Pamphylian
Explorer
I have a theory that you can learn a lot about a fantasy TTRPG’s design philosophy by looking at its magic items. Further, you can especially learn a lot about changes in design philosophy by looking at different takes on the “same”* magic item in different editions of a game. There are iconic items that have shown up in every(?) edition of DnD, and each provides a little window into the mechanics, the aesthetics, and the general scope and feeling of gameplay for the game they appear in.
Obviously there are many other confounding factors that circumscribe the role of magic items in a game, so perhaps we shouldn’t take differences within any particular cross-edition item too literally as a symbol of design philosophy. But I think there’s something here. The scope of items I’ll look at in this thread is narrow both within editions and across them. Both because of the many limitations of my knowledge and a desire to keep things brief (sort of), I’ll stick to a couple items in 1e, 5e, and a little of 5.5e. I’ll pick out a few patterns I notice that generally seem consistent with the flavor of the rest of the game, but I would very much like to hear about other patterns in other editions, as my take will be a narrow one.
The Staff of Withering
Here is the text of the magic item the Staff of Withering from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide:
Terrifying! The victim ages, his members wither! Like an ancient curse.
Some stuff probably happens in 2e-4e, but I’ll pick the story up at the item’s incarnation in 5e (2014, but I think 2024 is basically the same):
So, the basic idea is similar: a magic staff that does damage if you hit someone with it, but you can expend charge(s) to do some extra broadly withering stuff to the unfortunate blow receiver.
Obviously, there are some differences. One is that in the 5e version, the effects are more abstract - we go right to the mechanics. What does 2d10 necrotic damage look like? Ideally the DM does some work here to paint the picture but as written there isn’t too much concrete that we can grab onto besides the item name. Same with the disadvantage on Strength/Con checks. Meanwhile, in the 1e version, we can easily imagine someone aging 10 years, and we definitely can picture a random limb shriveling into uselessness (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comes to mind). And this isn’t just empty flavor, it hooks into all sorts of consequences and decision-making calculus for the players. Of course there are by-the-book mechanical effects - age in 1e comes with stat effects, and magical aging gets a System Shock check against death - but also some aspects that the players or DM can grab on to as affecting their context in the world. The item gives one delightful example: the aging doesn’t matter that much for long lived creatures, and might actually help Dragons. But also, perhaps it can be circumstantially mitigated (if you're on the Astral Plane, maybe you don’t age?). And aging may affect the social status of the affected character. The withered arm (or whatever) probably has some effects the DM can borrow from other rules, and also many that probably need to be adjudicated. Does it horrify children? Do things get septic? Can that be mitigated by amputation? Lots of possible consequences.
Another difference is in relative impact. If you get hit by the 5e version, it’s not pleasant (the hour effect is at least longer than a single encounter), but after a short rest, for mechanical purposes, you are good as new. If you get hit by the 1e version, the way the character interfaces with the game is changed on multiple axes, maybe permanently. There is powerful magic out there that can help you, but unless your cleric has it at hand, you have been changed in a rather profound way for the foreseeable future.
Finally, in 5e, we have a narrowing of not just the scale, but the scope of effects. Age changes and limb use are narrowed to a type of HP damage and a check/saving throw penalty, the bread and butter of most damage/conditions in 5e.
In my experience, these differences - concreteness vs. gamey abstractness in flavor, magnitude of impact, and scope of impact - are pretty characteristic of some of the design changes in AD&D vs 5e. 5e effects (comparatively) tend toward gamey abstraction vs. concrete in-world flavor, tend to be muted in magnitude (risk of death or permanent change is smaller, effects last less long), and (related to abstraction vs concreteness) often will aim to simplify consequences to HP damage and possibly one of a small set of conditions. 5.5e maybe takes it another step beyond 5e in this realm - more on that as seen in magic items below, but this thread describes this very well for the case of the Command Spell. A game like Pathfinder 2e sits even further along this spectrum, where player culture seems to often argue for a strong separation of “flavor text” and rules. Maybe 4e as well (though I’ve never played). Judging all this just from the Staff of Withering alone might be slightly unfair - there are magic items in 5e with more flavorful descriptions, as I think the name of the item here is supposed to do some work - but this is the story that’s jumping out at me.
