Dungeon Masters, What's the Most Useless Magic Item You Gave Players?

dmd dungeon masters of reddit what is the most useless magical item you've ever given your party and how did they use it a trinket that can excavate a 15 ftx 15 ft section of earth down to a depth of five feet turns out i had also given them at some point prior a trinket that fills roughly the same volume with water also turns out that water can be frozen surprising how many problems can be solved with various permutations of the applications of those three for starters anything under five feet tall can be suffocated if the person with the ability to freeze declares their cast as a reaction to the water being created in the pit anything around about six feet tall just gets its head kicked in while it's frozen in place fire as a hazard forget it spike pits gnaw traps pressure plates combat on stairs noop anything that allows a line of sight into an otherwise enclosed space yeah everything inside is drowned now need an attack of opportunity make everything in front of you fall five feet into that hole you just materialized and cast a saving throw think before you give non-combat tools to players they can and absolutely will use them to break everything around them give a child a hammer and all that the dm giveth but the dm must also remember to tacketh away one i was making things up as i go right so i gave my players a skill that would allow them to jump further but b gave them this ability in a small confined area two i gave my players a map for a corridor that went only one way three one one of my players had found a friendly slime that had been made up and literally the only thing the slime has contributed was learning how to play fetch that's cute though that they had a pet slime a hilarious looking hat that always points you to the nearest beer i think they forgot about it but maybe it will come in handy one day also a glaive that if you hold it makes you laugh at everything but also increases your charisma mod in episode one of swears sourbridge series they made a joke about a pebble that was able to smite pigs i decided to give my party the stone and made it only effective against pig-like creatures no awk was safe got this idea from reddit actually had a campaign where the heroes defeated a coven of hags at their lair afterwards a floating stick would follow them around everywhere the players were curious so they threw the stick away it came back every time so they cast detect magic on the stick but it wasn't magical in any way the players were completely dumbfounded and determined to figure out what this stick's deal was how could it float return every time and not be magical eventually they gave up trying to solve it and went on with the campaign believing that i the dm had no resolution in mind and was just making stuff up about 30 sessions later the wizard died and entered the ethereal plane there he saw his comrades and the stick and a dog the ghost of a dog the hag's pet who kept returning the stick thinking the players were playing fetch every time this broke the player's heart and the wizard was determined to make the ghost dog his new familiar so when i first started playing d about eight years ago i was extremely shy and nervous to rp in the second session as we were headed to a meeting with a representative of one of the more powerful churches in the yard we came across a guy selling potions of fire water guaranteed to boost your confidence the dm and the rest of the players had a chuckle at this as he was obviously just selling booze i being a naive 14 year old who knew nothing about names for booze i assumed this was actually some sort of magical confidence boosting potion fast forward to the meeting it's not going well i'm really nervous for real so decide to drink one of those potions mid-meeting the dm tells me yay i definitely feel more confident after a few minutes he says actually could you ask your words a bit more so i did playing along after the meeting ended he had me roll a constitution check and when i failed he described how i was having a hard time walking straight and my vision was getting funny and it finally clicks hang on am i just drunk cue the whole table bursting into laughter not having realized i had no idea what fire water meant and thinking i was just really into committing to this bit quite a fond memory of a very misinformative potions dealer it wasn't d and i wasn't the dm it's in one vampire requiem game our party once destabilized the entire hierarchy of vampirites in the caribbean with a jar of cursed peaches it was enchanted to refill itself and if the unfortunate individual who ate the peaches failed a fortitude safe it did a few lethal damage to their insides and they crap blood we filled a crate maneuvered it onto a rival's ship and claimed it was from a different rival full-scale war may or may not have ensued a ring of swimming plus 5 3.5 e except none of them had identified so they didn't know what it did beyond providing a bonus throughout the rest of the campaign they would have someone put it on just before a skill check they hadn't tested but this included a brief discourse where they lied to intimidated and attempt to reconcile with the heiling in their employ to test the social skills if it had had relevance at any point i'd have done a gimme but they never worked it out for once i'm sat on the other side of the screen on this dm gave me a set of sending stones which i got made into a nice set of earrings now one of the earrings got given to some rondo and everyone in a while i freak whoever is wearing it out by delivering ghostly and spoopy prophecies that's so cool when an item is not cursed so you make it cursed xd quel's feather token tree this item is a one-time used feather that turns into a tree when the command word is spoken we all laughed about how useless it was and the rogue nonchalantly offered to hold on to it