Items are categorised purely on their usefulness, and there’s an explanation for why each item is placed where it is. It takes three hundred and eighty items from the DMG and XgtE (I lied, I have counted) – that’s all of them except the six cursed items – and splits them into a new set of categories – ten of them rather than the DMG’s five. Arising from a discussion thread over on RPG.Net, it is a complete re-do of the magic item pricing system. It’s ridiculous.Īnd that’s where Blackball’s Treasure comes in. Yet a potion that lets you do it once and is then used up is classed as “Legendary” and is priced at a whopping 250,000gp. The average adventuring party will have someone who can cast it by the time they reach third level, and at higher levels where they have many surplus low level spell slots going invisible is pretty trivial. Sure, being able to go invisible is useful, but it’s only a second level spell. Yet in the book it’s categorised as “Uncommon” and is priced at a mere 500gp – cheaper than a non-magical breastplate! It doesn’t even require attunement to use one.Īt the other extreme, we have a Potion of Invisibility.
It completely trivialises overland travel. It can be used all day to fly great distances, skipping long treks through wilderness and letting characters spy on terrain and locations from the air. For example a Broom of Flying is an astonishingly useful and powerful item. Many of the items seem to be very badly placed in the categories that the writers have put them into. A simple Potion of Healing is far cheaper and less powerful than a Vorpal Sword, and consequently is in a category with a much lower price tag.Īnd this brings us to the flaw. The frequency with which any individual item is found bears little relationship to the category it is in, and it is readily apparent that although the names of the categories sound like they’re related to scarcity they’re actually just related to power and price.įor many items this is obvious. With these names, you’d think that they’re based on how frequently items are found but a quick perusal of the treasure tables shows this not to be the case. The five categories of item in the game are “Common”, “Uncommon”, “Rare”, “Very Rare”, and “Legendary”. However, there is a huge flaw with the magic items in 5e – and that is in how the items are assigned to the categories. Items are grouped into a number of categories, each of which has a consistent price in the buying/selling/crafting sections of the books. While it’s technically correct that they’re not necessary, most people will use them and the DMG provides prices for them, treasure tables in which you can find them, guidelines about when characters should start finding them, and “optional” rules for selling, crafting, and buying them.įor the most part, these rules work fine.
Sure, the 5e books go out of their way to say that magic items are optional and that the game will work without them, but then they say the same about feats and multi-classing.
This isn’t surprising, since magic items are always fun for players to get hold of. In 5th edition D&D, there is a big list of magic items – I’ve not counted, but it looks as though there’s as big a list as in most other editions of the game.
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