If I give her a +2 morningstar, she won’t give a rat’s titty about it. But she does end up near the front line a lot because of the party makeup and because I tend to make my players fight more groups of foes than lone monsters. But, I have this one cleric of Mystra in my game who has a lot of damage-dealing cantrips. For instance, most of my players have told me they prize magic weapons more highly than magic armor in the past. But whatever answer you give is going to be highly subjective and it’s going to be based on a lot of assumptions. But how does a +2 weapon compare to a suit of +1 armor? Which is more valuable? There’s lots of ways to argue that point and that’s what keeps most D&D forums on the internet going. Obviously, a +2 weapon is more valuable than a +1 weapon. Except within some very specific, narrow groupings, it’s hard to compare two magic items and determine which is more valuable. Because that’s really the problem with assigning prices to magic items. One that isn’t about analyzing what the items actually do and trying to compare the incomparable. The fact that the DMG acknowledges a price difference between consumable items and permanent ones implies there’s actually a systematic way to classify magic items and assign them prices. This is why I say the pricing scheme in D&D isn’t so much broken as unfinished. But it does give some insight into how items might be priced more systematically. Especially because there’s more than one way to consume a consumable. Unfortunately, that’s still not enough to build a crafting system around. This means that, whereas an uncommon item like a pair of eyes of minute seeing is worth 500 gp, an uncommon potion like a potion of acid resistance is only worth 250 gp. And it says that consumable items are worth half as much as other items. The DMG does distinguish between consumable items and items that last forever. It just wasn’t relevant to the larger discussion. I didn’t forget that the DMG specifically mentions that consumable magic items are worth half as much as other magic items. And even if it weren’t, I’d still have to discuss because, if I don’t, people will keep reminding me of it.
It wasn’t really important then, but it’s important now. Now, although I explained all of that last time, there was something I didn’t mention. It’s crazy to think that eyes of charming are worth just as much as eyes of minute seeing and that both have the same value as a wand of secrets or a mithril chain shirt or a +1 longsword. The magic items of a given rarity are just too varied to say they all have the same value. Unfortunately, while the DMG provides values for magic items based on their rarities, those values just wouldn’t work for Angr圜raft. And I had to do that based on the assumption that a magic item should require between three and eight units of materials to craft. Specifically, I had to figure out how much the materials should be worth based on the worth of the magic items they’d be used to make. I had to use the existing magic item list to help me define the materials that the players would use to craft magic items. In my last article on this topic, I explained that I had to design the Angr圜raft system backward.
#Dmg 5e magic item price how to
Because this week, I’m talking about… How to Price a Magic Item And that interesting, fun bit is what I’ll talk about… next week. Meanwhile, while I wasn’t assigning prices to every magic item in the game, I was doing something a lot more interesting and fun. I figured out a way to get them to assign themselves. Because it kept me from having to actually assign prices to every magic item in the game. And then, when I realized I was doing my job the stupid way, it made everything A LOT easier.
And when I realized that, it made my job easier. So, we’re just going to assume they’re not. The point is that the prices in D&D aren’t really broken. Because people who scream the word ‘broken’ generally don’t have anything useful or intelligent to say and I can just delete their comments. I know lots of people scream about how the magic item prices in D&D are broken. I just finished designing the pricing scheme that’s already half-baked into D&D. In fact, that’s the least interesting thing I did. I assigned prices to all the magic items in the D&D DMG. Believe it or not, I actually did what I said I was going to do two weeks ago.