Eyes of the Eagle

I dug up a pair of old binoculars to bring on the Dungeness Spit hike, and have since started going to local parks and using them to watch boats.  It's generated some good, first-person qualitative data for the wilderness vision distance question.

Observations:

There's another park across the lake from the park I go to.  It's about two miles of water.  With 8x magnification, on a clear day, I can count the cars in the parking lot, clearly make out the portable toilet, and can tell one person (or person with dog) from two people from five-ish people, but can't really discern anything about them other than that they're bipeds.  With the naked eye, I can often make out the glint of metal or glass from there on a sunny day but otherwise would be hard pressed to tell it apart from a field.

It is also easy to make out the contours of mountains about 40 miles away (I think, that's about where the range begins), and which parts of the mountain have snow on them, again provided clear weather.  To the naked eye, the view is still pleasing but I would be hard pressed to make any plans off of it.

With 8x magnification, I can sometimes make out the tail art on airliners coming and going from the airport about 15 miles south of me as they pass overhead, but I have been unable to observe the flight numbers.  I was able to identify an F-18 as such, and to see that an H-60 helicopter in the distance had its side doors open (I could see sky through it).

I was able to observe a pair of helium party balloons (lost from a party I presume) ascending about a mile north of my position, though I couldn't see them with naked eye so I stumbled on them accidentally while watching an eagle.  They were silhouetted against the sky or I don't think I'd've been able to see them with magnification either.

Sometimes I can read the numbers on the sails of boats; I don't actually know how close they were or how large the numerals were though.  Generally reading the names of small boats off their bows is beyond me unless they're quite close, but I have been able to read the names of two large tour boats off of their bows at maybe half a mile of distance, one in twilight.  Sometimes in the evening the air over the water shimmers like hot pavement and it gets hard to make out details of anything.  The lights from houses across the lake twinkle like stars.

The view of the moon is very good, especially because it is full right now.  I could make out some craters that were at an angle to the sun, and to see the shadows inside their rims.  I have never seen the moon like that before.  I was also able to observe some satellites, as basically dim stars moving on smooth tracks.

Remarks:

I really wonder how fleets coordinated their actions before optics.  I feel like making out semaphore at a mile without a spyglass would be really hard.  Did they just sail in really close order?  Did captains just have a ton of autonomy?  I was reading about the audible range of hunting horns and elk bugles a while back and I recall those being about a mile or so depending on terrain, but I would guess that auditory signaling might be hard at sea with the wind carrying it away.

ACKS' description for Eyes of the Eagle has them giving 100x magnification, which is pretty nuts.  Low-powered binoculars are 7-8x, high-powered are 10-12x.  Spotting scopes for long-range shooting are generally 24-60x, and that lets you observe groupings out to hundreds of yards.  100x is in an awkward spot between high-power spotting scopes and low-power astronomical telescopes.  With 100x magnification, I think it would be pretty easy to count individuals a mile or two away (but your field of view would also be obliterated - there's no way you could just wear 100x magnification binoculars like contact lenses in your daily life, never mind dungeoneering).

Amusingly, none of the other rulesets I checked (OSRIC, S&W, 3e, PF, 5e) listed a magnification for their Eyes of the Eagle.  3e, Pathfinder, and 5e did have a nonmagical spyglass though, with 2x magnification for 1000 gp, which is a little funny since they weren't definitely invented until 1608, well into the Gunpowder Age, and since Galileo also developed 8x and 23x telescopes by 1609.

I was surprised how much atmospheric effects mattered even over this fairly-short distance of two miles.

"The glint of metal" is probably a fine way to introduce a distant wilderness encounter with sentients.

ACKS: Last Rites

So I'm running a game with a mythic underworld, and lost souls of people who have died in unfortunate ways are a fairly common encounter type in the dungeon.  Got me to thinking about how before going into the dungeon, adventurers might be wise to make their peace with whatever gods they worship, so that they hopefully end up in a quality afterlife rather than a crap one.

Makes sense as a cleric spell, or even better as a use for Theology (which is currently a meh proficiency that never gets picked).  A character can tend to the souls of four characters who share his faith per rank of Theology, in about an hour a day of prayer, confession, ritual, guilt-tripping, and suchlike.  The beneficiaries of this effect gain a +2 "state of soul" bonus to Tampering with Mortality rolls if they die while under the spiritual guidance of a theologian.  Hireling and henchmen under the influence of a theologian may gain +1 morale because they know they're in good with the big man in the sky, but are also prone to bouts of moral behavior.  Multiple theologians do not stack.  Theologians are hireable as Healers in terms of availability and wages, but they may not want to follow you into the wilderness, so "organic" theologians are still convenient.

