I've been thinking about magic items and when to hand them out. The players want to feel the shift in the balance that the item brings. Which brings us to the dilemma.
If you give the item too early, it will destroy any resistance and rob the adventure of the feeling of achievement.
If you give it too late, it has a neglible effect and becomes anticlimactic. What will a +1 do, if you already have a +7? Thie item loses the very thing that makes it exciting to receive and therefore its reward. It also makes the player take the enjoyment away from other players as they become somewhat obsolete.
If you get it just right though, it makes the player feel rewarded, gives the party a little extra firepower, while preserving the balance of the adventure.
So, my question to you is, what is your metric for when to give an item? How do you know when it will hit that sweet spot? What is it about the item that tells you that it's too OP now, will be good in x number of levels but obsolete in y number of levels?
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I kind of disagree with the idea that a +1 doesn’t matter if you already have a 7. For one, you overcome resistance to non magical damage, which will double your damage against those enemies. And a +1 is the same as a +2 to str (or dex), or being a level or three higher to get a proficiency bonus. The math is so tight in this edition that every 1 really does matter.
What makes them special, is how special you make them. If they are rare, a +1 dagger will be a prized possession. And the fighter will really need to think because there may be times that it’s more useful than their longsword. If you give them out like tic tacs, they’ll just go into the pile with the rest.
Bounded accuracy is supposed to keep your to-hit chances from going overboard, so a +1 is always going to have an impact. And I wouldn't compare it to the +7 from proficiency and ability mod, I'd compare it to the +0 from their previous weapon. ;-)
That aside, what I do like to do on occasion is give a magical weapon something extra that only applies to the current adventure and really only to some of its encounters: a sword that's just +1 but does +1d6 damage against cultists sworn to Ichambyg, the false deity the ongoing arc is centered around, or a +2 spear that does radiant damage against vampires only and suppresses their shapechanger quality for 1 round on a hit - things like that. It allows me to give the party items that are more powerful than they'd normally have access to and that feel special and unique, without forcing me to keep upping the ante arms-wise.
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Personally, +1 to +3 items don't do that much for me. I'd rather have something more like pangurjan lists above, a special quality or ability. On my Fighter, a couple examples of items I found amazing are Ring of Free Action and Sunforger for the AoE hammer throw, no aim required.
The monsters and the guidelines in the DMG for balancing combat encounters is actually balanced under the assumption that the campaign has absolutely no magic items at all.
My group’s main DM likes to make it rain. In his opinion, the entire point of running around in a “high magic” setting is that every adventurer should have access to manually powerful magic items.* So he tries to get a Very Rare -Legendary item into each PC’s hands somewhere between 3rd and 5th level. Then he fills in with Uncommon and Rare magic items until 3rd Tier and hen the Very Rare items come back around again. *(Conan found the Legendary Sword of Crom as a roughly 3rd level Barbarian. Frodo was gifted The One Ring (an Artifact), a mithral chain shirt (Uncommon), and Sting (likely also Uncommon) all as a 1st level PC. Luke Skywalker received his dad’s old lightsaber when he was still maybe 2nd level. Harry Potter got one of the Deathly Hallows when he was still around 3rd/4th(ish) level. Arthor (The Once and Future King) pulled the Legendary sword Clarent (aka The Sword of Peace, The Sword in the Stone) from the stone when he was very young, eventually The Lady of the Lake (that watery tart) threw him an upgrade, the Artifact Excalibur after his otherother sword was broken in battle.)
