D&D 5th Edition: Good Riddance Magic Item Economy

The Basic Fifth Edition rules of Dungeons and Dragons finally released!  And there’s all kinds of goodies in that PDF, but I want to focus on this paragraph in the “Selling Treasure” section:

Magic Items

Selling magic items is problematic.  Finding someone to buy a potion or a scroll isn’t too hard, but other items are out of the realm of most but the wealthiest nobles.  Likewise, aside from a few common magic items, you normally won’t come across magic items or spells to purchase.  The value of magic is far beyond simple gold and should always be treated as such.

What, exactly, does this mean?  You know how if you crack open the 4th edition Players Handbook to any random page in the second half of the book, you would likely stumble upon a Sears and Roebuck catalog of magic items, each with a value, and a perfect ability for an exact leg of your adventuring career?

Yeah, that’s gone.  Magic items are back in the DMG, to be hoarded over by stingy Dungeon Masters.

That decision is bound to confound many players who broke in their dice within the past decade and a half of the game.  One third of the Player’s Handbook lopped clean off?  For what?  To add an air of vagueness about what magical items did, and how they operated?  It’s an interesting idea perhaps, but modern role-playing philosophy dictates that the game should be focused around what the players want to get out of their game, not the Dungeon Master’s whims.  And what many players want is the option to  pour over magic item tables between sessions and work out an attack plan for what your character needs at certain stages of the game.  Removing magic items from the Player’s Handbook only serves to tip the scales in favor of the Dungeon Master, who controls enough of the game already.  If players are supposed to fight back against the grasping manipulations of their Game Master, then the Game Master shouldn’t get access to what’s written on the player’s character sheet.  What’s the deal Wizards?  I thought you represented the misfit outcasts.  Why are you putting control back in the hands of the authority?

To answer that question, we need to step away from the table, and examine the history of the game.  In Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax’s original vision, the Dungeon Master represented a guardian enforcer who couldn’t be questioned, but might be bribed with slices of pizza.  In the 70s, when the very concept of role-playing games was groundbreaking, this made perfect sense.  Many early players were still focused on the idea of ‘winning’ Dungeons and Dragons.  Maybe not in the traditional sense, but it was important for early players to save the damsel in distress, beat the bad guy and be celebrated as heroes.  As the sessions piled up week after week, and the traditional hero’s journey became passé, players focused on sculpting the most powerful character possible.  These early players, sometimes only half-understanding the point of role-playing, often missed the point of the endeavor and would stretch any foothold of a rule into a bridge that allowed them to span the plot of the game to directly access their goals.  In that environment, good Game Masters needed to step forward and squash disruptive plans, since circumventing the point of playing the game often results in there no longer being a game.

With time, players grew up, more was written and read about what makes an adventure great, and the game matured.  Meanwhile, digital role-playing games fought for the attention of the dice and minis audience.  But one of the big selling points table top rpgs held over their digital cousins is that the rules could always be bent, situation depending.  In Skyrim, passing through a wall is a glitch.  But in Dungeons and Dragons, the ability to supersede barriers and force Game Masters to think on their feet is a feature.

That’s not to say online gaming is inferior to table top gaming.  In fact, many features from Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft dropped off the screen and landed back on the table, from different approaches to magic, to an increase in mini-quests and the parceling out of little achievements.  And one of the easiest hacks when translating from table to video and back to table was the concept of a ‘magic item economy’.  Some players respond well to gathering treasure and building on the value of your character over time.  And one of the simplest ways to do that every time a checkpoint is met, is to offer an assortment of magical items to tweak the character’s abilities and functions.  But if too many magic items are foisted on the players, then they lose their value, and an opportunity for advancement becomes wasted time.  If those items could be traded in for a fraction of their cost, however, and those players could use cash earned to buy the items they needed right now, then every magic item becomes valuable once again.

