D&D (2024) DMG 5.5 - the return of bespoke magical items?

[Horwath]

I think you should mix it up as DM. I'm not against dropping something for a class on occasion but you shouldn't never drop a cleric item even if there are no clerics in your group. Clerics are common and they make items so it seems illogical none would ever drop.

but what is the point?
so next session you can waste 2hrs on trying to sell the item at the 1st mage guild?
just give sack of gold instead.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You've given two works of fiction & a historical figure from 431BC (ie ~2500 years ago). The role of GM & player are effectively under the authority of the same author in the first two examples & It is likely that the 2500 year old bones are dust by now making the answer no.

There's a difference between an event of note interrupting and endless events of note

It doesn't have to be endless. It just has to be "about once every other month." That's all you need. They don't need to be earth-shattering (notice how half of the stuff I mentioned is specific only to the PCs, or only the handful of people they personally care about), nor obviously forced and artificial (you can easily build up reasonable justification for several of the things mentioned).

I'm not saying it's an absolute guarantee that the players won't have that time. I'm criticizing the claim, as already made, that it's an absolute guarantee that they WILL have that time. In practice, it's going to be a real crapshoot. The players will be taking a significant risk by hoping that nothing significant goes wrong.

 

[tetrasodium]

It doesn't have to be endless. It just has to be "about once every other month." That's all you need. They don't need to be earth-shattering (notice how half of the stuff I mentioned is specific only to the PCs, or only the handful of people they personally care about), nor obviously forced and artificial (you can easily build up reasonable justification for several of the things mentioned).

I'm not saying it's an absolute guarantee that the players won't have that time. I'm criticizing the claim, as already made, that it's an absolute guarantee that they WILL have that time. In practice, it's going to be a real crapshoot. The players will be taking a significant risk by hoping that nothing significant goes wrong.

No it does need to be endless because it doesn't take 50 consecutive days, it takes 50 cumulative days

 

[EzekielRaiden]

but what is the point?
so next session you can waste 2hrs on trying to sell the item at the 1st mage guild?
just give sack of gold instead.

Personally, I'd recommend going for Cleric-adjacent items, rather than "this is specifically and only for a Cleric and is thus totally useless to the PCs." So, maybe while delving in a particular dungeon, amongst other loot, they find a mundane holy symbol of Fnordia (perfectly ordinary, sell it or gift it to your local Fnordian church), a +1 mace that deals 1d4 radiant damage to undead, and some nice medium armor that adds your Wisdom modifier to any rolled healing you do or receive (note, "rolled", so no goodberry shenanigans). The first isn't useful, but it can be thematic and has non-pecuniary value in the right campaign. The second is generally nice, especially if there are a lot of undead in the adventure (as was the case in LMoP, for instance). The third is just nice in general, and might even be worthwhile for a character that would otherwise wear heavy armor: a Fighter with decent Dex and Wis might find that pretty tempting since it would work with Second Wind, a combat-leaning Bard (e.g. Swords or Valor) would appreciate it, a Druid could still get some mileage out of it, etc. It would be best for a Cleric, certainly, but it's not exclusively for Clerics.

It's perfectly possible to balance the desire for thematic items that fortify worldbuilding ideas and the desire to avoid pointless "vendor trash" items. This sort of thing is so easily resolved, I don't even really see it as an actual point of conflict between "it's a game, make it fun, avoid the boring" approaches (what might be called "gamist") and "it's a world, make it grounded, avoid the contradictory" (what might be called "simulationist").

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No it does need to be endless because it doesn't take 50 consecutive days, it takes 50 cumulative days

Oh. I thought it was consecutive, and if you were interrupted at any point at all, it had to start over.

That certainly changes things, yes. I can grant that if it is cumulative, eventually the party will be able to make something, assuming they travel to places that have the tools they need to continue their work. (As an example, if you were making a sword, most villages would probably have a blacksmith, so if you have your own smithing tools, you could spend a day here, a day there, etc. But you couldn't necessarily count on every village having tools, supplies, etc. for making a silk robe or a glass staff, for example--and even bringing your own tools can only get you so far.

Still, even 50 cumulative days could take quite a long time IRL in many campaigns, especially if the game actually considers overland travel time. I know far too many groups that just handwave overland travel as though it were nothing. Can't really be forging and hammering and quenching your fancy magic sword if you're in a covered wagon for a week--and that's a pretty reasonable travel time between moderately-sized medieval towns/cities by horse-drawn wagon. Even purely on horseback, switching to fresh horses every chance you get, and moving at the maximum speed you can manage while still eating and sleeping, it would still take multiple days to travel even a few hundred miles. Modern "extreme" horse-riding competitions where you don't stop for 24 continuous hours (not going to happen with PCs) can barely make 100 miles, and leave both horse and rider utterly exhausted.

