- After defeating the lone goblin guardian of the treasure chest, you open it and discover a magical ax. - This is pretty. Hey you guys, look how cool this is. - Yes, that is very nice. It reminds me of the axe I used
to use when I was a wee lad and I chopped wood out in the snow. It's negative 20 degrees up hill. - Indeed that appears to be quite the legendary magical axe you have there. - Are you kidding me, that axe sucks. - Hey will you shut up? Just let the barbarian
live out his fantasies. He'll be none the wiser. - Now that axe might not look like much, but it's actually quite powerful. It's a plus five axe of
instant death and destruction. (speaker howling) - Holy crap, why would you give him that? - We're only level two,
won't that break the game. - Indeed, but more importantly, now that you've given the barbarian such a powerful magic
item at such a low level, you need to give the rest
of us equally powerful and crazy magic items. - Oh, not to worry. There's a plus five dagger
of extreme stabby stabby, and plus five helmet
of impenetrable armor, a wand infinite level of nine fireballs and a tome of unlimited awesomeness. - Stabby, stabby time baby. (speaker howling) - I cast fireball, I cast by fireball. - Now, I'm not the best
dungeon master ever. - Oh, you certainly are. Nothing could possibly
go wrong with giving us all a bunch of super powerful
magic items at level two. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the DM Lair. I'm Luke Hart, and I've
been a cat-lover master since high school. On this channel I give
practical dungeon master advice that you can use in your
Dungeons & Dragons games. Today in the Lair, we'll be discussing 10 strategies
for rewarding magic items without breaking the game. That is, how to give your
players' characters magic items in a way that doesn't result
in the game becoming unbalanced insomuch that enemies and
encounters are trivial and get steamrolled with ease. Steamrolling is with ease,
it's always with ease. Yeah, you got it. Now, right about now some of you are furiously writing comments
down below along the lines of "The dungeon master has all the resources at their disposal to
adjust things as needed to account for lots of magic items and super powerful magic items. So there no need to
change or nerf how a DM gives out magic items." So, here's my disclaimer. This video is not for
experienced dungeon masters who don't have any issues with magic items breaking their games. If you know how to handle this already, you're in the wrong place. This video is for game masters who do need help with this issue. But, it's okay, go ahead. Leave your unhelpful comment below and give me a thumbs down, the YT algorithm loves that stuff. By the way, the July
issue of Lair Magazine, "Fire & Feast", is now
available to my patrons at the link below. It contains two D&D 5e
compatible adventures: The Temple of Two Dragons
for level 7 groups; and The Shattered Lair of Mount
Fallow for level 12 groups. Each adventure contains
everything you need to run it for your group, including the image files of the maps that you can easily load
into the virtual tabletop of your choice. Fire & Feast also contains
10 adventure ideas, 5 puzzles, 10 traps, 10 new spells, and bonus content from the Dungeon Coach, including three new subclasses: the Fighter Witcher, the
Druid Circle of Adaptation, the Ranger Trapsmith, and
the Ranger Apex Predator. You can get the July
issue of Lair Magazine by becoming a DM Lair
patron at the link below. And this month my patrons will also get a Map Pack containing
several pre-made dungeon and wilderness maps you
can use in your games and they will also get a City Tiles pack which you can use to
create custom city maps. Okay, now on to strategies
for rewarding magic items. Number one, at low levels
be frugal with magic items and at higher levels be more generous. Over the course of several years of running four simultaneous 5e campaigns, and until recently two games a week, I have found that magic
items are most game breaking at low levels but not so
much at higher levels. At higher levels, character
abilities become very powerful and magic items have less
of an influence on things. You'll also find that the
attunement mechanic starts coming into play at mid to high levels, effectively limiting how powerful a group's magic item cache is. Having lots of cool magic
items is only so powerful when half of them can't be
used due to the limitations of only being able to attune
to three magic items at a time. So, my advice is to
reward fewer magic items at lower levels than the core
rule books suggest you do, and then once your players
start to reach higher levels, say level eight or so, start
to ratchet things up a bit. By level 8, magic items become
less influential on the game, as long as you don't go nuts
and give out way too many or starting giving out very rare and legendary magic items too soon. If you decide to go all loose
cannon on me and revert back to giving magic items out like
candy and at high rarities, none of my advice can really help you. Now, if you want to know exactly how many magic items to reward, Xanathar's Guide to Everything
