Rewards affecting D&D Player Behavior

Rewards are essential to D&D: Gaining experience, levels, gold and magic items.
I explore rewards that give mechanical and non-mechanical bonuses.
Mechanical bonuses directly increase PC powers like attack, damage and skills.

Masterwork Armors

Masterwork Armors

Masterwork armors are introduced in Adventurer's Vault.
They give additional AC bonus and other special properties
like additional defenses or resists.

Armorers

Some masterwork armors in adventurer's vault are related to race:
Cloth: Githzerai
Leather: Drow
Hide: Dwarves
Chain: Eladrin, Genasi, Tieflings
Scale: Yuan-ti, Dwarves
Plate: Humans, Githzerai

This is good opportunity to give PCs or friendly NPCs
a moment to shine with creating masterwork armors.

The list above is just a guideline.
If someone can explain how to make a masterwork armor,
it is possible.
It depends on character background, intelligence, race, Nature skill (skins), Arcana skill (cloth; leather), etc.

Masterwork Rules

Masterwork Armor is made using:

• someone that knows the crafting techniques
• correct materials, total market price is the same as normal item,
  also sells for the same market price.
  For example: a magic armor's market price is 20.000 gp.
  A character that has 5000 gp in components cost needs
  pay up 15.000 gp. The masterwork armor's market price is then 20.000 gp.
• takes time to create in hours equal to the item level,
  which is can be interrupted.

Materials

• Cloth Armor
  Githweave: 5000 gp Alexandrite Crystals
  Mindweave: 6000 gp Sapphire Crystals

• Leather Armor
  Drowmesh: 6000 gp Onyx Crystals
  Snakeskin: 7000 gp Emerald Crystals

• Scale Armor
  Drakescale Armor: 4000 gp Rage Drake Scales
                                  5000 gp Dragon Scales

        Wyvern Scale Armor: 6000 gp Wyvern scales
                                            7000 gp Hydra Scales
        Stormscale Armor: 6000 gp Gorgon Scales

• Goggles of Night: 9000 gp Dark Crystal

Where to find Materials

• Crystals: found in caverns in the Fey wild,
  Nature to navigate and to avoid wildlife,
  Dungeoneering to find and navigate cave,
  History to know about caves

• Dark Crystal: found in darkest caves of the Shadowfell,
  Nature to navigate,
  Religion to stay clear of dangers,
  Stealth to bypass Nightwalkers, they can be distracted,
  Dungeoneering for navigating caves
• Scales: kill rage drakes, dragons, wyverns, etc. 

How to use Masterwork Armor

This all depends on how adventures are played.
If it's a pure dungeon crawl with players focusing on tactical combat,
it's best just hand them Masterwork Armor instead of regular armor.
That way, they don't have the hassle of finding components or caring about the details of crafting Masterwork Armor.

If players focus a on non-combat and crafting the above house rules may help crafting Masterwork Armor.

So it all depends on the play style of the group.

Common Magic Items

Common Magic Items in D&D 4E

Choosing magic items

I use the following method for giving out magic items:
1) I look at the theme a character is going for and whether
the magic item enforces that theme.
For example: doing massive damage per turn
                      be good in knowledge skills
                      be a sneaky thief
                      be good against certain type of enemies
                      enhance a favorite attack

2) The magic items used for attacks (weapons, implements) have useful properties and powerful powers.
Armors and the other equipment slots would be filled with
simple items that:

• increase defenses
• increase skills
• gives resistances
• enhances saving throws
• enhances healing surges or healing surge value

An explanation for the choices

First of all, I like the strength of a character to come
from a character, not from his or her magic items.
I dislike the character to be a figurative Christmas tree
to be effective.

There are enough powers for a character to choose from,
especially at higher levels.
I don't want to burden players with an overabundance of powers.
This should also speed combat.

These common items are not as exciting as rares with amazing
daily powers, but as I see them, they aren't supposed to be.
They are treasures and rewards, the players never
seem to mind those.

Shortage of common magic items

When Essentials came out, magic items were divided
in common, uncommon and rare items.
Common magic items have simple properties like described above.

Unfortunately, there aren't many common magic items.
An overview can be found here:
http://www.captainspud.com/4ecommons/

I suppose I can create my own common magic items,
unfortunately the character builder doesn't support
them.
Our group uses the offline character builder,
and we manage to work around some of the issues.
I don't have much experience with the character builder,
so a more in-depth discussion can be found here:
http://dungeonsmaster.com/2009/08/does-character-builder-limit-creativity/