Creating magic items in 5e

jodyjohnson

Adventurer
I like magic item crafting, keeps and armies, animal companions, and mounts. I think it provides more things for the campaign to play off of and provide goals outside of killing things and taking their stuff.

The frustration is when those extra elements become the means of just killings things and taking their stuff better. Magic items are going to be acquired either way - but if a player wants to craft then I'm fine with them finding the materials for making the item themselves and crafting them instead of plopping the finished item at their feet.

The key is usually time, all of the above presume that the adventurers aren't just rushing day after day to the next threat or lost dungeon. It assumes that the world isn't just a never ending string of threats and the party can take a month or a year off without 'losing the game'.
 

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Ilbranteloth

Explorer
To quote the president: "Wrong."

Thr main attraction for the area in which the adventure takes place is the Forge of Spells, because it waa a place where magic items could be crafted.

Well, sort of. The idea that you need a place to "channel(ed) the magic to enchant dwarven weapons and gnome gadgets" is cool, and would imply that such a location is required to make magic items.

But there is no other description aside from that sentence (twice), no advantage granted to attempting to craft items at the forge itself, and no rules for making magic items at all.

So I'd say it pretty much has nothing to say about it.
 

Ilbranteloth

Explorer
I like magic item crafting, keeps and armies, animal companions, and mounts. I think it provides more things for the campaign to play off of and provide goals outside of killing things and taking their stuff.

The frustration is when those extra elements become the means of just killings things and taking their stuff better. Magic items are going to be acquired either way - but if a player wants to craft then I'm fine with them finding the materials for making the item themselves and crafting them instead of plopping the finished item at their feet.

The key is usually time, all of the above presume that the adventurers aren't just rushing day after day to the next threat or lost dungeon. It assumes that the world isn't just a never ending string of threats and the party can take a month or a year off without 'losing the game'.

Agreed. Which is why the passage of time, having a place and people for "home" for all of the characters, and defining some of their personal goals are key in our campaign.

Surviving a dungeon is a lot like winning the lottery. You suddenly have a whole bunch of disposable cash that you didn't have before. What would you spend it on? A home? Vacations? Cars? Parties? Debt? Electronics? Adventuring is the means to the end, we think it's important to define that end ahead of time. Of course, once you have the coin, the goals may change. But there are always a lot of expenses to living, and it's rare for somebody to have nobody that they care about in the world. Of course, D&D characters seem to comprise a lot of orphans and street urchins.

While we don't play out all of the non-adventuring stuff, the goals of the characters are usually centered around it. Downtime is a big part of the campaign (made easier by having multiple characters for everybody), and strange ingredients can often be purchased rather than found by themselves. More than one wizard PC has morphed into more of an NPC hiring others to gather ingredients and craft items, etc. in the campaign. It's cool because over time the home town (if we're running that type of campaign), grows into more and more ex-PCs, who settle down to have families, etc. And when multiple characters are needed, then each player has plenty to choose from.

Having multiple characters that can switch in and out at appropriate times not only allows for a greater use of downtime and goals outside of adventuring, but it also means that it's not always the same adventurer's that are "saving the town" or whatever. There are some rivalries among PCs, but many of them are friends and share information and stories, and then those who are available at a given time, will go out to explore some more.

It also aids in a greater, and perhaps more realistic, passage of time in the campaign.
 

CapnZapp

Legend
Do people have any ideas on how to do this in 5e? Do you think it should be a player option in 5e?

I recall the RC had rules which broke down to a percentage chance to create an item based on your casting modifier, level, and I believe the level of spell that you were using to create an item.

2e had enchant an item and permanency spells for magical item creation. You also had to gather up some exotic items like the branch of oak tree which had been struck by lightning to create a wand of lightning (this is nonspecific, it could have been anything the DM determined). Presumably priests just threw an item on the altar and prayed a bunch for their items.

3e had the item creation feats and allowed you to make items to your heart's content as long as you had the money and experience points to pay for it.

4e, as I was just reminded, had a ritual that allowed you to create items. I believe they also had one to break down items so if you had an axe if thunder but really wanted a sword of frost you could perform the rituals and swap them about.

5e I think has some downtime rules (I'm drinking coffee in a cafe at the moment so can't check) and I believe they expanded in them in a UA.

At any rate, how do you deal with enchanting items in 5e? Have you brought back a system from an earlier edition? Do you use downtime as a means for item creation? Do you even allow PCs to create their own items?
The official rules for creating items can be summarized as "only NPCs with years and years of free time bother".

What you can expect as a player character is to cook up a few low-level potions. Maybe.

Also, what others have already told you: 5e doesn't work well with giving player characters a menu and just allow them to create items at will.

As for "base prices", the rarity-based pricing scheme is a total joke. All I can do is direct you to Sane Magic Item Prices. If I can mention only one benefit from using that document, it is that consumables generally cost 1/10th of a permanent item, not a preposterous half.
 