Conversely, when I DM, I’m super stingy until 4th(ish) level, even Common items and basic Potions of Healing are super duper scarce for the first 3 levels. Please note, PCs in campaigns I DM hit 3rd level in 3 sessions, so that’s not such a long wait; and they hit 5th level by around the 10th session. I want everyone to get their subclasses quickly so they can actually start to feel like the characters the Players imagined when they created them, and I want them to hit 5th level in a quick, but reasonable amount of time because that’s around when every PC really starts to feel like a hero. I am so stingy on the loot for the first few levels because m I specifically want the Players to feel the struggle of not having anything more than their starting equipment for a bit. Just long enough that when they do start to get some magic items, they have a real solid appreciation for them. If something as simple as a dagger, +1 seemed unattainable for a while, the. It still won’t feel like “lesser gear” even after they have something way cooler. They will (hopefully) retain that Uncommon dagger as a backup weapon for quite a while because they were so happy to have something to get past resistance after so long without. *(After the party has hit 4th level I try to get either 1 Common & 2 Uncommon items, or more often i try to get an Uncommon & a Rare item into each PC’s possession by the middle of Tier 2 (7th(ish) level). I figure, somewhere around 5th through 7th levels each PC should acquire a magic item that they can consider their “signature piece.” By 10th level I try to make sure that each PC has 1 Rare, at least 2 Uncommon items, and a Common for each of PC who wants one. The PCs start coming across upgraded replacements for their “signature piece” around 13h level (11th-15th, or basically throughout the 3rd-Tier of play.)
.My group’s main GM thinks I’m too stingy with magic items, and I thing he’s a little to free with them. He feels as if the PCs don’t actually get to feel like heroes in a high-magic setting until waaayy too long the way I do it. I feel that having access to super-powerful stuff too early makes less powerful magic items feel too “mundane,” and no longer special. He feels that anything lower than Rare should feel mundane to mighty heroes of the realm. I agree, but IMO the PCs are neither “mighty,” nor “of the realm” until at least 5th level pushing closer to 10th level. The way I see it, at 1st level the party is basically a bunch of unknown wannabes trying not to die clearing the giant rars out of somebody’s basement.
I started playing D&D back in 2e, and remember how death-prone PCs were back then. Many PCs died before they hit 2nd level, most died by 3rd, and very few at all made it to 5th level. Back then, creating a character you loved was just setting yourself up for upset, frustration, and misery. The PCs that survived to 5th level, those were the ones players fell in love with over the first four levels. They were awesome. Our main GM hated D&D until 3e, disliked it until 5e, and now he settles for D&D because that’s what hat is he majority of the table wants to play. (He prefers the World of Darkness, it suits him.)
He wants to jump right into an epic adventure like A New Hope right from the gate. The way I see it, A New Hope didn’t even start off anything close to “epic” at all, it was mostly just trying not to die and trying to find the next best step. It didn’t become “epic” until the end of the 2nd Act/beginning of the 3rd Act. By my estimate, that was around the time that Luke and Leia hit 5th level. Return of the Jedi ended with them somewhere between 15th and 20th level. It’s just a difference in opinion regarding a campaign’s starting point and pacing. 🤷♂️
Frankly, it doesn’t really matter “when“ they get magic items in regards to character levels or anything like that necessarily. What genuinely matters way more is that the PCs get them “at the he right time.” By that I mean:
They should start getting stuff when the players start feeling a little bummed that they don’t have anything yet, and/or a little too frustrated at how hard it is to overcome the challenges they are facing.
The challenges that the Party faces both before and after snagging some fleek gear should have degrees of difficulty commensurate with the gear the party can bring to bear against those challenges.**
D&D is supposed to be fun, unhappy players ≠ “fun,” and boring or unnecessarily frustrating encounter also = unhappy players. Challengea are often boring because they are too easily overcome, and they are most often “unnecessarily frustrating” when they are way too hard to overcome given the resources available. So when the players start to get frustrated or bored at not having any magic items, their characters start finding some. And when I want to be able to raise the dificulty of the challenges I present to the party, that’s when they find enough to consider themselves “equipped adventurers” by my standards. As long as the DM both “reads the room” to gauge the players’ feelings, and also plans encounters that are balanced so as to present the party with appropriate challenges considering the stuff they have,** then the magic items will be neither too early, nor too late. (In that regard they are like Wizards, they arrive precisely when intended.)
