I have a new side hustle: I’m one of the lead designers on Level Up, a new 5e-compatible tabletop RPG being developed by the folks at enworld. My guess is they must have seen my article about ewers in D&D and thought, “We want the ewer guy.”

Some of my stuff is up on enworld if you want to read it. I posted a chart-heavy article about damage by character class. You can also download the first levelup playtest packet: I wrote the backgrounds section.

Level Up is the game’s development code name; we haven’t decided the final game’s name yet. My vote is “Ewers and Dragons.”

I’m writing a new 5e-compatible treasure generator and releasing it under the Open Game License. That means that I won’t be able to include the magic items which aren’t included in the open-content System Resource Document (SRD).

How much of a problem is this?

Of the nearly 400 magic items in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, nearly all are in SRD. There are fewer than 30 non-SRD magic items. Let’s examine each one. I’ll assign each item a simple rating: WON’T MISS IT, WILL MISS IT, or WILL MISS IT A LOT. For the items that I’ll miss a lot, I’ll consider OGL-compatible alternatives.

Alchemy jug: The alchemy jug creates liquids.

You may look at the list of liquids the alchemy jug can create and wonder, why mayonnaise? There’s a charming story about that.

I like the alchemy jug well enough. My problem with it is it doesn’t go far enough. Each day it dispenses one of 10 liquids, in quantities ranging from 12 gallons (salt water) to 1/2 ounce (poison). But it’s a once-a-day item: if you used it to get a gallon of honey, or a dose of the surprisingly useless basic poison (DC 10 check to avoid 1d4 damage), you can’t use it get 2 gallons of mayonnaise until tomorrow. Compare that to the decanter of endless water, also an uncommon item, which can produce truly prodigious quantities of water, allowing players to defeat weighing puzzles and drown dungeons and allowing DMs to explain how colonies of monsters survive in the dungeon. The decanter of endless water is like carrying the sea in your back pocket; the alchemy jug is like carrying around a large jar. With reduced power comes reduced possibilities for creativity and hilarity. It would be more inspiring if all of the quantities were multiplied by, say, 10. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Cap of water breathing and mariner’s armor: I’m going to do these two similar aquatic items together. The cap of water breathing (uncommon) lets you breathe underwater. The mariner’s armor (uncommon) gives you a swim speed equal to your walking speed. Compare these to the ring of swimming (also uncommon, and in the SRD) which gives you a swim speed of 40, and the cloak of the manta ray (also uncommon, and in the SRD) which lets you breathe underwater AND gives you a swim speed.

Apart from the possible benefit of using a different item slot, the cap is strictly worse than the cloak of the manta ray. The mariner’s armor is not too different from the ring of swimming, but I’d rather have the ring, because it doesn’t lock me into otherwise ordinary armor.

Mariner’s armor also floats you towards the surface when you hit 0 hp, which is unique and somewhat useful. That raises this item’s value a bit. Still, if this armor didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t invent it. Rating: WILL NOT MISS EITHER

Cloak of invisibility. The cloak of invisibility has the exact same power and rarity as the ring of invisibility. It’s impossible to miss one while the other is in the game.

Instead of having two functionally-identical items in the DMG, I’d prefer it if every magic item had a few different variations listed: maybe a cursed version, a few that are different objects, a few with limitations or bonus powers. This would hugely increase the number of magic items without adding a lot more design and balance work. For example, what if the listing for the Ring of Invisibility looked like this:

Ring of invisibility
Ring, legendary

While wearing this ring, you can turn invisible as an action. Anything you are wearing or carrying is invisible with you. You remain invisible until the ring is removed, until you attack or cast a spell, or until you use a bonus action to become visible again.

Variations (roll 1d10)
1-5: normal
6: curse: though it’s not immediately apparent, the wearer is visible to undead
7: variant: cloak
8: variant: cap
9: inconvenient variant: eyeless black mask. The wearer is blind while invisible
10: bonus ability: while invisible, the wearer can see invisible creatures and objects as if they were visible

That’s the kind of thing I’m doing for every magic item in the Inspiration app. This makes a super-similar item like the Cloak of Invisibility unnecessary, as well as, I hope, doling out more wonder to jaded players. That said, it’s too big a project for my two-page random magic item replacement. For now, we can just cut the Cloak of Invisibility. The frequency of the Ring can increase slightly to cover for it. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Driftglobe. I think I don’t fully understand the driftglobe. What is it for? On the surface it seems like a nice, flavorful alternative to the Light cantrip: a little ball that hovers near you and sheds light on command. However, that’s not what it actually does! It doesn’t float near you at all: it follows 60 feet behind you. That’s weird because the Light spell has a radius of 40 feet, so the driftglobe doesn’t actually illuminate you most of the time.

The driftglobe can also cast Daylight once a day, which sheds bright light for 60 feet and dim light for another 60, which would actually let you peer forward in dim light, which is nice I guess.

What is the driftglobe for? Is it strictly for looking for pursuers? Or for setting up a decoy for an ambush? I’m giving it a provisional grade of WILL NOT MISS until someone explains what it’s meant to be.

Efreeti chain. +3 AC! Fire damage immunity! Walk on lava!

Fire immunity is nice. It’s easy to get resistance to anything, but hard to get immunity to a dragon breath damage type. Except poison. It’s a wonder there are any green dragons left, poor dears.

This is a pretty solid legendary item, though not the most showy. Its main problem is that it’s attached to chain mail, a weak type of armor. +3 chain is functionally equivalent to +1 plate armor. Still, it’s not bad. Rating: WILL MISS

Elixir of health. Elixir of Health is the Lesser Restoration spell in a bottle: it cures poison, diseases, and the blinded, deafened, and paralyzed conditions. Which is useful, I guess… after all, some parties don’t have clerics. But it’s a rare item. Compare it to Keoghtom’s Ointment (called Restorative Ointment in the SRD: character names are intellectual property, maybe Ed Greenwood will write a novel about Keoghtom someday), an Uncommon item, which cures poison and disease, PLUS 2d8+2 hit points, AND comes in 1d4+1 doses. I’d rather have that. All you get from the elixir of health is the blindness, deafness, and paralysis cures: in 5e these are generally short-term effects, sometimes “repeat the saving throw at the end of each of your turn” effects. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Gloves of thievery. All this is is a garment that gives a +5 bonus to a skill. I could come up with these all day long: Cloak of survival. Pointy hat of arcana. Mayor’s sash of diplomacy.