does give specific numbers of magic items to reward of which rarity, and at which levels. However, I suggest cutting
those numbers in half as a starting point and
then see how things go. You can always ratchet
things up later if needed. But if you give out too many, it's really hard to tale them back. Number two, ignore the
Magic Item Rarity Table in the Dungeon Master Guide On page 135 in the DMG there
is a Magic Item Rarity table that supposedly tells you
at which levels characters might begin to find magic
items of certain rarities. I suggest you ignore that table and go with the recommendations
I'm about to give you. Here's the thing, when
the DMG was first written, 5th edition had just come out. The game was young. It hadn't been played or
even play tested a whole lot. The game developers were
under pressure from the suits in the C-suite to wrap things up and ship the game out the door. And that table has NOT been
revisited at all over the years to account for more
powerful player options that have come out in splat books. So by this point, that table
is even less useful now than it even was when
the game first came out. This is my recommendation for when you should give out certain magic
item rarities in your game. Begin rewarding common
magic items at level two. Begin rewarding uncommon
magic items at level four. And then for rare magic items, those come along at level seven. Very rare at levels 11 and above. And then legendary at levels 17 and above. This will start your
characters out on a slow roll with less powerful magic
items at lower levels when they are most impactful, and then more powerful
ones at higher levels when they are still very useful, but not as crazy game altering. Number three, err on
the side of giving out too few magic items. You guys, you can always give
out more magic items later if you don't give out enough. However, it is exceedingly
hard and impossible to take those magic items back once you give them to your players. There's this thing that happens, when a player gets a cool magic item that they're excited about
and makes them more powerful. If you try to take it back they'll surround you and mortalize you. I don't suggest you try that. You're far better off not
giving them in the first place and then if you're too
stingy give some more. It's far easier trust me. Now, there is a popular
theory going around, promulgated by certain
sweaty-toothed madmen that you should give out
magic items to your players right away and like candy
because magic items are cool and you don't know how long
the campaign might last. Consequently, thanks to
these sweaty-tooth madmen, a common question I get
on my live streams is "Luke, help! I gave my
party too many magic items, now they are super powerful
and steamrolling the module, and I don't know what to do." My response is usually, "Well you screwed yourself
over on that one didn't you?" Actually I'll tell them
they have two choices. One, live with it, suck it up. You screwed up and gave your
players too many magic items. Done is done. Now, go through and adjust the
difficulty of your campaign or all the encounters in the module. That is your penance for
listening to bad advice. Of course, how do I know
it's bad advice, Luke. I'm a new dungeon master,
I don't know any better. Understandable, which is why
we have option number two. Confess to your players
that you screwed up and gave them too many magic items and that it's breaking the game and causing you loads of extra work. Ask them nicely and beg if you need to. If they would agree with
with giving you back some of their magic items
back or adjusting them to make them less powerful. And good luck, this will
feel like a nerf to players and many players don't like that. But if you have a reasonable players that understand your situation, they're probably gonna be
willing to work with you. If you give out fewer magic items than the DMG or Xanathar's recommends, everything will be okay. The rules are actually
balanced for zero magic items and most groups will do just fine with no magic items whatsoever. Don't believe me? Look at the "Are magic items
necessary in a campaign?" sidebar on page 136 of
Xanathar's Guide to Everything. It literally explains that
characters and monsters in D&D 5th edition are
balanced such that PCs do not need magic items to
keep up with the power curve except in very rare instances
which rarely happen. In fact, I would argue that
with the new character options coming out in books like Tasha's, character options that are
more and more crazy powerful, magic items are less necessary
than they were before. The truth is that 5th edition characters are super powerful all by themselves. They don't need magic items coming out of their ears on top of things. So, give out magic items sparingly, and then every couple levels of play, take an inventory of what everyone has and see if some more magic
items should be given out. Players do like magic items, so you don't want to
cut them off completely. Just don't be a moron and
give them out like candy unless you are a veteran dungeon master and know how to handle the
resulting power imbalance. Number four, beware of
magic items that claim to be uncommon but are
actually far more powerful. For example, winged
