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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 9855500" data-attributes="member: 93670">I linked to the Perkins tweet about magic items because they are that important & I wasn't about to go find the crawford video clip gushing about it.  I stand by my post55 statement though & I'll use the 3.5 dmg to demonstrate why it's so important, mainly because it was the last adventuring day attrition based edition★ to include such guidance.  The 3.5 dmg started with ch1 running the game on pg5 & (effectively) ended with the glossary on page289.  Out of those 284 pages there were 72 pages of magic items and rules for crafting  them in unique balanced flavors.  Beyond that were numerous pages dedicated to supporting the gm with guidelines for how much & why to give them like treasure per encounter wealth by level body slot/slot affinity bonus types & so on. There was even a whole book dedicated specifically to expanding upon that (magic item compendium) & almost every splatbook had at least a few pages of new toys the GM could employ in creating those items.  It wasn't just 3.5 though, ad&d2.0dmg had a whole ~12 page chapter aimed at getting the GM up to speed on the hows & whys wrt a lot of those kinds of things  and some of those 12 pages were expanded upon significantly in other areas of the 3.5dmg.  All of this hasn't even gotten to the player facing phb crafting related rules & pc abilities.Before anyone says it... Yes it was possible to make truly absurd & powerful magic items but the DMG provided GMs with a lot of tools to limit moderate & even encourage players to weigh keeping the result despite things like body slot conflicts getting in the way of expected churn vrs outright disposing of those to keep up with expected growth progression before tools like disjunction needed to be considered.TL;DR: d&d has always been positively swimming in a hycean ocean of magic items & they play a critical role that past editions were clear about conveying to the GM. It's only possible to pretend that a statement like <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> "If your 5E characters have no magic items, the game would still be balanced. Magic items are pure candy"<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> is true if you limit the scope of play to tier1 & early tier2 of play  where they often take a back seat to goals like filling out PCs with mundane adventuring gear such as platemail.★4e was ADEU & too different for useful comparison</blockquote>

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