Ilbranteloth

Explorer
The official rules for creating items can be summarized as "only NPCs with years and years of free time bother".

What you can expect as a player character is to cook up a few low-level potions. Maybe.

Also, what others have already told you: 5e doesn't work well with giving player characters a menu and just allow them to create items at will.

As for "base prices", the rarity-based pricing scheme is a total joke. All I can do is direct you to Sane Magic Item Prices. If I can mention only one benefit from using that document, it is that consumables generally cost 1/10th of a permanent item, not a preposterous half.

Yeah, magic item prices have always been a sore point for me. It's like the manufacture of guns is only known to a specific few, and that it takes days, weeks, months, or even years to make one, and might not work, and might hurt or kill you in the process, and requires rare ingredients that you have to go and acquire by adventuring, and oh, it always costs this to make that, and to buy/sell that.

If there's anything that has no fixed price, it would be magic items, unless you're in a campaign like Eberron where they are made more frequently.

In descriptions of shopping for magic items in the Realms, Ed says that most of the "magic items" for sales are things like love potions, simply household items, and occasionally something of more value, but buyer beware, because as often as not they don't do anything at all. On the other hand, you might find a rare magical helm in the corner of a shop that nobody knows is magical.

So "sane" prices might be a reasonable starting point, but as an example, the "recipe" for making ink to scribe a scroll of protection from petrification is in the DMG (1e) and includes giant squid sepia, a basilisk eye, cockatrice feathers, venom from a medusa's snakes, powdered peridot, powdered topaz, holy water, and pumpkin seeds. This is the sort of complexity and difficulty I prefer for making magic items, and the acquisition (and preservation/preparation) of such items makes setting a "usual" price impossible.

But the bigger factor in the "crafting" equation for me is always "why aren't they common" and there has to be real, in-world reasons why that is the case. Time and price is insufficient to explain in. In a world where there are powerful wizards and dictators that could simply send armies or slaves, and they would undoubtedly attempt to raise things like basilisks in captivity, scarcity of ingredients is also not enough. The secretive nature of wizards and the need for each crafter to develop their own personal approach, even with the help of others, has a bit of an impact, but ultimately I think there needs to be a risk involved as well. A risk of failure wastes time and money, and that's fine. But there's also the idea of laboratory explosions and such that I want to incorporate. And then figuring out why the Red Wizards of Thay can't just enslave enough wizards to generate an endless supply, which is why there needs to be a personal limitation, and the idea that the process temporarily, and sometimes permanently, weakens the crafter feels right to me.

As always, my perspective is from the world-building side. I'm not trying to deliberately make it very difficult for an adventuring wizard (PC) to do, but that the process is time consuming, difficult, and risky for any wizard. So I'm not quite at the "only NPCs with years and years of free time" but it's more on that end of the spectrum.

The key is to make sure that you work downtime into the campaign so the PC wizards can do that if they want to.
 


cbwjm

Seb-wejem
The official rules for creating items can be summarized as "only NPCs with years and years of free time bother".

What you can expect as a player character is to cook up a few low-level potions. Maybe.

Also, what others have already told you: 5e doesn't work well with giving player characters a menu and just allow them to create items at will.

As for "base prices", the rarity-based pricing scheme is a total joke. All I can do is direct you to Sane Magic Item Prices. If I can mention only one benefit from using that document, it is that consumables generally cost 1/10th of a permanent item, not a preposterous half.
This is what I like about the 2e and earlier edition crafting rules, made it much harder to craft something since you needed to research and then find exotic materials. For harder than 3e where you just grab a feat, a wand, and then cast a spell and spend some gold and experience. I think the 2e system might work quite well for 5e and it seems to be closer to the suggestion in the UA downtime document (which I've finally read) although that document still requires months of downtime for crafting rarer items.
 

They're on page 128-9
The rules are pretty light and open and generally left up to the DM, so it can either be a routine procedure like in 3e where you just throw gp into a pile and it becomes an item, or it can be a quest where you need to find the individual components for each magical item and specially craft it as part of a quest.
 

Ilbranteloth

Explorer
But they are. Rarity starts at uncommon, and even "rare" items are common enough your average adventurer is expected to have collected one by fifth level.

Collecting magic items in dungeons is not common. Adventurers make up maybe 1% of the population of the world? The number of magic items in a given setting compared to the population of the setting is very, very small.

The rarity of magic items is in relation to other magic items. It has nothing to do with how common they are in the world itself.
 

CapnZapp

Legend
They're on page 128-9
The rules are pretty light and open and generally left up to the DM, so it can either be a routine procedure like in 3e where you just throw gp into a pile and it becomes an item, or it can be a quest where you need to find the individual components for each magical item and specially craft it as part of a quest.
Oh, it can never be like in 3e...

(It can be routine, yes, but you will never finish an item in the timeframe of official adventure campaigns. And even if you somehow do, you're not likely to appreciate that uncommon thingy you started back at level 5 now that you're level 15)
 

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