several sessions later everyone had forgotten about it the rogue randomly brings up birds in conversation after an abundance of avian allegories all adventure abated during the discussion it was determined that the quilled portion of the feather is indeed sharp several sessions after that quell's feather token tree was a distant memory we get to the boss fight and are getting our asses absolutely handed to us everyone had resigned themselves for the tpk that was about to happen everyone but the rogue who nearly unconscious says okay guys i got this he tumbled next to the boss pulled out the feather stabbed him said the command word and dove for cover the feather stuck in the boss chest transforms into a lovely apple tree basically obliterating the boss the rogue picks an apple takes a bite and calmly says right so i'd like to search the room reminds me of the first episode of the orville happy arbor day technically pathfinder but we were playing a campaign where we were starting our own city and eventually country as a troop of evil wizards early on one of us got a robe of infinite wine which lets you pull a loose thread on the robe which magically turns into rope it is basically a magic item with infinite free rope for the rest of the campaign whenever our group would interrogate anyone or really just come across anyone we didn't like we would do so by force feeding them rope from the road to death at one point in the campaign one of our neighbor factions gifted us with a monument as a thanks for helping them in some war and we were presented with a giant sculpture of our party force feeding some poor bastard a bunch of rope it became the centerpiece for our city and a warning to our citizens and enemies alike one of my players found a broken drift globe in an old wizards tower it's basically a small globe that when activated floats after the players giving off light it's broken so it flickers a little but hey light is light they immediately paid to change its command were to pseudo activate sun painted a groucho marx face on it and bemused whether or not they could make it into a sentient magic item it was like 20 minutes of the session a growth potion not to be confused with a potion of growth which enlarges your whole body the growth potion comes in a small vial is bright blue and recommends you see the nearest cleric of effects do not wear off in four hours this is how you end up deeming into species reviewers so indian d5e the bag of beans is a pretty useless item in most cases with the effects ranging from pointless to mildly beneficial to harmful to even more harmful but with a shot at great loot the way it works is you take a bean from the bag plant it and the dm rolls for a result in the campaign i'm currently running and making posts about because it's awesome the paladin tried to get church to donate funds for some relief efforts after a town had been suffering from demon invasions unfortunately because of internal politics he couldn't get the funding one of the families who had lost their daughter were thankful to paladin for turning back the demons so they gave him a bag of beans they said they got swindled from a blind merchant and had no use for them as they were too afraid to meddle in high arcane the paladin went ahead and planted one in the fields to see what would happen from the spot of soft dirt erupted a geezer that shot out crude oil the paladin whipped out his portable hole and filled it up with over 2 000 gallons of oil he sold it all to the kingdom's military and made a cooling now if a flask of oil is one silver coin and a flask is about one cup that means this guy sold over three gold pieces worth of oil he took all of that gold and donated it to rebuild the town and compensate the families who had lost so much in the destruction of their homes tl dr the paladin got a bag of beans became an oil tycoon and donated the profits to a charitable cause dm had this caduceus staff that was being protected by a ninth level spell with an engraving that said vitas on it using it conjured up a couple lemons once a day when life gives you lemons we made lemonade and that was it it was about halfway into my campaign i had a cool treasure waiting for them in this cave before they even knew what was inside the chest they all shouted i opened the chest and grabbed the treasure this had been going on for a while to the point where it actually created conflict between players so i thought okay frick the thing that was supposed to be in the chest i'm giving these greedy bastards the most useless thing i could think of they opened up the chest and inside is a single wooden wand one of the players shout i use i.t i then describe how a huge burst of arcane energy shoots out and lands on the ground once the smoke and dust settles what's left on the ground is a single wooden wand i had given my players a creation that i had came up with on the fly a wand with the ability to duplicate itself the wand of wanding tl dr my players were getting annoying and greedy when it came to magic items so i gave them the wand of wanding this wasn't mine but i once read about a dm that gave his players a ring that creates an area around it of anti-magic that's only small so that you could easily pick magic locks etc one of the players was a gunslinger and got the wizard in the team to shrink cannonballs to fit in his gun then they placed the ring on the end of the barrel so as he shot them they got bigger essential making an actual hand cannon thought that was a pretty smart use of the item i read this somewhere i didn't do it but i think depending on how you dm it either works or it doesn't if you're a stickler for the rules which is fine that fair if you bend the rules to have a bit more of a relaxed game that's fine as well we were in the layer of something underground and they found a chest and there was a nice red pair of leather boots that's what the adventure said it