If you’re playing by-the-book 5e D&D, how much magical treasure is a party likely to find? Is it less than other editions? Is that wererat’s immunity to normal weapons a big deal?

The DMG and Xanathar’s Guide offer some guidance: “Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0-4 table, eighteen rolls on the Challenge 5-10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11-16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table.” That’s 45 rolls, roughly two per character level: three per level at CR 5-10, because level advancement slows there because that’s the game’s “sweet spot”. (I’m assuming that most fights are intended to be against a CR equal to character level, which may be a big assumption, but which looks borne out by this treasure distribution.)

Xanathar’s Guide has a further table, Magic Items Awarded by Tier, which specifies the number of major and minor items the party should expect to collect. For instance, during character levels 1-4, it says the party is supposed to accumulated 9 “minor” items (mostly expendable items like potions and scrolls, plus a few low-power permanent items) and 2 “major” items (like magic swords and shields and ioun stones and the like). During character levels 5-10, the party should find 28 more minor items and 6 more major items.

Because I like to check math, I decided to, well, check the math, and I found that the Xanathar’s chart is close to, but not 100%, accurate. For example, let’s take the number of major items collected during levels 5-10. Xanathar’s says 6 items will be accumulated over 18 treasure rolls. Let’s compare this to the Dungeon Master’s Guide treasure tables.

In one treasure roll for levels 5-10,, you have a 14% chance of getting 1d4 items from Magic Item Table F (an expectation of .35 items), a 4% chance of getting 1d4 items from Magic Item Table G (an expectation of .1 items), and a 2% chance of an item from Magic Item H (.02 items). Over 18 rolls, that’s 8.46 major magic items. Not a big difference from 6 – 40% off, which is in the ballpark – but if the Xanathar’s table is at all useful to you, you may like to have a more accurate version of the table.
My more detailed (broken down by level) and accurate chart is below.

I’ve also added a column for Magic Weapons: this is how many of the party’s major items can be expected to be magic weapons, based on the percentage of magic weapons on each treasure table. This is useful if you want to know, for instance, how big of a deal it is that gargoyles are resistant to, and lycanthropes are immune to, nonmagic weapons.

Magic Items Accumulated By Level

Level	Minor	Major	Magic Weapon
1	2.75	.75	.21
2	5.5	1.5	.42
3	8.25	2.25	.63
4	11	3	.84
5	14.4	4.85	1.29
6	17.8	6.7	1.74
7	21.2	8.55	2.19
8	24.6	10.4	2.64
9	28	12.25	3.09
10	31.4	14.1	3.54
11	35.5	15	3.76
12	39.6	16	3.98
13	43.7	17	4.2
14	47.8	18	4.42
15	51.9	19	4.64
16	56	20	4.86
17	60.85	21.6	5.38
18	65.7	23.2	5.9
19	70.55	24.8	6.42
20	75.4	26.4	6.94

The discrepancy in numbers between my chart and Xanathar’s may be nothing more than rounding error in the Xanathar chart: despite different estimates per level, we end up in the same place. Xanathar’s Guide says that over 20 levels, a party will find “roughly one hundred items.” According to my calculations, the party should find 101.8 items – pretty damn close to 100. Of these, 75 will be minor items, and only 7 will be magic weapons.

Conclusion 1: Use my chart instead of Xanathar’s if you are a fan of unnecessarily high precision.

Conclusion 2: Magical treasure is given out rather sparingly in 5e, apart from minor items, which are given out like candy. Let’s take a 6-person party, three of whom are weapon users. Each character won’t have his or her own major item until level 6, and all three weapon users won’t have magical weapons until around level 9. That means that that CR 2 Wererat (or CR 1/2 jackalwere), will probably be an annoyance for some time.

Caveat: This treasure distribution doesn’t match my game, and it probably doesn’t match yours either. In fact, it may not match any real-world game at all. Are there any DMs who provide purely random treasure, and at the by-the-book rate of distribution? I know that when I DM, the monsters drop minor magic items at a much lower rate, and major items at a much higher rate. Another DM may be much stingier than me. But if you are striving to play by-the-book, this may help you.
​

I made a new utility for DMs: HTML and PDF spellbooks for every Monster Manual monster.

If you’ve ever tried to DM a monster who uses a lot of spells – a lich, say, or an archmage – you’ll know that it is no picnic. Trying to pick out the lich’s next turn involves flipping through several spells in the PHB or in D&D Beyond. It sure would be nice if all the monster’s spells were presented together so you could just scan the page!

That’s what this tool is. Every spellcasting MM monster from angel (deva) to yugoloth (ultroloth) has its complete spellbook, in either HTML or PDF format, available here.

