D&D 5E Magic Item Inheritance

[Coroc]

[MENTION=1465]Li Shenron[/MENTION] It depends whether you love the rookie Levels and see them as a special challenge (like me). I do want to have magic items, for my Players and my characters, although 5e is designed to work without (in case of an extreme low magic campaign i could see that useful, but in that case i would eventually restrict the classes to halfcasters.)

What i do not want to have is a boost right from the start, not because it makes combat easier but because i feel that every bit of equipment has to be earned. Normally in my campaigns the chars get starting money but not every Equipment is available all the time from the start.

I love the you start naked in a dungeon approach also. I earned some criticism on that because People start arguing that this Approach prefers casters over non casters, but the same Thing in reverse happens if you give out mighty weapons and armor later on. Casters do less damage now in relation, and are eventually equally easy to hit.

In a defined high magic surounding icould agree on players starting out with +1 items but if so then all the Players get it, and those not having much Advantage from wepons might get something else to compensate, and there have to be other drawbacks, and the difficulty of Encounters has to be adjusted.

 

[Oofta]

I'd go a different way.

The young adventurer is given the sacred Flaming Sword of Orc-Doom, a family heirloom. There are famous paintings of long dead ancestors valiantly fighting off the hordes, fear gleaming in the eyes reflected off the light of Orc-Doom while the hero stands triumphant.

First battle, the adventurer cries "Flame on!" but nothing happens. Shaking the sword, he repeats "I said, FLAME ON!" ending with a shout.

A quiet voice responds in a very proper butler tone of voice "Tut, tut my dear lad. I don't think you're quite ready just yet. In fact, I think I shall suppress all of my magic until you are worthy of it".

At that point the sword is just a finely made non-magical sword until the adventurer is higher level. Basically, the sword grows in power with the adventurer and is at first a mundane sword with potential. Someday it will be awesome. For now, it's just a sword.

 

[Tersival]

I think it depends on how much background bonus features come into play in your campaign.

If you run games focused on wilderness dungeon bashing where many of the backgrounds are useless because your group never goes anywhere that a local would recognise and defer to a noble, a that a sage might be able to research something, or a soldier touch base with old comrades... and so on... then a magic inheritence would be unfair.

If you players get to benefit from their backgrounds on a frequent basis, it could well a great story arc provided the magic inheritence didn't put the inheritor ahead of the other PCs.

Assuming the later, maybe the inherited item at first only provides one of the minor property benefits outlined in the DMG p. 142-143 (e.g. it is a fey forged item that glows in moonlight) but at higher levels it can be atuned and gain more powers.

Atunement means sacrificing options for other significant magic items.

End of the day if it is doesn't favor one player over the others at your table and adds story elements to your game, I say go for it. Just be balanced and fair to everyone.

 

[sheridanwilde]

[MENTION=1465]Li Shenron[/MENTION]I love the you start naked in a dungeon approach also. I earned some criticism on that because People start arguing that this Approach prefers casters over non casters, but the same Thing in reverse happens if you give out mighty weapons and armor later on. Casters do less damage now in relation, and are eventually equally easy to hit.

I used to have a GM who always started campaigns in some form of institution (Call of Cthulhu it was an asylum, D&D a dungeon, World of Darkness a prison, etc). I presume that the "naked in a dungeon" approach is something similar? I would google it, but I suspect that phrase isn't going to return anything helpful ;-)

 

[Charlaquin]

I used to have a GM who always started campaigns in some form of institution (Call of Cthulhu it was an asylum, D&D a dungeon, World of Darkness a prison, etc). I presume that the "naked in a dungeon" approach is something similar? I would google it, but I suspect that phrase isn't going to return anything helpful ;-)

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Just like the Challenge of the Sword DLC for Breath of the Wild, you get thrown right into the tick of things with no equipment of any kind and have to rely on your own ingenuity, along with what ever supplies you can find along the way, to survive.

 

[5ekyu]

So, I've been thinking about the backgrounds from SCAG, and I always found Inheritor interesting. The thing is, I never really could figure out a way to make the inheritance not just sentimental or quickly outpaced. I think an inheritance should be something that is a core part of a character that uses this background, but not gamebreaking. I'm just not sure how to do that. I think it might also be cool for it to be a magic item, but that maybe either a little cheap or a little to easily outpaced, depending on how you look at it.

I like the idea of a magic item, and, to keep it somewhat balanced, is to use Matthew Mercer's Vestige system, a way that is even suggested in the book. If a weapon, it starts out as just a +1, and as time goes on, the DM, getting a good understanding of the characters knowledge of the nature of the inheritance, can make it more powerful over time, so it keeps pace with other weapons. This makes it so it starts out not too OP, but lets it not quickly become useless from a statistics standpoint.

I'm open to other methods or critiques on this one. Thoughts?

While a "growing" item is a possibility, i would instead be inclined to go with an item that itself is static but which keeps leading to other things. The item as a key or a map or both to me seems more broadly open to spawn a lot more story directly tied to that background than focusing on the developing powers necessarily does.

of course, one can do both, but at increased risk of gilding that lily more than may be helpful.

 

[Wulffolk]

How about this . . .

The character inherits an item that feeds on the magical properties of other items. At the beginning it seems like a mundane item because it has been starving. When the character finds another magical item during the course of their career the inherited item can absorb the power of an appropriate item. It can only hold the power of one item at a time though.

For example, you inherited your grandfather's sword. It looks cool, and apparently holds it's edge forever and won't break, but nothing else special about it. You find a generic +2 mace later, and the sword compels you to lay it across the mace. It absorbs the mace's power and becomes a +2 sword. Many years later you find a +1 Dwarven Thrower hammer. The sword consumes that power and can either be a +2 sword or be +1 with the throwing and returning ability. It must choose which power to keep and which to consume.

Maybe there is a duration that the item will hold the power before it must use it to feed itself, or there is a mechanic that requires the item to feed once per year or something like that. I haven't thought this through completely yet.

The benefit to this is that the items is no more powerful than what the character would normally find, but it has a history and story to make it special, and it grows with the character by consuming more powerful items as they find them.

Instead of Stormbringer consuming souls to lend Elric strength, this is a magical vampiric item that fuels itself by destroying other items.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I would go less with levels or tiers and more with a specific accomplishment or a specific "key" to unlock the power. That gives the PC a strong motive to do something that you, the DM, want the party to do: the sword is activated by plunging it the Burning Caldron of the King of the Fire Newts or after the party has liberated 100 slaves from the hobgoblins.

 

[ad_hoc]

Yeah, a straight up magic item is both overpowered and not in keeping with the spirit of Inheritor. It makes it worse to gain power over time.

If we want it to be a magic item something like this would be more appropriate:

Sword that glows when orcs are nearby ALSO orcs sense the presence of the sword and are drawn to it. This is a very LotR style item that is plot driven. It has both a minor benefit and a minor drawback.