didn't mean nothing they were just red because the adventure said so players got hung up on it and in the end joked about how these must be magic boots and in the end our elf put them on and clacked his heels together i decided oh come on and made them draw a bright yellow path wherever he went until he again clacked his heels like the yellow road and wizard of oz they never used them because apart from convulsed dungeons we never played in they are not useful unless you want to be tracked additionally it was not dnd and magic items are 8 and super expensive but no one wanted a pair of boots that colors the ground yellow oh man i love love love making dumb little trinkets and bits but this one thing i made was stashed away in the bank vault of a western style town where the only resident is a construct dressed like a sheriff and all the townsfolk are missing they figured out the mystery of the town construct killed them all and went crazy using their bodies as dolls they fought giant dune worms they were stalked for two days by this sheriff robot tried killing him and couldn't somehow managed to collapse a town on him they grabbed this little treasure box and ran out of the town well inside was a little jewelry box inside was a marble marble so basically tiny white polished stone sphere what could it be they risked their lives on this side quest to get it it was kept in a vault and everything but they held it up and once it was under open sky it zipped out the player's hand and rolled like 60 miles per hour off randomly into the desert leaving a cartoonist dust trail it was the marble of white wall home brew named for a city i placed in my world's cannon north pole arctic themed cliff city the marble flicked off north and it'll only stop once it reaches the true north pole the wrong direction of where they're going and also totally useless if they'd bothered to search the vault instead of booking it with the first thing they found they'd have realized this construct hoards tiny magical trinkets like wally the dagger of healing is a good one it does 1d4 damage and 3 healing so odds are in your favor that you can heal up over time but it hurts like heck i also gave them a cleaver of seasoning once that seasons any meter cuts perfectly i wasn't the dm of this campaign but i was the party member who received the item it was the horn of valhalla which if you don't know it's able to summon a hero to fight by your side for an hour i think the dm added his own flavor and said the horn could only summon a hero for our realm being new adventures at the time we knew nothing about the law of the land and the great heroes before us so this is where it gets useless and to the party funny we had a bard with us at one point until he died to a green dragon leading up to the event of his death he rolled natural 20s of what we say was the greatest performance on the planet to serenade the beholder the beholder impressed and confused lets us basically go fast forward to after his death the world now knows of his magnificent song to the beholder and no bard can match the performance only tribute to the greatest song of the world fast forward again we end up getting the horn and i use it to summon our bard back but instead of fighting by our side he sings songs and inspires us then disappears again for a month until the item can be used for the same purpose there were time where i got drunk in character and blew the horn just to talk to my old companion sorry if it's not that funny being there made it funnier to me boots off their walking basically they were boots that could not move closer to the ground so they let you walk on air like you would up a staircase but then you don't have a weight down also you could lose your balance fall over and hang upside down from the boots the ranger was dragged along like a kite for half of the day and spent the night about 60 feet up while the druid prepared a spell to remove the curse that meant he couldn't take them off they are now trying to pawn it off to some unsuspecting shopkeeper i think the moral of that story is that you shouldn't trust a pair of boots on a pedestal in the middle of a grain field with a beam of light descending down from the heavens upon it i'm not the dm but at one point we had a player who was a stage magician so they got a magic hat that you could pull unlimited rabbits out of now the dm thought this would be useless but funny little did he know how easy it is to weaponize rabbits when you're creative and at one point we even pulled a prison break using polymorph potions and about 85 rabbits after a few turns spent just pulling them from the hat not sure if this is what you're going for since it turned out to be quite useful that it was intended and a joke and is one of my favorite items i've seen in any campaign i've played i was running my son and some of his friends through a star wars campaign they entered a town and wanted to buy weapons but it was a small town and they had no weapons to sell this didn't sit well with one player he kept asking for weapons he kept bugging this one shopkeeper asking what he had so to try to shut him up i said he only sells frying pans the player immediately bought one and used it as a weapon the rest of the campaign he killed 10 storm troopers with that thing a few years later on his birthday my son bought him a real frying pan one of my players is a cleric of dreams and i gave her a magical sleeping mask that if put on a sleeping person will indefinitely sustain their sleep with incredibly vivid nightmares of their future death another one of my players is an arsenal who has prophetic dreams when my players were traveling between two cities they encountered a man who claimed to be a guide he said he knew the secrets to safe travels and he played a magic banjo my players were immediately suspicious of him but they decided to go along with him over the next few days of travel the