Also, I added a feature where you can login and design your own monster or NPC spellbooks. Just type in the name of a spell and the full text of the spell appears in the spellbook. You can also write up custom spells.

This utility was a real lifesaver the other night, when I was DMing a game. Midway through the battle, one of the players cast a Silence spell on my custom NPC necromancer. Normally this is a HUGE pain. You have to look up every single spell to check which ones don’t have a verbal component. Instead, I was just able to scan the PDF and quickly see how many spells the necromancer could still cast: none. All of his spells had verbal components. He was completely hosed.

Here’s that link again: The 5e Spellbook: Printable spellbooks for all the Monster Manual monsters

Back when 5e first came out, I made a one-page index of all the Monster Manual monsters, sorted by CR, with page numbers for each monster. Oddly enough, the Monster Manual didn’t have such an index!

Since I made it, I’ve found it insanely useful. I keep the PDF on my phone, and I have a copy taped to the inside back cover of my Monster Manual. I’ve used it before and during every D&D session I’ve run for the past 4 years.

Over the last four years, WOTC has released two major monster books: Volo’s Guide to Monsters and, as of a few days ago, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. I’ve updated my PDF to include the hundreds of new monsters from these books. The PDF has ballooned up from 1 page… to 2 pages. Not a lot of edition bloat so far. In fact, there was some room left on the second page, so I included encounter-building guidelines distilled from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. (My D&D group runs a bit hot so I have to throw more monsters at them than Xanathar suggests, but it’s a starting place.)

I hope you find this useful. Since it’s only 2 pages, you can still tape it to the left and right back cover pages of your Monster Manual.

I’ve talked before about never repeating the same combat encounter. Here’s one way to vary those boring ol’ goblin encounters: GOBLIN MAGIC, a twisted gift from Maglubiyet to his goblin worshipers that they might terrify civilized folk and provide creepy novelty to jaded D&D players.

About half of all goblin tribes have a goblin magician who knows 2 to 4 random spells (out of the 12 spells that I’ve written). The identity of the whole tribe is influenced by the particular spells known: for instance, if the magician can cast Silver Fire, the tribe will have a tendency to mad rampage and arson; if the magician can cast Clinging Illusion, the local people will live in fear of horrifying tricks; if the magician can cast Create Bugbear, the tribe’s bugbear assassins will haunt the night.

goblin magicians

Every goblin magician is a level 1 spellcaster with 1-2 random cantrips, 1-2 random 1st level spells, and 2 level-1 spell slots.

Goblin magicians have stats as goblins except they have 21 hp; their spellcasting stat is intelligence; and their spell DC is 10.

becoming a goblin magician

A goblin may become a magician in one of 2 ways:
1: Occasionally, a young adult goblin spontaneously develops magical powers. The other goblins revere and respect such goblin magicians, and occasionally eat them, because:
2: A goblin can gain a magician’s spellcasting ability and spells by eating its heart. (Not sure what will happen if a non-goblin eats the heart. I bet the eater learns a goblin spell and also picks up some permanent curse or insanity.)

magicians and silver

You’ll notice in the spell descriptions below that a lot of goblin magic is powered by silver. Goblin spell casters value silver coins, maybe even more than gold.

goblin spells

CANTRIPS: roll 1d6 twice. On a duplicate roll, the magician only knows one cantrip.

1: clinging illusion. As silent image but permanent until touched. Uses: setting traps (example: bear trap hidden by illusory pile of leaves) and nasty surprises (example: the blacksmith’s head disguised as a pile of gold)
2: madden object. Component: somatic. Choose one nonmagical object within 60 feet. It becomes animate for one minute: it can’t move but it rolls initiative and can make melee attacks (5 feet, +2 to hit, 1d8 damage). It has AC 12 and 1 hp and becomes inanimate when killed or when the shaman Maddens another object. Uses: turn enemies’ weapons against them; bottleneck them by animating doors; plague, bamboozle, and bebother them from hiding.
3: drink fear. When you hit someone with a melee or ranged attack, you may cast this spell as a bonus action. The target must make a Wisdom save or be afraid of you for one turn. While afraid in this way, they can only use the disengage or dash action and must move away from you. When someone fails this save against you, you gain 10 temporary hit points. Uses: get rid of warriors who threaten you; grow stronger from the terror of the weak.
4: fool’s bargain. Touch up to 10 silver coins and they turn to gold coins. They have a very faint magic aura of alteration. They turn back to silver if touched by sunlight. Uses: setting traps for greedy humans; cheating humans.
5: ugly mask. Component: 10 silver pieces, which are expended. Shape change into a halfling or gnome or other small race. You retain your stats, and your appearance is random and unique each time you cast the spell. When you are killed you revert to your true form. Uses: luring people into ambushes; going into civilized settlements to trade.
6: wither. Action, or Reaction when an adjacent creature is about to attack or run away. Range 30. Constitution save. EITHER: One of the target’s arms withers and becomes unusable. It drops what it is holding in that hand and can’t use that arm. OR: the target’s feet wither. It falls down and can’t stand up. Target repeats the save at the end of every turn.

