D&D 5E The Case for a Magic Item Shop?

[Grainger]

You do realise that the Inuit wore goggles nearly two thousand years ago. Goggles are not a new invention.

No, I didn't realise that, specifically. However, it doesn't have any bearing on my point.

This isn't about dating an invention and then saying that it should therefore be ubiquitous to everyone, everywhere after that point. The Romans had arrow-straight paved roads and central heating, right? They were before medieval times, right? So should these be included in D&D campaigns out-of-the-box? I know D&D has an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to what it considers "medieval", but I believe in reigning some of this in, and that picking the right details is important to campaign flavour. Goggles, straight roads, central heating - all fine if you've actively decided to include them in your campaign, but as an out-of-the-box element of a medieval fantasy setting? That's my point.


Edit: thinking about this some more, it's just a question of what you're used to. "Goggles of..." have been in D&D for a long time. If you're used to this, then the idea doesn't stand out. I've never encountered them in-game, so they leap out to me as a bit daft. It's not a huge deal either way, but I'll probably be omitting them from my campaign.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Agreed. It is boring. But, it's also very, very fast. Imagine that you now have six players, all of which want to find an enchanter, make a deal with a demon, etc and you get to spend the next several sessions completely derailing the campaign just to basically run six different lone wolf campaigns. Ick, no thanks. There's a reason we don't have Paladin Mount quests built into the class anymore.

Oh, for sure. And there are various gradations of special-snowflake-side quest-adventure! you could arrange. Maybe the party comes across some human raiders with a few doses of magic eye cream and the player can figure out where they got it. Or maybe he just finds a tube.

 

[aramis erak]

Maybe in your campaign.

Try "In the 1E DMG and Adventures" and "On Mystara".... that you can't be bothered to actually know what was published isn't MY problem. There are lasers in an AD&D 1E module, set on Greyhawk. Forcefields, too. Two official gameworlds have had high tech areas, as recently as the mid 90's... Mystara (both surface and hollow world - Blackmoor's Cataclysm is in fact set on Mystara, as are the Blackmoor modules for Cyclopedia, and was technological in origin) and Greyhawk.

Note that in Hollow World (which is part of Mystara), the blacklore elves in the zoo-that-is-hollowworld are using tech that only works in their valley, due to the influence of the Immortals, but their surface progenitors had lasers that worked everywhere.

My campaigns are generally late renaissance level due to magic, and the underdark is fed by plants grown under continual light spells. There's nothing wrong with subsetting, but knowing the actual tech base helps understand the weirdnesses in the magic items list...

 

[Doug McCrae]

My character is a human, very adept in stealth, re-skinned as a ninja. Sneaking and scouting for the party is her role in the group. But recently we've been in the underdark and it looks like we're going to be there for quite some time. My main role, sneaking ahead and scouting, is now useless because I:
A. Cannot see in the dark and
B. If I use a light-source, I am automatically not stealthed, making me the worst ninja ever.

Imo your initial concept - a human scout - was fatally flawed. The scout in a D&D party almost always has to be non-human, because the dungeon is such a common environment. One could argue that the real problem was that you were successful for several sessions with this character concept, which meant that the problem couldn't be spotted and dealt with quickly enough. Generally, the further one gets into a campaign, the harder it is to fix a flawed PC.

But that doesn't help you solve the current problem. You should discuss the matter with the GM and come up with a mutually agreeable solution. Acquiring goggles of darkvision or a similar item in a treasure horde at the earliest opportunity does seem like the best option. They could be restricted to only work in the Underdark, or they could be temporary items such as scrolls or potions of darkvision. Alternatively your PC could encounter some strange magic that transforms her into another race. This could also be a temporary phenomenon. Generating a new character is another possibility, but would seem to be the most radical and disruptive option.

Please don't worry about being a 'whiny player'. If an issue is troubling you to the extent that it's causing you not to enjoy a long running game, in which there's already been a considerable time investment, then the sensible thing to do is to raise that issue with the other participants. Sometimes you can't resolve these kinds of things on your own.

A positive feature of magic item trade is that it does give the players more power over their characters' capabilities, which increases enjoyment of the game for a significant number of players. I agree that "What do they spend it on?" is an issue in D&D that, for me, wasn't plausibly resolved by training costs.

 

[Grainger]

Try "In the 1E DMG and Adventures" and "On Mystara".... that you can't be bothered to actually know what was published isn't MY problem. There are lasers in an AD&D 1E module, set on Greyhawk. Forcefields, too. Two official gameworlds have had high tech areas, as recently as the mid 90's... Mystara (both surface and hollow world - Blackmoor's Cataclysm is in fact set on Mystara, as are the Blackmoor modules for Cyclopedia, and was technological in origin) and Greyhawk.

