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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomedunn" data-source="post: 9505319" data-attributes="member: 7040979">This approach should work reasonably well at higher levels, where the gap in power between levels is more consistent, but at lower levels it runs the risk of significantly overestimating how much stronger a party is for certain types of magic items.I did a similar analysis where I looked at how magic items impacted <a href="https://tomedunn.github.io/the-finished-book/classes/magic-items-and-encounter-balancing-p2/" target="_blank">PC XP thresholds</a>. This gets around the low level issue of adjusting the party's level, and allows scaling above level 20, but at the cost of some extra math that some might not be comfortable with.The general results are summarized in the table below, which shows the average percent increase to a PC's XP thresholds for different types of magic item bonuses. In case it wasn't clear, the first row is for items that increase your attack bonus or save DC, and the second is for items that increase your armor class or saving throw bonuses.[ATTACH=full]385741[/ATTACH]The values for each type of offensive magic item bonus assume all of your damage benefits from them. So a monk will benefit less from a +1 weapon than what's listed because a good portion of their damage comes from unarmed strikes.Similarly, the values for magic items that boost a character's armor class or saving throw bonuses assumes all of the damage they take is affected. If we assume half the damage a character takes comes from attacks and half from saves then a character with +1 AC from a magic item will only get half the listed benefit, or around 3.8%.From my research into this topic, it's clear that the 2014 encounter building rules don't account for the PCs having any magic items in determining their XP thresholds. Its possible the 2024 rules also do this, in which case the above table should still apply, but I haven't had a chance to verify this by calculate XP budgets for the updated classes.</blockquote>

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