boots are not uncommon, they are very rare in my book. They essentially give you unlimited flying during an adventure due to
how the magic item is worded. However, Wings of Flying, listed right below winged boots by the way are significantly less powerful, giving you less flying time and yet Wings of Flying are rare. Being less powerful than Winged
Boots which are uncommon. I sometimes just don't know
what folks are smoking at times. The fact is, many uncommon
wondrous magic items are more powerful than they
may seem due to creative ways that players use them. You learn this from experience or from reading up on
them on the internet. And the more you play the game, the more you realize
that item rarity actually doesn't seem to correlate
too well with how powerful a magic item is. I mean it should according to
how the DMG describes rarity, but in actual game play it really doesn't. Now you can chalk this up
to a lack of playtesting or a failure to incorporate
playtesting results into the alpha and beta
drafts of the rules. You might point out that
game developers play the game far less than they probably should. You might blame the
suits for making changes and poking in things
they know nothing about. But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is
that you can't trust rarity as a judge of an item's power. As I was researching this topic, I stumbled upon a very
useful article online called Sane Magic Item
Prices, link down below. Basically lots of people
had a big discussion about relative magic item
power and then priced them out with the least powerful items
being worth the least gold, and the most powerful items
being worth the most gold. Now, I'm not suggesting you
necessary sell magic items or even use the gold pieces they listed as an indicator of what a
magic item should sell for. The primary usefulness of
what they did in my opinion is that they ordered the power
of the various magic items in the DMG based on gold piece prices. So, you can at a glance
see the relative power of the various magic items. And this is super super
helpful for dungeon masters, especially new ones. Number five, change how attunement works. Since attunement is a limiting factor in how many magic items
that require attunement a PC can use at any given time, and since magic items
that require attunement are often far less powerful than ones that don't require attunement, changing some of the
rules around attunement can be useful to us. In the rules as written, any given character can attune to three magic items at a time. And attuning to a magic item
that requires attunement takes a short rest which lasts one hour and can't be interrupted, otherwise the attunement
process must begin again. Also, unattuning from an
item requires a short rest. So, if a character is maxed
out at three attuned items and wants to swap out
one item for another, it takes two short rests. One to unattune an item
and the second to attune to the new item. Now, the first rule we can
change is how many magic items a character can be attuned to at a time. And I suggest changing
this to an increasing scale whereby at lower levels PCs
can be attuned to fewer items and then as they gain
levels, it increments. Specifically I would do this: At first level, a PC cannot attune to any magic items at all. So they are limited to using magic items that do not require attunement. And there are lots of common
and uncommon magic items that don't require attunement, so there are no worries there. At 3rd level, a PC gains
the ability to attune to one magic item at a time. At 6th level, a PC can now attune to two magic items at once. And then 9th level, a PC can attune to three
magic items at once. And then of course you stop there. You never let them attune to
more than three magic items. Don't go crazy and loose
your mind on me here. Somebody's down on the comments. Oh, this is great and then they just can do more and more and more. No, don't go that way. Doing this allows you to
perhaps give out magic items a little more readily if you want to as long as they require attunement, but limits the PCs in
how many they can use in the lower levels. And then once they get
into the higher levels where magic item power is less
of a factor in game balance, they can attune to three magic
items per the core rules. The next rule you could tweak
is for how long attuning to a magic item takes. Instead of a short rest, you
could say it takes a long rest to attune to a magic item. And if you did this, I would
say that over the course of a long rest, a PC could
both unattune from a magic item and attune to a new magic item. Now, what this does is
limit PC power a bit by making the cost of swapping
attuned magic items higher and something they probably can't do in the middle of delving a dungeon. Finally, if you really want to limit the amount of magic items
PCs can use in your game, you could make it so that all magic items require attunement. That way any given character could only use up to three
magic items at a time. And you could use the
previous two rule tweaks as well to limit things even more. I'm not sure I recommend
going this overboard crazy with limiting how many
magic items PCs can use. Those rule changes are