LEVEL 1 spells: roll 1d6 twice. On a duplicate roll, the magician only knows one first level spell.

1: silver fire. Duration 1 minute. Each turn, you can fire up to 3 balls of silver fire at different creatures or flammable objects within 30 feet. They automatically hit and set the target on silver fire. This does 1 point of damage per turn for the duration of the spell or until someone spends an action to extinguish the flame. Goblins who are set on fire are filled with ecstatic glee: they lose their instinct of self preservation and live their few remaining turns only for arson, death and destruction. On a hit to a creature or object, blazing goblins set their target on silver fire. When the duration of the spell ends, all fires are extinguished. Component: 1 silver piece expended per ball of fire thrown. Uses: cause absolute blazing chaos at a town fair; create goblin kamikaze warriors; make enemy warriors waste time extinguishing themselves while the magician escapes.
2: create hobgoblin. You point to a goblin of your tribe. It dies and collapses into a boneless heap. Then the corpse swells as a naked hobgoblin begins tearing its way out of the dead goblin’s mouth. The hobgoblin is restrained until it spends an action tearing itself free. Use: when your tribe is threatened and you need a backbone of mighty warriors. Downside: the hobgoblin will demand that the tribe create an upper class of hobgoblin warriors, who will enslave the rest of the goblins and turn the tribe into a war machine. Component expended: 100 sp.
3: create bugbear. As create hobgoblin but with a bugbear. Uses: when you want a strong ally to defeat enemies. Downside: after the battle, the bugbear will hang around bullying the tribe for a few months till it wanders away. Component expended: 100 sp.
4: create gnasher. As create hobgoblin but with a giant misshapen mad goblin killing machine called a gnasher: stats of a flesh golem except it’s always berserk and cannot be calmed. Use: as a vindictive final act of destruction right before the heroes (or rival goblins) kill you. Downside: not only will the gnasher kill your enemies, it will almost certainly kill you as well. Cost: 100 sp.
5: accept sacrifice. As a reaction when you would be killed, you and another goblin switch places. The teleported goblin suffers all of the effects of the triggering attack or effect and you suffer none of them (unless you’re still in its area of effect). Uses: stay alive when you would be killed.
6: sleepwalker. Duration 10 minutes, concentration. Up to 3 sleeping or unconscious subjects make a wisdom save with disadvantage. On a failed save, each rises as a sleepwalker (all stats as zombies but the hp of the original creature, or 1 hp if currently at 0 hp). The sleepwalkers follow the telepathic orders of the caster. If concentration ends, the sleepwalkers fall prone in normal sleep. Every time a sleepwalker is damaged, it may make a new save, this time without disadvantage. Note: if sleepwalkers are dropped to 0 hp with non-lethal damage, they fall unconscious but then arise in 1 turn with 1 hp. Uses: ambush sleeping villages and hero camps, make allies kill each other. Capture victims and organize gladiatorial sleepwalker fights.

Note: goblin spells, especially silver fire and clinging illusion, are heavily influenced by James Blaylock’s Elfin Ship novels. Goblin magic may also look familiar to people who played the blogofholding.com Mearls D&D game. Other goblin magic was adapted from my previous post on how goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears are related.

​Let’s say you’re a D&D character with secondary casting ability, like a paladin, ranger, eldritch knight, arcane trickster, or even a character with the arcane initiate feat. You only have a few low-level spell slots, and your spell save DC is probably not that high because it’s based on your second or third best ability score.

Which of your attack spells will still be useful at high level? Which will drift into irrelevancy?

The highest level monsters tend to have high strength, constitution, and even charisma, as befits the biggest, baddest, and most fearsome monsters in the world. But as monsters get bigger, they don’t get much more nimble, smart, or wise.

If I were really committed to data, this is where I’d have a graph of all six monster attributes from CR 1/8 to 30. It’s too tiresome to do that. But I will go to the trouble of coming up with attribute averages for epic monsters.

