For Sale: Boots of Elvenkind. Never Worn.

During the D&D Preview Show of Gencon 2010 Wizards of the Coast announced that they would be handling the acquisition and distribution of magic items in a new way going forward. The new system categorized items by rarity, and assumed that players could not be able to buy or craft the vast majority of items. This was a design decision that the developers said would "give the power back to the Dungeon Master when it comes to the high end magic items" and they wanted items to "be more part of the story, more part of the natural evolution of your campaign- and not the end result of a shopping trip." They even concluded this part of their presentation saying "most of the items in our books will become entirely the domain of the DM in terms of how those items get into the hands of the players." ¹ This announcement was met with several rounds of applause by the assembled geeks.

¹ These words were mostly Jeremy Crawford's. Dragon Talk: "August 9, 2010: Gen Con D&D Preview Show").

This was a pivot in game design in an edition that had begun by including magic items in the 4th Edition Player's Handbook (instead of being in the Dungeon Master's Guide as in previous editions. This was also quite different from the days of 3.5 Edition, when a character had to have a +X weapon and +Y armor by Z level or their efficacy as a character would suffer for it.  From your headband of intellect down to your boots of striding and springing you would try and make the most out of every body slot by pouring over price lists while leafing through the numerous supplements until you had stretched every gold piece to its limit and had your shopping list for an upcoming campaign. This approach to character optimization gave rise to the "Christmas Tree Effect" which colorfully described how a fully equipped character would look when subjected to a detect magic spell.

In 2014 Fifth Edition was released and the categorical approach to magical items remained the official choice of Wizards of the Coast. All items are either common, uncommon, rare, very rare, or legendary and it is explicitly stated that magic items are the purview of the Dungeon Master.

There are only four common magic items in the DMG and for some reason the potion of climbing is one of them.

I reached out to a big name in the field of optimal item selection advice for 3.5 characters to see how he felt about this shift in game design.   He is known as Darrin on the Giant In The Playground forums, but he may as well be named Shax as he is the original poster of the thread titled Shax's Indispensible Haversack (as seen here).  This thread is one of several that many players (myself included) referenced when they were creating a character- another popular thread was known as Bunko's Bargain Basement.  My conversation with Darrin focused on how this approach to magic items was continued in the 5th Edition of the game.

Q.  Do you like or dislike the new way that loot is handled in 5th edition?


A.  I. haven't really had a chance to get all that familiar with 5E, but I am familiar with the "Christmas Tree" problem in 3.5. And I certainly understand why 5E wants to move away from that sort of loot model.

Much like prestige classes, the magic items in 3.5 are one of its biggest strengths and one of its most horrendous weaknesses. The flexibility and modularity of such a robust magic item system makes in endlessly entertaining to upgrade and juggle around your loot. However, it also *requires* the PCs to load themselves down with "standard" magic items just to be competitive. So while I personally love to fiddle around with all of the unusual quirks and wicked combos hidden in various magic items, it does force the PCs into a horrible rat's race of arms & armor that tends to crush out individuality and character-driven stories.

So I understand why 5E would want to move away from that. But as it always happens in game design... when you take something so fundamental out of the system, it can have huge implications and unforeseen consequences on the rest of the system. I haven't seen enough of 5E to know if the designers really understand how magic items should work in a heroic fantasy game.

Q.  Do you think that it weakens player characters or makes things less fun for the players?

A.  Hell no. A robust magic item system works against having well-developed and interesting characters. For decades, D&D managed to get around this almost accidentally, mostly by starting of characters at low-level with limited access to magic items. When magic items become much more prominent in later levels, personalities and character motivation are usually well-established and more developed. 3.5 short-changed this quite a bit by accelerating magic item acquisition. It's still possible to create interesting characters in 3.5, but it's a lot harder when your character is expected to "pull his weight" in combat and a great deal of his effectiveness is determined more by his magic items than his personality or character choices.

I see it as more of a trade-off kinda thing. Fantasy characters absolutely should get lots of loot with cool magic items, that's a huge part of the fun of the game. 3.5 sort of swung that lever a little too far in the mechanical direction, at the cost of character development and storytelling. Swinging it back the other way doesn't entirely fix everything, though... D&D has never really handled flawed characters or narrative structure all that well, and it's hard to build up the importance of those elements without wrecking large parts of the rest of the system.

Anyway, the Christmas Tree problem is a very large part of 3.5. It's a very important part of what made 3.5 so successful, but it also has some pretty significant consequences as well. That being said, having a huge variety of magic items is not a requirement to make a game "fun". You can have a lot of fun in a low-magic character-driven 3.5 game, just as much as you can have a lot of fun with a very tactical and item-driven 5E game. I'm not sure if there's really all that much value in pitting one edition against another.

Except for 4E. 4E was chock full of stankitude.

Regardless of how much you may miss the 'epic lewt' feel of 3.5 or how much you appreciate the refreshing rarity of a +1 dagger- this seems to be the old model made new again.  I for one have mixed feelings about it as someone who loves being on both sides of the DM's screen.  I feel that without big ticket magic items to buy that I care less about acquiring wealth- and that is one less carrot for me to dangle as a DM, but I also feel that as a player finding that keen needle in the boring, mundane haystack makes for a great story...  Even if I really wanted a flaming needle.