Five Gamebreaking Magic Item Combos in D&D 5e.

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the seekers guide to twisted taverns which is a new product for 5th edition live on kickstarter till march 6th the seekers guide to twisted tavern includes 14 new tavern locations filled with crazy npcs exciting clues and mysteries to explore as well as just a lot of fun and games and revelry to improve your games of dungeons and dragons taverns have been a cornerstone of dungeons and dragons campaign and i feel like we're overdue for a good pub crawl some of our amazing friends are working on this project including logan from runesmith here on youtube as well as eldermancy and ghostfire games so please check out the kickstarter and see all the great stuff they're working on they have totally blown past all their funding goals and are adding on some amazing new features to the book as we speak so check them out right at kickstarter by following the links below and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are looking at five combinations of magic items that are pretty game breaking that you might want to watch out for in your games of d5e players love receiving magic items and dungeon masters love handing out magic items and you might see a list of a few magic items that you're very excited to drop on your players until one of the characters makes a broken combination that creates a lot more work for the dungeon master at the table we call these combinations game breaking because they create situations where the dungeon master must constantly invent new ways to challenge their player characters or work around these particular combinations this can be really laborious for a dungeon master and frankly it gets exhausting to have to do it it feels limiting because you can't necessarily use those monsters that you wanted to use or that boss that you wanted to use because your players are going to steamroll it very very easily in a way that they wouldn't have been able to do had you not given them these magic items so let's take a look at these five combinations and discuss why we think that they impact the game in a negative light there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling the first combo of magic items is a two-parter it is a very simple set of items that really is on the wish list of many fighters barbarians paladins and other melee combat types and that is a nice meaty plus two or plus three sword combined with a belt of giant strength particularly the very rare or legendary ones like the belt of fire giant strength or the belt of storm giant strength which set your character's strength score to 25 27 or 29. when you combine them together what you end up with is a character who has a bonus to their attack and damage roles that is far superior than most other creatures monsters or anything that you can throw at them in the entire game with this combination you can get as high as a plus 18 to hit if you have the right character who has these magic items combined with something like a great weapon master who now they're able to take minus five which isn't going to impact that much on a plus 18 it doesn't matter at all to get a massive amount of extra damage this type of character is going to bring down most boss monsters in a few hits yeah with a attack bonus of plus 18 even a plus 13 with a plus with a minus five from great weapon master then on the other end of that you end up with a character that has a bonus to their damage rules of plus 20 plus whatever they roll on the dice if they're you're they're using a two-handed weapon plus whatever else can be stacked on top of that from your class you end up with a wrecking ball of a character and while characters should be able to deal a lot of damage and it should be really really satisfying having seen characters with this combination of magic items feats and class features in high-level adventures league play such characters are very easily capable of dealing out hundreds of points of damage in a single turn of combat and in many cases they can one shot in a single round particularly fighters that have three or four attacks in action surge they can basically one shot everything which basically means that as a dungeon master you either have to inflate the hit points of the monsters to a really really gross level which can cause combat encounters to drag out on the opposite end and you end up with situations where the party is basically playing deliver the missile and so even though you can do these really inventive things like give your lich flight or give them invulnerability or give them all sorts of things this warping effect happens where the entire party just figures out how do we deliver the barbarian now the belt of giant strength and a magic weapon is something that a lot of people are going to be after but there are a lot of great weapons out there that do not add the plus bonus something like the flame tongue is a great weapon to choose to award somebody who already has the belt of giant strength this means that they get a cool magic weapon as well as increasing their strength but their to hit and damage are not off the charts they'll still feel very powerful and very potent but this is a great solution to this also keep in mind that we are discussing plus one plus two plus three weapons but there are a lot of magic weapons that have other features but also include a plus bonus so just be aware when you're looking at the magic items of giving one character too many plus bonuses into one thing if your fighter is a sword and board fighter who is not taking great weapon master it actually might be okay to award these magic items if the player hasn't min max their damage output already but if you have a melee damage dealer think about the consequences of giving them these powerful items because you can end up with an absolute blender in front of you and it is exhausting to have to consider that in every combat encounter you design it it just is a lot of extra work so now moving on to the defensive counterpart to this combo we're looking at the combination of something like plus three armor plus three