No, You DON’T “Need” Magic
So it’s just after 6AM, and I’ve been up since 0430 for no reason at all, and I’ve scrolled through the entire Internet. So you’re getting a blog post.
It’s happened again. A well-meaning Fifth Edition GM has posted:
My group is getting to a point where buying items is needed. I am struggling to make magic shops with inventory for weapons, armor, alchemy, scrolls etc. Is there anything out there to help me? Pricing, what inventory I should have of each, how much of each etc.?
Why is this a question?
More than a decade in to Fifth Edition, a new quasi-edition just around the corner, and people are still stuck in the “but characters NEED magic items” rut from legacy editions.
They don’t, not nohow, not ever.
Fifth Edition is specifically designed to easily capstone a character who’s never owned a single permanent magic item. That’s one of the things that made 5E attractive to many folks, including me, who hated the requirement to grind gear (and gold for gear) in 3.X and 4E.
There are so many ways built in to the game, as RAW, to do everything magic items can do, that falling victim to “but characters NEED magic items” has a distressing tendency to unbalance the game.
Adding to my frustration, the same GMs who came into the internet asking for magic-item price resources come back later asking for help dealing with characters who walk all over supposedly balanced encounters. Gosh, I wonder if there’s a connection… 🤔
Let me just run down a quick mental list of the in-game mechanical reasons for which characters required permanent magic items, combined with how 5E invalidates them (this list is not exhaustive; it’s what springs to my tired mind at the moment):
Bonus Creep. 5E’s bounded accuracy, in the shape of Advantage/Disadvantage, made obsolete the requirement to have an ever-increasing bonus (+1 at lower levels, +5 at capstone) for armor and weapons. Matter of fact, in 5E a +1 bonus is a Big Deal in terms of how the dice math works. (If you don’t know what bounded accuracy is, here’s an excellent explanation.)
Critter Resistance. 5E did away with different creatures having different resistances, like one kind of demon can only be hit by a +1 weapon, but you need a +3 to hit a different breed. Some have resistance or immunity to damage caused by nonmagical weapons. But not only is there a surfeit of character abilities that turn their mundane weapon attacks into magical ones, there’s a 2nd-level spell called magic weapon that’s available to wizards, clerics, and paladins.
Spell Choices. When you had to memorize spells — and then “forgot” them after casting them — what spells to prepare was an agonizing process. Do you really waste a “slot” for magic weapon when you might memorize a more tactically-useful spell? That’s no longer the case. You can prepare magic weapon along with tactically-useful spells and spend the slots on whatever you want.
Item Creation. Okay, you don’t want to waste a “prepared” slot on magic weapon or true seeing or whatever other non-combat buff spell makes magic items obsolete. Make some consumables! Use those downtime rules! Both the Dungeon Masters Guide and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything contain rules for crafting spell scrolls and potions. Use them.
Of course, this elegant piece of mechanical design helped make gold as a reward largely pointless in a character-facing mechanical sense, according to RAW, but that’s a different discussion. 😉
So Just STOP.
It boils down to this: Whenever you’re tempted to “fix” something about Fifth Edition — or, hell, any game — run down a mental checklist.
- Is there already a rule for this? If the game is as mature as 5E, the answer is “probably, it’s just a matter of finding/remembering it”.
- Is that rule suitable for my table? Maybe your table desperately wants to visit a magic shop. Maybe your world is even more high-magic than 5E’s already fucking gonzo magic-saturated internal universe. If so, go nuts. But have the honesty to admit that the consequences might be dire. Speaking of which…
- What are the possible consequences of changing that rule? No rule exists in a vacuum. Modifying one rule will intersect with other rules in often maddening ways, and you can rely on canny players to find those intersections. See above for the knock-on effect of magic items useful in combat having a profound impact on RAW encounter balance.
While you’re running down the checklist, let caution be your watchword. What seems an easy solution very likely isn’t. If it was that easy, the game would already use that rule. You dig?
Anyway, those are my up-too-damn-early thoughts. YMMV.