We saw this resonate in Dungeons and Dragons 3.0.  The Dungeon Master’s Guide included what Second Edition players would think of as extraordinary costs.  A flaming, returning +1 dagger was equal to a +3 dagger, and worth 18,302 gold coins.  Speaking from personal experience as a Dungeon Master, I didn’t noticed the difference at first.  The decision to stick an arbitrary number next to a magic item was uninteresting to me.  But as my players picked up the Dungeon Master’s Guide (a manual that used to be a secret codex for the Dungeon Master in the 80s, but became common knowledge with the advent of the internet, and the open-sourcing of Dungeon’s and Dragons)  my players took notice that magic items were saddled with a cost.  And whether or not I wanted a world flooded with magic items, it was going to happen.  The door to fabulous cash prizes lay open, and I couldn’t stop my players from passing through to the other side without devolving the game into a stream of arguments, which could only lead to an end to the games altogether.

By the time Fourth Edition was published, the magic items section expanded and became a large chunk of the Player’s Manual, eliminating any chance for the Dungeon Master to appear even-handed if he ever threatened to somehow restrict the buying and selling of magic items.  Magic items were now officially a part of character generation and advancement, and removing the entrenched system left the players too weak to fight encounters of their level.  In fact, the Fourth Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide went so far as to tell the Dungeon Master to ask players for a wishlist of magic items they wanted to receive at various levels.  That way, wish listed Hats of Disguise and +2 Arrow Deflection Bucklers could be casually tossed on top of the next treasure heap, like Christmas presents from an uninvolved parent who doesn’t know or care what his or her children want, as long as they’re happy.

The end result was that magic items were taken for granted.  Instead of mysterious and potentially dangerous artifacts that forced the players to take extraordinary risks to acquire, magic items were commonplace claptrap that cluttered the character sheet with excess bookkeeping.  In the Second Edition of the game, a whole adventure could be structured around unlocking the secrets of a mysterious fairy heirloom secreted for generations in a hidden abbey.  By the time Fourth Edition rolled around, that kind of story would lose its impact.  Who cared about a magic item that a player received at sixth level?  By the time we finish this quest to figure out what it does, the players will be eighth level and need a more level appropriate magic item anyway.  Might as well sell the thing and get it over with.  And cursed magic items all but became extinct.  A cursed item used to be a way to taunt the players when they proved too greedy.  A cruel joke, but appreciated if it was well deserved.  Giving a Fourth Edition player a cursed item was akin to serving a sandwich with a plastic tomato slice in it to a person on their twenty minute lunch break.  All you get is an annoyed hungry person for your misguided attempt at humor.

The cruelest trick of all, though, is what this item management did to published adventures.  Because instead of representing wild cards in the game, piles of min/maxing magic items became necessary to maintain game balance.  A friend of a friend of mine told me that the tipping point for him was in Expedition to Demonweb Pits.  In that adventure, the players encounter an Aspect of Yeenoghu, Demon Lord of Gnolls and the bestial embodiment of savage butchery.

It’s a climatic high in the book, pitting the adventurers against a major player in Lloth’s tangled web.  So what’s the first thing the writers advise the Dungeon Master to do to reinforce in players’ minds the terror that is Yeenoghu?

Round one: Yeenoghu drinks a Potion of Bull’s Strength.

This is the exact opposite reason why many of us still choose to play tabletop roleplaying games.  Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be a series of exciting adventures filled with diabolical villains foiled by clever choices.  Villains, especially endgame monstrosities, are supposed to take advantage of the existing rules to help seamlessly tell a story.  The rules are there to serve the players and to settle arguments before they begin.  Few, if any characters, should become slaves to the game—chess pieces incapable of moving beyond their boundaries.  As soon as a non-player character does anything other than act within the bounds of its personality, much of the point for playing Dungeons and Dragons over other tactical miniatures games is lost.

So good-bye magic item vendors with more cash on hand than the entire kingdom they settled in.  You were fine as a joke concept, but the joke got old fast.  And good-bye abusing magic items as a crutch for game balance, or as a deus ex carceri device.  Good-bye snowplowing through treasure hordes to get to the plot points.  Good-bye mendacity and predictability.  Security blankets may be what players want, but it isn’t why they play.

Good riddance paying 18,032 gold coins for a flaming, returning +1 dagger.  I sure hope you never come back.