An ordered list

When I first saw 5th edition DnD I thought its handling of magic items was excellent.  In older editions magic items got complicated and felt a lot more like an optimization problem than like a fantasy adventure.  Characters had to be decked out in magic top to bottom, and had a variety of slots that needed to be filled.  You needed magic boots, magic belt, 2 magic rings, magic hat, etc.  Fantasy stories don't have these absurd numbers of magic items, and this felt to me like it could be better.  5th edition simply has 3 slots for magic items, which reduces the total number of items you need.  I liked that plan.  

I don't like the plan much anymore.  At low levels those 3 slots aren't relevant because you don't have enough magic items.  At medium levels you swap magic items around the party until everyone has their 3 slots full.  At high levels new magic items either are better than your current ones and bump an old one off, or they are useless.  In my campaign with Naked Man we regularly find new items that he is excited to tell us about, consider them, and then try to figure out how much money we can sell them for.  Everyone already has their 3 items, so a new item with niche use or which simply isn't that powerful is worthless.

I can't even save up for later.  I know that I will have 3 attunement slots now and will never get more, so if an item is bad, no point in keeping it.  I do want characters to have different values for items, but a system where most new acquisitions are met with 'meh, I guess we can sell it' isn't working well.

Characters pretty much have an ordered list of magic items, and everything below 3rd place is junk.  That doesn't have to be the case.  Right now the system is bad - it doesn't matter at low level, is okay at medium level, and is bad again at high level.  We should start with 1 slot and go up to 5 or so over time.

A conversation with Naked Man left me thinking about how to implement this.  One thing he pointed out, which is entirely true, is that many characters make their last meaningful advancement choice at level 3.  After that they just use feats to buff stats and continue to get the abilities that are listed.  No other choices are made.

We can potentially solve both of these problems simultaneously.  Feats have the trouble that there are a few great ones and a ton of rubbish ones.  Improving all the terrible feats so that characters consistently take them would be useful - raw stats should be a default just in case you happen to hate all the listed stuff, not the standard thing everyone does.  Right now though I don't want to rewrite all the feats.  

Instead I think I should simply add a new feat to the game:  Mighty Spirit.  Add 1 to your total number of magic item slots.  In addition to this I would also start slots at 1 instead of 3.  Of course this needs to be counterbalanced by giving characters more feats.  My initial thought is to add new feats at level 6, 10, 14, and 18.  This would mean that a player who wanted to take tons of weird feats is welcome to, people who just want more stats can do that, and somebody who wants to have a huge number of magic items can make that happen.

While taking another copy of Mighty Spirit doesn't sound exciting in itself, it opens up some really cool options.  When you take it you aren't just increasing a number, you are adding some powerful new abilities to your character.  By the time peopel are high level they likely all can use a bunch of magic items, but the degree to which this happens is player controlled, giving them more impactful choices.

I want magic items to feel impactful.  I want people to have real choices later in character life that matter, and aren't just +2 to a stat.  I think we can do these things at the same time.