The average attributes for the 12 epic-level non-dragon monsters, from the CR 17 Death Knight to the CR 30 Tarrasque, are

Let’s say you’re a high level paladin with a spell DC of 16 and a spell attack of +8. As a group, the epic-level monsters will frequently weather your constitution-based spells (55% of the time) and your spell attacks (60% of the time) but will rarely avoid your dexterity-based spells (only making their saving throw 35% of the time) or wisdom-based spells (40% of the time).

When you throw dragons in the mix, the pattern is even more pronounced. The average attributes of the ancient chromatic dragons are

So the dragons will beat your constitution-based spell 60% of the time and your spell attacks 55% of the time but a dexterity-based spell only 25% of the time and a wisdom-based spell 35% of the time.

So because monster Dexterity doesn’t scale much, dexterity-based spells rule, right? The only problem is, most dexterity spells are direct hit-point damage spells, and monster hit points scale very well. Your dragon will probably miss its save against your Burning Hands but barely notice its effects.

Therefore, an interesting class of spells are those that require Dex saves and have non-damage effects. Highlights of this category include:

Faerie Fire: all attacks against the target have advantage for a minute! My Druidic arcane initiate character uses this spell. A+ would learn again
Grease and Sleet Storm: creatures fall prone! Good for arcane tricksters and eldritch knights, though neither are from their preferred magic schools.
Web and Evard’s Black Tentacles: creatures are restrained until they take an action to break free with a different attribute check. Again, good for arcane tricksters or eldritch knights though not from preferred schools.

Wisdom-based attack spells are also good for dabblers, and there are a ton of low-level, non-damage spells that require a wisdom save. Highlights include:

Command: make the opponent do something stupid. Good for paladins.
Compelled Duel: monster has disadvantage attacking anyone but you, allied attacks end. Good for paladins.
Tasha’s Hideous Laughter: incapacitates, save ends. On brand for arcane tricksters.
Wrathful Smite: frightened, save ends. Paladin, obviously.
Crown of Madness: opponent attacks a target of your choice, wisdom save ends. It’s a wizard Enchantment spell, so it’s useable by eldritch knights but best for arcane tricksters.
Hold person: paralyzed, wisdom save ends. Wizard Enchantment, best for arcane tricksters.
Fear: fear, must dash away from you, Save ends. Wizard enchantment, best for arcane tricksters.
Hypnotic pattern: incapacitated for 1 minute. Wizard illusion, best for arcane tricksters.
Slow: target is seriously debuffed, save ends. Off-specialty but useful for arcane tricksters and eldritch knights.

Xanathar’s Guide to Everything has new rules for magic item creation: An item requires an “exotic material” to complete it, which you earn by facing a monster with an appropriate Challenge Rating. The exotic ingredient might be a trophy, like a yeti skin, or a treasure guarded by the monster, and should be “a thematic fit for the item to be crafted.”

The book suggest a few examples, like water weird essence as an ingredient for mariner’s armor, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a complete set of recipes for every magic item?

Well, it just so happens that I’ve been using nearly identical item-creation rules for a couple of years now. I even ran one campaign that was heavy on magic item creation, so I have a reasonably-playtested list of recipes for each of the items in the Player’s Handbook, fully compatible with the rules in Xanathar.

Rules notes:

An easy way to customize magic items is to take an item’s power and attach it to a different object: boots of flying becomes an umbrella of flying, for instance. Apart from armor and weapons, pretty much everything else is interchangeable. Here are some d20 lists for reskinning items.

Note: you can roll once per item type and use the result throughout a certain dungeon. For instance, all potions in the Berserkers Freehold are actually applications of woad.

POTIONS
1: an entire gallon of wine which must be completely consumed
2-11: just a boring ol’ potion
12: facepaint, rouge, or woad
13: drug-tipped needle that you need to jam into your arm
14: rare herb (give it a name: potion of storm giant strength = “galeroot”, etc)
15: smelling salts
16: scroll containing a 2-line rhyming incantation
17: pearl that must be eaten, or something else that people don’t usually eat like a scorpion or spiderweb
18: torch: potion affects whoever lights the torch
19: pinch of fairy dust
20: one-use ring: its magic is activated when it is removed or destroyed