But despite their simplicity, I think the gloves make story space for themselves. They’re the best magic item for pure thieves. I assume every npc master thief probably has a pair of gloves of thievery – do you think they steal them from each other as a rite of passage? – and as a DM I’ve equipped them on a few NPCs. Rating: WILL MISS

Instrument of the bards: The bardic instruments are interesting: they’re not the “+1 to spell attacks” typical to the big spellcaster implements. Instead, each instrument grants seven daily spells.

Storywise, a magical instrument seems like a must-have for a bard, and beyond these instruments, there’s not too much available. Every bard can’t be playing pipes of the sewers. Without these items, there’s no bardic capstone item. Rating: WILL MISS A LOT

Potion of fire breath. This is a great little low-level potion. It gives you a nicely balanced attack: 4d6 or save for half, usable 3 times – and it’s a vivid image: take a swig and then breathe fire, like a carney or like Xena in the credits of her show. It also fills a need. There are not a lot of consumables that let a non-spellcaster do big damage.

Fire is clearly the best element to breathe, but considering how monotonously often this potion comes up in treasure, I wouldn’t mind a little more variety. Exhaling a blast of cold or poison would certainly make sense and be cool. Rating: WILL MISS

Potions of greater healing, superior healing, supreme healing. I was surprised to see these weren’t in the SRD, because they’re very similar to items in the third edition SRD – potion of cure serious wounds, etc – and generally anything in the 3e SRD is in the 5e SRD. But yeah, they have different names. There’s a use for a high-powered potion to slug down in the heat of a hard combat. Rating: WILL MISS A LOT

Potion of invulnerability. This grants resistance against all damage for a minute. If you can control the pace of a battle against a boss, you essentially get double hit points (resistance to all damage). This is a nice item with a powerful, if not very cinematic, effect that rewards resource management – and possibly trivializes one encounter. Would I miss it? As a player, maybe. It’s always fun to breeze through the DM’s setpiece battle. But as a DM: WILL NOT MISS

Potion of longevity. Eternal youth… the dream of every NPC and completely irrelevant to every PC. Not a lot of PCs die of old age… at least onscreen. Although the potion of longevity is fun for worldbuilding, it doesn’t need to come up in treasure. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Potion of vitality. This potion is one of the only ways to remove exhaustion besides bed rest. In a game with plentiful magical and nonmagical healing, that makes it useful. Rating: WILL MISS

Rod of resurrection. The Rod of Resurrection is great because it lets a non-divine party have access to resu – wait, what’s this? Requires attunement by a cleric, druid, or paladin? Well, I guess it saves a diamond worth 1,000 GP. A neat thing about this item is it has a 1 in 20 chance of being destroyed each time it is used to cast Resurrection. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Rod of the pact keeper. I’m going to come out and say it. I hate this item. The rod of the pact keeper is a warlock-only item that’s a beefier version of the wand of the war mage (useable by any spellcaster). Both items add +1, 2, or 3 to spell attack rolls. The rod of the pact keeper ALSO adds its bonus to the warlock’s save DCs. This means, just to pick an example out of the air, that my party’s level 12 warlock with a +2 rod, spell DC 19, can trivially end fights against vaguely level-appropriate beasts like remorhaz, rocs, hydras, etc. with Hold Monster (90% success rate). (Yeah, one of my players did this to me. It was a behir. Rest in peace – you never got your chance to shine.)

Increasing DC is more harmful than increasing spell attack, because most monsters have a dump stat which you can target to lock them down. As a DM, I would not mind if all if all pact keeper rods turned into wands of the war mage. Rating: WILL DEFINITELY NOT MISS

Saddle of the cavalier. In a game with as little mounted combat as D&D, this is a very niche item. But I have a confession. In a SRD-only game, I’d actually miss it! I’ve had several characters with saddles of the cavalier. Sure, it’s not like getting unhorsed happens every day in d&d, but might be a life saver if you’re riding a hippogriff. And it’s a great item to give a dirtbag NPC in a joust. Rating: WILL MISS, BUT MAYBE THAT’S JUST ME

Scroll of protection. In 30 years of playing D&D, I’ve never encountered one of these. I’d love to hear your anecdotes about how they turned the tide of an adventure. Until then, I WILL NOT MISS

Sending stones. This is the item I’d miss most in a SRD-only campaign! Our party had a set of sending stones in the last game I played in as a character, and I liked everything about them. I liked how they enabled reconnaissance and splitting the party. I liked the fiddly details of deciding who got to carry one of the stones and who had to stay in touch by other means. Of all the magic items collected by our high-level party, the Stones got the most screen time. (The Rod of Security probably came next.) Rating: WILL MISS A LOT

Staff of the adder. This is a fun item: it does as much as 4d6 damage, and it has hit points so people can attack it and permanently destroy it. It’s significant enough to be exciting and it requires the player to take a risk. Plus it’s vivid. It says something about you if your main weapon is a snake staff that bites people. That said… it’s much easier to imagine in the hands of an evil NPC than as the main weapon of the typical party cleric. Plus, the SRD also contains the Staff of the Python, for all your sticks-to-snakes needs. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

Sword of answering. For whatever reason, I never encountered the Swords of Answering before 5e, although they’ve been around since 1e. I’ve never used one as either a player or a DM. I think their names seem a little hokey and theosaurusy to me, at least in a group. A single sword named Last Quip might be OK, though I’m certain that nothing could redeem the name Replier.

The power of the sword is cool: use a reaction to make a riposte when attacked. It sounds like the type of item which makes everyone remember you have it, which is good: “You take 12 damage.” “I reply with Replier.” Might make up for the hokey name. Rating: I MEAN I WON’T MISS IT BECAUSE I’VE NEVER USED IT BUT IT SEEMS NICE ENOUGH, COULD BE FUN. BUT IF BACKED INTO A CORNER I… I… GUESS I WON’T MISS IT

Sword of vengeance. A cursed +1 sword that makes you attack the person who hit you. This is a tough one, since my criterion for these ratings was “would I miss it”. As a player, I obviously wouldn’t miss a cursed item. As a DM, I like the sword well enough. The curse isn’t debilitating most of the time – it makes the player do what they would probably do anyway most of the time – and there is a listed way to break the curse and end up with a nice magic item. I like that cursed item design.

