I have advocated in the past for change of function of tokens which I thought were bad for the game.
Sometimes this has eventually happened (nerf to Eldritch healing bonus and Lenses of Divine Sight interaction). Many more times the changes I advocate for are not done.
I'm mentioning this to say I think we have common ground potentially here.
My criteria for change is "do I think this is harming the game at large." This is a high threshold to meet, and in part it is high because making rules changes that reduce the usefulness of peoples collection is always going to be pretty bad for some players. I think the benefits should clearly outweigh the costs by a large margin.
Well, then why can't I equip 10 Rings since I have a bunch of Rings and 10 fingers? "That's the rules they say".
Yes. And also because equipping 10 rings would be BONKERS POWERFUL AND GAME BREAKING.
Let's look at a Melee build, and suppose you're rolling with the Supreme Ring of Elemental Command and Muk's Ring of Havoc.
Adding in 8 more rings gets you for melee:
Ring of the Eel: +3 damage
Ring of the Drake: +2 damage (Or Ring of Brilliance for 2-handed melee)
Ring of the Champion: +1 to hit and damage
Rolland's Ring of Protection +6 for +6 to AC
Ring of Protection +4 for +4 to AC
3x Rare Save Rings for +4 to saves
For a total of +1 to hit, +6 to damage, +10 to AC, and +4 to saves - which is a game breaking amount of power compared to someone who is using 2 rings.
I do not believe is not comparable to the benefits of a bunch of slotless tokens.
So saying "well what's the difference between allowing people to play with 10 rings and with a bunch of slotless tokens" is that playing with 10 rings grants much, much more power than a bunch of slotless tokens does.
These same folks who like slotless Tokens are commenting about how we need to cool it on slot expanders. Double standard I say.
I think most people who want to cool it on slot expanders wand to do so to put the brakes on power creep; not because of some ideological commitment to slot expansion in general.
If every slot expander in the history of TD were limited to common tokens only, or to conditional tokens like the +10 to saves vs Gaze attacks on Spectre's Spectacles, the pushback on slot expanding tokens would be very different, if it existed at all.
I think slotless Tokens never should have been created in the first place. If your character is carrying a Token it should take up SOME slot. Gear slots would have been nice. Maybe 20 Gear slots max. Then Jeff could have came out with cool Tokens like Mules, or Magic bags, or something that eventually expanded the Gear Slot if he wanted to. But having a character that can wear only one pair of shoes but can carry hundreds of other items around.....come on. And now every build has the exact same Tokens.
That horse has left the barn.
As mentioned above, I sometimes believe things are so bad for the game that retroactive changes should be made, but that should be a last resort.
Slotless tokens are not, in my estimation, causing more problems than several other features of the game such as: double puck slides in melee, AC being not very valuable, UR+ token obsolescence within 1-3 years due to power creep, I could go on but you get the picture.