** 👇
According to the recommended guidelines in the DMG, I am waaayy too free with the level and quantity of magic items in my campaigns. If I am considered too generous with magic items by Crawford’s standards, then my group’s main GM must be off the charts. I make (almost) every combat encounter in the “very hard-deadly+” range, and hit the party with three or four of them in an “combat-oriented adventuring day.” (Some days it’s just all social, exploratory, or otherwise skill/player-oriented with little to no combat. These are the days the Party might face a single “medium-hard”combat encounter, if any.) The players occasionally comment about how hard and “grueling” some of my combat encounters are, especially towards the end of the day when they are out of everything. Our main GM has occasionally commented to me how hard he finds it to create meaningfully challenging combat encounters in D&D. (We both have all the same players.)
TL/DR:
Practice “hot fixing” encounters. Even if a DM prefers not to adjust combat difficulty after combat has started, it’s still a useful thing to practice. If you do need to do it, able to do it without it seeming obvious is a useful tool for one’s toolbox. It also helps one develops the their understanding/instinct for balancing combat so it gets easier, and hot fixing inevitably becomes less necessary over time.
Better to be a little too stingy than too free if one struggles to balance combat so encounters are both fun and challenging. Adding another wave of monsters (or whatever) to raise the difficulty of an encounter half way through is easier than trying to adjust encounters to be less difficult after combat has started.
I asked a very similar question a month back and added a poll. Most people seem to think the sweet spot for number of magic items per character throughout a campaign is 3.
Conversely, when I DM, I’m super stingy until 4th(ish) level, even Common items and basic Potions of Healing are super duper scarce for the first 3 levels. Please note, PCs in campaigns I DM hit 3rd level in 3 sessions, so that’s not such a long wait; and they hit 5th level by around the 10th session. I want everyone to get their subclasses quickly so they can actually start to feel like the characters the Players imagined when they created them, and I want them to hit 5th level in a quick, but reasonable amount of time because that’s around when every PC really starts to feel like a hero. I am so stingy on the loot for the first few levels because m I specifically want the Players to feel the struggle of not having anything more than their starting equipment for a bit. Just long enough that when they do start to get some magic items, they have a real solid appreciation for them. If something as simple as a dagger, +1 seemed unattainable for a while, the. It still won’t feel like “lesser gear” even after they have something way cooler. They will (hopefully) retain that Uncommon dagger as a backup weapon for quite a while because they were so happy to have something to get past resistance after so long without. *(After the party has hit 4th level I try to get either 1 Common & 2 Uncommon items, or more often i try to get an Uncommon & a Rare item into each PC’s possession by the middle of Tier 2 (7th(ish) level). I figure, somewhere around 5th through 7th levels each PC should acquire a magic item that they can consider their “signature piece.” By 10th level I try to make sure that each PC has 1 Rare, at least 2 Uncommon items, and a Common for each of PC who wants one. The PCs start coming across upgraded replacements for their “signature piece” around 13h level (11th-15th, or basically throughout the 3rd-Tier of play.)
@IamSposta I try to give out magic items roughly the same as you, and with the same general philosophy. I am assuming what you listed above does not include consumables, right? How many consumables do you tend to give out?
Last campaign, I gave out a lot of consumables, potions, etc. thinking it would be a good way to give them a cool/fun reward without accidentally breaking the game (I am a relatively new DM). My players mostly hoarded them and didn't use many of the potions other than healing potions (until the final battle with the BBEG). I think they are coming from the video game mentality of consumable items being "too good to use." Which is fine, they can do what they want, but I am just trying to decide how I want to handle consumables in this next campaign which is about to start. I felt good where I was at with the non-consumable magic items.
@IamSposta I try to give out magic items roughly the same as you, and with the same general philosophy. I am assuming what you listed above does not include consumables, right? How many consumables do you tend to give out?
