D&D 5E Guidelines for magic items for high level characters?

[jgsugden]

I have to admit, I miss the guidelines from 3.5 and 4e.

I'm running a high level one-shot (17th level). Cleary the PC's should have some magic items but I have no idea how much. Anyone have any rules of thumb?


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Don't sweat it for a one shot. You're not going to ruin the experience with too much or too little. Tell the PCs to select one rare and tree uncommon items during creation and then you can pick one very rare item for them each. If you're making the PCs, select all the items.

 

[Fanaelialae]

That sounds like a description of 3E or 4E.

In 5E I've found that this isn't telling the whole truth.

In 3E or 4E, sure, my players would have made short work of "standard" encounters, and you wanted and needed to spice things up on occasion.

But in 5E savvy players with feats and items absolutely destroy encounters. It's not just a matter of upping the challenge; it's often so bad you could throw out the encounter and completey replace it with something completely different in a whole other league of difficulty.

5E monsters are helpless in the face of a sharp party. They have substandard ability scores, skill bonuses and saving throws. They don't have elementary tricks and tools to survive the most trivial of tactics. They have nothing to counter the myriad of special abilities given to player characters.

5E gives out more goodies to PCs than ever before: just things like Bless, Bardic Inspiration and Battlemaster superiority dice give players unprecedented control over when and where monsters aren't allowed to succeed, and when and where PCs will succeed at their actions. And this doesn't even begin to talk about feats like Lucky and Great Weapon Mastery. Or even significant bonuses like Inspirational Leader or Alert, bonuses players frankly don't need because they'll succeed anyway.

At the same time, 5E simplified monsters to the point where they threw out the baby with the bathwater - most monsters are reduced to big bags of hit points with little recourse than to rush up to the heroes to try to kill them in melee. But negating this is trivial in D&D, and monsters all too often lack means of overcoming battlefield and movement control.

The overall effect is clear and distinct: 5E is by far the "easiest" edition in a long while (at least since 2000).

It is at this stage adventures are built on the expectation that play groups does not use feats, items or multiclassing, and that they somehow keep adventuring for up to 8 encounters a day (despite humongously generous resting rules and spells such as Rope Trick and Leomund's Hut)

The end result is catastrophically easy challenges in published products.

3.x had the opposite problem. For a non-optimized party with non-optimized gear, a normal CR fight was often fiendishly difficult. Frankly, the only edition without a majority of bag-of-hp monsters was 4e, and that had its own issues (as much as I loved that edition).

5e is calibrated a particular way, which is not the same as 3.x. It's like complaining that your sedan isn't a great vehicle for off-roading without modification. It isn't designed for off-roading (it's designed to be newbie friendly, which IME 3.x wasn't).

It isn't hard to create synergy in 5e. You can modify monsters (which is easier than it was in 3.x because rather than assuming that you will add entire class levels, the system assumes an a la carte style of monster design). You can also reskin (the Knight is a good option for this; it gives the equivalent of bless and can easily become a goblin or orcish champion). You can also use terrain to the monsters advantage, which makes sense because PCs usually face monsters on the monsters' home turf. Being forced to fight aquatic creatures in the water is one obvious use of this.

If you have an experienced group and you want to challenge that group then yes, you need to tweak standard encounters a bit. However, that was true even of 3.x (where you could take optimization to truly absurd heights not seen before or since), so at least 5e has the advantage of being newbie-friendly. That's not to say that 3.x was bad (it was revolutionary, and we probably wouldn't have 5e without it) but it was calibrated to an "average" skill group, so of course it was harder than a system calibrated to an inexperienced group. Presumably, an experienced group has an experienced DM who can calibrate difficulty by designing encounters that have better synergy.

 

[CapnZapp]

If you have an experienced group and you want to challenge that group then yes, you need to tweak standard encounters a bit.

No, you have to completely redesign encounters and add much more tools to monster stat blocks.

At high levels, this is much more than "tweak a bit".

You don't seem to be listening to me, Fanaelialae. Are you running high level games for veteran players with all options on, or are you merely wishing this wasn't a problem for experienced groups?

What we can hope for is an "advanced dungeons & dragons" down the product pipeline. I love 5E and will certainly not go back to the broken messy editions of 3e, PF or 4e. But what's especially needed in 5e is a replacement monster manual designed for the expectation that the subsystems offered by the PHB are actually used - the monster design in the MM is the weakest part of 5e.