Also, the sword fills a niche: there has to be a cursed sword in the game. (Is there only one cursed sword in 5e? That’s crazy. There should be more. There’s like 15 in my app.)

My only criticism is that it requires you to make a saving throw whenever you take damage, which might be a lot of saving throws. Rating: WILL MISS

Tentacle rod: this is a super weird item. It acts sort of like a weapon, but it has fixed attack bonus and damage (3 attacks, +9, 1d6) so it’s a great thing to give a wizard or a non-melee cleric, which makes sense for a drow item. It also has a reach of 15, and if all 3 attacks hit, it slows down the target and denies them opportunity attacks and bonus actions – all great for a spellcaster trying to get away from attackers. This is the kind of item that makes me want to… do math.

How often will targets get dazed or racked with pain or whatever from this weapon? Depends on their AC and Constitution. A tough opponent like an adult red dragon (AC 19, Con 25) will be affected 6% of the time – comparable to the chances of a critical hit. A squishy target like an Archmage (AC 15, Con 12) will be affected 30% of the time.

This is a fairly cool and potent weapon, but I fear that it falls in a crack: no one with weapon skill will want to use it (since its damage is fairly low) and people without weapon skill are too fragile to use it much except in emergencies. I’ve not seen it used, and looks like the kind of cool thing that would lie fallow on a character sheet. What’s everyone else’s experience with it?

Rating: a provisional WILL NOT MISS

Tome of the Stilled Tongue. This item is brimming with story hooks – so many that I can’t summarize them all here, except that the book acts like Tom Marvolo Riddle’s diary.

The book’s main power is that, once a day, you can cast any spell as a bonus action. This is a nice breakage of the action economy that seems appropriate for a legendary item. I’m sure that a wizard will be able to find many game-breaking combinations.

It also fills a story place. it’s a sinister book that can be dangled in front of evil-curious player: kind of a junior Book of Vile Darkness.

It’s a cool package, wrapped up in a good story, and tied up with a tongue. Rating: WILL MISS

Weapon of warning and Sentinel Shield. Two more items I want to talk about together.

While the weapon of warning is on your person, you get a bunch of cool benefits like not being surprised. But you don’t get any benefit from actually using the weapon in combat: you could keep this +0 weapon in its sheath and get all its benefits. It might as well be a magic ring or hat. This is an example of what I think of as a “golf club weapon”: it’s something to caddy around for its niche use, not something to actually fight with.

Like the weapon of warning the Sentinel Shield gives you a bonus (to perception checks) not related to its function (shielding). It’s another golf club item: there’s an incentive to have it handy, but none to use it as a shield. It would be better off as a magic magnifying glass or monocle. Rating: WILL NOT MISS

So what will I miss?

Overall, the list of non-SRD items is not that strong: I rated more than half of the items WILL NOT MISS, and there are some items the game is better off without, like the Rod of the Pact Keeper.

The 7 WILL MISS items are things that are kind of neat but their absence doesn’t leave a hole in the game. They are:
efreeti chain
gloves of thievery
potion of fire breath
potion of vitality
saddle of the cavalier
sword of vengeance
tome of the stilled tongue
I’m ready to wave these items a teary-eyed farewell. Nevermore will I breathe fire while not falling out of my magic saddle.

The WILL MISS A LOT items are the big problems. These are the items that, to me, fill an important role in the game. Let’s go over each of these 3 items and see if we can live without them or if we need to come up with some sort of replacement.

instrument of the bards: Every class gets a signature magic implement that helps them do their job: fighter and rogue types get magic weapons, wizards and clerics get wands and staffs. Technically, as a full caster, a bard can use a wand or staff as their implement, but a bard’s implement really should be instrument-shaped. If the high level bard doesn’t have a magic lute, something has gone very wrong.

Are there other SRD items that can do the job? Pipes of the sewers and pipes of haunting, but not every player envisions their bard as a spooky rat-summoner.

With the instruments of the bards gone, we’ll need to add a new magic instrument. I’d really like to do something as simple and generic as possible – something like an instrument +1. But what would that even mean?

Could it be as simple as reflavoring the wand of the war mage as an instrument? +1 to spell attacks? It would be kind of underpowered, since bards get nearly no spells with spell attack rolls – most of their spells rely on saving throws. We could grant a bonus to their save DC, but then we’re in the same trouble we are with the bounded-accuracy-breaking Rod of the Pact Keeper. It could grant a skill bonus, but bards don’t really need a ton of help with skills.

We could also have it grant a few daily spells, but that’s basically what the Instrument of the Bards does. I want to be careful not just to ape a non-SRD item. That doesn’t seem kosher.

What if we work off of a bard class feature, like Bardic Inspiration? It’s a bit unconventional for a magic item to key off a class feature, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t. Let’s have it boost bardic inspiration, and we’ll also have it boost Perform checks. That makes sense: a magic instrument sounds better than a normal instrument.

Instrument +1, +2, +3:
Wondrous item, rarity varies (requires attunement by a bard)

Adds its bonus to ability checks to play the instrument, and to the die total whenever your bardic inspiration die is rolled.

This isn’t overwhelmingly powerful. Bardic Inspiration feeds into lots of subclass features, but is a limited resource. The instrument +1 is weaker than a sword +1, but I’d rather err on the side of too weak rather than break the game.

sending stones: Sending stones are nice because they remove many of the logistical issues associated with splitting the party, and allow a new tactical style of play. The spell equivalent, Sending, is a 3rd level spell and so can’t really facilitate conversations. The weaker version, Whisper, has a range of 120 feet.

Are there any other SRD magic items that can do the job? Crystal ball of telepathy, but that’s a Legendary item. Oddly, the Figurine of Wondrous Power (silver raven) kind of fits the bill. It’s Uncommon, and it allows you to use the Animal Messenger spell. Not as convenient as the Sending Stone, which is essentially a cellphone, but still fun.

It would be easy to make up paired items that communicate with each other as sending stones do. A pair of Tom Riddle-like journals: whatever you write in one appears in the other. Paired mirrors, each reflecting the images in view of the other. Paired swords: two people wielding them can communicate with each other telepathically. I could add one of these, but I think I’m going to try to make do with what’s already in the SRD. In my version of the magic item table, I’m going to make the Silver Raven figurine somewhat more common to cover for Sending Stones’ absence.