Now, I won’t hide that I find the 1e version of this item immensely cooler than the 5e version on basically all dimensions. It’s much closer to what I want out of a magic item. Which Staff of Withering version would strike fear in the hearts of players if an enemy wielded it? Which version would make the players feel immensely powerful and able to reshape the world if they had it in their hands? Which version feels like an object from myth, that can transform lives and possibly campaigns and live on in stories long after the session is over? Which version gets forgotten at the bottom of a Bag of Holding? Which has enough actionable flavor that players can wield it creatively and villains diabolically? Which item feels like Magic? I know the answer for me - there’s a reason I now always cross reference the 1e version of a magic item when I’m DMing 5e. I play and enjoy 5e, but I much prefer the AD&D design philosophy in these areas, and my ideal next edition would move in the 1e direction in these respects.
If I were to make an argument for the 5e version, it’s got conciseness going for it. For me that’s an “all else equal” sort of virtue - if you are cutting out cool actionable flavor, I’ll suffer some extra text instead. But it can be useful if you are quickly looking something up. The item is also self contained - the DM and players don’t have to figure out what happens if you have a withered arm. The mechanical universe is all spelled out and clearly defined (unless the DM wants to lean into some homebrewed flavor). That isn’t really a virtue for me, that’s not really what I’m looking for from TTRPGs, but I can understand why some like it. I find it fits in a little better with a game like Pathfinder 2e, where the game system is designed to run like ~perfectly balanced mathematical clockwork. The appeal of 5e has never been that for me, I like that wild unexpected things can still happen and that sessions often hinge on somebody’s decisions in gameworld terms rather than abstract mechanical terms. It’s not like 5e has some perfect math that some extra flavor and impact will mess up, why not lean into those things?
Maybe this all falls into eternal debates about Simulationism vs. Gamism vs. Narrativism. If I understood those things maybe I’d have a comment. Naively I’d be tempted to say that for some rules you could argue AD&D is a bit more “gamey” than 5e, but it’s sort of more of a simulationy-gaminess that…nevermind. Instead, here are a couple more items, just to show that I’m not 100% cherry picking here:
The Trident of Fish Command
From AD&D:
I picture Triton commanding a mass of sea life swirling about him amongst the waves - land dwelling mortals flee before his wrath!
The 5e version:
Again, the 5e version is… concise. The effects and who they affect are quite clear. Just look at your monster entry in the monster manual: are they a capital-B Beast? Do they have a swim speed? You’re good to go, just apply the effects of the Dominate Beast spell. This isn’t anything to sniff at! And mercifully, the user needs to consider the environment - you aren’t just sterilely summoning a fish-flavored area effect. But the 1e item turns things up quite a bit: you now affect all fish in a huge radius (6” = 60 feet in the dungeon, 180 feet out of doors), you can convey primitive emotions through them, you are protected even from those that succeed on their save. It’s not a pure buff though: if a non-fish monster is within 10 feet of you and attacking you, the fish can’t really help - a tactically interesting touch.
It would feel rather intimidating to go against an enemy with the 1e version in the right environment - instead of just 1 fish ally, they potentially have a swirling vortex of fish, but one you can counter by getting up close range (but maybe that’s what the enemy wants?). Likewise, you feel like a sea god if you defeat this enemy and take their Trident. Awesome. I also appreciate the Gygaxian but (or thus?) delightful examples of what counts as fish and not fish - a bit more flavorful and “in world” feeling than just “Beast with Swim Speed.” I appreciate the Melvillian classification of whales as fish in the 5e version, but I also would delight in the Moby Dick-esque arguments between a player and the Trident that the 1e version may encourage over whether a certain sea creature is a fish or not. I understand that not everyone would.
In general, the Trident of Fish Command follows the Staff of Withering Pattern (SoWP): 5e makes things a bit more abstract, a bit lower in impact, and the scope of the impact is a bit narrowed.