 

[CapnZapp]

Then, we can get back to the actual topic of the thread, namely wishing for utility-based magic item creation and pricing, so the OP's request for guidelines for magic items make sense again.

Magic items are fun

 

[Fanaelialae]

No, you have to completely redesign encounters and add much more tools to monster stat blocks.

At high levels, this is much more than "tweak a bit".

You don't seem to be listening to me, Fanaelialae. Are you running high level games for veteran players with all options on, or are you merely wishing this wasn't a problem for experienced groups?

My experience differs.

Are guys with 20 to 30 years of experience who started in 1e/2e what you would call experienced veterans? Guys who for at least the past 17 years have, on average, played D&D at least once a week with sessions that tend to go for 6 to 8 hours? Guys who have played every edition or almost every edition of D&D/AD&D? Is 19th level what you would consider a high level campaign? If so, then yes, I've run high level games for veteran players in 5e, and I had little difficulty challenging them (though I did have to think about how to create challenging fights a bit more at high levels than low levels, though not nearly as much as even a mid-level campaign in 3.x). And yes, I play with all the options turned on and then some (I've created a fair number of options myself). I honestly mean no disrespect, CapnZapp, but perhaps it is you who is not listening to me.

What we can hope for is an "advanced dungeons & dragons" down the product pipeline. I love 5E and will certainly not go back to the broken messy editions of 3e, PF or 4e. But what's especially needed in 5e is a replacement monster manual designed for the expectation that the subsystems offered by the PHB are actually used - the monster design in the MM is the weakest part of 5e.

I don't think you'll ever get your wish for a monster book with harder monsters, unless it comes out on DM's Guild. It runs counter to the newbie-friendly mentality that 5e is based around. A newbie isn't going to know not to buy the "Advanced" D&D monster book on the shelf of Barnes & Noble; in fact they might think that the "Advanced" means it's a newer and better version of the original Monster Manual.

A quick look at the designing monsters section starting on page 274 of the DMG shows ways that you can easily tweak monsters to make them tougher without increasing their CR. For example, one of your complaints was that monsters have terrible saves, poor skills, and low ability scores. Do you realize that you can give a monster proficiency with every saving throw, every skill (with expertise if desired), and increase their non-combat related ability scores all the way up to 30 without changing their CR one iota? There are a wide assortment of monster features on pages 280-281 of the DMG which can be given to any monster as you desire without changing the CR at all, including the Hobgoblin Captain's Leadership trait which is basically Bless. (Your players like to have always-on Bless? Well, now so can your monsters!) I'd recommend creating a list of the no-CR-change features for yourself, so you can easily add them on the fly. Additionally, do you realize that you can add +2 AC or step up a creature's HP one step on the monster chart (DMG 274) or step up a creature's damage one step on the monster chart, or increase it's attack bonus by +2, often without changing the CR (because each of these is only worth a half CR). In fact, you can add + 1 to both a monster's attack and AC, without any change to the CR whatsoever.

Other things you can do is use monsters tactically. Have a bunch of bag-of-hp monsters? Have them use the Shove action (remember that you can give them expertise with Athletics without changing their CR) to push PCs into traps / hazardous terrain, or knock them prone and grapple them. Have those monsters fight in terrain that favors them. Use monsters that complement each other (like the aforementioned Mind Flayers and Intellect Devourers; just don't really use that example unless you're tired of the campaign, it's too mean). And you have to take the party's capabilities into consideration as well. If your PCs all ride brooms of flying then don't send a horde of melee monsters against them unless you want to give them a gimmie (which can be fine and fun on occasion). Send a horde of flyers against them, who can use shove to knock them off their brooms and send them plummeting. If your party is made up of a bunch of Sharpshooting snipers then use monsters who can either also attack at that range (removing disadvantage at long range does not change the CR of a creature) or use creatures that can get close (via invisibility, etherealness, or even just a good stealth check). Occasionally things won't go in the monsters' favor and the players will nonetheless run roughshod over them; that's okay, IME that's supposed to happen now and again, particularly at the higher levels.

But there's a reason why many old school players fear the puny kobold. As my father likes to say, "Work smarter, not harder."