RINGS
1: metal hand, pegleg, glass eye. can only be worn if you are missing the appropriate body part
2-11: just a ring
12-13: +1 dagger: you can activate a spell or power only as part of an attack, or alternatively by giving yourself one of those ritual palm cuts you see in like every fantasy movie (doing yourself 1 point of damage)
14-15: other jewelry (necklace, tiara, earring, bracelet, crown of living flowers)
16: ever-full box of snuff, candies, or pills which must be attuned to you. Taking a dose activates the item’s powers for 12 hours
17: fantastic hat with 1d6 feathers and a brim of 2d20 inches
18: a blessing which someone bestows on you. You can transfer the benefits by saying the blessing to someone else
19: signet ring. Only functions if you are part of the family or organization specified by the ring. or it’s a wedding ring and it only functions if you’re married.
20: signet ring. Choose another random magic ring. When the signet ring is turned in, it acts as ring 1. When the signet is turned out, it acts as ring 2

RODS, STAFFS, WANDS
1: puzzle cube that must be solved to use a power (1 action per attempt, Int or Wis check DC 10)
2-10: just a rod, staff, or wand
11: umbrella. Every use of a charge changes the umbrella’s state in some way (open/close, handle extended, inside out, etc)
12: trumpet or horn or gong or basically anything else where activating a power is extremely loud
13: monocle: putting it on allows you to activate a power, letting it fall comically out of your eye activates another
14: bag of something weird, like teeth: throw one to activate
15: gemmed crown: each gem activates a different power
16: spoon, fork, or knife: activate a power by eating
17: glove: powers can’t be activated while the glove is holding anything
18: glowing orb, or giant and obviously expensive jewel
19: whip: powers activated by cracking the whip
20: a familiar which bonds to the owner (as if the owner had cast Find Familiar). The familiar can activate the magic item’s abilities

SCROLLS
1: heavy stone tablet
2-11: just a scroll
12: a specific braid in someone’s hair: may be copied like a scroll, but only into someone else’s hair. When the spell is expended, the hair unbraids itself
13: tiny spirit who can cast spells. Flits around you and casts spells at your command; leaves when all spells are expended
14: belt pouch containing one peculiar coin per spell. Spell is cast when you flip the coin. On a heads, the coin is not expended; on a tails, the coin disappears
15: deck of spell cards: contains 6 spells but you can’t decide which one to cast, you have to pull one randomly from the deck and toss it like that one X Man
16: graffiti nonsense words which sear themselves upon your retina until you read them aloud
17: spell is written on the last page of an otherwise mundane book
18: verse of a song which can be sung as an action. No one can sing the verse more than once. However, anyone else, regardless of class, who hears it may make a DC 15 Intelligence check to learn it. Bards have advantage
19-20: jewel: any user, regardless of class or level, can cast the spell by shattering the jewel

WONDROUS ITEMS
1: something large and/or breakable, like a piano, alchemical setup, rug, or statue
2-11: as written in the item description
12: mirror, map, painting, certificate, or something else in a frame
13: key, keyring, bottle opener, coin purse, handkerchief, string, or anything else which is often kept in ordinary pocketses
14: gamepiece from a set, such as a chessman or die or playing card. Find the rest of the gamepieces! Each has the powers of a different wondrous item!
15: sock, necktie, cummerbund, garter, shawl, or other rarely-magical article of clothing
16: book
17-19: roll up another random wondrous item. It looks like item 2 but has the powers of item 1
20: it’s sharp, or on a stick, or it fires lasers, or something, and can be wielded as a +1 weapon (+2 if very rare, +3 if legendary)

OK, now I’ll randomly roll up one of each of the item categories (selecting the first of each type from donjon.bin.sh and then rolling on my charts) and see if I come up with good items.

Potion of Superior Healing; roll of 16, Rhyming Incantation: An astrological star chart which contains the couplet “Sun and Moon, heal my wound.” Read the words aloud and be healed 8d4+8 HP, and the star chart incinerates.

Ring of Warmth; roll of 6: just a Ring of Warmth. Boring! Roll again! 17. Hat. A dragoon hat with a phoenix feather plume and a 15-inch brim. Wearing it grants you resistance to cold damage and immunity to cold above -50 F, but makes it hard for you to walk through narrow doors.

Tentacle Rod; roll of 14, bag of something weird: A bag of beaks. As an action, you can throw up to 3 beaks (range 15): make a ranged attack with a +9 bonus. On a hit, each beak does 1d6 piercing damage. If you hit a target with all 3, you do all the fun Tentacle Rod stuff (DC 15 Con save or be agonized till it makes its save, etc).

Spell scroll (Ray of Frost); roll of 20, gem: A frost-covered sapphire. Throw it on the ground to shatter it and a Ray of Frost leaps out at a target of your choosing.

Saddle of the Cavalier; roll of 9, key: a horsehead-handled key. While you’re mounted on any beast with a saddle, you can magically insert the key into the saddle and lock or unlock it. While the saddle is locked, you can’t be dismounted and attack rolls against the mount have disadvantage.