ACKS - Mundane Equipment Kits

Once upon a time, I wrote that simplifying encumbrance by putting mundane gear into bundles would be great and useful.  So here are some kits, in the style of Beyond the Black Gate's old standard adventuring kit.  I'm making the reasonable assumption that players will buy backpacks and count their arms, armor, and military oil separately.  I'm also assuming that rations weigh 2lb per day, per page 94.  This means that one day of rations is an item, and six days of rations are about a stone (though I am sorely tempted to fudge a little and make a week's rations a stone, for roundness), assuming you can get water from somewhere else.

A backpack holds four stone, and so can be used to carry up to four of the following kits.

• Burglary Kit: Thieves' tools, crowbar, large sack, small mirror, hooded lantern, pint of lantern oil (four hours of light). Cost 41gp, weight 1 stone.
• Camping Kit: Tent, blanket/bedroll, tinderbox, 1 day of rations, wine/waterskin, fishhooks and line.  Cost 25gp, weight 1 stone.
• Replace fishhooks and line with hatchet for +3gp cost.
• Extra rations: 6 days of rations, cost 3 gp, weight 1 stone.
• Extra iron rations (normal rations go bad in about a week): 6 days of iron rations, cost 6gp, weight 1 stone.
• One day of water: Cost 3gp for containers (about four waterskins), weight 1 stone.  Refillable, but be careful with your source.
• Climbing Kit: 100' rope, small hammer, 12 iron spikes, grappling hook, pouch of chalk. Cost 30gp, weight 1 stone
• Dungeoneering Kit: 6 torches (1 hour of light each), dagger, 50' of rope, 12 iron spikes, small hammer, large sack. Cost 8gp, weight 1 stone.
• Replace dagger with a set of manacles with key for +17 gp cost.
• 10' pole - inexpensive, weight 1 stone, doesn't fit into a backpack.
• Gothic Monster Hunting Kit: Holy symbol, mallet and 4 stakes, 1lb garlic, 1lb belladonna, silver dagger, small mirror. Cost 73gp, weight 1 stone
• Medical Kit: 2lb of comfrey (HP), 1lb of birthwort (poison), 1lb goldenrod (disease), 1lb woundwort (HP), small bonesaw. Cost 54gp, weight 1 stone
• More of herbs: 2 lb of comfrey, 1 lb of birthwort, 1 lb of goldenrod, 2 lb of woundwort, cost 60 gp, weight 1 stone.
• Monster Part Collection Kit: Four jars, scalpel, bottle of cheap liquor.  Cost 7gp, weight 1 stone.

The main things I feel like I'm currently missing are mapping (with parchment, ink, and so forth) and navigation (compass, sextant, spyglass, &c).  But I don't think dungeon mapping gear would take up a full stone, and navigation gear isn't in the book and quite possibly also not a full stone, so I guess those two are just going to get skipped.

Two Thoughts on Loot

On from my player Alex:

WRT magic items; I feel like one thing we may be missing on the ladder to domain level is selling off some of the bling...

And damn if he isn't right.  We ended up with a veritable armory of swords +1 in the last campaign I ran, and in Alex's game last semester, we were so loaded with swords that we stacked a pair of +3s...  on a henchman (admittedly, we had next to no fighters).  A sword +1 resells for 5kGP, +2 for 15kGP, and +3 for 30kGP and XP, all of which add up quite nicely when your party's collection of magic swords gets to the point where you need a wiki page to keep track of them all.  The "sell before use for XP" rule makes a lot more sense when PCs actually, you know, sell magic items...

The other thought: as I'm rolling up things that treasure maps point to, I've hit a number of fairly serious magic items.  Permanent effect, trope-bearing, multi-use stuff.  And I had a good laugh at myself when I had the thought that, "You know, a ring of wishes would be less trouble, since I can more-or-less count on them burning it out fairly quickly for avarice, rather than it becoming a long-term source of non-XP power."  Still, it'll be interesting to see some powerful gear other then the boring old Sword +n in PC hands, and they do still have to do the dirty work of finding it...

The Standard Kit

I really like ACKS' templates.  However, they're a pain in the butt to build, because you have to pick equipment.  I do like the notion of providing flavor to a template via well-chosen mundane gear, but it gets to be a bit much to pick everything when you're aiming to build multiple templates per class.  I've also noticed that some of the published templates miss out on important things; we had a new player bring in a spellsword his first session with the template from the book.  When the party was separated, he found himself without torches through no fault of his own!  He managed to survive the ghoul-teleport debacle anyway, but this was due in part to DM mercy as a result of being shafted by the template.