One more item so we can add 5.5e into the mix:
The Sword of Sharpness
The AD&D version:
The 5e (2014) version:
Both versions more or less have the same effects at the same level of concreteness and scope. In both cases, we have a sword that can lop off a limb on a good roll (a very rare effect in 5e!), and also can generate light. The 5e version also has an extra effect that maximizes damage against objects (I guess analogous to the “solid metal or stone” in the 1e version) - I like this a lot, even though object damage/HP seems to be rather ill-defined and circumstantial in 5e. But the limb loss is obviously the star. I don’t want you (the reader) to think I have some weird thing about limb crippling, but I do find it interesting as a rather impactful game effect that isn’t just HP damage and a carefully circumscribed condition. In 5e, there are restoration spells that imply the existence of PCs/NPCs with lost limbs, but very few mechanical ways to get to that state - outside of DM fiat, I’m struggling to think of ways besides this item.
The obvious difference between items here is that the 5e version basically seems a bit terrified of this limb loss ever actually occurring. You have to roll a 20… and then another 20. So, a 1/400 chance. How often is that coming up in practice? Hardly enough to plan around, unless maybe you have 2 Divination wizards each with a Portented 20 in their back pocket. Meanwhile, in the best case, the 1e version has a 15% chance of member separation - that’s something you can build into a strategy. So, in terms of item effect magnitude, the Sword of Sharpness follows the pattern we’ve seen. In 1e, this is a terrifying item to go up against, and possibly a character-defining item to wield. In 5e, it might be situationally useful or fun to pray that at some point in the campaign you’ll get double 20’s (hopefully not wasted on a kobold), but it’s probably also ending up at the proverbial bottom of the Bag of Holding.
The Sword of Sharpness is also a case where the 5.5e version makes a further substantial change, worth commenting on:
5.5e has done away with the limb loss, and thus the utterly terrifying “effect of such loss determined by the DM” from 5e 2014. This isn’t exactly a downgrade in terms of magnitude of impact: a level of Exhaustion is probably not as rough as losing a limb (unless you are already very exhausted), but it’s also 20 times more likely. So I get that change if the only other option is a 1/400 chance of limb loss. But come on! Just let me lop off a limb on a crit! Let me enact the Monty Python black knight scene! Let a DM do some adjudication! Let the Cleric finally cast Regenerate! What’s the worst that could happen? Will a campaign collapse into infighting and chaos? Will a carefully crafted encounter be “ruined”? We already have the Vorpal Sword! I’ll remember a lost limb way more than giving or receiving a rather abstract and circumscribed level of Exhaustion. Let the gangrene fester!
So, this seems to match the general pattern of changes from 5e to 5.5e: as with the Command spell, we move further away from a more concrete, open-ended 1e philosophy, towards the Pathfinder 2e realm of narrower impact and gamey abstraction. The changes from 5e to 5.5 aren’t huge, but many of them seem to be of this type - for this reason I’m generally inclined toward 2014 over 2024 if I have the option.
______________________________
To sum up,
I think there is something to the idea that a game’s magic items give you a little microcosm of the game’s design philosophy. You can gain insight into a large portion of the game’s flavour and mechanics just by perusing the magic item lists in the DMGs of 1e or 5e, and the design history of a particular magic item can tell a revealing story.
I think there are some counterarguments to this for the case of 1e vs 5e. For one, magic items might play a more character defining role in 1e than in 5e, where more character abilities build out a PC’s repertoire. But still, as long as you agree with the general philosophy, I see no downside for more impactful, flavourful items in 5e. You also might also argue that you can afford to give PCs more impactful items in 1e because there are more ways to lose items (magic item-eating rust monsters, disenchanters, item saving throws, easier character death). Maybe! Maybe that is an argument that 5e would benefit from more of these things…no need to get too precious about magic items, let them be easy come, easy go.
I’d definitely be interested in hearing about other ways this manifests - other design stories you could tell with other items (maybe countering this one?), patterns in other editions, patterns in other games - Call of Cthulhu's magic items surely risk your sanity for the most part? You could probably make a very similar argument looking at Spells across editions as well. Maybe it would also be revealing to look at which magic items appear at all (or not) across various editions - does it say anything that 5e has no Scarab of Enraging Enemies or no Chime of Hunger? What can we say about the wonderful-in-all-editions Mirror of Life Trapping? Share other items or eviscerate the above if you feel so inclined!