Last campaign, I gave out a lot of consumables, potions, etc. thinking it would be a good way to give them a cool/fun reward without accidentally breaking the game (I am a relatively new DM). My players mostly hoarded them and didn't use many of the potions other than healing potions (until the final battle with the BBEG). I think they are coming from the video game mentality of consumable items being "too good to use." Which is fine, they can do what they want, but I am just trying to decide how I want to handle consumables in this next campaign which is about to start. I felt good where I was at with the non-consumable magic items.
I've been guilty of this in video games and D&D, hoarding consumables. Once I got a line to my next replacement consumables, I usually use the ones I had from earlier on. I mean, I don't want to use a Potion of Healing(supreme) without real good reason if it costs like 10,000 gp to make one and even more to buy another.
I guess what I'm really saying is that as a DM, you have help establish if you will be generous with consumables or stingy. That will obviously dictate if the resource will appear as a last resort only option or sporadic advantage option, etc.
I've been thinking about magic items and when to hand them out. The players want to feel the shift in the balance that the item brings. Which brings us to the dilemma.
If you give the item too early, it will destroy any resistance and rob the adventure of the feeling of achievement.
If you give it too late, it has a neglible effect and becomes anticlimactic. What will a +1 do, if you already have a +7? Thie item loses the very thing that makes it exciting to receive and therefore its reward. It also makes the player take the enjoyment away from other players as they become somewhat obsolete.
If you get it just right though, it makes the player feel rewarded, gives the party a little extra firepower, while preserving the balance of the adventure.
So, my question to you is, what is your metric for when to give an item? How do you know when it will hit that sweet spot? What is it about the item that tells you that it's too OP now, will be good in x number of levels but obsolete in y number of levels?
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I kind of disagree with the idea that a +1 doesn’t matter if you already have a 7. For one, you overcome resistance to non magical damage, which will double your damage against those enemies.
And a +1 is the same as a +2 to str (or dex), or being a level or three higher to get a proficiency bonus. The math is so tight in this edition that every 1 really does matter.
What makes them special, is how special you make them. If they are rare, a +1 dagger will be a prized possession. And the fighter will really need to think because there may be times that it’s more useful than their longsword. If you give them out like tic tacs, they’ll just go into the pile with the rest.
Keep in mind that +X bonuses aren't the only thing that makes a weapon or suit of armor special.
Maybe it does some sort of elemental damage.
It could it lights up.
It could have some sort of special senses.
Maybe it talks.
Even if the only magical thing it does is look cool, it's still magic.
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Bounded accuracy is supposed to keep your to-hit chances from going overboard, so a +1 is always going to have an impact. And I wouldn't compare it to the +7 from proficiency and ability mod, I'd compare it to the +0 from their previous weapon. ;-)
That aside, what I do like to do on occasion is give a magical weapon something extra that only applies to the current adventure and really only to some of its encounters: a sword that's just +1 but does +1d6 damage against cultists sworn to Ichambyg, the false deity the ongoing arc is centered around, or a +2 spear that does radiant damage against vampires only and suppresses their shapechanger quality for 1 round on a hit - things like that. It allows me to give the party items that are more powerful than they'd normally have access to and that feel special and unique, without forcing me to keep upping the ante arms-wise.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
There is actually a section in the book that may guide you on what to give and when. It is very general but, it's a good place to start.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/a-world-of-your-own#TiersofPlay
Personally, +1 to +3 items don't do that much for me. I'd rather have something more like pangurjan lists above, a special quality or ability. On my Fighter, a couple examples of items I found amazing are Ring of Free Action and Sunforger for the AoE hammer throw, no aim required.
The monsters and the guidelines in the DMG for balancing combat encounters is actually balanced under the assumption that the campaign has absolutely no magic items at all.
