[MUD-Dev] Too much magic?

[Brian Hook]

If a game provides pierced nipples, pretty much every player will
have magical rings dangling from their nipples if given the chance
unless there's a reason for them not to.

Is this a bad thing?  Obviously players do this because they want to
do this and want to have uber buff characters, so there's the risk
that if you take this away you'll have a bunch of irate players
(yes, this assumes a goal-oriented playerbase -- let's not get off
on a tangent about how you do or don't want this type of player in
your game).

But on the other hand, if you can compensate in other ways and
provide an in-game mechanic to limit this, it may make for more
interesting choices.

The first thing you can do, of course, is just limit magical items a
lot, so that high level characters are mostly walking around with
finely crafted items.  This is fine, and at least they're not
walking accessory shops.

Another thought is to implement a "magical nausea/overdose" type of
thing.  Characters can tolerate magical fields up to a point --
beyond that, they start suffering side effects that offset the
bonuses.  Some characters and/or classes and/or races could have
very high or low magical sensitivity, even to the degree that
certain people could implicitly detect magic the way some people can
detect cats.  Magical allergies =)

I'm pretty much torn on this issue.  On the one hand I'd actually
like a world where one magical item per person would almost be
considered excessive, not a world reminiscent of my days as a
13-year old Monty Haul DM.  On the other hand, I really don't want
players to get frustrated because they can't have magical crap in
every possible character location.

Brian
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