We've long been fans of Ming's Standard Adventuring Kit, and made great use of it during the last campaign, but it was occasionally irritating that the prices and weights of things were not in accordance with ACKS' rules.  It also seems a decent solution to the template equipment problem; a template with "Flavorful weapon, appropriate armor, one or two other misc items, and the Standard Kit" is very quick and easy to assemble.

So what does the Standard Kit look like in ACKS?

• Backpack
• Blanket
• Pint of military oil
• Small hammer
• 12 iron spikes
• One week's iron rations (medium-quality, 3gp)
• 50' hemp rope
• Sack, large
• Sack, small
• Tinderbox
• 6 torches
• Waterskin

Total price: close enough to 15gp
Total weight: 2 stone (12 items)

The main alteration from Al's list is the removal of the grappling hook, as grappling hooks are expensive in ACKS.  The beer and holy symbols were also omitted.  I also waffled over the inclusion of a dagger in the list, but hitting 12 items on the nose was too convenient, 18 gp is a less-easy-to-deal with number than 15, and clerics can't use 'em.

Next time: actual templates.

Of Nethack and Item Identification

During some downtime last week between finals and graduation (also - yes I am graduated!  Now taking a break at home before job and lease start), I decided to take up Nethack.  It turned out to be a wonderful hybrid between Dwarf Fortress and TSR D&D, and I had quite a bit of fun (including DF-grade 'FUN') right up until I found and ID'd a wand of wishes and suffered a crippling case of decision paralysis.  But the whole experience did tickle some brain cells on a problem that has bugged our ACKS group before - how to identify items?

Really the problematic items here are the command-word items (wands, staves, swords of charming, those sort of things) and some of the edge-case passive items like rings of fire resistance.  Potions are easy enough to get with Alchemy, scrolls are quickly deciphered with Read Languages, and we tend to let people determine the bonus of a suit of magic armor or a weapon after sparring with it some (we assume fighter-sense and combat experience provide a fairly good sense for how much better than normal those sort of things are, and I'm way too lazy to keep those secret in use for any longer than I have to).  But I think the keys to handling charged item identification are suggestive descriptions and blind activation.

To say that Nethack's wand descriptions are suggestive would be quite misleading, as they're random, but they are at least consistent and got me thinking about charged-item description, which we have to far slacked on pretty hard.  Perhaps all detection wands have a small crystal ball embedded on the end of a stick whose type is appropriate to the type of detection, or offensive wands appeared charred, or so forth.  This lets players get a general idea of the type of a wand, but not its exact function.

Blind activation is something which Nethack does do well, and it is one of the standard ways to identify wands.  ACKS, however, has no clear facility for it.  Upon a re-reading of the magic item identification rules and the wands, staves, and rods rules, it's not entirely clear whether the user needs to know a command word or just sort of points and clicks.  Given the sort of hilarity that building experimental wand-testing setups can result in, I'm inclined to rules in favor of blind activation (particularly with the caveat that a blindly-activated staff will use one of its capabilities at random).  Limiting blind activation to Magical Engineers and Arcane Dabblers (both at -4) might also be reasonable (also wow, I never realized bards got Arcane Dabbling for free...  that's a pretty serious proficiency at mid-to-high levels).  In either case, there's still a trade-off; running a full identification will tell you how many charges it has, but will take time and money, while a blind activation takes maybe a turn but burns a charge and has a chance of frying your whole party if it turns out the copper stick with a piece of amber on the end that you thought was a wand of treasure detection is actually a wand of lightning...

Other thought - Alchemy II is kind of a bummer, and given how potion miscibility works in ACKS, it would be cool if there were a way for players to pre-identify the 'potion countdown' (potency?) of a given potion so that they could better plan their imbibing.  I'm sort of thinking potency identification on 18+ for Alchemy 1, then +4 extra per further rank (as usual) so that taking Alchemy II lets you more than double your ability to do it.  On the other hand, alchemy is already quite good on the whole, and allowing methods to pre-determine potency generates more paperwork / record-keeping.