My group’s main DM likes to make it rain. In his opinion, the entire point of running around in a “high magic” setting is that every adventurer should have access to manually powerful magic items.* So he tries to get a Very Rare -Legendary item into each PC’s hands somewhere between 3rd and 5th level. Then he fills in with Uncommon and Rare magic items until 3rd Tier and hen the Very Rare items come back around again.
*(Conan found the Legendary Sword of Crom as a roughly 3rd level Barbarian. Frodo was gifted The One Ring (an Artifact), a mithral chain shirt (Uncommon), and Sting (likely also Uncommon) all as a 1st level PC. Luke Skywalker received his dad’s old lightsaber when he was still maybe 2nd level. Harry Potter got one of the Deathly Hallows when he was still around 3rd/4th(ish) level. Arthor (The Once and Future King) pulled the Legendary sword Clarent (aka The Sword of Peace, The Sword in the Stone) from the stone when he was very young, eventually The Lady of the Lake (that watery tart) threw him an upgrade, the Artifact Excalibur after his otherother sword was broken in battle.)
Conversely, when I DM, I’m super stingy until 4th(ish) level, even Common items and basic Potions of Healing are super duper scarce for the first 3 levels. Please note, PCs in campaigns I DM hit 3rd level in 3 sessions, so that’s not such a long wait; and they hit 5th level by around the 10th session. I want everyone to get their subclasses quickly so they can actually start to feel like the characters the Players imagined when they created them, and I want them to hit 5th level in a quick, but reasonable amount of time because that’s around when every PC really starts to feel like a hero. I am so stingy on the loot for the first few levels because m I specifically want the Players to feel the struggle of not having anything more than their starting equipment for a bit. Just long enough that when they do start to get some magic items, they have a real solid appreciation for them. If something as simple as a dagger, +1 seemed unattainable for a while, the. It still won’t feel like “lesser gear” even after they have something way cooler. They will (hopefully) retain that Uncommon dagger as a backup weapon for quite a while because they were so happy to have something to get past resistance after so long without.
*(After the party has hit 4th level I try to get either 1 Common & 2 Uncommon items, or more often i try to get an Uncommon & a Rare item into each PC’s possession by the middle of Tier 2 (7th(ish) level). I figure, somewhere around 5th through 7th levels each PC should acquire a magic item that they can consider their “signature piece.” By 10th level I try to make sure that each PC has 1 Rare, at least 2 Uncommon items, and a Common for each of PC who wants one. The PCs start coming across upgraded replacements for their “signature piece” around 13h level (11th-15th, or basically throughout the 3rd-Tier of play.)
.My group’s main GM thinks I’m too stingy with magic items, and I thing he’s a little to free with them. He feels as if the PCs don’t actually get to feel like heroes in a high-magic setting until waaayy too long the way I do it. I feel that having access to super-powerful stuff too early makes less powerful magic items feel too “mundane,” and no longer special. He feels that anything lower than Rare should feel mundane to mighty heroes of the realm. I agree, but IMO the PCs are neither “mighty,” nor “of the realm” until at least 5th level pushing closer to 10th level. The way I see it, at 1st level the party is basically a bunch of unknown wannabes trying not to die clearing the giant rars out of somebody’s basement.
I started playing D&D back in 2e, and remember how death-prone PCs were back then. Many PCs died before they hit 2nd level, most died by 3rd, and very few at all made it to 5th level. Back then, creating a character you loved was just setting yourself up for upset, frustration, and misery. The PCs that survived to 5th level, those were the ones players fell in love with over the first four levels. They were awesome. Our main GM hated D&D until 3e, disliked it until 5e, and now he settles for D&D because that’s what hat is he majority of the table wants to play. (He prefers the World of Darkness, it suits him.)
