The Dnd 5e Magic Item Generator is a tool that allows Dungeon Masters (DMs) and players in the popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) to generate unique and varied magical items for use in their campaigns. This generator assists in creating items with various properties and abilities, adding depth and complexity to the game world. Magic items in D&D can range from powerful weapons and armor to enchanted trinkets and potions. These items often possess unique properties that can aid players in combat, exploration, or other aspects of the game. The Dnd 5e Magic Item Generator provides a framework for generating these items in a random or customized manner. One of the key features of the generator is the ability to generate items based on certain criteria or parameters set by the DM or player.
Reason number 3: collective ownership
In my Inspiration app, I ve got dozens of interesting magic ammunition variants in my magic item table replacement, I ll settle for making them a bit more common. So once I create my own random treasure-and-magic items generator, I ll make it available under the OGL so everyone can use it for whatever they want it for.
One of the key features of the generator is the ability to generate items based on certain criteria or parameters set by the DM or player. This allows for greater control over the types of items generated, ensuring they align with the specific needs of the campaign or character. For example, a DM may want to create a magic item that boosts a character's strength or grants them the ability to cast certain spells.
Dnd 5e magic iten generator
I’ve been talking about building a D&D 5e random treasure generator on one page (sort of a companion to 5e Monster Manual on one page): a better, more granular version of the DMG treasure tables that assign coins, gems, and so on.
If you read my blog, though, you know that there’s one thing I love above all else, and that’s uncontrolled scope creep. As I’m working, I’m starting to feel that I’m leaving the job half-done. Random monetary treasure is well and good, but what about random magic items?
The DMG has 6 pages of tables to roll on to figure out what magic item you find. On the whole, these charts are pretty good. They’re not perfect – I’d adjust the frequency of many items, especially pesky common items like potions of giant strength and dust of dryness – but they’re usable, unlike the monetary charts. At this point in 5e, I bet a lot of you have given up on the treasure tables, but you might still be using the magic item tables.
Is it worthwhile to build a replacement for the magic item tables too?
I think it is. And there are three big reasons to do so: support for multiple game styles, rebalancing, and collective ownership.
Reason Number 1: Support for multiple game styles
In the lead-up to 5e, there was a lot of talk about how it would be the most customizable and modular of all editions. Want to play a grim-n-gritty game or a wuxia game? There would be various “knobs and sliders” (I think that was the analogy of the day) to give you the game you want. I’m almost positive that there were going to be sliders for low- or high- magic and treasure.
Those never materialized in the final game (unless I missed some page in the DMG?). We ended up with a fairly opaque treasure system. It’s not easy to tell how to adjust the magic-ness of your game on the fly – or even to tell how low- or high-magic 5e is by default.
So let’s figure that out now. With the DMG and Xanathar’s charts about expected treasure hoard rates, we can math all this out to determine the chance of any item falling into the hands of a typical adventuring party. Then you can decide whether you want a higher or lower magic setting.
A D&D party which does the by-the-book number of encounters, over 20 levels, will find about one permanent and four expendable magic items per level. Here’s some of what they get:
–10 potions of healing, and about 10 total of the other healing potions (greater healing, etc). About one potion per level to share among the party.
–About one spell scroll per spell level. Personally, this doesn’t feel super generous. Assuming that about half of spells are on the wizard spell list, a wizard is learning a new spell from a scroll maybe once every 4 character levels. It’s a bit disappointing to me because I love the idea of the knowledge-seeking wizard character who hunts down scrolls.
–4 magic weapons. On average, each character gets one magic weapon for their whole career.
–Very few AC-increasing items. Up until around level 17, the whole party finds about one AC-boosting item, such as a +1 shield or a ring of protection. At legendary tier, they maybe find a second one. The D&D team really put the brakes on runaway AC expansion – so much so that, while higher-CR monsters get more accurate, PCs don’t really get much harder to hit.
I’m curious about what you think. Does the D&D magic default seem right to you, or would you prefer more or less magic than this? What I learned from this exercise is: relative to 5e D&D expectations, I’m a high-magic DM! I probably give out twice as many permanent magic items as I would if I were guided just by the encounter frequency defaults and treasure tables.
Knowing my own inclinations tend towards high magic, I want to make sure to preserve the standard D&D default treasure payout for the people who like that style. However, I also want to include rules for running a higher or lower magic campaign.
So that’s one reason to build my own magic treasure generator: to build the sliders and knobs we never got.
Reason number 2: rebalancing.
Some things, like a relative scarcity of magic weapons, can be marked down to different playing styles: some things strike me as just plain wrong. I will make some adjustments to both the scarcity and the power level of certain items. For example:
The math validated my hunch that there are way too many giant strength potions given out. The average party, over 20 levels, gets 7 potions of giant strength. They may be useful for buffing the fighter in a big fight, but I’ve never found them that iconic or imagination-grabbing. I’d trade in a bunch of these for healing potions, please!
The average party gets 2 potions of climbing. I’m not sure that I’ve ever used any.
-The party has 60% chance at Universal Solvent, 15% chance at Sovereign Glue. What? If anything, these proportions should be reversed. Sovereign Glue on its own is a fun invitation to hijinks. Universal Solvent on its own is just nothing.
-The party gets a total of three pieces of magic ammunition (+1 arrows, etc). This one broke me. I tweeted about it and wrote a huge blog post which is maybe too in-the-weeds to post, even for me. The short version is this: a +1 magic arrow is a nearly insignificant resource. The fact that the whole party gets only one over 20 levels is, to me, insane. Insignificance plus hyper-rarity is a bizarre combination. In order to have a place in D&D, magic arrows either need to be a) much more common, or b) much more interesting. In my Inspiration app, I’ve got dozens of interesting magic ammunition variants: in my magic item table replacement, I’ll settle for making them a bit more common.