I also sort of want to build an extensive themed potion descriptor table for parties lacking an alchemist, but given how often that prof gets taken and how effective it is, I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

ACKS Scripts - Magic Item Availability

One thing which can sometimes be annoying in ACKS is when your players ask "Well, what magic items are available in town this month?"  When it comes to most goods like war galleys and military oil, indexing into the availability table and rolling the percent chance isn't so bad, because there just aren't that many things.  But depending on how you count scrolls, there are close on 300 magic items in ACKS Core, which can make playing the "magic item availability guessing game" a right royal pain in the arse if your players have a long wish-list of low-probability items.

So I automated it.  Here's a python script that checks availability for each item in this text file based on price and market class.  I'm reasonably certain it would work on Windows if you passed the input file in with Windows-style path separators, but don't actually have any (working) Windows machines to test it on :\ .  Works on linux, though.

Writing and running this script has also made me realize that scrolls are much more available than we thought, though the selection of available spells is pretty random.  This has a number of interesting implications.  First, wizards can use bought scrolls to expand their spell selection with a bit more control than learning from a master, and with a higher rate of success than doing research (as long as the spell is one available on bought scrolls, ie in Core).  Likewise, high-power scrolls of Death Spell, Disintegrate, Flesh to Stone, and similar are a nice (if pricey) way for a mid-level party to add some one-shot punch.  On the other side, high-level cleric scrolls of Restore Life and Limb, Remove Curse, Remove Disease, and Neutralize Poison can provide super-healing in the wilderness for a high price (something I know the Grim Fist has done; I kind of wondered where they had gotten two RL&L scrolls...).  Finally, with scrolls more readily available, the thief and bard ability to read scrolls is suddenly much more useful than when they were only found as random treasure or crafted.

In any case, this is the most recent of a decent pile of scripts I've written for ACKS.  I'll release more as I clean them up.  Others of interest include a treasure generator (there's already a good online version but I needed to write a recursive parser anyway, and didn't want trade goods in hoards by default), automatic hex-stocker (needs expanding with the recursive parser from the treasure generator, more monster data files), a henchman generator (needs naming, proficiencies, and hench magic items, but does choose class intelligently based on stats and generate wizard spells known), and one that takes in a text file containing information on a region's towns and their relative locations and generates all the mercantile demand modifiers (needs waypointing to cut down on the number of links you have to specify - all traffic from the Mediterranean to ports on the Atlantic has to pass through Gibraltar or Suez, so it would be better to specify distance from each Med port to Gibraltar and Suez and each Atlantic port to Gibraltar and Suez, but as it stands you'd need to specify the distance from each Mediterranean port to each Atlantic port, which is a real pain).  And I guess I should get a github or something for storing these, rather than throwing them in a web-public directory...

Random Books

Riffing off of Query-Based Reconnaissance, Grognardling, and the Dungeon Dozen, I decided to come up with some books for fantasy campaigns, along with topics and number of questions.  I think I'm going to do something like "For each day of study, a reference work allows you to ask one question about its topic, up to a maximum of n plus your Intelligence modifier.  These questions need not be asked immediately, and may be asked during combat without taking any time."

And so, books!

1. Manual of the Black Lotus: An Assassin's Formulary.  A thin black book with no writing on the exterior; provides up to five questions on poisons.  Often written in obscure, secret, or malevolent languages (Zaharan, Infernal, Assassin's Cant, &c).
2. Drums in the Deep: The Memoirs of Durik Thalagrim, Goblin Hunter.  A formidable tome bound in unadorned brown leather and written in a clear style, providing up to seven questions on goblins or subterranean navigation.  Almost always written in Dwarven.
3. Of Gods Most Foul.  A thick book, with an iron cover and a lock.  An exceptionally complete work on the deities of the monstrous races, this tome provides nine questions on the theology, worship, and rituals of such gods.  Compiled and written by a militant inquisitorial arm of one of the major good-aligned churches, typically in a Church Latin-equivalent language and in a writing style similar to the historical Malleus Maleficarum.
4. A Compleat History of the Broken Wands.  A scholarly treatise on the history, membership, tactics, and campaigns of a famous company of mercenary wizards, as well as the opponents that they fought.  The book provides up to five questions on these topics, and may additionally provide a few tips or suggestions for spell research to combative mages.  Often written in Elvish, and considered a canonical volume by Elven war-wizards.
5. The Saga of Ingbold Norviksson, as Compiled and Translated by Imris the Scholar.  Typically found as an illuminated manuscript, though the first editions are rumored to be on scrolls of sealhide, the Saga provides up to seven questions on the gods, heroes, myth, and culture of the Frozen Northlands or other viking-equivalent culture (should such exist in your campaign world).  Typically written in common, but in the style of the historical Prose Edda, and often with very confusing metaphors.
6. Shortbreads, and other Hobbit Cuisine.  A cookbook, typically bound in green, and providing five questions on cooking or hobbits.  Typically written in Common, as no respectable hobbit would be caught reading a book with such a terrible title.  It's rumored that the original author was ostracized from his shire as a result of the publication, and became the first (and perhaps last) adventuring hobbit.
7. On the Creation and Descent of the Beast Races.  A weighty tome with a wolf's head on the cover, written by a clearly unbalanced wizard with a good amount of personal experience with beastmen, On the Creation is still a useful reference work for those interested in hunting them.  It provides six questions on the habits, societies, religion, and arcane methods of crossbreeding to the astute reader.  Written in an odd rambling style, typically in an obscure arcane language.
8. The Unabridged Travels of Alain of Murdosh.  A blue-bound volume of fantastical stories of the sea by a retired deckhand-turned-pirate captain.  Some of them are even true!  Most useful to adventurers, however, is the section on managing a crew of rowdy pirates.  As a result, the book provides four questions on nautical superstition and the practice of piracy.  It may be used for a further four questions regarding other fantastical locales mentioned, but the answers to these have only a 50% chance of being correct.
   

