D&D 5E How often should a party be rewarded?

[Imaculata]

How often do you reward your party with magical items?

More specifically how much loot should a lvl 7 party have?

I reward them with magical items very rarely, so that magical items remain special.

As for your second question, a lvl 7 party should have as much loot as you want them to have. I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but it's the truth. Some DM's hand out loot like it was Christmas, and other DM's are closer to Scrooge. I'm more of a Scrooge type. I don't want too many magical items to creep into my campaign, because that means I have to start arming my monsters with high end gear as well.

As for general rewards. There's at least one cool reward per quest, and there's always a reward at every quest chain. Every dungeon floor will at least have one cool item, and I hand out healing potions if I know there's a hard encounter up ahead. I use my own random loot tables to determine if the party finds other stuff as well, such as a locked box, or a key that fits that lock. It's kind of cool when they find a little key, and yet don't know what it is for. I can then make that up on the spot.

 

[Uchawi]

It will depend on the players at the table. But I would also watch the gap between casters and martial characters, and act accordingly. If you are stingy with magic items then you should be stingy with how casters gain new spells.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I go by the amounts recommended in the DMG, but since I'm usually playing official adventure paths, I usually don't have to care about it.

There might not be item rewards, but doesn't mean I don't reward my players. If they have a clever idea I reward them with a positive effect. I also frequently reward bonus exp for accomplishing something (avoiding an encounter, finishing a quest). So if the question generally is "How often should the party be rewarded" then the answer is "Whenever they do something that's smart and/or succeed on a check".

 

[Herod]

Whenever it feels appropriate, such as when they've completed a task for a wizard with a few spare magical what-nots and are receiving the item(s) as payment, or when they dispatch a famed and terrible monster which numerous other adventurers have died trying to defeat (that's how dragons accumulate an assortment of magic items that they have no use for, such as swords and armor)

However much they have earned, or chanced upon.

There is no specific "correct" amount.

This sounds great as a loot mechanism, and just makes alot of sense. It also helps in creating a bit of history behind the magic items that are received.

Thanks for all the responses, they are very helpful indeed. I would give my players more consumables but they store them away like squirrels, all of their potions just go into the bag and never come back out.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I would give my players more consumables but they store them away like squirrels, all of their potions just go into the bag and never come back out.

You want your players to quit doing that and start using consumable items, then you have to give them so many consumables that it becomes annoying to them not to use them. Fill their character sheet space with so many consumables they have to use one just to have room to write something else down.

Trust me, my group used to hoard consumables to the point that they ended one campaign with a total of like 6 dozen consumable items still in the party's possession having used exactly zero in the coarse of the campaign that took them from 1st to 17th level in AD&D. Now they don't, and it is because I flooded them with consumables until they started using them - they then naturally realized the benefits of actually using what they found when any appropriate opportunity arose, rather than waiting on the mythical "more beneficial later", and have continued to use consumable items even as I have scaled back to my usual distribution volume.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It really depends on the campaign. Going by Adventurer's League play, magic items are really rare. At 5th level, most people seem to have between one and two items. In my previous campaign, I generally did one permanent magic item plus a consumable per adventure, but have since slowed it down considerably.