Best Mundane Common Items in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

so you want to be an adventurer you say you want to explore the darkest of dungeons slay terrible dragons fight back fiery fiends and solve century-old puzzles well you're gonna need some stuff magic items are cool we all love our plus-one long swords but if you really want to be a great Dungeons & Dragons Fivey party having the right mundane items with you could be the difference between life and death so here is my list of the 15 absolutely best must-have mundane common items and Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition ok this first one is easy and frankly boring so let's just get out of the way now ro you've got to have rope every party should have a hundred and fifty feet or more rope on them at any given time I mean honestly between simple tasks like tying up your enemies to binding the hands of your enemies to fastening the hands of your capture enemies together Rob just has so so many uses for the average party of murder hobo adventurers as a fun little rope trick for you tie away to the end of your rope like a grapple and the next time an enemy turns invisible in front of you pull out your rope and start swinging it around in a 15 foot circle like an old school skipping yes that was a 1991 skipping to I reference you're welcome next up we have probably the single most underrated mundane item in all of D&D chalk holy smokes chalk is a must-have here's the deal chalk is the single most effective way to not get lost in a dungeon but while I will fully admit that that may be a rare occurrence for your party to sort of fall into this niche situation what makes chalking must have it's just how cheap it is in light it is to carry seriously a piece of chalk costs wait for this one single copper piece and it has no discernible weight so just buy 10 of them and hand them out to everybody you're done next up we have one of my favorites which I've talked about before here on the channel a simple scroll tube I can think of lots of different ways to use a scroll tube most of which involve carrying small bits and bobs but my favorite is to combine it with the light spell why easy cast light on a bit of rag or cloth and throw that into the scroll tube you now have the perfect light source that you can cover easily and quickly if you need to hide in a a flashlight our next item is something that after years literal years of using them in games decades seriously I have just realized I've been pronouncing incorrectly the entire time Pitons or as I'm sure many of you know them as Pitons there are so many great uses for Pitons like jamming doors if you need to sleep in a dungeon climbing up and sometimes down cliff sides or something similar that's very steep making sure your Dean doesn't kill your character randomly by having a crap mountainside white walkway just get out on you you can even use several Pitons to anchor if you want to Gulliver's Travels somebody down to the ground and don't forget you can always use several of them in conjunction if you need to anchor something really heavy say for your block and tackle that's lowering down your pack meal loaded with bags of gold from a slain dragon's hoard speaking of which that brings us to our next pair of items a small sledgehammer and block-and-tackle most of the time these are needed alongside your Pitons but any adventuring party worth its salt should have at least one set of these between them to buy both is literally two gold and eight pounds and while the block-and-tackle may not be needed as often the amount of times you will end up using your hammer might shock you also don't dismiss the pulley so quickly a little bit of fun math for everybody for each pulley you add to your system you are creating a mechanical advantage of an additional unit of force now you also have to increase the distance that you pull the rope for each pulley so if you wanted to lift say a cinder block one foot up with one pulley you would an essence need to pull the rope two feet however with your mechanical advantage you would only need to apply half the force to do so and the players handbook was kind enough to let us know that the mechanical advantage for a block and tackle system is four to one which while it doesn't say this specifically would typically be referred to as a double tackle but the reason I want to point all of this out is that by adding two of these block and tackles together you would create a mechanical advantage of eight to one so don't think that four to one from the page B is the cap use your ingenuity and anchor these to multiple points in order to spread out the weight when you are lifting a dead giant off like a trapdoor that they fell on again you just need lots of ropes and Pitons and a hammer to drive your Pitons and maybe you could carry a few those in like a scroll tube or something I don't know oh the next a mundane item our must-have list is a colored waxed candle basically what we're doing here is creating a super large crayon or as we say in Texas a crown yes that's seriously how we say crayon I'm not even kidding so now whenever we come across some crazy runes carved into