Interesting Magic Items

"It is not the sword, but the hand that wields it."

A significant portion of Trailblazer's analysis of 'the spine' is motivated by the desire to prove that "The Big Six" items are not necessary for game balance.  For those unfamiliar, the Big Six are magic weapons, magic armor and shields, rings of protection, cloaks of resistance, amulets of natural armor, and ability score boosters like the belt of giant strength and the headband of intellect.  These items are all distinguished by 1) requiring no actions to activate and 2) applying bonuses to the core combat stats of a character (mental ability score boosters are an odd case, in that they increase the save DCs for spellcasters, but are significantly less useful for noncasters).  As TB's analysis shows, these items contribute significantly to a character's power, especially in regards to defense; of the big six, three exist for the sole purpose of boosting AC, while only one exists solely for boosting attack and damage.  Further, the cloak of resistance is critical in boosting poor saves to a reasonable rate of success, especially as character level increases.  Poor saves grow at 1/3 of character level, while monster special ability save DCs grow at 1/2 of monster hit dice.  As monsters of CR n often have greater than n hit dice, and sometimes as many as 2n hit dice or more, player character poor saves are rapidly outstripped without some kind of extra bonus (namely the cloak).

Trailblazer uses its analysis to suggest that there may be alternatives to using the Big Six, namely Combat Reactions, Action Points, and similar.  Though I don't remember seeing an explicit motivation for this move, I have inferred several.  First, getting rid of the Big Six combats the "Christmas Tree Effect", namely that player characters are so decked out in shiny magical items that they look like Christmas trees done up in tinsel and glowing ornaments.  This is a problem both because it generates downright silly character portraits (see some of the art from the Epic Level Handbook, for example), and the concentration of wealth involved stresses the economics of the campaign world.  Removing the Big Six also eliminates magic item turnover.  We've all seen it; you find a +3 sword and all of a sudden your +2 sword, companion for many long adventures, a named and storied weapon, falls by the wayside.  The final complaint that I see about the Big Six is that they're boring.  They're uninteresting and don't feel magical.

So I thought to myself, "Hey, let's follow Trailblazer's lead, get rid of the Big Six, and make some magic items that are interesting."  I've got a couple ideas along these lines.  TB suggests items with spells per day; I'd actually done this before reading Trailblazer's suggestions in this regard, by giving a party a Cloak of the Cat, which allowed the wearer to use of Cat's Grace and Catfall each once per day.  That was kind of interesting, though to be fair it was a bit underpowered at the level I gave it out.  I'd probably make some such 'buff items' usable as swift actions, so that as with the Big Six, they don't have a huge impact on the action economy of a combat.  I also considered various conditional save boosters, like an amulet that grants a bonus to saves against poison, or a bonus to will saves, or a bonus to just your poor saving throw(s).  Again, less bland than normal, and not complex enough to bog down play.  Magic weapons with spells per day that gain charges under certain conditions, like a bloodthirsty weapon that gains a charge when you slay a living foe with it, or one that gains a charge on a critical threat, might also work.  A little more complex, but they're primarily a tool for melee classes, whose gameplay and choice sets tend to be simpler than those of casters.  If we can trust a caster with a pile of wands, each of which has charges, it seems reasonable to trust the fighters similarly.

But this post isn't really about those interesting magic items.