Note that in Hollow World (which is part of Mystara), the blacklore elves in the zoo-that-is-hollowworld are using tech that only works in their valley, due to the influence of the Immortals, but their surface progenitors had lasers that worked everywhere.

My campaigns are generally late renaissance level due to magic, and the underdark is fed by plants grown under continual light spells. There's nothing wrong with subsetting, but knowing the actual tech base helps understand the weirdnesses in the magic items list...

Yeah, and part of the Mystara world background had a crashed spaceship as a major game-changer. D&D (especially early D&D) is full of unusual things, but that doesn't make those things typical parts of the a typical campaign background. I don't think anyone said that D&D products never had any elements that resembled high-tech, but what matters is the specific game-worlds that DMs run, be that home-brewed or their particular version of an official world (I can imagine many Mystara DMs, for example, ignoring the spaceship material).

 

[ExploderWizard]

Yup, and as usual, it's the automatic presumption that the player has to be THE superstar. Any problem at the table is automatically the player's fault and DM's are paragons of virtue and never, ever the cause of the problem. Note how everyone should contribute INCLUDES the DM. Which means when a player tells you he isn't having fun, it's your job as the DM to fix that. Telling the player to suck it up is a toxic solution.

It would be much, much more useful if DM's would actually take some responsibility once in a while for causing problems at the table.

Your mistake seems to be assuming the problem is the fault of anyone in particular before there is any evidence of of wrongdoing from either party.

If the problem is approached rationally and logically it will get fixed. Neither the player nor the DM should blindly accept blame for something without all the facts. In many matters such as this, the collective opinion of the group as a whole is worth a listen.

 

[KarinsDad]

Try "In the 1E DMG and Adventures" and "On Mystara".... that you can't be bothered to actually know what was published isn't MY problem. There are lasers in an AD&D 1E module, set on Greyhawk. Forcefields, too. Two official gameworlds have had high tech areas, as recently as the mid 90's... Mystara (both surface and hollow world - Blackmoor's Cataclysm is in fact set on Mystara, as are the Blackmoor modules for Cyclopedia, and was technological in origin) and Greyhawk.

Note that in Hollow World (which is part of Mystara), the blacklore elves in the zoo-that-is-hollowworld are using tech that only works in their valley, due to the influence of the Immortals, but their surface progenitors had lasers that worked everywhere.

My campaigns are generally late renaissance level due to magic, and the underdark is fed by plants grown under continual light spells. There's nothing wrong with subsetting, but knowing the actual tech base helps understand the weirdnesses in the magic items list...

So, 10% of D&D campaign worlds ever published (and 1% of the adventure modules) had a small amount of this type of thing in them and 90% do not and you are stating that the tech base of D&D is high technology?

Yeah, got it.

Also, Blackmoor was in the ancient past (pre-technology) of Mystara, not the other way around.

Maybe you could point out where force fields and lasers and air cars are located in the 1E DMG because I cannot find them.

On the other hand, my copy of the 1E DMG states on page 113 that gunpowder brought in from a Boot Hill campaign becomes inert junk in a D&D setting and dynamite becomes inert. Yup, there is a tiny section on converting Gamma World to D&D and D&D to Gamma World, but D&D is not Gamma World. Although TSR allowed for an old west campaign setting and a high tech campaign setting, D&D was neither of those. And many elements of high technology in some modules like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks were due to downed spacecraft that did not originate on the campaign world setting. They were not the origin of the technology of the campaign world.

Chocolate in my peanut butter.

 

[Hussar]

That's not necessarily a DM failure. As an extreme example, suppose the DM and 4 out 5 players are having a wonderful time, and the last player won't be happy unless the game is totally changed. That's not a DM failure, it's a bad fit. Some game preferences are just incompatible. A good DM will try to maximize fun at the table, including his own, but sometimes there aren't reasonable compromises, and sometimes someone is a bad fit for the group.

I don't necessarily disagree, but, by the same token, shouldn't the DM wear a bit of responsibility for a complete failure to learn about the player in the first place? If the player's preferences are incompatible, shouldn't the DM know that before the game starts? Granted, the player should be stepping up here too and learning enough about the campaign and the group to not waste everyone's time, but, the DM pitched the game (presumably) and the player didn't find anything objectionable at the time. How much information could the DM have really given that player before the game started in order to know whether or not the player is a good fit for the group.