a wall or portal there is no need to jot them down perfectly we can literally just get a quick rubbing of it and move on and if our dungeon master pulls the old quote important secret page ripped out of a book gag then there's a chance that we can still see what was written depending on how much time has passed and how much your DM runs with the rule of cool next up we have another pair of items I want to group together for a little trick a fishing line and a bell this is truly one of my favorite little tricks to use I and I'm sure most of you guys get what we're going to do we're going to make ourselves a little alarm that takes almost nothing to set up by creating a trip line either with or without the bell want to know exactly when to light a small trail of oil to set the entire hallway on fire just wait around the corner and listen for that little bell and laugh like a maniac want to see if anyone is following you into the cave fishing line and bell want a little extra security to wake the camp up even though someone is on watch you guessed it and by the way if you don't think adventurers wouldn't snap awake at the sound of a little bell while they can't I'm guessing you don't have kids yet I sleep with a CPAP and huge Texas thunderstorms roll through without stirring me even the tiniest bit but my son's bedroom door at 6:15 a.m. wakes my wife and I up immediately so fellow parents out there please feel free to back me up in the comments section I'm totally convinced that this would be far more effective than you might think at raising everybody's attention from from sleep and waking them up oh and by the way six Pitons with fishing lines between them would trip a minute or if it was chasing you hello prone and surprised target I'd like you to meet my friends advantage extra attack and surprise month next up we have the incredible bag of flour why is flour awesome because invisibility flour flour everywhere and of course you could use it to like detect drafts I guess but although this is line compared to the best reason to use it and that's because flour apparently is like crazy flammable seriously google it I'm picturing a small bag of flour sitting in the middle of the hall then suddenly right when two orcs come up to investigate it I am flaming arrow explosion time for those of you who don't believe me I'll throw a link to someone blowing up four bags of flour and I'll warn you the sound is legit if you're not expecting it and wearing earbuds so be careful next up we have something in a very similar vein with what I'll just call pockets and now more than actual sand in traditional Japanese ninjutsu metsubushi was typically made from ground-up pepper and glass fragments and stored in hollowed-out eggshells filled with rice glue paste and I know many of you Dungeon Master's out there might be want to deny the effectiveness of this because there are not clear defined rules in the game or even giving a reflex safe to avoid being blinded for X amount of rounds seems abusable by your players but if caught unaware the metsubushi egg would absolutely an opponent even if only for a round or two oh and another way to use this is just with an empty scabbard simply crush up sand and bits of glass fill your scabbard about a third of the way and you now have a tube in which to sling this into someone's face from like 10 to 15 feet away also if you're planning on using this please do me a favor and talk to your DM about the mechanics first throwing this out in the middle of the game is a smartypants oh I got you D a moment is kind of lame if for you DMS consider giving this attack a once per day effectiveness similar to the mummies dreadful glare as the opponent won't get caught off-guard a second time within the same day or combat or whatever you get it after that we have the incredible bag of caltrops let me just say I know ball bearings exist but caltrops are superior in every single way excluding covered area caltrops are insane you have a solid 15 deck save they deal damage they can stop a faux dead their tracks they can even reduce your opponent's speed until they heal for one gold piece and two pounds of weight by four of them seriously just like always have at least four bags on the party at any given time your wizard and arcane Archer thank you ahead of time our next must-have item is a signal whistle I mean if you're tired of your fellow adventurers splitting the party and having to stay within 120 feet for the Wizards message spell to just barely be in range try the signal whistle it's literally five copper pieces and let me just say you guys in my 5e patreon campaign taking on grunt Hogg at the moment y'all could have used a few of these bad boys over the last few sessions and you know I'm telling the truth so next time your group gets paid fifty gold each for a quest reward spend five copper on a whistle instead of just immediately at the tavern that that last part was for everybody not just not just for that one group our penultimate must have mundane item is not a set of manacles or even a mirror it's not even a ten-foot pole but rather a pouch full of twenty silver pieces yes you heard that right it blows my mind that players