I take it you’ll be planning to do much the same thing with heroes’ magical armour, as this is supposed to scale upward to match monsters’ attack bonuses too.

Watching this closely, munching popcorn.

I have plans for a future article detailing how I plan to handle AC and the other defenses to compensate for the removal of those Enhancement bonuses. That is, as soon as I figure out how to handle AC.

Gotcha! Remove that step where every player buys an “Amulet of Protection +1″ ’cause it’s the cheapest neck slot item and you can’t really afford to leave off your +s to defense, sounds like a good plan, *especially* for your leveling scheme. :)

And this will make e.g. Boots of Quickness (giving +1 to Reflex) feel far, far cooler.

The current plan for my campaign is to “speed” through the heroic tier, and possibly through the other tiers as well. Characters will be leveling up after each session, so that we can see the higher levels of play. (While the player list is not set yet, those most likely to play have all played several characters in the heroic tier already.)

I specifically didn’t mention magic weapon that have other effects that just the +X Magic Weapon. I want to be able to give my players cool magic items, I just don’t want the basic mechanics of the system assuming that I will.

I have no problem with magic being pervasive, I just don’t want to have to hand it out like candy. If I were going with the standard magic items, and using the XP rate that I plan to do I would have to hand out 3 magic items for each 5 sessions multiplied by the number of players I have. So, a 5 player party would average 3 magic items per session. And thats with giving them anything cool like rings, boots, gloves, potions, scrolls, etc.

I did consider just bumping up all of my players items to +X at the appropriate level, but I wanted to remove that overhead from my players. Because I knew that at least 1 person would forget to change their items over, or not really understand… and handling it all on the DM side is just easier.

As for Excalibur, yes it would be an Artifact.

To boil it all down, I simply want to remove the Enhancement bonus from the items. Perhaps I did not explain that properly above.