*We could get philosophical here about what counts as the "same" item, but I’m going at least rule in items with the exact same name for the purposes of this thread.
Obviously there are many other confounding factors that circumscribe the role of magic items in a game, so perhaps we shouldn’t take differences within any particular cross-edition item too literally as a symbol of design philosophy. But I think there’s something here. The scope of items I’ll look at in this thread is narrow both within editions and across them. Both because of the many limitations of my knowledge and a desire to keep things brief (sort of), I’ll stick to a couple items in 1e, 5e, and a little of 5.5e. I’ll pick out a few patterns I notice that generally seem consistent with the flavor of the rest of the game, but I would very much like to hear about other patterns in other editions, as my take will be a narrow one.
The Staff of Withering
Here is the text of the magic item the Staff of Withering from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide:
Terrifying! The victim ages, his members wither! Like an ancient curse.
Some stuff probably happens in 2e-4e, but I’ll pick the story up at the item’s incarnation in 5e (2014, but I think 2024 is basically the same):
So, the basic idea is similar: a magic staff that does damage if you hit someone with it, but you can expend charge(s) to do some extra broadly withering stuff to the unfortunate blow receiver.
Obviously, there are some differences. One is that in the 5e version, the effects are more abstract - we go right to the mechanics. What does 2d10 necrotic damage look like? Ideally the DM does some work here to paint the picture but as written there isn’t too much concrete that we can grab onto besides the item name. Same with the disadvantage on Strength/Con checks. Meanwhile, in the 1e version, we can easily imagine someone aging 10 years, and we definitely can picture a random limb shriveling into uselessness (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comes to mind). And this isn’t just empty flavor, it hooks into all sorts of consequences and decision-making calculus for the players. Of course there are by-the-book mechanical effects - age in 1e comes with stat effects, and magical aging gets a System Shock check against death - but also some aspects that the players or DM can grab on to as affecting their context in the world. The item gives one delightful example: the aging doesn’t matter that much for long lived creatures, and might actually help Dragons. But also, perhaps it can be circumstantially mitigated (if you're on the Astral Plane, maybe you don’t age?). And aging may affect the social status of the affected character. The withered arm (or whatever) probably has some effects the DM can borrow from other rules, and also many that probably need to be adjudicated. Does it horrify children? Do things get septic? Can that be mitigated by amputation? Lots of possible consequences.
Another difference is in relative impact. If you get hit by the 5e version, it’s not pleasant (the hour effect is at least longer than a single encounter), but after a short rest, for mechanical purposes, you are good as new. If you get hit by the 1e version, the way the character interfaces with the game is changed on multiple axes, maybe permanently. There is powerful magic out there that can help you, but unless your cleric has it at hand, you have been changed in a rather profound way for the foreseeable future.
Finally, in 5e, we have a narrowing of not just the scale, but the scope of effects. Age changes and limb use are narrowed to a type of HP damage and a check/saving throw penalty, the bread and butter of most damage/conditions in 5e.
In my experience, these differences - concreteness vs. gamey abstractness in flavor, magnitude of impact, and scope of impact - are pretty characteristic of some of the design changes in AD&D vs 5e. 5e effects (comparatively) tend toward gamey abstraction vs. concrete in-world flavor, tend to be muted in magnitude (risk of death or permanent change is smaller, effects last less long), and (related to abstraction vs concreteness) often will aim to simplify consequences to HP damage and possibly one of a small set of conditions. 5.5e maybe takes it another step beyond 5e in this realm - more on that as seen in magic items below, but this thread describes this very well for the case of the Command Spell. A game like Pathfinder 2e sits even further along this spectrum, where player culture seems to often argue for a strong separation of “flavor text” and rules. Maybe 4e as well (though I’ve never played). Judging all this just from the Staff of Withering alone might be slightly unfair - there are magic items in 5e with more flavorful descriptions, as I think the name of the item here is supposed to do some work - but this is the story that’s jumping out at me.