elf ranger caught him doing several strange things in the middle of the night poking around their belongings but each time he had some excuse to save his hide until a night before they arrived at their destination he went poking around the dream cleric's backpack and pulled out the mask she woke up looked him in the eyes and then nodded and pretended to go back to sleep as he crept up to the sleeping arsenal the elf came out of her trance and stopped him from putting the mask on the prophet they fought and killed him of course but they didn't fully trust the dream cleric after that it was a fake cursed beard that couldn't be removed from your face i think it was loosely based on an idea i found on reddit it provided no distinct disadvantages the curse was easily removed and one of the campaigns i used it and one of the players realized they liked their character better with a beard i had a dwarf god curse an elf with a beard over insulting his hombre dwarf spirits liquor had them roll a d20 to find out new length every day on a 20 it was a trip hazard bastard never thought of tying it back or braiding it to make it shorter in a seafaring campaign they found an amulet uh sure it's magical it um it can show you which way is north i gave them an amulet of true north players did you just give us a compass that's a compass britches of birches these rough fibrous trousers have the texture and coloration of birch tree bark although uncomfortable and stiff no penalties are imposed on the wearer besides staffing if the owner spends a move action to stomp his feet a fully grown birch tree will spring from the ground directly in front of them not useless i guess just odd not even close to useless you could make hundreds of gold per day create forests for the highest bidder the aristocracy a logging company whoever that's right up there with the druid who runs around blessing fields with plant growth and the wall of stone quarry druid wizard sorcerer not dnd but a classic from paranoia is a plasma grenade you throw it and it covers the room in a sticky yellow substance the goal is to see how many players get it i gave my players a coin of certainty which was an item that always landed on heads not entirely useless but not overpowered in any way well the bastards glued it to a legendary coin of beisha but i gave them which if lands on heads can make a d20 roll for another creature or one instead uses their reaction so they took a powerful item based on chance and make it a certainty an oversight on my part but i felt it was fun and creative and i like to reward my players for that sort of thinking i did the same character through two homebrew dungeon world games the second game was a sequel game i was a completely uncasual dude in a world of mages and mage servants but i had a camera i stunned a few things with the flash and at one point my camera became a plot point because it had taken a photo with some very secret mage bulls tourists a map that had to be in the area for a certain amount of time to map it by the time the map has mapped the area they had already traveled through most of it though colon got a tank it off sobriety when filled with alcoholic liquid it removes the alcohol entirely pretty useless except in a drinking match made an attempt and the cheat was discovered and we all got beat up in a rowdy bar and had to make a run for it i gave one of my players the armor of gleaming it's just really shiny armor that has no actual effect on anything except to look cool since this character was based on gaston from beauty and the beast a ranger who really hated wearer beasts he was happy to look really cool until one day when they were facing down a medusa then with a series of lucky roles for gaston and a series of bad roles for the medusa he managed to throw a piece of his armor off gleaming right past the medusa's face which he was foolish enough to look at and rolled badly enough to instantly turn herself to stone clear here not the dm a fish-shaped charm that glowed at seemingly random times it glowed when we were in the tavern and got attacked by a drunken guard it glowed when we were walking over a dilapidated bridge that nearly collapsed it glowed when we tiptoed past a saltwater troll we'd taken to calling if the crabs gonna happen charm but then for the rest of the campaign it never glowed again when it was all over i wanted to know what the charm did it detects fish within 20 yards i stole this item idea from someone else but i gave my players a cloak of invisibility that narrates the wearer's actions turns out it's still useful in a setting with a lot of noise to drown out what it's saying i've yet to give them any magical items as we are only two sessions in but i plan on giving one person in the party a magical potato that never decays or rots it's all magical effect is that once per hour the potato is magically transported into the inventory of another ally with infinite range the potato can also be written on with ink which is what i hope my players figure out i hope they use it in case the party decide to split up and they need some way of finding each other by teleporting the potato to each other with information written on the potato i haven't decided on the name yet but i'm thinking hot potato or something along those lines the good old wand of create one dove create wand one use it's a one that when used creates a wand the only spell the new one knows is create wand it was ruled that because the original wand only had one use it was dispelled if the old one didn't disappear i can't think of several uses for them right now instant kindling new arrow shafts support skeleton for a decoy torch handles possible chew toys to distract a guard dog fun times if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video bye for now

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Id: EENE7o6tMFg

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020