relatively low-magic, magic items tend to be rare and unique, and the game is about solving unprecedented problems in unique and creative ways.

·         Upon touching a magic item with bare skin, most people can tell most items are magical. There are some exceptions to this rule; for example, some magic items could have their magic purposefully concealed. However, most of the time touching a magic item elicits a sensation “butterflies in the stomach,” “hair standing on end,” or “pins-and-needles.”

·         Character action and player problem-solving trump dice rolls. If a character does something that would reveal the properties of a magic item, they do so – no dice rolls necessary. However, they must specifically describe what they do (ex. while wearing the slippers, they jump up and down or run a short distance). Saying “I experiment with the magic item” or “I try to figure out what the magic item does” is not enough.

·         Discerning the nature of magic items without player specificity requires 1. character expertise and 2. a dice roll. Specifically, identifying magic items without experimentation requires a character to know the identify spell, which operates with the following rules (note that these are based off the GLOG magic system, and therefore uses magic dice invested in a spell).

Identify: Once each round for [sum] rounds, you may make an Intelligence Check with a Target Number of (18 minus [dice]) to learn one fact per success about a magical enchantment affecting a touched creature or object. For the duration, you must use the object according to its function (ex. wear apparel or wield weapons). The referee makes these checks in secret; a roll of 1 on the d20 reveals a false piece of information about the enchantment(s), as determined by the referee.

And, for good measure, here’s a GLOG-based version of detect magic:

Detect Magic: For [dice] x 20 minutes, you see a magical glow around enchanted creatures and objects within [sum] x 15ft. The more powerful the enchantment, the stronger the glow.

Lastly, player characters can also pay NPCs to identify magic items for them. Their access to this option depends on the availability of magic-using NPCs and the cost of their services, which player characters must be able to afford with payment either in coin or in kind.

This system addresses the first problem because it describes how to react when a player tells you they want to "experiment to identify a magic item." If their character does not have expertise in identifying magic items, the player needs to be more specific.

This system also addresses the second problem because it describes how a player can circumvent their own lack of expertise when playing a character who knows more than they do. Even if a player can't deduce the qualities of a magic item (or doesn't want to spend the time to do so), they can circumvent their own lack of expertise through magic or services from non-player characters.

Of course, the issues of traps and secret doors are separate, but related, issues likely worth another entire article. So is the issue of how to handle a player with more knowledge in their own head than their character has - something that's been hotly debated since the conception of tabletop RPGs. Again, it's a related challenge worth more words than I can devote here.

But there you have it… a rather consistent system I plan on using for future games of the old-school rules hack I’ve made (whose rules will get around to posting / explaining, at some point). In the meantime, I hope you find this system helpful, or at least interesting.