Here are some encounters that you could run in a truly alien setting, like another planet or a far realm. They’re pretty low-level, suitable for characters around level 5 to 10, or for, say, level 3 characters who are in way over their heads.

These encounters are mostly inspired by weird stuff I saw in a documentary about coral reefs.

Roll d12 on this chart while traveling, or d6 while stationary. This encounter table is based on this encounter table template which incorporates rules for weather, resting, and getting lost:

1: Make up an encounter that’s related to your campaign or to one of your characters. If nothing springs to mind: you meet a plane-traveling evil level-15 wizard from the world of Mystara. He/she is searching for a Sea Anemone of the Magi said to be lost in this dimension, and suspects the PCs of trying to get it first. He/she will not attack unless that suspicion becomes a certainty. He/she will trade help or information, but offers nothing for free. His/her skin is covered with weird flowers and he/she detects magic at will (see encounter 4).

2: 2d4 levitating, hand-sized, ovoid stars which cast bright and cheery light in all colors. Their touch is telepathic poison: saving throw or take d20 psychic damage from their nihilistic world view. Evil characters take no damage. AC 15, 2d8 HP.

3: 1d4 walking ten-foot-tall antlers. They charge and impale victims for 2d20 damage. Impaled creatures take full damage each round until they use an action to disentangle themselves. The antler can carry around up to 3 impaled creatures at a time. AC 18, immune to piercing attacks, 10d8 HP.

4: A field of human-sized flowers which snatch victims in their finger-petals, digesting them for 1d20 damage in subsequent turns. AC 12, 1d8 HP. The flowers’ only sense is Detect Magic, so they will only attack creatures under magical effects or with magical gear. Anyone who takes damage from a flower will sprout small, harmless flowers in 1d4 days. Until the flowers are pruned, the character can Detect Magic at will.

5: 1d4 quivering, jelly-like, transparent pillars, periodically shot with neon lightning. They travel like Slinkies. 2 in 6 chance that there is a sluggish creature inside (lumpy cone, fire-spewing sac, silver torpedo, teleporting lightning bolt). If any players push their way into the pillar, they are rewarded by being healed 1 HP for every 10 minutes they remain inside. AC 10, 10d8 HP, regenerate 1/turn.

6: Rot grub rain. Anyone whose flesh is exposed to the rain is infected.

7: Rotting, gooey meat surrounds a 10-foot-wide hole in the ground. Inside a three-room underground lair is a giant armor-plated shark (AC 18, HP 20d8) with a giant, exposed brain (AC 13). Called attacks on the brain do double damage but the attacker must make a saving throw or take 1d20 psychic damage. The shark can make a bite attack (3d20 damage) and a gaze attack at a different target (gaze: saving throw or the target and its equipment becomes soft and gooey: AC reduced by 5 until the target next eats). The lair contains 1d6x1000 GP worth of cut gems, a gem vein with a potential 5d6x1000 GP more in gems, and inch-tall miner octopi (each day, they mine and cut 250 GP worth of gems, of which they eat half).

8: A silent wave of purple light rolls over the sky. In every direction, the sky and ground are twisted and swirled, so the shortest path between any two points is a curve or spiral. Travel requires a daily DC 15 Intelligence check or the party is lost. This effect lasts for 1d4 days or until someone gets a natural 20 on one of the intelligence checks.

9: 1d4+1 pools filled with a heavy oil (if burned, burns blue and does cold damage) and small, oily, scaly creatures. If you dive into the pool and swim through a thirty-foot-long tunnel, you will emerge from a different pool. (Roll 1d6: 1-3: the exit pool is more than 100 miles away on the same plane. 4: the exit is somehow the same as the entrance pool. 5: The exit is on a different plane. 6: The exit is on the swimmer’s home plane.)

10: A waving fern which exudes a visible bubble, 30-foot radius. The bubble is buzzing with small, flying, colorful creatures of all descriptions. Any creature inside the bubble is under the protection of a Sanctuary spell until it does violence.

11: A mountain of curvilinear catacombs, terraced apartments, and caves of chaos. At the top of the mountain, inch-tall blind octopi labor to create new levels.

12: Inch-thick tubes of multi-colored, hyperdense stone (20x the weight of normal stone) lead in an intermittent trail to a human-length, flat, spined worm. Rear attack: poison spines, 1d20 damage, saving throw or paralysis for 1 minute. Front attack: The worm’s all-consuming maw telekinetically sucks in everything in front of it in a 20-foot cone (save or be swallowed) and excretes everything (including adventurers) as inch-thick stone tubes. Stone to Flesh restores things to their original shape, but dead. AC 20, HP 15d10.