He wants to jump right into an epic adventure like A New Hope right from the gate. The way I see it, A New Hope didn’t even start off anything close to “epic” at all, it was mostly just trying not to die and trying to find the next best step. It didn’t become “epic” until the end of the 2nd Act/beginning of the 3rd Act. By my estimate, that was around the time that Luke and Leia hit 5th level. Return of the Jedi ended with them somewhere between 15th and 20th level. It’s just a difference in opinion regarding a campaign’s starting point and pacing. 🤷♂️
Frankly, it doesn’t really matter “when“ they get magic items in regards to character levels or anything like that necessarily. What genuinely matters way more is that the PCs get them “at the he right time.” By that I mean:
D&D is supposed to be fun, unhappy players ≠ “fun,” and boring or unnecessarily frustrating encounter also = unhappy players. Challengea are often boring because they are too easily overcome, and they are most often “unnecessarily frustrating” when they are way too hard to overcome given the resources available. So when the players start to get frustrated or bored at not having any magic items, their characters start finding some. And when I want to be able to raise the dificulty of the challenges I present to the party, that’s when they find enough to consider themselves “equipped adventurers” by my standards. As long as the DM both “reads the room” to gauge the players’ feelings, and also plans encounters that are balanced so as to present the party with appropriate challenges considering the stuff they have,** then the magic items will be neither too early, nor too late. (In that regard they are like Wizards, they arrive precisely when intended.)
** 👇
According to the recommended guidelines in the DMG, I am waaayy too free with the level and quantity of magic items in my campaigns. If I am considered too generous with magic items by Crawford’s standards, then my group’s main GM must be off the charts. I make (almost) every combat encounter in the “very hard-deadly+” range, and hit the party with three or four of them in an “combat-oriented adventuring day.” (Some days it’s just all social, exploratory, or otherwise skill/player-oriented with little to no combat. These are the days the Party might face a single “medium-hard”combat encounter, if any.) The players occasionally comment about how hard and “grueling” some of my combat encounters are, especially towards the end of the day when they are out of everything. Our main GM has occasionally commented to me how hard he finds it to create meaningfully challenging combat encounters in D&D. (We both have all the same players.)
TL/DR:
Practice “hot fixing” encounters. Even if a DM prefers not to adjust combat difficulty after combat has started, it’s still a useful thing to practice. If you do need to do it, able to do it without it seeming obvious is a useful tool for one’s toolbox. It also helps one develops the their understanding/instinct for balancing combat so it gets easier, and hot fixing inevitably becomes less necessary over time.
Better to be a little too stingy than too free if one struggles to balance combat so encounters are both fun and challenging. Adding another wave of monsters (or whatever) to raise the difficulty of an encounter half way through is easier than trying to adjust encounters to be less difficult after combat has started.
I hope that helps.
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I asked a very similar question a month back and added a poll. Most people seem to think the sweet spot for number of magic items per character throughout a campaign is 3.
@IamSposta I try to give out magic items roughly the same as you, and with the same general philosophy. I am assuming what you listed above does not include consumables, right? How many consumables do you tend to give out?
Last campaign, I gave out a lot of consumables, potions, etc. thinking it would be a good way to give them a cool/fun reward without accidentally breaking the game (I am a relatively new DM). My players mostly hoarded them and didn't use many of the potions other than healing potions (until the final battle with the BBEG). I think they are coming from the video game mentality of consumable items being "too good to use." Which is fine, they can do what they want, but I am just trying to decide how I want to handle consumables in this next campaign which is about to start. I felt good where I was at with the non-consumable magic items.
I've been guilty of this in video games and D&D, hoarding consumables. Once I got a line to my next replacement consumables, I usually use the ones I had from earlier on. I mean, I don't want to use a Potion of Healing(supreme) without real good reason if it costs like 10,000 gp to make one and even more to buy another.
I guess what I'm really saying is that as a DM, you have help establish if you will be generous with consumables or stingy. That will obviously dictate if the resource will appear as a last resort only option or sporadic advantage option, etc.
Correct, those numbers do not include consumables. And yes, they hoard them. (Players almost always hoard them, even me when I’m a player. 🤷♂️)
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