shields and the cloak of displacement this combination does for armor and ac what the first combination did for attack and damage this is escalated even further by the fact that what a lot of people don't realize is that magic armor and magic shields don't require attunement this means that a character can wield plus two plus three plate and a plus 2 or plus 3 shield and still wear a cloak of displacement and a ring of protection or some other magic item that also increases their ac armor class is one of those things where there's a certain point where we see monsters in the game by and large not able to keep up with very high armor class you end up with a character that now has an armor class of 2627 and all attack roles have disadvantage on them and maybe they're an eldritch knight and they can cast shield or they have other ways of getting that even higher than that and now conventional enemies that rely on attacks to harm this character just don't matter and now as a dm if you want to even deal damage to this character at all now you got to pull out the spell casters i feel like when we look at an ac that pushes past 20 and goes as high as 25 or 28 you're in this situation where a lot of the monsters that you want to present to the party are not going to be able to do any damage to this character yes you might still have your boss monsters who can stand up to them and deliver a few impactful hits or some spellcasters who are going to knock them over with spells but when you are designing a combat encounter that's not the only thing you take into consideration you want minions and other sort of lieutenants who can deal damage and intimidate the party in meaningful ways when you have a character with 25 to 28 ac these become nothing they become nonsense that you're just littering the battlefield with that don't matter to that character and therefore it becomes a lot more effort to actually challenge a character that has ac that high and that again is just making so much more work for the dm and especially if it's one character who has that while the others don't you're now creating this imbalance in the game where one character is going to stand out above all the other characters and that's also something you want to be careful of one person stacking up magic items might suddenly push way ahead of the other player characters and create an imbalance that is disappointing at the table yeah i saw one situation where a dungeon master solved solved this issue by just never having enemies attack the fighter who had this monstrous ac so the fighter couldn't do what they wanted to do which would be that frontline defensive force because all the enemies just ignored them and went right for the squishies in every single combat encounter so not only did that player feel bad because they weren't able to do what their character was good at because the dm created tactics in every single combat that circumvented the mistake that the dungeon master had created it meant that the other players who couldn't keep pace with the ac of the tank we're just getting destroyed over and over and over again the exemplification of this issue is that when you have to rely on that strategy as a dungeon master at encounter after encounter after encounter after encounter it just gets monotonous and boring and you just start carrying your hair out of like how do i create a satisfying combat encounter i just want it to happen once i think a lot of these combinations that we're looking at are actually really fun to award to a 20th level party who is going into their final combat encounter and then you give them the means to break the game and you throw everything horrible at them at once and then you have this really really high level gameplay where they get to feel the power of the magic items but if you're awarding these types of combinations at low level or mid-level play it's a problem that you have to deal with for the rest of the campaign and it starts to weigh on you as a dm the third combination to watch out for is more of a recent problem particularly because of tasha's cauldron of everything which introduced a class of magic items that allow spell casters to increase their spell-saving throw dc's and their spell attack modifiers previously we the only items in the game that did this were the rod of the pact keeper which is a warlock only item and the cloak of the archmage which is the legendary magic item these two items together if a character had them uh warlock could use them to increase their spell saving throw dc by five um now that combination is available to many more spell casters and there's a few other items out there that will increase your spell saving through dc what this means is that a character very high levels of play can end up especially if they get one of those magic items that boost their main casting stat you could end up with a saving throw dc in the mid-20s and this is the third leg of this problem is that now enemies can't make their saving throws against the very high level spells of your spellcasters if at mid to high tier play your spellcaster is able to outcast even the greatest villains that dungeons and dragons has to offer that's going to be a problem for what you're trying to create in the atmosphere of a dnd campaign the threat goes way down when the spellcaster can dish out any spell they want without really any fear of people being able to do anything about it and really this kind of ripples through all three of the examples we've given so far that if you want to boil it down to one thing it's try to avoid giving magic items that offer the same stat boosts time and time again that increase a certain aspect that is the driving force of that type of character to heights beyond which are manageable at the table the reason why this is a problem for dungeons and dragons fifth edition specifically is that d5e embraced this design idea called bounded accuracy it means that unlike other iterations of the d20 system games or previous editions of dnd particularly fourth edition and third edition where the name of the game was stacking your modifier as high as you possibly