Potions of greater, etc. healing: Do we need more-powerful healing potions? I think we do. Just giving out oodles of healing potions at high level doesn’t have the same impact. If you’re really hurt during a fight at high level, you can’t spend four turns drinking healing potion after healing potion.

I could just make up new high-level potions that have similar names – Potion of Stupendous Healing, heals 7d4+7 damage! – but that’s such an obvious gloss for the Potion of Superior Healing that it feels like a cheat. Instead, I’m going to take a look at other magic items and spells.

The best SRD magic-item equivalent for a Greater Healing potion is the Restorative Ointment: as an action, you cure 2d8+2 hit points (similar to a potion of greater healing) plus you cure poison and disease. We can increase the frequency of Restorative Ointment on the magic item table to cover the lost potions. Since the ointment comes in lots of 1d4+1 (3.5) doses, we can replace every 3 or 4 appearances of Potion of Greater Healing with a single appearance of the Restorative Ointment.

That leaves us without a replacement for the potions of Superior and Supreme healing, which heal 28 and 45 hit points respectively. I think I’ll have to make up an item to replace these. One item should be enough to cover both.

I’ll take a look at high-level SRD spells. After all, a lot of potions are just spells in a bottle (mind reading, flying, speed). Are there other healing spells I can distill into liquid form?

Two spells spring to mind:
Heal. Heals 70 hit points. This spell also ends blindness, deafness, and any diseases affecting the target.
Regeneration. Heals 4d8 + 15 (33) hit points. For one hour, the target regains 1 hit point at the start of each of its turns (10 hit points each minute). And you regrow toes.

Each spell has a major problem.
-The Regeneration spell is a ton of bookkeeping, both out of combat (how many minutes has it been now?) and in combat (did I remember to heal my one hit point this turn?)
-The Heal spell is about 50% more effective than the Potion of Supreme Healing. Plus, there’s its name. What do you call the potion? Potion of Heal? “For 50 GP you can buy the Potion of Healing, or for 5000 gold you can buy the Potion of Heal.” Not confusing at all.

Despite its disadvantages, I’m drawn to the sheer simplicity of Heal. No bookkeeping, and no dice rolls. You just get 70 hit points. That’s a lot of hit points – enough to fully heal an 8th-level fighter. If we cut that in half, we’ll be right between the Superior and Supreme potions, and right on target. And we’ve got to do something about that name. What if we add “true” to it? That’s what D&D does when it wants to make a more powerful version of a spell (True Resurrection, True Polymorph).

Potion of True Healing
Potion, rare

When you drink this potion, you regain 35 hit points and are cured of blindness, deafness, and any disease affecting you.

conclusion

OK, so I think we’ll be able to play D&D without missing the non-SRD magic items too much. We’ll tweak our magic item list a bit (boost the frequency of Restorative Ointment and the Silver Raven figurine), and create two new magic items (instrument +1/+2+/+3 and Potion of True Healing). With those gaps filled (communication, bardic instruments, high-level healing) there’s nothing left that I’ll really miss.

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.

I don’t like edition wars, but let’s have a friendly little edition skirmish. Which edition lets you generate the “best” random treasure? I’ll be judging based on variety/unpredictability of treasure, appropriate matching of combat risk and monetary reward, economy of page space, and number of rolls required.

It may seem like a pointless exercise, but I have a reason for it. I want to figure out what I like about previous designs so I can imitate my favorite.

In my last post, I talked at length about how I don’t like the 5e monetary treasure tables. My conclusion: The developers made a decision to limit treasure rolls to a single d100 roll, and that decision led to unvarying, samey treasure, with wide bands of character levels where treasure values don’t increase. Treasure needs to be more varied between levels, and even within a single level.

I plan to make replacement treasure tables for 5e: tables which preserve the quantity of monetary and magical treasure earned over each adventuring tier, but spread it around in a more natural-seeming and satisfying way.

And, as for every bit of rules-mongering that I do, I want it to fit on one printable page. (5e’s tables take up about 3 pages.) More variety than the 5e DMG, in a third the space? It might be a bit tricky. I’d better do some research.

So, did other editions do any better at letting you roll up interesting, varied, inspiring treasure? I’m not primarily considering magic items here – just the coins and other forms of nonmagical wealth.

first and second edition

Even if you never played 1e, or one of the other TSR versions of D&D, it will probably come as no surprise that its treasure system was a complex, nonsystematic edifice that seemed less like it was designed and more like it evolved. There was no explicit concept of wealth by level in 1e (though since 1 gp = 1 xp, your earned money was roughly equal to your earned xp). There were no treasure charts by level. Instead, there were 26 “treasure types”, labeled A through Z, with no explicit guidance about what each was for. Each monster had a bespoke, customized treasure entry in the monster manual containing zero or more treasure type codes. For instance, hobgoblin treasure is “individuals J, M, D, Q (x5) in lair”. (It’s either treasure or it’s subway directions. J to M to D to Q will get you from JFK airport to my house in Brooklyn.) Generally (but with many exceptions) stronger monsters had more treasure, but in a more naturalistic than mathematical way.

I love how treasure is story-driven with this method. Pirates have rich treasure plus a treasure map! Xorn have a lot of gems! Dragons have a little of everything! The only disadvantage, if it is a disadvantage, is that the intended pace of treasure acquisition was not clear to DMs, and therefore in gp=xp systems, the intended pace of leveling wasn’t made explicit.

The 1e system could require a lot of die rolling for big treasures. On average, for instance, Treasure Type A requires about 20 to 25 rolls, minus any required for figuring out what gems you had. (Let’s assume you didn’t roll separately for all 4-40 gems.) Is this extra work a problem? I mean, it’s not a show-stopper. Generally, keeping the game moving is a plus, but treasure generation might be an exception to that rule. Farm it out to the players! They’ll be happy to do it.

What the 1e treasure matrix loses in economy of die rolls, it gains in economy of space. It takes up a single page in the monster manual! Very tidy.

So that’s first edition. The second edition system is just like first, with a few values moved around, so I won’t treat it separately.

Overall grade: A

Third edition

Third edition was the first time D&D had a rigorous and transparent treasure system designed to get characters the right amount of treasure at each level. Each level had a different set of treasure tables with smoothly ascending cash values. Furthermore, within each level there were variations: at level one, for instance, you might find copper OR silver OR gold OR platinum, with a wide range of possible values for each. (But never two types of coinage together, oddly, unless you lump several treasure rewards together.)