Sometimes I don’t just disagree with how common an item is; I disagree with what level characters it’s for.
For instance, the flame tongue sword is Rare. It does 2d6 (average 7) extra fire damage on every hit. That’s very powerful! It does more damage than the Very Rare Frost Brand.
The vicious weapon, like the Flame Tongue, is Rare. It does 7 extra damage on a natural 20. It’s about 1/20th as powerful as the Flame Tongue, but has the same rarity. It’s also significantly weaker than a +1 weapon (which has an Uncommon rarity).
I’ll be moving these and other items up and down the random tables to provide better balance. When you get one of your rare opportunities to earn a magic item, I don’t want it to be a dud or a game-breaker.
Reason number 3: collective ownership
The DMG random tables are not in the 5e SRD. In other words, they’re not open content usable by third-party publishers. 95% of the 5e magic items ARE in the SRD; the random tables are not.
This is important for a few reasons. For one, it means that you can’t legally make various helper apps (like my Inspiration app) that use the official tables to quickly roll up treasure. You can secretly use the official tables and hope you get away with it, but that’s not really honoring the terms of the Open Game License. So any third-party publication or software that randomly assigns treasure needs to come up with their own method for doing so.
Here’s another reason why the license issue is important. Lately, WOTC has made some shameful corporate decisions – from the way they treat and pay their freelancers of color, to the tepid disclaimer they added to past publications with racist tropes.
Now I expect that WOTC can do better in the future. But I also want to have options in my back pocket – specifically the option to play D&D without cracking open a WOTC book.
So once I create my own random treasure-and-magic items generator, I’ll make it available under the OGL so everyone can use it for whatever they want it for.
the blogofholding treasure generator
So what am I signing myself up for? I’ve already promised to come up with a new, improved, one-page monetary treasure generator. I’m almost done with that – I just need to run a few more simulations to make sure it provides the results I expect. And it turned out, fitting it on one page is easy. I need a bigger challenge.
Here’s what I’m promising now: A complete 5e treasure generation system for wealth and magic items, replacing the 10 or so pages of charts in the DMG. It will have the following features:
-The monetary system will be overhauled, as I’ve detailed before.
-There will be rules for high and low-wealth campaigns and high and low-magic campaigns.
-It will rebalance magic items by rarity and power.
-It will scale by party size. The current system works well for four- and five-character parties, but can’t gracefully handle huge-party or solo play.
-It will be released under the Open Game License.
-All of it – the charts, the customization rules, the tables for assigning 300+ magic items (but not the OGL license) – will fit on a two page spread. You can roll treasure and assign magic items without any page flipping. This seems like a crazy goal, but I’ve been playing around with it, and I think it’s possible. Hope you like small print!
We’ll see what else I end up adding before it’s done. I have a few ideas for extra features that I’d like to jam in, space permitting.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 at 10:33 am and is filed under RPG Hub. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The DMG random tables are not in the 5e SRD. In other words, they’re not open content usable by third-party publishers. 95% of the 5e magic items ARE in the SRD; the random tables are not.
The generator can be used to create such an item, taking into account the desired parameters. Additionally, the generator provides a system for determining the rarity and power level of the generated items. This helps maintain a sense of balance within the game, ensuring that the items are not too overpowered or underwhelming. It takes into consideration the level of the characters in the campaign and the rarity of similar items in the game's rulebooks. By using the Dnd 5e Magic Item Generator, DMs and players can save time and effort in creating unique and balanced magical items for their campaigns. It adds an element of unpredictability and excitement to the game, as players never know what kind of powerful artifact or enchanted trinket they may come across in their adventures. Whether used to reward characters or provide them with much-needed tools, the magic item generator is a valuable resource for enhancing the gameplay experience in D&D 5e..
Reviews for "Creating Magic: The Importance of Custom Magic Items in Dnd 5e"
1. John - 2 stars - I was really disappointed with the Dnd 5e magic item generator. The items it generated were either too weak or simply didn't make sense in the context of the game. I was hoping for a tool that would help me create unique and powerful magical items for my campaign, but this generator fell short. It lacked variety and creativity, and I ended up having to come up with my own items instead. Overall, I wouldn't recommend using this generator if you're looking for quality magic item ideas.
2. Sarah - 3 stars - I had high expectations for the Dnd 5e magic item generator, but unfortunately, it didn't live up to them. While it did provide a decent number of magic item ideas, I found that most of them were quite generic and lacked any real depth or uniqueness. Additionally, the generator didn't allow for much customization or fine-tuning, so I couldn't really tailor the items to the specific needs of my campaign. It served as a decent starting point, but I quickly found myself having to tweak the generated items to make them more interesting and useful. Overall, it's an okay tool if you're in need of some quick magic item ideas, but don't expect it to be a game-changer.
3. Alex - 1 star - I found the Dnd 5e magic item generator to be quite frustrating and disappointing. The items it generated were often overpowered and unbalanced, which created a lot of issues in my campaign. Additionally, the generator lacked any sort of organization or categorization, making it difficult to find specific types of items or to sort through the generated results. It felt like a random mishmash of poorly thought-out ideas, and I ended up spending more time trying to fix and adjust the generated items than actually using them in my game. Overall, I would not recommend using this generator if you're looking for a reliable and well-designed tool for creating magic items.