Now, I won’t hide that I find the 1e version of this item immensely cooler than the 5e version on basically all dimensions. It’s much closer to what I want out of a magic item. Which Staff of Withering version would strike fear in the hearts of players if an enemy wielded it? Which version would make the players feel immensely powerful and able to reshape the world if they had it in their hands? Which version feels like an object from myth, that can transform lives and possibly campaigns and live on in stories long after the session is over? Which version gets forgotten at the bottom of a Bag of Holding? Which has enough actionable flavor that players can wield it creatively and villains diabolically? Which item feels like Magic? I know the answer for me - there’s a reason I now always cross reference the 1e version of a magic item when I’m DMing 5e. I play and enjoy 5e, but I much prefer the AD&D design philosophy in these areas, and my ideal next edition would move in the 1e direction in these respects.
If I were to make an argument for the 5e version, it’s got conciseness going for it. For me that’s an “all else equal” sort of virtue - if you are cutting out cool actionable flavor, I’ll suffer some extra text instead. But it can be useful if you are quickly looking something up. The item is also self contained - the DM and players don’t have to figure out what happens if you have a withered arm. The mechanical universe is all spelled out and clearly defined (unless the DM wants to lean into some homebrewed flavor). That isn’t really a virtue for me, that’s not really what I’m looking for from TTRPGs, but I can understand why some like it. I find it fits in a little better with a game like Pathfinder 2e, where the game system is designed to run like ~perfectly balanced mathematical clockwork. The appeal of 5e has never been that for me, I like that wild unexpected things can still happen and that sessions often hinge on somebody’s decisions in gameworld terms rather than abstract mechanical terms. It’s not like 5e has some perfect math that some extra flavor and impact will mess up, why not lean into those things?
Maybe this all falls into eternal debates about Simulationism vs. Gamism vs. Narrativism. If I understood those things maybe I’d have a comment. Naively I’d be tempted to say that for some rules you could argue AD&D is a bit more “gamey” than 5e, but it’s sort of more of a simulationy-gaminess that…nevermind. Instead, here are a couple more items, just to show that I’m not 100% cherry picking here:
The Trident of Fish Command
From AD&D:
I picture Triton commanding a mass of sea life swirling about him amongst the waves - land dwelling mortals flee before his wrath!
The 5e version:
Again, the 5e version is… concise. The effects and who they affect are quite clear. Just look at your monster entry in the monster manual: are they a capital-B Beast? Do they have a swim speed? You’re good to go, just apply the effects of the Dominate Beast spell. This isn’t anything to sniff at! And mercifully, the user needs to consider the environment - you aren’t just sterilely summoning a fish-flavored area effect. But the 1e item turns things up quite a bit: you now affect all fish in a huge radius (6” = 60 feet in the dungeon, 180 feet out of doors), you can convey primitive emotions through them, you are protected even from those that succeed on their save. It’s not a pure buff though: if a non-fish monster is within 10 feet of you and attacking you, the fish can’t really help - a tactically interesting touch.
It would feel rather intimidating to go against an enemy with the 1e version in the right environment - instead of just 1 fish ally, they potentially have a swirling vortex of fish, but one you can counter by getting up close range (but maybe that’s what the enemy wants?). Likewise, you feel like a sea god if you defeat this enemy and take their Trident. Awesome. I also appreciate the Gygaxian but (or thus?) delightful examples of what counts as fish and not fish - a bit more flavorful and “in world” feeling than just “Beast with Swim Speed.” I appreciate the Melvillian classification of whales as fish in the 5e version, but I also would delight in the Moby Dick-esque arguments between a player and the Trident that the 1e version may encourage over whether a certain sea creature is a fish or not. I understand that not everyone would.
In general, the Trident of Fish Command follows the Staff of Withering Pattern (SoWP): 5e makes things a bit more abstract, a bit lower in impact, and the scope of the impact is a bit narrowed.