The rigorous, explicit nature of 3e treasure might not appeal to every DM, but as a tinkerer I appreciate it. If I wanted to make up a treasure or reward on the fly for a group of 4th level characters, it’s easy to extrapolate a reasonable value: compare that to 1e, where I have no idea what’s a good-sized treasure for a 4th-level party.

The third edition charts are tidy. They all fit on one or two pages, depending on printing, from level 1 all the way to level 30 (though level 30 is absurdly unusable: same as level 20 but with an additional forty-two major magic items. Still. Pretty good for one page of charts!)

It also required fewer die rolls than the 1e chart, at least at low to mid levels. Instead of rolling on an eight-column matrix, as in 1e, you roll on a three-column matrix. For level 11, for instance, the maximum number of rolls you can make is ten, excluding gem subtables but including magic item determination. Obviously, at level 30, you’ll need at least 42 more rolls for all those major magic items. But I think we can agree they printed that line as a joke and ignore it.

There’s one more thing I like a lot in 3e: it’s the only edition with a “mundane items” table in the treasure section. Especially at early levels, there’s room for useful, expensive items as a treasure reward. The Mundane Items table included expensive armors, masterwork weapons, alchemist’s fire, and the like. It provided upgrades for low-level characters while keeping magic items rare – and also buffed monsters. Kobolds with plate armor and alchemists’ fire are no joke.

Grade: A

Fourth edition

Like third edition, fourth edition had a cash reward progression which increased smoothly every level – better than the big 5e tier-sized blocks of identical treasure. (In 5e, you have exactly the same expected treasure from a CR 5 encounter as from a CR 10 one.) 4e also had nice, organic-seeming groupings of treasure of the kind that you can’t get in 5e. For instance, in 4e, you could find a magic item with no coins; or reasonable-sized groups of one or two gems instead of 5e’s bunches of 7 at a time; or a treasure consisting only of gems.

Fourth edition’s 20 charts took up three and a half pages: about the same amount of space as is required for 5e’s four charts. Not too bad.

And I believe 4e is the edition that came up with the idea of leveled grades of gems. In previous editions, a gem was a gem was a gem – identical to any other until you rolled on a separate chart to determine its value. For instance, in third edition, at level 1 you have a 5% chance of finding one gem, and at level 20 you have a 35% chance of finding 4d10 gems. But a gem found at any character level had the same average value. Even at level one, you might roll high on the gem table and get a 5,000 gp diamond.

That appeals to the gambler in me, but the 4e way is more buttoned-down. At low levels, you found onyx, and at high levels you found star rubies and astral diamonds.

So the 4e system had a lot going for it! However, there was one slight problem. 4e didn’t actually have a system for random treasure. There were no tables to roll on: you selected from fixed-value “treasure packets” for each level. Individual treasures were quite varied, but the amount of treasure per level was completely predetermined. So as decent as 4e’s treasure handouts were, we can’t use them as a guide for making new random treasure charts.

Grade: Incomplete

Fifth Edition

I cover 5e exhaustively here and it gets a C.

and the winner is…

Much as I love the treasure-type system of the early editions, I think the third edition treasure tables are my favorite. There’s an argument to be made either way. You might prefer the esoteric and monster-story-driven treasure types of 1e to the mathematical precision of 3e. 4e (no random treasure) and 5e (unvaried magic treasure) are decidedly inferior to those two.

can we improve 5e?

In my next post, I’ll build a new treasure table for fifth edition, using third edition as my jumping-off point. It’ll offer varied treasure, with different payouts for each level, and it’ll grant the same amount of overall treasure as the current 5e tables do. As a bonus, I want to make it compatible with very large or small adventuring parties (no edition’s treasure tables were designed with solo play in mind). And I’ll add mundane treasure.

If possible I’d like it to fit on one page, so you can print it out and tape it in the back of your DMG. Not guaranteeing a huge font though!

I’ll also build these rules as an option into my Inspiration app, so you can have better treasure when you’re DMing from your phone.

I’ve been running D&D 5e dungeon crawls lately (testing my Inspiration app) and one thing jumps out: by-the-book treasure isn’t nearly varied enough.

I’m not talking about magic items: sure, I’m a little sick of potions of giant strength, but D&D has a generosity with its magic item list that I very much appreciate (more than 300 items in the DMG!). I’m talking monetary treasure.

This problem doesn’t come up much in my regular D&D campaigns, because neither I nor my co-DMs use the loot tables in the 5e DMG. After all, there’s not much to spend money on in non-houseruled 5e, so you can make up literally any amount of money and it makes no difference to game balance.

Even without much to buy, discovering treasure still is (or should be) fun. As a DM, I’ve always liked rolling on treasure tables, and as a player I like uncovering exciting caches of gold and jewels. But when I stick to the letter of the law, as I’m doing in this playtest, the defects of the 5e treasure tables become apparent.

In the course of a recent dungeon delve down to level 3 of a random dungeon, I’ve written down the treasure hoards we’ve found. Here are a few of them:

On level 1, we found: 2500 CP, 900 SP, 90 GP, 6 50-gp gems.
On level 2, we found: 2100 CP, 1100 SP, 80 GP, 6 50-gp gems.
On level 3, we found: 2100 CP, 1100 SP 60 GP, 5 10-gp gems.

When I listed them out like this in my notes, it became clear to me that, apart from magic items, every treasure I found was going to look exactly the same. Around 2000 copper. Around 1000 silver. Around 100 gold. Maybe 6 or so handful of gems or art objects. Every. single. time.

There are a few main problems with cash rewards in 5e:

Lumpy progression.

There’s not a new chart every level. You roll on the exact same treasure chart for all encounters from CR 0 to 4, and then graduate to the next chart up, which you use for six more levels, and so on. Each treasure table generates a coin value ten times the last one – a huge jump. It’s too big a jump, too infrequently. If the devs had found a way to divide this increase evenly over every level, then each level could have been worth 50% more than the last: a noticeable increase each level, and one that gives meaning to choices about challenging an easier or harder foe. (Right now, four bugbears have the same expected treasure trove as four kobolds. Level 3 of the dungeon has the same treasure as level 1. Why venture deeper?)

Samey treasure.

