Oh! Items! How interesting!
Folks who know the flavor....Swan, EFHW, or anyone else...what kind of artifacts might we we be dealing with? I’ve never played in an Asher game, but in Joth’s game the objects were plentiful and (mostly) useful.
So I have not really played in a ton of specifically "Asher RMMs"... but I have found that typically items kind of scale out on either side of the spectrum. In my experience, it goes one of two ways:
Power Item - There is super powerful item that normally needs to end up in the right pair of hands, or be combined with another item (or more I guess), in order to like "activate".
Nothing Item - Items that just literally do nothing and waste time and energy. Best example I can think of is a Faust RMM a while back where they put the ability to "freeze" a player in to play (I think it was Ashes that got frozen actually), and then they put the item of "Flint" in play. Wasted a ton of time trying to figure out how to use to flint to make a fire or whatever in order to "unfreeze" Ashes. In the end... the flint literally did nothing and had no potential to do anything.
I think that focusing on items, based on my experience thus far, kind of leans towards benefiting skum. Does anyone agree with that? I do not have a ton of RMM exp...
My reasoning is pretty much based on the concept that we don't ever get to weigh the risk-reward of the item before being able to potentially use it.
Moreover, to get to the point where we could potentially use said item we have to do the whole "will the real slim shady please stand up" bit... which of course gives a world of info to skum, gives them CC options, fake claim options, angles to push.... and all of it is without knowing what the potential upside will be generally.
I am not saying not to focus on items EVER... but probably this early it is better to leave it aside for the time being.