Obviously, the above should only be used if you feel you are having difficulty challenging the party. Against an inexperienced or non-optimized group the above would likely result in frequent TPKs, IMO.

Then, we can get back to the actual topic of the thread, namely wishing for utility-based magic item creation and pricing, so the OP's request for guidelines for magic items make sense again.

Magic items are fun

For guidelines on magic item prices, I consider this the best supplement I've seen (it's from DM's Guild):

http://www.dmsguild.com/product/205...=Discerning+Merchants+Price+Guid&test_epoch=0

As an added bonus, it's free. (Note that I would not recommend letting your players go hog wild and pick items from here based on a gold allowance, as that is likely to result in very potent characters who find the game "too easy" with respect to untweaked encounters.)

 

[Ahrimon]

Actually, feats don't let you exceed the cap of 20. All feats use language along the lines of: Increase your Intelligence score by 1, to a maximum of 20.

So really rolling for stats at most is going to give a character a +1 bonus over other PCs a little bit earlier. I wouldn't consider that game breaking.

You may be misunderstanding Ad_hoc. I don't think he's saying that feats allow you to exceed the cap of 20 on a stat, but they do allow you to exceed the power curve of a 20 on a stat.

For example with no feats, after 20 you start pushing a secondary stat. With feats, after 20 you can take a feat that applies to your primary function. For example, a great weapon fighter can take Great Weapon Mastery after getting their strength to 20. Whereas without feats they would switch to raising con. And a barbarian with 20 con could pick up the feat that increases your number of HP per level rather than switching to dex or another stat.

At least that's what I took from his comment.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

High level characters in 5E don't need magic items to be effective, but I'd hand some out anyway since magic items are fun.

The encounter building guidelines in the DMG are not very useful at high levels anyway, so adding some magic items to the mix doesn't really change anything.

 

[Hyperlexic]

Then, we can get back to the actual topic of the thread, namely wishing for utility-based magic item creation and pricing, so the OP's request for guidelines for magic items make sense again.

Magic items are fun

I've been on forums long enough to not expect too much adherence to the stated topic.


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[Quickleaf]

Then, we can get back to the actual topic of the thread, namely wishing for utility-based magic item creation and pricing, so the OP's request for guidelines for magic items make sense again.

Magic items are fun

Agreed. There's a couple guides out there for those inclined towards 3.5e/4e style magic item guidelines or simply picking-and-assigning. First of all, the DMG pricing guidelines are pretty much worthless. Not entirely worthless, but the reasoning behind them is very very uneven & fails to reinforce the limits of the tiers-of-play set out in the core books.

For a good example, you can read Saidoro's post on Sane Magic Item Prices where he compares approximate costs of flying magic items. He comes up with a new list of GP values for magic items that is very well thought out. However, overall the numbers look low to many folks (as do the ones in the DMG). You can find a pretty Sane Magic Item Prices PDF by Inconnunom.

Waffle2121 also did a solid straightforward anlysis called A Nonrandom Guide to Loot where he reverse engineers the DMG tables. Worth a look. His chart looks at magic items for the entire party. You'll need to do a bit of number crunching to get individual PC guidelines (which I've conveniently already done and posted previously in this thread)

When starting PCs at higher level I generally first consider the tone of the game. If it's high magic (think: standard D&D fantasy), I don't use the DMG p. 38 Starting at Higher Level guidelines, and instead use Waffle2121's guidelines. However, when letting players choose starting magic items in this situation, I keep an eye toward enforcing the tiers-of-play (e.g. generally no flying or levitating items during 1st-4th level). So that means reviewing their magic item lists, often triangulating the best approach using Saidoro/Inconnunom's analysis. And there are exceptions: for example, an Al-Qadim game might have "magic slippers (boots) of levitation" and "rugs (brooms) of flying" for purchase at the prices suggested by the DMG (i.e. they'd be more common than in other games). So really it depends on the game you're running.

 

[jrowland]

I try not to think too much as a DM. I think enough in real life.

Level 2-5: a couple of potions or scrolls each (appropriate rarity for the level)
Level 6-10: As above plus an uncommon item each
level 11-15: As above plus a rare item each
level 16-20: As above plus another rare/very rare item each

More than generous.