Every treasure hoard of a given tier group has exactly the same coinage mix. For all of CR 0-4, it’s impossible to roll up a treasure hoard containing electrum or platinum, and it’s impossible to roll one WITHOUT about 2000 copper, 1000 SP, and 100 GP. There’s a bit of variation when it comes to the gems and art objects rolls, though you will never find a solitary gem or art object (the smallest number of either you can find is 2d4, and the average is 7).

You’ll also never find a cache of gems or a magic item without some attendant cash. Every randomly rolled treasure must contain money. After the Lady of the Lake raises her arm from the water to give Excalibur to Arthur, she also tosses 42,000 gp and 28,000 pp ashore.

There are more interesting variations in the “individual treasure” tables, but unfortunately that’s all pocket change.

No big scores.

There’s little roulette-wheel drama in 5e monetary treasure: no sense that you could stumble on a big score (except by DM fiat). The only meaningful variation is in whether you get gems or art objects, and how many of each. On each treasure table, the best gem or art object result occurs about 20-30% of the time, so it’s not particularly unusual; and apart from the lowest tier of play, the best possible gems/jewelry roll can increase total treasure value by about 10%, so it can almost be ignored.

The ninja rule.

you know what? The minor point that I mentioned before, that you can’t roll up a single gem or art object, is actually a big problem for me. A single well-described piece of jewelry or idol, or a fist-sized emerald with a strange flaw, could grab someone’s imagination. However, gems and art objects generally come in packets of seven. Rolling up and describing seven art objects is an exercise in tedium for the DM and player.

DM: … encrusted with rubies; and, finally, a goblet etched with a baronial shield and the motto EVER TRIUMPHANT.
PLAYER: ….. ok, so… seven art objects worth 2500 each, get it. (instantly forgets every detail)

Since gems and art objects are just interestingly-described cash, there’s no point in presenting them in numbers that repel description. I might make up one or two interesting art objects that give flavor to my setting, but not seven.

Why is 5e like this?

I’m not sure exactly what was going on with treasure tables during the development of 5e, but I think that most of the problems stem from a single design decision: making the treasure tables require only one percentile roll to generate the whole treasure.

Take a look at one of the treasure tables, the one for CRs 11-16.

After a single d100 roll, you know almost everything about the treasure: what types of coinage you get; the number and denomination of gems and jewelry; and what magic item tables to roll on. Compare that with, say, the 3rd edition level-11 table, which required 3 d100 rolls: one for coin type, one for art/gems, and one for magic items.

I think the decision to go down to one d100 roll in 5e had to be a deliberate choice. But it was one with some bad consequences.

No roll for coin type

In the 3e chart, you roll to see if you get silver, gold, or platinum. (It’s a little weird that you can’t get a mix of coins, but whatever.) Each of the possible coin types had a slightly higher average value, so rolling a higher-denomination coin was better.

In the 5e chart, you always just get gold and platinum, no roll required, and no variation between treasures.

Combining the art/gems and treasure roll

Look how big the 5e 11-16 treasure is! There are 33 rows. It takes up almost a full print page. And if you look closely, it’s not super varied. The 32 rows of the “gems or art objects” column are just alternating the same four entries over and over again, eight times. The 28 rows of the Magic Items columns are just repeating the same seven entries four times each.

In fact, this table looks like it was derived by listing out all the permutations of two much tidier tables. These tables don’t exist in print but I’m confident they looked like this:

gems and art objects: roll 1d20:
1: nothing
2-6: 2d4 (5) 250 gp art objects
7-11: 2d4 (5) 750 gp art objects
12-15: 3d6 (10) 500 gp gems
16-20: 3d6 (10) 1,000 gp gems

magic items: roll 1d20:
1-3: nothing
4-6: Roll 1d4 times on Magic Item Table A and 1d6 times on Magic Item Table B
7-12: Roll 1d6 times on Magic Item Table C
13-15: Roll 1d6 times on Magic Item Table D
16 Roll once on Magic Item Table E
17 Roll once on Magic Item Table F and 1d4 times on Magic Item Table G
18-19 Roll 1d4 times on Magic Item Table H
20 Roll once on Magic Item Table I

If you map the permutations of these two charts onto one d100 chart, it perfectly recreates the existing 5e table, bar rounding error.

The big problem is, the two charts, while they require an extra roll, are more economical of space. If the two tables were printed side-by-side, as was done in 3e, you’d only use 8 rows instead of 33.

page count matters

Combining every treasure and art/gems roll into a single roll matters a lot because it balloons the space requirements for a single treasure table. And, since book pages cost real money to print in an already fat book, you just can’t include a lot of these huge tables.

It takes more than half a page, on average, for each of 5e’s four treasure hoard tables. If you had one such table per Challenge Rating from, say, 0 to 21, that would mean devoting 12+ book pages just to treasure charts. That would mean cutting 10 pages of other content.

On the other hand, if they’d used separate d100 rolls for art/gems and magic items, as in 3e, they could probably have fit 22 such charts in around 3 pages.

So, once they’d decided to present giant treasure tables that required only a single roll, there was a real-world economic incentive to cut down the number of tables to four, one per tier.

Does limiting treasure tables to one d100 roll even make sense?

I’ve posited that the developers made a decision to limit monetary treasure generation to a single percentile roll. Is that even a valuable goal?

Not in my opinion.

First of all, once you make your percentile roll, there are still secondary rolls required to determine how many coins, gems, and art objects you find: 4d6x1000 gp, 3d6 500-gp gems, etc. The averages are given: “4d6 x 1000 (14,000) GP”. But you have to roll, or otherwise vary, these amounts. You can’t just take 14,000 every time.

According to the DMG: “Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0-4 table, eighteen tolls on the Challenge 5-10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11-16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table.” Imagine if a DM didn’t roll, and used average treasure for all of these monetary rewards. From around levels 5 to 10, the party would find eighteen consecutive treasures with exactly 700 CP, 7000 SP, 2100 GP, and 105 PP. The treasure coinage is already noticeably lacking variety even if you do roll; if you don’t, it would be comical. The same is true for gems and art: you’d always find either 5 or 10 of each.

So, assuming we are rolling for coinage and gems/art, we’re always making three or four extra rolls in addition to our percentile roll.