fairly heavy handed, though they could be okay
for certain campaigns, especially a campaign
that the dungeon master is specifically billing as low magic. For campaigns like that, they
could be very appropriate. Otherwise, they might just
be al little bit too much. Number six, ignore how
experienced dungeon masters reward magic items in their games. So you're like watching Critical Role and other D&D shows run by
professional game masters who often have tons of experience? Awesome, me too. Those shows are often very
entertaining and fun to watch. However, don't check
your brain at the door. Recognize two things. First, those are
experienced dungeon masters. What works for them and what they know how to do won't necessarily work for you, especially if you are an
inexperienced game master. Second, they are running a D&D
show whose primary objective is entertainment value for the viewers. How they do things should be taken with a large grain of
salt for dungeon masters who are running D&D
games and not D&D shows. Because there is a
difference, a big difference. This piece of advice actually applies to almost everything
professional dungeon masters do, which means that it also applies
to rewarding magic items. So, your favorite dungeon
master claims in his videos that he loves giving
out tons of magic items to his players, does he? That's great for him, he's experienced. He knows what it means to his game for the PCs to be even more powerful, and he knows how to balance
encounters appropriately as a result. But if you're an inexperienced
or new dungeon master, do you know how to do that? If not, you'd better think twice about doling out crap tons
of magic items like he does. The same thing applies to advice you may find on the internet or the advice from us talking head YouTubers. Just because I say I do a thing or another video advice
guy says he does a thing does not mean you should
do that same thing. Evaluate all advice through the filter of your own experience and knowledge. Also consider if the
person is giving advice to new DMs or experienced DMs. Or if the person is just
saying "This is what I do." An experienced DM saying
"This is what I do." Is probably less helpful for new DMs, unless the person says it
will work for them too. Number seven, reward more consumable and rechargeable magic items. You can still have a
game full of magic items. You can still be generous
with magic items, even at low levels when
you give out consumable single-use magic items such
as potions and scrolls. Because it can only be used once, its power is very limited
and cannot by definition be permanently game breaking even though it could influence one specific encounter of course. You can also take more
powerful magic items like wands and instead of having them regain all their charges at dawn each day, you can say they have a
fixed number of charges and when they are all
used up, they are gone. You can also make magic
items rechargeable. Basically, you take any magic item and put a cap on how
long its magic functions for any given day. That belt of giant strength, well it only works three times per day for one minute each time. Efreeti chain, same. It only works a certain
number of times per day and for a limited duration each use. And then it must recharge. Many magic items already work this way, so you can add a little homebrew to others to make them have a similar functionality, thus allowing you to reward them without them having as powerful and affecting on game balance. You can also add a game mechanic for recharging those magic items. So, take wands. They don't automatically
recharge every day at dawn, but a wizard could expend
a 3rd level spell slot to recharge a wand of lightning. For every 3rd level
spell slot they expend, the wand regains one charge. Efreeti chain could be recharged by casting fireball into it, or by submerging it in flowing lava. A belt of giant strength
could be recharged by casting enlarge into it, or by filling up a reservoir
in the belt's buckle with a large lock of giant's hair, that the characters must somehow procure. You can use your creativity to make this recharge mechanic pretty interesting and cool for your players. Number eight, use magic
items that gain power as the characters level. There are a couple ways you can do this. First, you can give the characters
personalized magic items that are intended to grow in
power as the PCs grow in power. So at level three the magic
sword doesn't do much at all. At level six though it
becomes plus one sword and then at level nine the user gains resistance to fire damage. At level 12 the user can cast
fireball three times per day. At level 15 the sword
becomes a plus three sword. At level 17, the user can cast wall of fire three times per day. And that's just one example. Use your creativity to come
up with mechanics like that for magic items you give your players. Just bear in mind that if you do this, the PCs should get far fewer magic items because those they do get will
gain power as they level up. You might even consider
enlisting your players' help in designing these custom
magic items that power up. Find out what they want to be able to do and give them a say in designing
