D&D 5E (2024) Indirectly Buffing Rogues, Rangers, Monks Via Magic Items?

[Horwath]

Hence curated lists. I dont hand out much in the way of vicious weapons (they're "the best").

I actually like Vicious weapons the best.
With following bounded accuracy design goal, they work better than +X items

Hence the following house ruled items.

Magic weapons:

Common: +1 damage
Uncommon: +1d6 damage
Rare: +2d6 damage
Very rare: +3d6 damage
Legendary: +4d6 damage

Magic armor: damage reduction from all attacks.

Common: DR 1
Uncommon: DR 3
Rare: DR 6
Very rare: DR 9
Legendary: DR 12

As for casters "implements"
they gain damage/healing bonus to one roll of the spell per spell level(cantrips are level 1 spells for this)

IE: for 3rd level spell
it would be
Common: +3 damage/healing
Uncommon: +3d6 damage/healing
Rare: +6d6 damage/healing
Very rare: +9d6 damage/healing
Legendary: +12d6 damage/healing

for 9th level spell it would be:
Common: +9 damage/healing
Uncommon: +9d6 damage/healing
Rare: +18d6 damage/healing
Very rare: +27d6 damage/healing
Legendary: +36d6 damage/healing

As for save bonuses from items, they are also removed.
now they give save proficiencies chosen after a short rest with using the item.

Uncommon: 1 save proficiency
Rare: 2 saves proficiency
Very rare: 3 saves proficiency
Legendary: 4 saves proficiency

 

[Seramus]

Without them tgey still better than most spell casters at levels that matter.

Magic items are a great way to help martials with the exploration and social pillars. It's true that anyone can use utility items, but martials get so happy when they can contribute outside of combat.

 

[tetrasodium]

Player Wish List. Encourage your players to keep a wish list of magic items they hope their characters will find in the course of the campaign. If you want to award a magic item but don’t have a specific magic item in mind, you can pick an item of the appropriate rarity from your players’ wish list.

I tried that so many times for so many years with 5e & frankly wotc themselves poisoned that well so badly that players who started with 5e don't even know how to make a reasonably plausible list (I've seen holey avenger sword of wishes & similar wayyy too often from level 1 players).

Worse still is that 5e magic items don't have enough fine toothed granularity for me as a GM to actually consider anything like a list because the whole thing is designed around an absurd one & done "it's magic" so the list starts with something like "magic greatsword/longbow/etc" then simply ends unless I as GM start editing monsters to counter the designed in no magic items poison where it then ceases to be a list or factor of design like past editions where churn was a thing & it becomes "I just wanna play d&d, how about you just give me what I need to keep up with your unknowable homebrew man" with none of the proactive desire to seek it out that was previously present.


With that said, I think bob worldbuilder kinda revealed the core root cause of the whole problem wotc refuses to address in his

Spoiler: recent video

Wotc doesn't seem to design for or look at a concept like a campaign unfolding as an ongoing sandbox where players have agency to traverse the world with a series of first person present tense choices. Instead it's probably looked at more of place where players can invoke some form of "flavor is free" cosmetic skin like the tcoe personalizing spells blurb in a series of self contained quick time event-like battles like cosmetic skins. Under that sort of QTE style play it's hard to consider the impact of actual play foundational cracks growing from the default skills, DCs, extensibility of reciprocity, risk, resting, Nova Loops, magic items & all the other systems that start to break down the further gameplay walks away from one where the GM simply invalidates those problems by effectively teleporting between self contained events while taking the heat for such overt railroading.