And that’s not even counting magic items! Look at the 5e CR 11-16 chart above. There is a lot of percentile rolling here! Some of the entries call for rolling up 1d4 magic items from one table, and 1d6 from another. Each of these d4 and d6 rolls requires further percentile rolls, so, on average, this table entry requires an average of eight rolls, most of them percentile rolls. Taking the table as a whole, you make an average of three and a half extra rolls to determine magic items.

In total, a DM is actually making around nine rolls to determine each CR 11-16 treasure. Saving that one extra percentile roll didn’t make much of a difference.

looking backwards to go forwards

So now that I’ve exhaustively detailed my problems with 5e’s monetary treasure tables: can we do better?

I think so. I’d like to scrap the four 5e treasure tables and make (at least) twenty new ones. I think the in-game economics of 5e are fine as far as they go, I just think the tables could be presented better and the lumpy parts smoothed out.

In my next post I’ll look back at previous editions to see how they did treasure, and we’ll see if we can find the best model for how we’d like 5e treasure tables to look.

I just released the first Android beta test for Inspiration 5e. This test concentrates on dungeon exploration, levels 1 to 7.

You can download the APK [Jun 2 Edit: I’ve removed this build, in preparation of releasing a new build with fixes and new features]

Installation instructions: Follow the link above. You’ll need to say OK to install an untrusted app, and grant permissions for the app to look at your contacts and location. Note: I don’t save or share this information. I ask for photo permissions so that I can allow you to share a bug screenshot with me. I don’t use or look at location data at all, and I don’t know why the app asks. I’ll fix this in future versions.

Here’s what I’d like you to test:
-Turn on Map Mode and explore a dungeon
-Browse for a monster or spell

Here’s what I’d like you to tell me:
-Is it obvious how to save or reroll dungeon rooms, encounters, and treasure? With Map Mode on, is it obvious how to explore the dungeon?
-Is it obvious how to look up a monster or spell?
-When you restart the app, are your settings and Saved items saved?
-What are your biggest annoyances?
-Any suggestions or feature requests?

Last weekend I did a playtest release for Inspiration. I ended up only doing a release for the Iphone: I figured I’d see if there were any huge show-stoppers before I bothered everyone with an update.

I got very encouraging feedback: besides some UI issues, I got a lot of requests for features which I already know I need, and are already on my upcoming feature list. So I’m putting a week or so of work into polishing the UI and adding a few of the most-desired features. Once that’s done, I’ll release a playtest to Android users.

Here’s the big feature I’m adding: a random encounter generator for every monster.

Up until now, Inspiration has only offered the traditional type of random encounter generator, by terrain type, the way print Dungeon Masters Guides always did it. You’re wandering through the forest, you’re level 5, what monster do you run into? That’s useful at times, but as a DM in the middle of a game, I frequently know what kind of monster I want to use; I just don’t have time to use the official encounter-building tools to create a balanced encounter for the party’s level.

On each monster’s stats page, I’m adding a tool where you can choose a terrain and the desired Challenge Rating of the encounter, and it will make an encounter for you, potentially including appropriate allies, pets, minions, traps, and other complications.

To do this, I’ve made a web of relationships between the D&D monsters. Hobgoblins, for instance, are most often led by hobgoblin captains or hobgoblin warlords, but might sometimes be led by a bugbear or an evil mage or knight. Similarly, hobgoblins frequently employ goblins as cannon fodder, but might also use worgs, ogres, or even ballistas and catapults.

I think it’ll be super useful to be able to instantly whip up, say, a CR 5 goblin encounter (such as 20 goblins with their 5 giant rat pets, led by a bugbear, skulking behind a pit trap), a CR 14 mage encounter (an evil mage with 6 minotaur servants among explosive runes traps) a CR 16 bone devil encounter (one bone devil with its six cambion spawn), or whatever else you need to fit your story.

I’m almost done updating each monster with its potential minions, bosses, and pets. Then after a little testing of my own, I’ll send out an Android playtest. Looking forward to see if you guys like it.

Sign up for the Inspiration beta test!
Read more about the Inspiration app

Like a lot of folks, I’ve been cooped up inside with no D&D, which made me decide 2 things:

1) now is finally the time to release my free 5e Inspiration app beta
2) it should support solo play.

I’ll be sending out beta invitations this week. Sign up here if you haven’t already!

Beta 1 will include dungeon adventures only, from levels 1 to 7. It will support any number of players from 8 all the way down to 1. 5e Inspiration is designed as a DM aid, but it can also be used as a DM replacement if you don’t have another player on hand. The app gives you dungeons full of locations and encounters; you just have to run the battles yourself.

Here are the questions to think about when you try on the beta:

1) Is it clear how to use the app? Are there any user interface elements that are confusing?
2) Could you easily find all the information you need to run battles, traps, and other encounters?
3) How is solo D&D? Is the balance good? Any player deaths? Did you get rich?
4) Any bugs?

I’ll be sending out beta invitations this week. A few days later, I’ll send out a survey.

I hope this app gives you some D&D fun even if the pandemic is keeping you from doing other fun things you’d like to do. And I hope you’re well, and safe.

Sign up for the Inspiration beta test!
Read more about the Inspiration app

In most fantasy universes in which people cast spells, magic is a talent that few are born with. No matter how much they study, some people will never be anything but muggles, while other people are born with the Talent or the Gift or a high midichlorian count or whatever.

There are a number of reasons why this choice makes a fictional setting more coherent and focused.

However, these reasons don’t really apply to D&D, which has never had any pretensions at being a coherent and focused fictional setting.

D&D is a world where magic is common. Most of the D&D classes are spell-users to some degree. Most of the monsters have spells or magical abilities. You might assert that offscreen, within the borders of civilization, magic is rare, but the players’ game experience don’t really speak to that assertion one way or the other. The fact is that in D&D as it’s played, the world is chock-full of magic knapsacks, resurrection magic, and fireballs.

Your wizard isn’t special. If you come up with some demographics that specify that, say, only one in every thousand people has an arcane gift that can be nurtured, you fall afoul of the fact that nearly every D&D party has a wizard, or a variation like sorcerer, warlock, or bard – not to mention the clerics, paladins, rangers, monks, and druids also in the party. I’ve been playing D&D for decades, and I’ve seen a lot of wizard characters, and if they’re all rare and special, they’re the most common rarity there is. When a wizard character dies, we know we can go back to town and pick up another one if we want. We might claim they’re rare in the campaign setting, but they’re not rare in the game. Furthermore, most players don’t want their wizard characters to be feared, or hunted as witches, or even venerated as demigods every time they come to a new town. Every game session of D&D doesn’t have to be the X Men mutants vs. the world. Just leave me alone and let me do my shopping! Therefore, a blase attitude to spellcasters is pretty common among NPCs: the sort of attitude that comes from familiarity.