could the progression of how high the numbers get in d and d5e is much flatter characters cap out their ability scores to 20 which is a plus five bonus and their proficiency modifier only increases from plus two to plus 6 over the course of 20 levels but these magic items blow the doors off this bounded accuracy system by taking what would have been a plus 8 to a plus 11 bonus and cranking that up to a plus 18. and that has a really significant impact on the math that is underlying dungeons and dragons 5th edition now moving on past the just stat boosting options that are clearly game breaking for the reasons given we have a couple others that we think are just problematic because of what they offer in the play styles presented the first one being the combination of something like the winged boots with a cloak of invisibility if you give this combination to a ranged damage dealing character you're gonna have a problem and i have told this story several times in my life but i gave jill uh the boots of flying when she was playing a ranger and i gave them to her at level four and for the rest of the game all of the combat encounters had to account for the fact that jill could just fly 20 30 40 feet up in the air and snipe people with her bow i didn't give her the cloak of invisibility because the winged boots proved problematic enough that i had to rearrange several of the combat encounters presented in the campaign i was running to modify them to be able to deal with a flying ranged attacking character if you gave them the cloak of invisibility on top of this you now have to do twice as much work now suddenly every combat encounter needs to include a true sight flying creature to deal with that character if you have a character that's just whipping around the battlefield unseen and untouchable because they're in the air and you can't pinpoint exactly where they are this is a hard problem to deal with and this exemplifies for a dungeon master one of the challenges of dealing with these combos because oftentimes the resp the natural response to any of these magic item combos or any overpowered characters is oh well the dm can just fix it by redesigning the combat encounters well that's not really fair to dungeon masters that might be running a module because they need to save time because they work a 60-hour week and d is the thing that they do to relax and they're trusting the module to deliver a balanced gameplay experience for them and they gave them a magic item because they wanted to add a little bit of spice but that's a mistake now that's biting them in the ass and while it's okay for that character to get their spotlight a character with these combinations of items just hogs that spotlight because they create this gravitational field around them because it's so warping in what it does and lastly we come to one of the most classic game breaking combinations of magic items that everybody knows and if you don't know about it you're about to find out just how devastating this can be and this is the combination of the portable hole and the bag of holding both the portable hole and the bag of holding for a long standing tradition in dungeons and dragons have had an effect where as they are both magic items that create extra dimensional spaces if one is placed inside the other it opens a rift to the astral plane that sucks in everyone within 10 feet note that this is a rift that sucks in everyone within 10 feet and not a 10 foot diameter rift so if you go to tarask you can just run up to it bam doesn't matter how big the creature is the re the size of the rift is not specified it just sucks in everyone within 10 feet and deposits them to a random spot in the astral plane there is also memes like the arrow of ultimate destruction which is an arrow designed with a portable hole in the front and a bag of holding in the back so that when it makes contact one goes into the other creating this rift this is a ridiculous win button for dungeons and dragons if you accidentally award one player a portable hole and another player a bag of holding and they figure this out it means that they're just going to save it for the final boss of the campaign throw this together and even if they have to sacrifice a player character they instantly kill the well they instantly teleport the creature to the astral plane not to mention the other problem that you might have is player characters who don't realize that this is a problem and so they take their portable hole and they're like i'll just keep this in my bag of holding and then suddenly they pop goes the whole party into the astral plane now you have a very different campaign that you have to play while they discover how to get out of the astral plate the portable hole in the bag of holding only cause this when they are brought inside an item that creates an extra dimensional space so this astral explosion doesn't happen when a portable hole is brought into an extra dimensional space created by a spell such as when you bring a bag of holding into a rope trick or a demi plane or even some people have thought that uh dimension door involves an extra dimensional space which it doesn't nothing in the spell description actually says that so you can use dimension door and teleport while holding a bag of holding or a portable hole without causing this astral rift the the in fact the the game rules of dnd5e are very specific like i'm pretty sure the only way you can actually cause this to happen is by putting the portable hole in the bag of holding maybe liam's secret chest would do this as well but by by but even then that's an extra dimensional space created by a spell not an item so that's a way to like clamp down the abuse of this if you've got a party member that thinks that they can like cause this by just doing rope trick plus bag of holding doesn't work there is always the chance that by awarding your players this combination they're gonna wait the entire campaign for the right moment to use it and then not be able to use it in the moment they thought they were going to be able to and that's kind of just the funny thing about awarding anybody something