don't use and abuse just how unbelievably filthy rich most of them typically are if we were to translate the amount of gold an entire party of level ten adventurers has on them at any given time it would be like you and your friends walking down the street with 200 grand in your pockets but you are also each a deadly assassin more than capable of defending yourselves from street thugs all joking aside on page 159 in your players handbook we get a table with a bunch of random expenses like how a messenger to the next town over is to copper per mile or a coach cab within a city is just one copper like why are you walking anywhere we're not even talking about general labor and higher links you want a dozen untrained workers to set up a constant perimeter around your tavern for the next 48 hours straight hire I mean give them all whistles there are only five copper pieces each and the lookouts are just two silver a day also and I have to totally give credit to a random redditor for this pretty clever idea if you and your party have ever tried to stick out an area before you're not sure if it is still actively getting foot traffic the easiest way to tell is to simply place a silver coin down where it could be found and wait a couple days if it's gone when you come back the area still has activity for those of you Wizards who love to use the alarm spell but aren't sure where to put it when you when you can't put a coin smack dab in the middle of your casting area to make sure those pesky goblins and brigands walk exactly where you've laid your alarm spell and finally that brings us to our 15th and final must-have mundane item for your dungeon the Dragons 5e game Oh creepy wooden mask okay maybe that's an exaggeration clearly a mask is not actually necessary or really even that useful in a traditional sense but trust me the next time your party hits up a big city go find a woodworker that can whip you up a mask as far as roleplay and shenanigans full face masks cannot be beaten and are worth every gold piece trust me I know I covered this in a video probably a few years back now on the stalker of Nasra which is a rumor my bard Oliver Ridley started about the existence of a creepy floating Specter who singled touch would kill a man after I had planted the seeds within the city for a few days I snuck up on a pair of thug standing guard in front of an area that my group needed to sneak into I then had my Butler Gerard my unseen servant hold up a cloak and creepy mask I ran out from the bushes screaming no no it's the stalker mezra don't let it touch me and I had it close in on me while I pretended to fall over and die then I had a look at the guards while I lay there and I secretly cast dissonant whispers a purely verbal spell causing only one of the guards to hear whispers of evil and forcing it to basically run away immediately needless to say they full-on panicked and my group casually strolled past moments later but the mask the mask is the key and I imagine you guys could probably come up with about thousand other awesome uses for a creepy mask which is why I am cheekily cheekily is a word I hope including it on this list it's just too much fun not to and so now I want to ask you guys what did I miss what deserve to be on this list and what deserve to be left off that I simply rated too high also if your group has had any funny or crazy stories about how you guys used a plain Jane item to the immediate the fundament of your dungeon after please we'd love to hear them I of course want to give an absolute massive thank you to all of my amazing patrons over at welcome adventures calm thank you guys so much for all the support I know times are crazy right now and it just matters to me it matters to my wife so genuinely thank you if you guys like what I do here you want to support more content like this welcome to ventures calm is a great way to support the channel and snack some rewards for yourself if this is your first time here and you love role-playing games as much as I do I would love to have you subscribe every week I put out new videos on GM tips player tips tutorials and more so if that sounds like something you might be interested in just hit that subscribe button down below and come join us thank you guys so much for watching my name is Cody and may your games be filled with awesome memories and even better friends I'll catch you guys next time

Channel: Taking20

Views: 428,141

Keywords: taking20, dungeons and dragons, D&D, D&D 5e, DnD, dungeons & dragons, dungeon and dragons 5e, 5e, 5th edition, how to play dnd online, how to play d&d, d&d 5e online, worst dungeons and dragons, broken d&d characters, overpowered d&d builds, most broken d&d combos, d&d rules mistakes, things adventurers should always carry, most useless items in d&d, most useless items in dnd, D&D Rope, D&D best magic items, best D&D items, Best d&d mundane items, 5e mundane items, mundane

Id: jFuPLM0UuUA

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ShiftyDM]

I have no affiliation to the channel, but I highly recommend this video. Being prepared for every scenario, like a James Bond super spy, is how you roleplay an intelligent strategic character.