I’ve written before about how you can kind of use the old-school “1 GP = 1 XP” rules in D&D 5e. It works, if you squint.

I just wrapped up running a treasure-hunting campaign, where each gold piece of treasure gives the party 1 XP, and it turns out “it works if you squint” isn’t quite good enough for actual play. Also true about actual play: the more frequently you use a house rule, the simpler it gets. Here is the tautologically simple final version of my GP=XP rules.

Each monster’s “XP value” is actually its treasure value in GP

Turns out that trivial use of the symmetric property is all you need to preserve all of 5e’s baseline leveling assumptions, while giving characters approximately the expected amount of coin.

Here’s a fun advantage of this rule: each monster now has its treasure spelled out in the Monster Manual instead of in the DMG – for coins, anyway. I still flip through the DMG to roll magical treasure.

This system has another advantage over the stock treasure rules: coin hoards are now more finely graduated by Challenge Rating. In the standard 5e rules, every encounter from CR 0 to 4 has a treasure hoard of about the same value, around 400 GP; every encounter from CR 5 to 10 is worth about 4000 GP; etc. In my system, each 1/8-CR bandit has 25 gold, the bandit captain has 450 GP, etc.

There is a disadvantage, at least in theory: no variance. Every CR 1 monster has exactly 200 GP? Weird! At the beginning of my GP=XP experiment, I wrote up the following chart to randomize samey treasure. The chart was simple enough that I could memorize it.

Randomizing treasure: roll d6
1: No treasure
2: 1/2 normal treasure
3-4: Normal treasure
5: 1.5x times normal treasure
6: 2x normal treasure
Note: For unintelligent creatures, you could roll on this chart twice and take the lowest, and for greedy creatures like dragons, roll twice and take the highest.

You know what? In practice, I never needed this chart. I wrote it to solve a theoretical situation: “what if the players repeatedly fight encounters with the same XP total” – and that situation just never came up.

Does this rule match 5e’s implicit “wealth by level” assumptions? Pretty much yes, actually, except it’s a little stingier at high levels. But who cares, because there’s virtually nothing for sale to high-level characters anyway! But if you want to use these rules AND you’re playing at level 17 and above AND you think legendary magic items should be for sale, adjust their price so that they start at 20,000 GP instead of 50,000 GP. Everything else seems to work fine.

D&D started as a hack on a war game, which is why OD&D depends on, but does not provide, mass combat rules. The original game included kingdom management rules and prices for castles and armies. The first adventure module, in the Blackmoor supplement, had rooms that contained hundreds of soldiers. You were expected to break out TSR’s Chainmail war game to use these things. In fact, as you got higher and higher level, Gygax expected that more and more of your time playing D&D would actually be spent playing Chainmail. That’s sort of like if you went to a Scrabble tournament and they said, “Good news! You guys are such good Scrabble players that now you get to play Monopoly.”

D&D went mainstream because audiences liked the fast, immersive, co-op game of the imagination, and they didn’t latch onto (or even understand the references to) the slow, rules-bound, head-to-head, miniature-requiring war game. So, in later editions, the Chainmail references were cut. Essentially, D&D’s intended end game, conquest and rulership, was removed. The middle of the game, grinding for money, was extended, even though there were now no castles and armies to spend the money on.

And this is a big loss for D&D. In any edition, high level D&D is not a solid product. High level fights are swingy, monster variety is sparse. And, worse, with epic battles and kingdom-building mostly offscreen, characters can’t leave their mark on the game world, except by saving it from ever more powerful dungeon monsters. Players and DMs alike generally try to keep away from war epics, because running big battles isn’t something D&D does.

To fill the hole left by the removal of Chainmail and epic-fantasy play, TSR and WOTC churned out stand-alone battle supplements every few years:

-OD&D introduced Swords & Spells, which was an updated Chainmail with special rules for each of the D&D spells and monsters. It technically allowed battling lone heroes against 10:1 (10 soldiers to a mini) figures, although it recommended avoiding cross-scale combat as much as possible.

-Basic D&D included War Machine: a sort of spreadsheet where you came up with a rating of each army and then rolled a percentile die to decide the battle.

-1e and 2e both published an edition of Battle System. This was another entry in the Chainmail/Swords & Spells tradition, but it came in a box with cut-out-and-assemble peasant houses, which was cool.

-3e had the Miniatures Handbook. Again, its mass combat rules were along the lines of Chainmail, featuring typical war game rules for formations, facing, morale, etc, using d20 mechanics.

