| abstract
| - Any man on the street with a few nasty scars and good tale or two can call himself an adventurer, but there are a few true tests that can determine the difference between a talented liar and the kind of person who considers fighting dragons a slow day at the office. It's not demonstrable skills, or nerve, or even a history of past accomplishments. It's magic items. I know that this sounds counterintuitive, but work it out for a second. Put a fighting guy with just better than average stats, some class features, and some HD out on the front line, and what do you have? Basically, you have a giant, which means "NPC". Without a magic weapon to bypass DR, good armor to avoid being clobbered, healing magic to recover for the next fight, and crazy extra effects to surprise an enemy like dimension dooring with the Cape of the Mountebank or reflecting a spell with a Ring of Spell Turning, you just don't have enough mojo to call yourself a PC. Monsters have bigger raw stats and better recharge times on their abilities, so if you don't have something extra you aren't going to be able to compete. Magic items are the true test of the adventurer because they say "I'm trying to grow my power asymmetrically and I'm willing to do it by stealing it from other people who are also growing their power asymmetrically." Anyone can fire a bow at a manticore in flight, but only an adventurer is so concerned with power that he'll track that manticore to its lair and risk getting boxed in by a family of manticores just for the opportunity to root through its dropping on the off chance some would-be hero got eaten by the thing and a magical trinket or two survived passing through its innards. Some would called that "greedy", but in fact that's "hardcore." Real adventurers are willing and able to risk their life on just the hope that their efforts will bring magical loot, and it's worth it. The more magical loot one gains, the more able an adventurer is to survive the next terrible risk that might offer magical loot. Heck, just holding onto any reasonable-sized pile of magical loot means that one is to be reckoned with. A real adventurer won't sell his Helm of Brilliance for a pile of "magic beans" and he's not going to put himself in a situation where a common cutpurse is going to walk away with his Pearl of the Sirenes, and he's going to set himself up in society in a role where the local king or warlord can't just send a few longbowmen and an apprentice with detect magic to confiscate his magical loot "for the good of the state." Magic items are not just a reflection of your power, but a reflection of your character and your ability to choose your own destiny. That being said, magic item creation and ownership is a big deal, and should not be the abbreviated (and broken) process that you see in the DMG. Here are some rules to make it sane and easy.
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