that is ultimately powerful but only gets to be used once is when do you use it now that was a problem for us it might not be a problem for all parties some people might be really keen to use this combination on the first instance they get it's like i don't like the way this guy's talking to me and that could happen at my table i actually tend to just ignore this concept a bag of holding in a portable hole can go wherever the heck they want and their value doesn't change and nothing crazy happens i feel like that added caveat of putting them together creates this rift is nothing but problematic yeah and i feel like this kind of follows into that tradition of like all these magic items that do things like conjure food or conjure coins and you do that thought experiment of oh if this magic item exists it would break the economy and i i just think that that's a world building problem not like necessarily a game breaking issue because in my estimation magic items should not be so common that they could destroy the economy but there's some really fun thought experiments of what what happens with certain magic items on world building and the eberron campaign is actually a great answer to that um there's cool worlds that kind of deal with that sort of world building game breakiness but overall today we've talked about like the actual mechanical sort of what happens in your character's adventures game breakingness and i have to say of all the combos that we talked today the one that i'm actually least hesitant about putting in the hands of my own players is the portable hole plus the bag of holding because i know that you guys would hesitate to use it and you know and you also know that we only get to use it once yeah and that's the thing is that that one actually is the least game breaking because it's a one-time event that's going to happen and then both items are gone yep so the other options that we've looked at just to summarize all this is when you're awarding magic items to your players be aware of what abilities and classes and subclasses they're playing and what that could mean and the various magic items that you've awarded and how those could stack up if you present magic items to your group and you think that one character is going to take that plus three sword and the other one is going to take the belt of giant strength you can't really account for the fact that one of them might say hey can i get both because then i can do this this and the other thing and suddenly they've broken the game so you just want to be aware and you can actually check out a lot of our videos on creative magic items and other really flavorful magic items we have an entire list of videos that really talk about cool magic items that are much more balanced and add a lot of role play and flavor along with being great rewards for the players to explore and as long as you steer clear from this really the challenge is you don't want to make more work for yourself as the dungeon master you can award these and you can solve these problems these are completely solvable problems but what it's doing is you're basically pulling the rug out from under your own feet you give the players these wonderful magic items and then suddenly you find yourself having to double down on your workload which is something that most dms don't necessarily want to do let's face it your players are going to cause you enough headaches they're going to find ways to create lots of trouble and the last thing that you actually need to do as a dungeon master is give them more opportunities to do that yeah um because that that's actually where you can create that abusive situation that really feels like it is making your game work and making you burnt out of playing think about things like how you don't really want to award rare magic items out until level five very rare magic items out to level 10 and legendary magic items out to level 15 and you probably don't want to have characters that have really as a good rule of thumb characters should probably have about as many magic items as their proficiency bonus and that's and as soon as you have more items than that that's when they're getting a little bit too much that kind of moderation can help avoid creating a situation where you're making more work for yourself as a dungeon master because you have enough work to do in plotting your world plotting your campaign creating your adventures designing combat encounters and if every time you sit down to design a combat encounter or scenario you have to play around the combos you should always think about the capabilities your pcs when you're doing these things but if you feel like you are having to like deal with this as an obstacle constantly that's when you create a problem for yourself and so that's what you want to avoid so this has been a look at five game-breaking magic item combinations in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about some of your crazy combinations of magic items in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the support of our patreon community a massive thank you to all of you that have joined our community over the years we could not make what we do on youtube without you if you enjoy the work that we do consider joining our community by following the links below or at patreon.com dungeon underscore dudes also our live play campaign dungeons of drachenheim is coming to kickstarter we've partnered with ghostfire games to bring dungeons of drakenheim to life as a 5th edition module you can find links below to get on the mailing list to keep up to date with all the news surrounding the upcoming kickstarter and don't forget to check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6pm eastern at twitch.tv dungeon underscore dudes you can find all the previous episodes of that campaign right up over here and as we said earlier we have plenty of videos on magic items for 5th edition dnd check those out right over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 304,223

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: KFg9rDJa6Mc

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021