-5e has two sets of playtest mass-combat rules, some iteration of which will presumably see official publication some day. The first playtest has traditional wargame-style rules, with frontage, etc. The second boils down every army to a single “battle rating”, in the Basic War Machine tradition.

All of these games perpetuate the flaw that kept Chainmail from catching on in the first place: in order to play them, you have to stop playing D&D.

D&D is not a war game. All the design decisions that make a good war game lead to a bad D&D game, and vice versa.

-Because war games are played competitively, they must be fair. D&D campaigns can only achieve longevity when they are unfair in favor of the players.

-Because war games are fair: war games must have complete rules. You can’t make stuff up halfway through without favoring one of the players. So you can only make a pontoon bridge if there are rules for it. D&D rules are incomplete by design. There are no rules in any edition for making a pontoon bridge, but if you can scrounge up some boats and lumber, the DM will let you do it.

-Because war games are complete: war games must have detailed rules. A good war game models the rock-paper-scissors of archery, cavalry, and spearmen, and provides big bonuses and penalties based on terrain, flanking, morale, fog of war, high ground, and anything else that might conceivably come up. D&D, on the other hand, features abstract combat rules that look nothing like reality. Core D&D combat is a barebones transaction of combatants trading swipes. More important than realism is simplicity, because most of D&D is not in the combat engine but in the DM and player improvisation that happens at the same time.

running an epic battle in D&D

D&D is great at handling small fights – say, five characters fighting a few trolls. Why can’t the same rules handle five characters, the town guard, and a dragon fighting against a skeleton army, a lich, and a dozen trolls?

What if the first edition Monster Manual had contained stat blocks for a skeleton horde, a town watch, and so on? Think of the stories we could have been telling all these years.

My alternate-history army stat blocks are pretty simplistic, but that’s what I like about them. A requirement for war-game standards of rules completeness and detail has been holding back high-level play for years. A D&D combat is great because of all the rules that Gary Gygax didn’t include. Let me talk about the war game rules I think D&D can live without.

Casualties. When half your archers are dead, you can fire half as many arrows, right? Nah. Just as a D&D hero at 1 hp fights at full strength, A 100-soldier army, even at 1 hp, is still a 100-soldier army. After the battle, hit point damage can be translated into some ratio of dead, wounded, and fled, at the DM’s discretion.

Facing, frontage, formation. These rules appear in nearly every war game. We need that level of detail like we need the First Edition grapple rules.

Figure scale. War games are not designed for varying figure scales: every miniature on the battlefield needs to represent, for instance, 20 soldiers. A war-game fight between a lone hero and a 20:1 army unit is usually wonky or impossible. On the other hand, if every army is treated as an individual D&D monster, a tenth-level fighter can battle on fairly even terms with a troop representing 10 first level fighters, which can in turn battle a troll or a unit of 36 goblins.

Time scale. Most war games have realistic but D&D- incompatible turns of ten minutes or more. I’m sticking with D&D combat rounds. If a massive war is over within a few six- second rounds, that’s fine with me.

If anything, D&D-style fights can be too fast. To make it more likely that everyone gets a turn, I’ve added a special rule in my army stat blocks, capping attack damage so that no army can score a one-hit KO. This favors the underdog (and the underdog is usually the PCs). Still, this is a special exception and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were unnecessary.

Leadership bonuses. Many war games assign static bonuses to troops based on the abilities of their commanders. In a war game, which doesn’t allow for referee discretion, this is the best you can do. But in D&D, if a player delivers a speech and leads a charge, or comes up with a clever scheme, the DM can assign appropriate bonuses. The more the players act creatively, the more vivid the scene will be – just as in a standard D&D fight.

Spell rules. We do NOT want a Swords and Spells-style gloss on every spell describing its interaction with armies. Here are my abstractions:
1) Damage spells ignore area of effect. An 8d6 fireball does 8d6 damage.
2) “Condition” spells are all-or-nothing. If a Bless spell can target all the members of an army, it operates normally. Otherwise, it fails.

Morale, flanking, setting ambushes, charging, fighting withdrawal, high ground, and every special case I haven’t already mentioned. First and and Second Edition have explicit morale rules. In other editions, morale failure is by DM fiat. If the local morale rules (or lack thereof) are good enough for 10 goblins at level 1, they’re good enough for 100 goblins at level 10. The same principle, “use existing combat rules”, applies for flanking (present in 3e and 4e), charging (present in every edition but 5e) and so on.

Here are the stat-block templates I’ve used for turning any creature into an army of any size. I’ve done first and fifth editions (my current favorites).