Because I realized, as I went to write that post, that nearly every fantasy RPG blogger and their brother has a post like that, either lamenting the lack of interesting magic items, suggesting how to make magic items more interesting, or giving a few examples of their own.  Likewise, all those interesting things slow down play, confuse new players (or if they're situational bonuses, like a bonus against poison, they're forgotten and wasted), and increase book-keeping.  Plus, it's possible those guys playing fighters wanted to avoid the kind of resource management that casters have to do, and really don't want to deal with spells per day or charged swords.  It's all fine and good for the DM to be handing out interesting items, but it's the players who have to deal with actually using them.

Which brings us to the crux of things - D&D is a game that we play for fun.  "Are the Big Six items fun?" is, in a sense, a more important question than whether they're interesting or boring or balanced or anything else.  Likewise, are 'interesting' magic items fun?  Sure, it's nice to have an oddball magic item now and then, as Tim's use of the Stone of Alarm, Horn of the Tritons, and Forn of Hog showed in the sequel campaign.  But I get the feeling that if every damn magic item operated like those, it would get kinda overwhelming...  unless you had fewer magic items.

Which led me to the conclusion that the best way to handle the Big Six is to make them inherent / innate bonuses.  I'm considering two schemes, but they both work very similarly.  In the first, when you level, you get a budget of astral gold pieces that you can 'spend' on inherent bonuses.  In the second, you spend literal gold pieces while carousing, and this boosts your inherent capabilities.  If you're boosting your Constitution, it might be that you literally drank thousands and thousands of gold pieces worth of ale, and your liver has turned to steel, rendering you more resistant to attacks.  Natural armor bonus from expensive ritual scarifications, Intelligence bonus from concocting expensive elixirs which boost your brainpower, Wisdom bonus from sacrificing gold to your deity in exchange for guidance, attack and damage bonus from getting into many many barfights and paying for damages, and so forth.  Gold gets spent, you get permanent enhancement bonuses to things at the same rates it would have cost you normally.  Pros and cons of these inherent bonuses:

• On the plus side, they can't be stolen from you.  On the minus side, when you die, the other PCs can't take them off your corpse (which, in turn, doesn't screw with party wealth when people die.  So it's really a plus, from my perspective, but players might be less happy about it).
• On the plus side, they apply regardless of what weapon you're using or armor you're wearing, increasing your versatility in that regard.  On the minus side, they can't be changed once chosen - if you invest umpty thousand gold pieces in boosting your strength, but realize later that you should've gone with dexterity, you can't just swap your gauntlets of ogre power with the rogue's gloves of dexterity.
• On the plus side, they can't be dispelled - they're part of you.  On the minus side, they don't stack with buffs or any Big Six magic items you might find; if you have +4 to strength by this scheme, it's a +4 enhancement bonus, and Bull's Strength does you no good at all.  Likewise, if you have a +2 weapon bonus, a +1 sword is no help (should you happen to find one, which is unlikely).
• On the plus side, you get to choose whatever you want, rather than finding a +1 ring of protection when everyone in the party has +2s, and you can choose to specialize in unusual ways.  If you have a melee mage, you can get the +3 weapons without stepping on the fighter's toes.  On the minus side, you only get these things between adventures; you no longer have the possibility of going "Ooh, I grabbed a random wang from the dragon's hoard, and it's +n!  I stab the dragon with it!"
• On the minus side, you can't take these things off of dead NPCs.  On the plus side, this gives me an excellent excuse to hand out tons and tons of gold pieces.  When was the last time the dragon's hoard was actually enough gold for the dragon to sleep on?  Those days are back, baby.

And finally, it lets me give out magic items that aren't awesome because they're +n, but because they have interesting properties.  You might find a flaming sword.  It's just flaming.  That's it.  And it'll grow with your fighter, because you keep boosting your personal enhancement bonus.  Sting?  Just an orcbane shortsword with some history.  Excalibur?  Holy vorpals, batman.  Also expect to find wands, potions, staves, and wondrous items that aren't Big Six.  And maybe some of the interesting stuff I mentioned earlier will work its way in.  But the really neat thing, to me, is that this scheme should let a high-level character, naked and armed only with a rolling pin, kick an amount of ass comparable to the amount he would kick if properly armed and armored.  Yeah, he'll miss the +5 armor bonus from his breastplate, but he'll still have a high enough AC, to-hit, damage, and saving throws to have a chance against a high-level foe.  He doesn't need a ton of bling to do his thing, because he is badass.  Did Conan need armor to kick ass?  Didn't think so.  Why should your barbarian?