2014 includes a lot of passive agressive design choices to place awkward hurdles in the way of using magic items as if there was an effort to pressure away from using them. Magic items have always been a pretty core part of d&d gameplay for various reasons & the DMG once even included a few pages about their importance to gameplay with a good chunk of chapter10 even beyond the rather clear & uncertain insight into human nature described on pg115. Despite multiple new editions & a wildly different set of mechanics that section is still largely 100% accurate to what was released in 2014. It's been said many many* times how magic items are not required or needed for PCs in 5e by design with no indications of being outright in either direction since 2014.
No matter how often someone at wotc says otherwise magic items are clearly an obviously a core pillar of d&d, just a quick page count shows just how true that is/ It's odd for an unneeded optional feature to consume 92 pages of the DMG 12 pages of XgE 19 pages of TcoE 7 from GGtR 6 in Theros & countless pages of the various hardcover adventure books. Without even counting eberron's rising from the last war or Spelljammer's magic item pages in even a single adventure that combines to a page count of magic item related content that is edging in on something close to some of the hard cover adventures themselves (especially if you subtract the title page, various publishing legaleese &OGL pages, index & what are often charitably dubbed an "appendix"),
As shown above magic items are obviously magic items are not a discardable "optional" pillar of d&d and yet there are a wide range of rather odd choices that 2014 5e implemented that do little more than hamstring the GM in their use as what seems to be a primary goal.
It may not have been perfect originally in the 3.5 PHB but at least the 2006(?) revised character sheet added sections for possessions on/not on person, & magic items worn with spaces marked out for item, location & weight. None of those are represented in the 5e character sheets. Digital distribution & at the table use of PDF editing digital devices back then was nowhere near as simple as it is today, but it demonstrates an additional passive aggressive hurdle thrown at the GM in the 2014 rulebooks in how it treats & omits parts of encumbrance.
Not only are body slot locations left undefined by the ruleset of 2014-today, so too are key details of how actually carrying stuff works. Container capacities are found on phb153, but on no page of any 5e book is it explained how they work. Obviously without body slots being defined those containers can't be restricted to specific body slots to the joy of every GM who has tried to require container use only to crash into debates over why ## strength should allow Bob's PC to wear multiple backpacks 4 sacks & 47 pouches plus a two handed weapon or sword & board. If the container omission were limited to that we could point to the dmg141 entry to limit that kind of situation, but the GM is already treading on thin ice just by trying to require container use given that nowhere does it really say that a PC needs to use them or more importantly how they work. Do items in a container count against encumbrance? If so is it full or partial weight after weight distribution of backpacks & such? How many of a given container type can a player wear on their PC?... Nobody knows the answer to any of those because the rules for those containers don't exist& the closest you can find to rules related to them is on PHB190 where the sidebar helpfully shoots the GM's case to require container use by eliminating any costs & risks to interacting with them in combat. Sure PHB176 has some rules related to carrying capacity but those too shoot the GM's case to require containers, unlike past versions where such rules created meaningful choices, these ones either make every effort to ensure they will never matter or will always matter in an annoying way without actually creating meaningful choices that differentiate one build from another that chose differently.
*I'm not watching through hours & hours of Wotc folks to find videos that happen to mention it but seem to recall Crawford mentioning it as recently as the last couple months.
No matter how often someone at wotc says otherwise magic items are clearly an obviously a core pillar of d&d, just a quick page count shows just how true that is/ It's odd for an unneeded optional feature to consume 92 pages of the DMG 12 pages of XgE 19 pages of TcoE 7 from GGtR 6 in Theros & countless pages of the various hardcover adventure books. Without even counting eberron's rising from the last war or Spelljammer's magic item pages in even a single adventure that combines to a page count of magic item related content that is edging in on something close to some of the hard cover adventures themselves (especially if you subtract the title page, various publishing legaleese &OGL pages, index & what are often charitably dubbed an "appendix"),
As shown above magic items are obviously magic items are not a discardable "optional" pillar of d&d and yet there are a wide range of rather odd choices that 2014 5e implemented that do little more than hamstring the GM in their use as what seems to be a primary goal.
- Starting with one thing that 5e did add (attunement & attunement slots). These are split across DMG136 & 138. The word attune or attunement cal also be found on PHB pg50 66 80 8192 178 &246 &252 & 266 & 271, none of those actually explain attunement & the only ones referencing magic items that require attunement are spells that can do something noteworthy with it. There's no reason to detail what they do here in this post since anyone reading this forum almost certainly knows what attunement:yes magic items & attunement slots are. The people who don'tknow what magic item attunement is should be obvious from the fact that at no point in the PHB is it actually described in any way.
- The passive aggressive hurdles thrown in the GM's way continue from there to the character sheet itself (wotc pdf download link). After nearly a decade wotc has still not taken steps to correct the fact that nowhere on the character sheet is there a place players can write down what they are attuned to where their GM could hypothetically glance at with the extremely reasonable "let ne see your sheet(s) for a second Bob" type overview. The omission appears deliberate at this point given that none of the ease of releasing a new PDF & the fact that none of the setting & adventure books tried to correct it with an updated sheet like page 286 of the Magic Item Compendium did in 2007 with this second problem.
- The 2007 Magic item sheet wasn't built for attunement since it predated the 2014 5e publication by several years, but it demonstrates an additional passive aggressive roadblock. I wanted to be sure if 4e included a magic item sheet or not rather than just going with my vague memories of minimal experience & found several attempts to update it (like this) but 2014 5e DMG 141 provides a pretty significant passive aggressive roadblock thrown in the way of updating such a sheet to 5e in the "multiple items of the same kind" section. Although body slots are implied to exist & there have been at least two entirely different sets of them, at no point do any of the 5e books actually list them or describe their use like 3.5 pg288 does masterfully on page 288 in the slot affinities sidebar.
It may not have been perfect originally in the 3.5 PHB but at least the 2006(?) revised character sheet added sections for possessions on/not on person, & magic items worn with spaces marked out for item, location & weight. None of those are represented in the 5e character sheets. Digital distribution & at the table use of PDF editing digital devices back then was nowhere near as simple as it is today, but it demonstrates an additional passive aggressive hurdle thrown at the GM in the 2014 rulebooks in how it treats & omits parts of encumbrance.
Not only are body slot locations left undefined by the ruleset of 2014-today, so too are key details of how actually carrying stuff works. Container capacities are found on phb153, but on no page of any 5e book is it explained how they work. Obviously without body slots being defined those containers can't be restricted to specific body slots to the joy of every GM who has tried to require container use only to crash into debates over why ## strength should allow Bob's PC to wear multiple backpacks 4 sacks & 47 pouches plus a two handed weapon or sword & board. If the container omission were limited to that we could point to the dmg141 entry to limit that kind of situation, but the GM is already treading on thin ice just by trying to require container use given that nowhere does it really say that a PC needs to use them or more importantly how they work. Do items in a container count against encumbrance? If so is it full or partial weight after weight distribution of backpacks & such? How many of a given container type can a player wear on their PC?... Nobody knows the answer to any of those because the rules for those containers don't exist& the closest you can find to rules related to them is on PHB190 where the sidebar helpfully shoots the GM's case to require container use by eliminating any costs & risks to interacting with them in combat. Sure PHB176 has some rules related to carrying capacity but those too shoot the GM's case to require containers, unlike past versions where such rules created meaningful choices, these ones either make every effort to ensure they will never matter or will always matter in an annoying way without actually creating meaningful choices that differentiate one build from another that chose differently.
*I'm not watching through hours & hours of Wotc folks to find videos that happen to mention it but seem to recall Crawford mentioning it as recently as the last couple months.