I'm a huge believer that a DM should be very specific about what the campaign will be about and what is expected from the players. Just saying, "Hey, I have a DnD game, let's play on Thursday night" is a recipe for disaster.
[MENTION=6779234]Grainger[/MENTION] - I'm again not necessarily disagreeing with you either. But, since goggles DO exist long before medieval times, it's not a huge stretch to think that other groups might invent goggles. I'd have a bigger issue with, say, glasses (which do actually appear as magic items in more than a few D&D supplements - wasn't there glasses of read magic in 3e?) which are very anachronistic. But, really, you have effectively goggles on the front of a helmet and masks are certainly not anachronistic. If goggles really bug you, why not a sort of mask that lets you see in the dark? Maybe a black one with pointy ears that causes the wearer's voice to drop several registers and sound like he's gargling gravel.

Hee hee, the twelve year old in me remembers creating 1e magic items like Claws of the Wolverine and Ruby Lenses of the Cyclops, so, Mask of the Bat wouldn't be too much of a stretch.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=8277]epochrpg[/MENTION], I'm not entirely sure why you prefer conveniently-stocked magic shops to conveniently dropped loot, but in any event it seems like neither is a solution in your current (underground, non-urban) circumstances. How about a devout prayer and sacrifice to the god of the sun (thereby soaking up some gp) rewarded by a blessing that lets you see (or maybe it should be a sacrifice to the god of the earth - bury some of your gems back in the ground by way of offering!).

In 4e, this would work for divine boons; I don't see why it couldn't work in 5e either, provided the costing is roughly correct, that is, equivalent to the goggles. If the boon is going to be temporary, the costing could be based on X scrolls of darkvision instead.

Magic items are supposed to be cool. Requiring time and effort to get them preserves this. Make them something you can buy at the local 7-11 and all the cool evaporate.

This is highly variable across tables, I think. For my players, the interest in magic items doesn't derive from how they're acquired but how they're actually used during play. Relatively utiitarian magic goggles won't become more interesting simply in virtue of taking multiple hours of play to acquire.

If it's like the standard underdark, as introduced in 1e modules like the D1-3 series, humans interact with underdark communities - sometimes travel there from the surface. Regular traders or travelers, most likely fairly powerful in their own right, may be good sources of human-friendly devices for seeing in the dark. If so, hit a few caravans if you can find them and loot for such items.

Keep in mind that if there are civilizations in the Underdark (drow, duergar, svirfneblin, et cetera), then there are probably a handful of surface-dwellers who've found themselves living in those civilizations. They have the same problem you do, except in their case they aren't trying to be stealthy but just get along in cities where everybody except them can see in the dark. Many of them probably have goggles of night or the equivalent. So all you have to do is locate such individuals, then either make a deal of some kind or kill them and take their stuff.

I'm glad to see that Dausuul at least incuded the "make a deal" option. It would be odd to be so adamant against magic items for trade that traders won't part with them no matter what the price offered, and so have to be robbed for them!

this is an important world-building issue, thus it can't be the pretended solution. You can't pretend to change how the campaign fantasy world works because you need to fix your problem. Letting you find THE magic item that solves your problem is OK, but IMO the DM shouldn't be pushed to a major flavor change to the whole campaign.

This is another playstyle thing. The notion that quality of the player's play experience should be subordinated to the GM's unilateral conception of how the gameworld should be is very foreign to me.

 

[Hussar]

Your mistake seems to be assuming the problem is the fault of anyone in particular before there is any evidence of of wrongdoing from either party.

If the problem is approached rationally and logically it will get fixed. Neither the player nor the DM should blindly accept blame for something without all the facts. In many matters such as this, the collective opinion of the group as a whole is worth a listen.

:/ Hrm, I could have sworn some poster in this thread talked about players asking for items to make them suck less should be booted from the game. I know I read that...

suppose Goldmoon should have told her companions to sod off she was staying home because she was gimped because the true gods had been forgotten.

At my table if being handed a new toy to compensate for a disadvantage every time it comes up is a requirement for fun then its best to not play.


If your character is completely shut down in the dark then just accept the fact that he/she is no ninja and was just playing around at it. Tell the party that you hope they manage to save the world and go home to grandma's house for some milk & cookies.

Boo hoo hoo I'm not at maximum effectiveness in the dark so throw me a gewgaw to nullify the disadvantages I chose at character creation, is not a good reason to include magic item shops.

Someone's been making assumptions all through this thread, but, it isn't me. I've not made a single comment about the OP's DM. The worst thing I've said about anyone is that a DM who ignores an unhappy player is a bad DM. I guess that's a disputable point, maybe. I certainly feel that way, but, apparently that's an opinion that isn't shared.