Magic items turn to dust, and that's a good thing

There's an expectation behind the words "magic items" that has been ingrained into us by years of D&D and Pathfinder, that gear = permanent increase in power. The problem is that this is how video games feel like, but not how TV or book narratives feel like, so if I want to create the latter (and I do), I need to veer away from that.

Vivid magic items all exhaust themselves, none of them is permanent. This is partly because I lean toward animated TV narratives, where people have signature items (and don't replace them after every adventure for a better model), and partly because I want players to come up with innovative solutions. 

Recall: How do you overcome a difficulty? It depends on how you present your PC's action; and if your PC has some cool item, they can do some cool thing. Like, maybe ignore the giant snail's hard shell by using a resonating chime that creates vibrations. So magical items are good. But it's even better to constantly have different ones, because if you keep using your magnetic spike on every brigand's sword, the shtick might wear off, and there goes the innovation. (Or you might come to really like it, and then it becomes signature, which is for another time)

The conclusion: Magical items should disappear after a few uses. And there should always be new ones to get.

This ties well with one of the biggest design questions: Why go adventuring. In Crystal Heart you go into the world to get Crystals. In Vivid, you go to get magical items. The people no longer have magic, the only magic is in items, so having them is the only way to get unique abilities that can help solve big problems (like defeating a huge monster that threatens a village, or being powerful enough to escort settlers through a wild land). It's the "resource you can only get from dangerous places", the "why it makes sense adventurers exist."

But for all of this to work, we must tackle the issue of item destruction: When should it happen? And, doesn't it suck to have your cool item just break? In D&D it sure does. So in other words, we need a way to make the breakage feel fair, and maybe even exciting. 

Enter: dust. When an item runs out of magic, it doesn't literally breaks. The magic just falls off, in the form of grey dust. If you drank a potion - there's dusk residue inside. If you throw an exploding ice crystal - there's dust to be gathered from the floor afterward. When the magnetic spike's power runs off, dust falls off of it, but the spike remains (so your magical shoes won't just crumble, your feet are safe). The more robust the item - that is, the less likely it is to lose its magic - the more portions of dust you'll get.

And currently, dust can be used for one main thing: to find magic items. There's no "detect magic" spell in this world (there are no spells), so when you want to check if something's magical, you need to either try it out, or scatter dust on it, because it makes magical things glow. Dust helps PCs find new items, which is exciting, so getting dust is pretty awesome. It's the promise of things to come.

The other issue is the timing of the item's destruction, and currently that's very much in the player's hands. All items are one of two types: One-use, lasting for a known amount of time (so of course the player is in charge) or "breaks on Complication". In the latter case, when the PC gets a Complication - which is always a known quantity, and occasionally even a player decision - the GM can decide the item breaks or degrades a step. This only applies if the item was used in the current action, though, so if you want your bright sword to stay bright and awesome, you can just never use it, and it'll be safe. And if you do use it - you know you're taking the risk.

Magic! It should be magical, not formulaic.