The trouble with magic items in 5e D&D

[Shipyard Locked]

It's good that 5e made magic items almost entirely optional. However, they may have gone a bit too far.

What I mean is, so many cool special abilities have been baked into the progression of the classes in 5e D&D that it's difficult to cook up magic items that don't feel redundant or boring. The Dungeon Master's Guide makes a noble effort to fill the tiny crevices left between the archetypes, feats and spells, but I often find myself flipping through the item list thinking, "That's just extra damage, the rogue can already do that, the wizard can already do that, this effect overlaps with a feat, this became redundant three levels ago..."

Homebrewing rewards in these conditions is oddly reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering or 4th edition D&D design: coming up with 25 complicated ways of doing something that was already effectively covered by 3 basic iterations. This issue is probably going to get thornier once Xanathar's Guide to Everything hits.

 

[Raleel]

yea. i noticed that as well. it's great for balance and all, but it does tend to silo things. it makes it harder to give folks new things mechanically.

I like 5e in a lot of ways, it's not for me. It'll bring in a lot of new players, and I think that is wonderful.

 

[The Butcher]

"That's just extra damage, the rogue can already do that, the wizard can already do that, this effect overlaps with a feat, this became redundant three levels ago..."

Magic items in D&D have always replicated character abilities. Cloaks of elvenkind, healing potions, wands of fireballs...

I have never ran D&D5 but I'd welcome the chance to break free from the magic item expectation treadmill. I'd be inclined to tie magic items to character level (a la D&D3 Weapons of Legacy) and to intertwine them with character abilities (e.g. the Scepter of Light grants any spellcasters +1 damage per die when casting radiant damage spells or abilities).

 

[Raleel]

Yea, it's built very much to avoid simple pluses like that. There might be some other options.

I feel like magic items that allow for more problem fixing and less combat tend to work a little better. But also they tend to not come up very much, as it is often a combat focused game.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

Magic items in D&D have always replicated character abilities. Cloaks of elvenkind, healing potions, wands of fireballs

True, but I feel the issue has been magnified by feats and the desire to have no 'dead levels', even on classes like fighters and rogues.

... and to intertwine them with character abilities.

This is one of the best solutions. It's more labor intensive that items anyone can use effectively, but it certainly feels special to the individual player. Might be a little weird justifying it in-world though. "Huh, isn't it weird how there was a gauntlet specially designed for a techno-monk in this ruined druidic labyrinth?"

I feel like magic items that allow for more problem fixing and less combat tend to work a little better.

Absolutely in my experience, but as usual, "There's an app a spell for that."

 

[The Butcher]

This is one of the best solutions. It's more labor intensive that items anyone can use effectively, but it certainly feels special to the individual player. Might be a little weird justifying it in-world though. "Huh, isn't it weird how there was a gauntlet specially designed for a techno-monk in this ruined druidic labyrinth?"

Yeah, that would probably require either letting go of randomness, or working with it (maybe the druids defeated a techno-monk and kept his effects as trophies?).

 

[Shipyard Locked]

Yeah, that would probably require either letting go of randomness, or working with it (maybe the druids defeated a techno-monk and kept his effects as trophies?).

Oh that would certainly work once, maybe twice, but it might start to get funny as each of your special snowflake PCs coincidentally finds the items that fit them like a glove over a dozen levels of play. :p

Gives me flashbacks to 4th edition's items 'wishlist' that players were encouraged to give the GM so he could better plan their 'drops'...

 

[The Butcher]

Oh that would certainly work once, maybe twice, but it might start to get funny as each of your special snowflake PCs coincidentally finds the items that fit them like a glove over a dozen levels of play. :p

Use randomness. Also make items universally useful but only marginally beneficial outside their intended audience. (also an old standby, what use are gauntlets of ogre power to a magic-user anyway?). And finally, make your setting ancient and hoary enough that countless civilizations have left rare and strange legacy items).

 

[thedungeondelver]

I've run in to this myself. On the one hand, it makes 5e easy to run a Lankhmar or Middle Earth setting where magic items are so rare as to be nigh-unique, but on the other hand for me both as a DM and a player part of the appeal of D&D is gadgetry. A clumsy but, I think, fitting analogy would be a sci-fi game where everyone did the power armor thing but also everyone was a superhero and none of the armor's gadgets were really worth fiddling with. Then it's kind of meh. They went too far to remove the "Christmas Tree" effect that some Monty Haul games from OD&D all the way through late 3.5 could have (IDK about 4e, was it dripping with magic items too? I know they were listed in the PHB and the dictum was to the DM "Your players will ask for some magic items at each level, do your best to fulfill their wishes" or something like that - not edition warring, just sort of summing up the little I recall).

 

[Shipyard Locked]

(IDK about 4e, was it dripping with magic items too? I know they were listed in the PHB and the dictum was to the DM "Your players will ask for some magic items at each level, do your best to fulfill their wishes" or something like that - not edition warring, just sort of summing up the little I recall).

That was the gist of it, yes. Crucially, the game's combat math also assumed players would be gaining certain plusses from items by certain level thresholds, so you really had to stay on top of that. 4e style magic items tended to either boost a character existing special abilities or perform an effect that you'd already seen before, but with esoteric permutations. Like: "If you hit an enemy of the shapechanger subtype with this weapon and an ally is standing next to it, your ally and the target switch places and your ally gets +4 to hit the same target but -2 to the damage."

I also don't want to come off as edition warring, as I actually ran several 4e games and would again if that's what people wanted, but this definitely was one of 4e's sore points.

 

[Tommy Brownell]

I dunno, this is another one of those things that just wasn't a problem in our Tyranny of Dragons campaign. When people got magic items, they used them, they were generally more special than short sword +1, but they weren't big gamebreakers. It worked out. Though, I did mine earlier editions for magic items a lot, too. I mean, I have all four volumes of the Encyclopedia Magica *right there* and conversion is a snap, why not?

 

[Raleel]

I've run in to this myself. On the one hand, it makes 5e easy to run a Lankhmar or Middle Earth setting where magic items are so rare as to be nigh-unique, but on the other hand for me both as a DM and a player part of the appeal of D&D is gadgetry.

I think this is possible, but the lack of casters of any real level and the lack of healing tend to make things more difficult. Certain expectations get tossed out.

Additionally, it is hard to find easy tropes to lean on for easy character distinction. Class gets duplicated and muted, to some degree. It's not such an issue for the Twain, but the 9 had 4 hobbits that would be hard to tell apart outside of personality differences.

Takes some effort, but 5e definitely does support it better.

 

[OHT]

I dunno, this is another one of those things that just wasn't a problem in our Tyranny of Dragons campaign. When people got magic items, they used them, they were generally more special than short sword +1, but they weren't big gamebreakers. It worked out. Though, I did mine earlier editions for magic items a lot, too. I mean, I have all four volumes of the Encyclopedia Magica *right there* and conversion is a snap, why not?

Yeah, pretty much this. Magic items are no longer a necessity, but are still nice to have and there are a metric shit-tonne from older editions that are relatively simple to convert.