Point being: if you make it 50 continuous days of labor, it's a pretty difficult (not impossible, but difficult) challenge for most groups. If you make it 50 cumulative days, sure, it may eventually happen, but it could be months IRL, and by that point the character's needs or desires could have easily changed. This isn't some insane wish-granting engine where players just get whatever they want as soon as they want with no complications or consequences.

And folks wanting to curtail excessive usage simply need to add two relatively reasonable restrictions: one, as noted, make it require consecutive days rather than cumulative ones, and two, require that the PC(s) actually have the personal expertise to do what they want to do, or that they work with artisans who do have it. The former, as noted, makes it a dicey proposition that you can sit still long enough to get the task done. The latter makes it so you have to do the crafting in an actual workshop or the like, meaning podunk nowhere villages aren't gonna cut it, you need a relatively sizable town or even city.

@Hussar has the much more reasonable concern: "Oh great. More spells. Just what I always wanted."

 

[Lanefan]

Ever since D&D, many TTRPG's have had these two axes of character advancement- what you get from "experience" (be it levels or increasing individual traits) and what you get from "treasure".

Treasure has always been the province of the person running the game, and for many years, there was no real guidance on what players should/could have. It was scattershot, up to DM will or whatever was in the adventure.

Which is at least a somewhat realistic take on the often-unrealistic amount of treasure in dungeons: it's gonna be random, or based on whatever last owned the place.

Sometimes, however, a character concept requires a specific bit of treasure, and games have wrestled over the years on how to get the items into the hands of players. A Star Wars game might allow Jedi, but what is a Jedi without a lightsaber? Star Wars SAGA solves this by giving a Jedi a lightsaber as a class feature. But this then leads to the question of "how much is this feature worth" when balancing classes. And then, if later on, the players find a lightsaber, how much does this devalue the class feature?

Other games try to fix this by having magic items be purchased or crafted, but this leads to pushback from people who feel magic items should be exceptionally rare or "special", as opposed to just gear characters equip, which isn't helped by the scores of rather mundane items (the +1 long swords and rings of protection for example).

If the magic item required for the concept is relatively common and-or useful to anyone (say, a device of at-will flight) it's usually pretty easy to handle. That said...

I had a new player come to me with this fantastic character idea they had, inspired by some show they were watching. In it, a character had a "laser whip", and they wanted to build a PC around using something similar.

Whips being very underused in most games, I was on board with the idea, but the issue of how to get the whip in the hands of the player was something I wrestled with. The cost of a +1 brilliant energy whip-dagger (can't be a normal whip, because the rules said they were useless against any creature with natural armor and I wasn't sure if brilliant energy would get around that) was prohibitive and not something they could get early. So I switched gears and decided on a +1 flaming whip-dagger.

I couldn't really let them start with it at level 1, so I seeded it in a level 3 adventure. The player struggled with their normal whip-dagger for a few levels, as it's damage was low, and they had yet to acquire the abilities to make it useful, thus most of the time they were forced to use a sword.

...if the character concept hinges on a near-unique item like this, the player IMO just might want to rethink.

Then tragedy struck. The character actually died on the adventure the magic whip was in, and the player was no longer interested in a whip user, so made a new character. So that when the magic whip was found, it was now an oddity that nobody was built to get much use out of!*

*Though at least, being 3e, it could be sold for extra cash later.

You call it tragedy. I call it Tuesday.

I've long ago learned the hard way to never design anything around any one specific PC as without fail that'll be the character who immediately dies, or gets booted from the party, or who the player decides to retire* or cycle out.

* - I did this to my DM once. Unknown to me, the next adventure was mostly based around one of my PCs (I was running two at the time); but for perfectly valid in-game reasons I wanted that character to retire. I stated the character was staying in town, and why; other players heard me but the DM didn't, and we got two days out of town with him still thinking I had two characters in the group. It wasn't until we got to dangerous territory and made up our night-watch list that the DM realized my other character wasn't there.

"Squaaawk!" says the DM. "Where'd he go???"
"He's back in town where I said he was," says me, "retiring to [continue doing in-game stuff he'd already been doing]."
"No he's not! You need him! Go and get him!"

And so they came back to town and hauled my sorry butt out into the field. Later events would make me kinda wish they hadn't, but oh well...

To this day, a lot of cool magic items I put into my adventures don't get used, for various reasons. And a magic item nobody wants is not "special" in any shape or form, thus I have to give players some way to use it down the road, either to sell, trade, or use as a gift or bribe to some NPC.

Magic items can always be sold, one would think.