One more item so we can add 5.5e into the mix:
The Sword of Sharpness
The AD&D version:
The 5e (2014) version:
Both versions more or less have the same effects at the same level of concreteness and scope. In both cases, we have a sword that can lop off a limb on a good roll (a very rare effect in 5e!), and also can generate light. The 5e version also has an extra effect that maximizes damage against objects (I guess analogous to the “solid metal or stone” in the 1e version) - I like this a lot, even though object damage/HP seems to be rather ill-defined and circumstantial in 5e. But the limb loss is obviously the star. I don’t want you (the reader) to think I have some weird thing about limb crippling, but I do find it interesting as a rather impactful game effect that isn’t just HP damage and a carefully circumscribed condition. In 5e, there are restoration spells that imply the existence of PCs/NPCs with lost limbs, but very few mechanical ways to get to that state - outside of DM fiat, I’m struggling to think of ways besides this item.
The obvious difference between items here is that the 5e version basically seems a bit terrified of this limb loss ever actually occurring. You have to roll a 20… and then another 20. So, a 1/400 chance. How often is that coming up in practice? Hardly enough to plan around, unless maybe you have 2 Divination wizards each with a Portented 20 in their back pocket. Meanwhile, in the best case, the 1e version has a 15% chance of member separation - that’s something you can build into a strategy. So, in terms of item effect magnitude, the Sword of Sharpness follows the pattern we’ve seen. In 1e, this is a terrifying item to go up against, and possibly a character-defining item to wield. In 5e, it might be situationally useful or fun to pray that at some point in the campaign you’ll get double 20’s (hopefully not wasted on a kobold), but it’s probably also ending up at the proverbial bottom of the Bag of Holding.
The Sword of Sharpness is also a case where the 5.5e version makes a further substantial change, worth commenting on:
5.5e has done away with the limb loss, and thus the utterly terrifying “effect of such loss determined by the DM” from 5e 2014. This isn’t exactly a downgrade in terms of magnitude of impact: a level of Exhaustion is probably not as rough as losing a limb (unless you are already very exhausted), but it’s also 20 times more likely. So I get that change if the only other option is a 1/400 chance of limb loss. But come on! Just let me lop off a limb on a crit! Let me enact the Monty Python black knight scene! Let a DM do some adjudication! Let the Cleric finally cast Regenerate! What’s the worst that could happen? Will a campaign collapse into infighting and chaos? Will a carefully crafted encounter be “ruined”? We already have the Vorpal Sword! I’ll remember a lost limb way more than giving or receiving a rather abstract and circumscribed level of Exhaustion. Let the gangrene fester!
So, this seems to match the general pattern of changes from 5e to 5.5e: as with the Command spell, we move further away from a more concrete, open-ended 1e philosophy, towards the Pathfinder 2e realm of narrower impact and gamey abstraction. The changes from 5e to 5.5 aren’t huge, but many of them seem to be of this type - for this reason I’m generally inclined toward 2014 over 2024 if I have the option.
______________________________
To sum up,
I think there is something to the idea that a game’s magic items give you a little microcosm of the game’s design philosophy. You can gain insight into a large portion of the game’s flavour and mechanics just by perusing the magic item lists in the DMGs of 1e or 5e, and the design history of a particular magic item can tell a revealing story.
I think there are some counterarguments to this for the case of 1e vs 5e. For one, magic items might play a more character defining role in 1e than in 5e, where more character abilities build out a PC’s repertoire. But still, as long as you agree with the general philosophy, I see no downside for more impactful, flavourful items in 5e. You also might also argue that you can afford to give PCs more impactful items in 1e because there are more ways to lose items (magic item-eating rust monsters, disenchanters, item saving throws, easier character death). Maybe! Maybe that is an argument that 5e would benefit from more of these things…no need to get too precious about magic items, let them be easy come, easy go.
I’d definitely be interested in hearing about other ways this manifests - other design stories you could tell with other items (maybe countering this one?), patterns in other editions, patterns in other games - Call of Cthulhu's magic items surely risk your sanity for the most part? You could probably make a very similar argument looking at Spells across editions as well. Maybe it would also be revealing to look at which magic items appear at all (or not) across various editions - does it say anything that 5e has no Scarab of Enraging Enemies or no Chime of Hunger? What can we say about the wonderful-in-all-editions Mirror of Life Trapping? Share other items or eviscerate the above if you feel so inclined!
*We could get philosophical here about what counts as the "same" item, but I’m going at least rule in items with the exact same name for the purposes of this thread.
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