the magic item's features. Does this take some of the mystery and awe out of the game for them? Yes, it sure would because
they know everything the magic item will
eventually be able to do. So, I personally probably
wouldn't do that, it ruins a bit of the fun
for them in my opinion but it is an option. Because it's fun not knowing what you're gonna gain at certain levels. And the magic items suddenly does X thing and you're just like, woo. But if you know what it's gonna do, it takes a lot of that
mystery and suspense away. Next you can have magic
items be "depowered." That is, they've lost some
of their magical power and they must be powered back up through some game mechanic that you determine. So those boots of flying
right now can only help the PC jump twice as far or twice as high. But if the characters go on a quest to the mountain of Yundofar
and obtain a feather of a roc, they can have a local
wizard use that feather to imbue magical flying into the boots. However, the boots still only give a very limited amount of flying, and another quest would be needed to power them up some more. Now, before you get all
hyped up on this idea, let me give you a massive word of warning. Doing this could easily cause
your entire D&D campaign to become nothing more than quest after quest of the players just trying to level up their magic items. So that module you were running? Yeah, just forget about that. All your PCs care about now is powering up the magic
items you gave them. This is an example of something
that looks great on paper, but in actual practice
might not work so well. At least not if you do it
for lots of magic items. It would work great for
one magic item in the game, especially if the magic item is important to the main plot line
and must be powered up in order for the group to
defeat the final villain. If used for something like
that, it could be super cool. Number nine, reward magic items
with more flavor than power. Just because you're giving
your players magic items doesn't mean they have
to be super powerful. You can easily give them strange and exotic magic items
that have lots of flavor and backstory and even do
something cool and interesting, but that doesn't have much use in combat or contributes very little to combat. A bag of holding falls into this category, as do paper birds. You can now carry bunches of stuff and not worry about inventory management. Yay, you can send messages
over long distances. That's useful and fun, but doesn't require the game master to beef up the combats one bit. You can also design homebrew magic items with minor magical abilities
but with lots of history and backstory that ties
into your game world or the campaign. Things can be cool without
having to be powerful. And this allows you to
reveal interesting bits of lore about your world
or the campaign plot in a unique way as opposed
to information dumps by NPCs, for instance. Number ten, just beef up the game. Let's be honest here, making the encounters more
challenging is not that hard. So, you can be generous with magic items, ignore everything I just said, and then add an additional
monster or two to encounters if the PCs are particularly
powerful due to magic items. You can increase the monster hit points, or even better increase
their damage output by giving them an additional attack. These are super simple
and quick adjustments that you can make to the game, even to pre-made modules
that you are running. This isn't brain surgery. It literally takes seconds to do, and you can even do it on
the fly during the game. Now, many people will
tell you that instead of just increasing monsters'
stats like hit points and DPS, or increasing the number of monsters, that what you should do is make the monsters fight more intelligently. And this does work as long
as you know how to do this. Though I will argue that it is much harder to do in actual practice than
it is to tell you to do it. Not only is this more challenging to pull off than simply
increasing the number of monsters or beefing their hit
points or damage output, but most new dungeon masters
don't know how to do this. So that sort of advice is
not very useful to many DMs. However, if you do want to learn how to make monsters
fight more intelligently, there are two ways to do it. Number one, years of experience. Or number two, you can
read "The Monsters Know What They Are Doing" by Keith
Ammann, link down below. You can get the book off Amazon
or you can read his blog. Both are excellent and will help you learn how to have your enemies fight
more tactfully in combat. Remember, if you're looking for professional-grade DM
resources such as 5e adventures, traps, puzzles, and more,
check out Lair Magazine at the link below. Decrease your prep
time; improve your game. Also, if you have DM questions
you'd like me to answer, I have live streams every week on Twitch where I answer your dungeon
mastering questions. Follow me on Twitch at the link below. If you enjoyed the advice in this video, or just my ruggedly handsome face, give this video a thumbs
up and leave a comment for the algorithm down below. Let YouTube know that I don't suck. And until next time let's play D&D.
