That would be an exceedingly bad additional rule to introduce.
The existing ability rules place NO bans on increasing abilities (to those who will howl: go read them). The player merely has to justify an increase. If they can justify it is related to the episode it is cheap. If unrelated, the player need only write a one sentence description on their character sheet. Inventing reasons to improve the ability rating of a magic sword is not difficult. (e.g. 'I had it blessed by X', 'I further unlocked its secrets')
If you were to make the rule strict, so it was almost impossible to improve the ability of an item, then this removes the incentive for players to create new characters with cool sounding items (e.g. the example sack of winds), since the player will be unable to raise the ability rating of the item much above 13 (not useful in a 1W2 power campaign).
> If you don't
> want a feeble hobbit to possess the Ring of Doom 5W4, then don't let him find
> it.
A straw man. Please pay attention.
To starkly illuminate the problem with , I originally used Stormbringer as an example. I changed to the Ken & Bob example because it is not a Great Item of Power. It is, in fact, a puny magic item. Ken and Bob have 20 as their best ability; the Magic Sword is only 1W. And 'don't let him find it' is no answer: if Bob were to have cemented the benefit, there is no problem; in fact, the item is so puny for Bob that it is only marginally worthwhile for Bob to cement it.
Tim Ellis notes:
> But also note that there was probably some
> agreement between Bob & Ken as to who would have the sword
I agree. However, I carefully constructed the example to show that whether an item is unbalancing can be a subtle question. Natalie the Narrator could quite easily overlook that the puny Magic Sword 1W was unbalancing, and Bob likewise. Only later would it become apparent. The purpose of rules is to avoid such problems. Natalie could make various post hoc fixes (in effect, introducing additional rules) to try to rectify the problem, but this is kludgy.
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