A magic item can be the most amazing, wonderful thing, but if it doesn't do what the player needs it to do, it's meaningless. Which is why I feel that letting players have at least some agency with regards to treasure can be a good thing!

In theory this sounds fine. In practice, though, when you don't even know which characters are coming on a given adventure until they've already left town, random or pre-placed treasure is still the way to go. That, and there's been times when I have tried to place treasure intended for specific characters and for whatever reason the treasure ended up with someone else, or sold off, or never found.

 

[Lanefan]

Could the characters of LotR take fifty days off to make a magic item?

They spent about that long in Rivendell forming the Fellowship so sure, why not?

Characters have lives full of adventure. They aren't normal. They don't live at the pace normal people live. They have that not-actually-Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

This is only true if you-as-DM make it true or the players go out of their way to make it true.

There's nothing anywhere in the rules saying PCs can't just do one or two adventures a year and spend the rest of their time in downtime activities.

Yes, if they were normal people leading normal lives, 50 continuous, uninterrupted days would be a cakewalk. Adventurers are not normal.

It really isn't that hard to find something that will interrupt the work for a couple days every few weeks, and that's enough to derail the work.

I can't remember the last time a party took a couple of months off in my game. Sometimes this is my fault as DM: an adventure (be it planned or unplanned) will rear its head right away. I'll cop to that.

But far more often it's the players: "We've done our training and divided our treasury, we're good to rock. What adventures are out there? We're looking!" and the second they get a sniff of a mission, they're off.

 

[Lanefan]

i feel like the actually important cost to making a magic item is the gold, and perhaps special materials, so if you can fund and source those i don't see why a rare items should take five times as long to craft than an uncommon one.

Which raises another question: is it assumed the PCs are doing this crafting themselves, or are they paying someone else to do it while they go off and do other things, such as adventuring?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

YES!!! Between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Gandalf literally can spend decades making whatever he wants, if he was under the D&D rules.

...During the story of LotR.

Obviously not in the literally 60 years BETWEEN stories (remember, Bilbo is freshly 50 in The Hobbit and turns "eleventy-one", 111, at the start of Fellowship).

For God's sake man, this is so obviously disingenuous I can't believe you're actually serious here. A 60-year timeskip for most campaigns would mean rolling fresh characters, not eagerly thinking about the items you've crafted.

Between when the little girl is born and they start their adventure, living in the village. They do a few heists, but overall...YES! They have a few years there.

Then let me make crystal clear:

WHILE they are on the adventure.

Which is what would actually be happening when D&D characters do that.

Okay...maybe not.

I think it is dependent on the pace of the adventure. Some may have the time, others may not.

Which was my whole point. It's the players taking a risk (again, under the mistaken assumption that it was consecutive rather than cumulative days of work), the hope that nothing significantly distracting comes up in the next 50 days. No tempting opportunities for sweet, sweet lewts. No summons from the Crown. No orc raids on the nearby vineyards/grain fields that supply the local vintners/breweries (which would be more than motivation enough for several PCs I've known!). Etc.

As noted, I mistook the 50 day timer as consecutive rather than cumulative, which makes a major difference. But I appreciate that you recognize the core point: being in the middle of an ongoing adventure can quite easily make extended downtime difficult to justify.

You do know the days can be interrupted, right, and don't have to be consecutive?

No. I don't have the book in front of me, just like most people right now.

It would be really easy to craft magical items just as part of the time taken while on a journey.

It absolutely would not. Any time you're in a wagon or on horseback, you emphatically are not crafting--and if you want to make even remotely decent time while doing so, you're not going to do any crafting in the between portions either, where you'll be mostly spending your time asleep or taking care of the horses and such.

LOL, right now my PCs are travelling by boat, so they aren't even exerting themselves and could "work" on crafting while enjoying their cruise.

How, exactly? The kinds of "forges" you'd see on sailing vessels could not handle forging a whole sword (and certainly not a suit of armor), and you're not going to have looms, nor are you going to want to do delicate work with glass or gemcutting or the like. Even leatherwork is going to be tough because tanning hides on a constantly sloshing ship would be a nightmare. Unless you've bought purely intermediate products you're gonna have a rough time.

There's a reason you didn't see sailing ships produce finished goods while in transit. If it had been even remotely financially practical, it would've been done. It wasn't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes. Beyond what another poster has said, 17 years pass between Bilbo's party and Frodo leaving Bag End, they spend two months in Rivendell, and another month in Lorien. In fact, they do make a magic item during their Rivendell downtime, as Narsil is reforged into Anduril during that time in the book.

Again: I consider this argument deeply disingenuous.

The adventure doesn't actually START until the Fellowship is formed. That's literally the "party formation" scene. Everything prior to that is us getting the backstory.