Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

I believe the rules limit the number of speciifc types of magic items that will be able to work when worn together, not where they must eb worn. So he could in theory have a ring on a tooth or something.

Beholders don't wear rings. Period.

Just because Lewie reacted that way doesn't mean THEY don't know how to wear a ring if they wanted to.

Early on in our games, we decided that the "standard" locations were that way for a reason -- and the justification we came up with was that the magic interacted with your body's Chakras. Overloading/disrupting one's Chakrahs (say, two rings on one hand) usually caused increasing discomfort until death, along with non-functioning of the items (neither was able to draw sufficient energy to operate, but both were causing damaging feedback). Location was a factor, in that one could wear two rings (or a bracelet and one ring) if spread over the two arms. Earrings, however, were too close to your Brow Chakra and so you could only have one magical one, etc. Armors almost always tapped into your Root Chakrah (so no wearing rings/bracelets on your toes/legs if you also wore armor, etc.)

A little cheesy perhaps, but it put to rest most of the usual questions/complaints while also providing a framework for cute character customizations that were not unbalancing...

That's a great explanation. Here's another feasible one: the magical items are "programmed" with respect to functions of body parts on which they are worn.
For example, ring of accuracy is designed to be worn on the hand. When put on, it makes the hand steadier and the fingers more agile, so that the wearer may have better control and achieve better accuracy when firing a bow or similar weapon.
Beholders have no hands; therefore, if a beholder is able to fire a bow at all, he does it by some other means (telekinesis?) and there is no physical limbs that can be improved. If he puts the ring on his tooth, what organs and actions could be improved? Perhaps he would spit more precisely?



[nerdity caution]
Okay, Lewie's magic ring was designed to influence the brain through the hand. So we can assume that there must be some "path" from the hand to the brain that is required for the ring to work.

When the ring is deployed via some organ that's not a hand, and if the path is hard-wired in it, the ring would likely produce an error and fail to function at all (similarly to Charlotte's case, when it could not find a specific part of brain). (An analogy from the real world: I've heard of many popular applications for MS Windows OS's that would run only when installed on the C: drive).

Lewie obviously forgot about the issues of cross-platform deployment (he intended to use beholders in his plan, but somehow didn't take into consideration their very specific "hardware" configuration). So in essence he did something similar to writing a virus for Windows 7, placing it on an USB stick and trying to launch it on an ancient UNIX server that has no USB support yet.

P.S. Maybe that's the reason why beholders don't wear rings: they have no necessary hardware to install them properly and their software is anyway incompatible with many of them.