Cursed Items and Item Identification

Another piece of the game removed by 4th edition D&D is cursed items. The Paizo 3.75 followed suit and removed cursed items from the game. Both editions also made item identification much easier. These two topics are inextricably linked. Cursed items typically come from using a magic item without having first identified it. So the danger of cursed items relates directly to how easy it is to identify items. The whole subject relates to how mysterious and powerful items are (a subject I talked about in a previous post).

So do cursed items add anything to the game? A long time ago the way characters handled magical treasure was to equip it and see what happens. In this world magic items were a little more mysterious, back before these items moved into the Player's Handbook. Sometimes these items would be cursed and the players would have to suffer the effects. With changes in the game players act differently. They tend to not use magic items unless identified. A lot of this is because they would have to swap out a known good effect for an unknown effect. Also there is a basic level of caution that has developed. But are cursed items fun? Do they model fiction well? I think curses can be fun, but they tend to be very negative for a very innocent action of wielding a weapon or slipping on a ring. Fiction has an assortment of curses, but they tend not to simply be objects that are crappy that you have to use. Typically they are much more sinister and story driven. So in essence, a weapon that appears to be a +3 sword but then is actually a -3 sword that you can't not use isn't that much fun. But a +3 sword that hungers for the blood of your friends that will make you have a 1 in 10 chance of attacking an adjacent ally can be pretty cool. How about a magical stone that also shows up on your person and seems to attract undead enemies. Cursed items, in my mind, require even more thought than normal magic items, but they can be fun and arbitrarily removing them from the game is a mistake since it is something that limits the game.

To make cursed items possible you have to make identifying either hard or imprecise. Identification tends to make life easier. If you have ever run a game where every time you ask a player's armor class they respond with something like "not including any magical bonuses from these boots and that ring..." you know that it is covenient. Also identification lets characters use their treasure. Many times in 3.5 characters will pick up treasure that could immediately be useful. This can be plot based. Every cultist has a ring of electrical resistence to handle a trap later on. But in most cases characters will just toss unidentified items in a bag and won't use them until the next adventure. So keeping item identification easy is a good thing in my mind.

So making item identification imprecise seems a possibility. Both 3.75 and 4.0 have tied item identification to a skill instead of a spell. I think this is great because it makes it easy to do and it is something you could do in the middle of an adventure. Another reason why this is good it because you can assign a difficultly to things. For example, in the case above a simple normal roll can tell the basic properties of an item, but maybe a very high roll would be required to tell you if an item is cursed. This way you could not only have cursed items, but items could always remain mysterious because they would never be fully identified.