Your wizard isn’t super powerful – at least not at first. In any edition, a first- or second-level wizard isn’t any more powerful than a fighter, and might be significantly weaker. Sure, a first-level wizard can drop a fighter, and a crowd of commoners besides, with Sleep or Burning Hands, but a fighter can drop a wizard with one hit. It all comes down to who wins initiative. And besides criminal assault with Sleep and Burning Hands, what can a novice wizard do that’s any use? They might be able to get a middle-class job as a repairman (Mending), a mortician (Gentle Repose), a locksmith (Knock and Arcane Lock) or a charlatan (Charm and Disguise Self). They might rightly be regarded with suspicion, but not necessarily with awe. Being a low-level wizard might be kind of like being a grad student. It takes years of study, and might lead you to a respectable career some day, but no one’s really jealous of you right now.

There’s one more reason to avoid the “some people have the Gift” trope, at least for the 5e wizard class specifically. It steps on the sorcerer’s toes. The sorcerer’s story is all “I have a special inborn gift that lets me set things on fire.” Sorcerers are not much of a foil for wizards if the wizard’s story is “I too have a special inborn gift. Mine lets me set things on fire after five years of school.” I much prefer the more democratic message that anyone can go to school, make something of themselves, and learn how to set things on fire.

1st-level wizard spells for the masses

Given all this, I say: Open the arcane floodgates wide! Let anyone into the Arcane University, PC or NPC, from muggle or wizard family, so long as they can pay the tuition. The real limitations on wizard power are more insidious: not everyone has the wealth and leisure to attend wizard college, and, as is true for any other character class, most people stay low level. Few survive, or care to brave, the dangerous adventures required to become even, say, third level and unlock second-level spells.

Therefore, first-level wizards (and clerics, and bards, and other learned spellcasters) might be as common as educated people in our own medieval or renaissance times. Imagine a Shakespearean England where every Oxford scholar can cast Shield but not Suggestion, every vicar can cast Cure Light Wounds but not Lesser Restoration, and every minstrel can cast Charm Person but not Detect Thoughts. Would it really be that different from the standard D&D world?

low-level spells and society

Would this turn your world into Eberron, where magic is commercialized and ubiquitious? Not really. In fact, it’s surprising how much first-level spells resist the assembly line. A world where first-level spells are common actually resembles the medieval world that medieval people thought they lived in. You go to your local cleric for healing, blessings, and the detection and turning of minor demons. You go to the local witch for curses and curse removal. Really, Create Water and Purify Food and Drink are the only first-level spells we’d think of as being economically exploitable, and they’re small-scale.

Second-level spells offer a bit more room for altering society. I believe that lighting cities with Continual Flame is a classic Eberron move. Detect Thoughts and Zone of Truth could change the justice system. Lesser restoration – LESSER restoration – cures all nonmagic diseases, making a 3rd-level cleric better than the best 21st century hospital.

If third level spellcasters are dirt-common in your campaign world, you might stray a bit from the standard D&D pseudomedieval assumptions. But I don’t think you’ll do your campaign world any harm by allowing a Magic Missile-toting scribe in every village and a Cure Wounds-casting cleric at every roadside shrine. If anything, you’ll bring it more in line with the actual high-magic D&D gameplay that I’ve experienced, where no one blinks at the arrival of a traveling wizard, and someone in town can lift the curse on your fighter – for a price.

Traps are kind of an unsolved problem in 5e D&D (of course, I said this before about 4e). On the one hand, you can’t leave traps out, because they’re an integral part of the dungeon delver fantasy. On the other hand, the way they’re usually used in 5e is not fun. Your stock 10-foot-pit trap is (if your passive Perception is high enough) a piece of scenery hardly worth mentioning, or (if your passive Perception is low) an unavoidable hit point tax, or (if your DM doesn’t use Perception) a guess-what-the-DM-is-thinking game, or (if overused) an incentive to play in a laborious and dull style involving ten foot poles.

Even the writers of 5e don’t have a lot of faith in traps. Consider their advice from Xanathar’s Guide:

If your encounters or adventures are sown with too many traps, and if the characters are victimized over and over again as a result, they are likely to take steps to prevent further bad things from happening. Because of their recent experience, the characters can become overly cautious, and you run the risk of the action grinding to a halt. Traps are most effective when their presence comes as a surprise, not when they appear so often that the characters spend all their effort watching out for the next one.

I think this is wrong. Call me naive, but I think traps can be fun. Don’t be stingy. Slather them on! Run an all-trap dungeon. Run an all-trap adventure! If you’re willing to put a little extra work into it, there are ways to make each trap into an entertaining encounter.

I’ve been the victim of many traps in my years of playing D&D (and also inflicted a few as the DM). Sometimes, defeating a trap can feel extremely satisfying, and even falling victim to a trap can be a hilarious table moment. It all comes down to warning the players, implicitly or explicitly, that they might be walking into danger.

Here are the setups of some of the traps I’ve enjoyed most as a D&D player. We’ll get into the trap solutions later on.

player skill vs character skill

The traditional trap dichotomy is between old school “player skill” style and new school “character skill” style.

The “player skill” school holds that characters should perform certain intelligent actions to avoid traps – prod every floor with a pole, throw a coin onto the metal floor, pull the lever with Mage Hand while standing across the room.

The “character skill” style relies on die rolls. Your characters are more competent adventurers than you are – a character with high Perception shouldn’t miss an obvious trap because their player didn’t guess what action the DM expected them to take.

In most D&D situations, player skill vs. character skill is a false dichotomy. If you want to get up a cliff, you can either use an Athletics check or do something clever with ropes. If you want to convince a guard to let you pass, you can make a Persuasion check or you can say something reasonable. There are many solutions to any problem.

Traps don’t have multiple solutions because they often don’t present themselves as problems – by the time you know there’s a trap, the encounter is over. Traps exist outside the usual D&D action loop, which is described in the PHB as:

1. The DM describes the environment
2. The players describe what they want to do
3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions

The trap action loop is more like this:

1. The players blunder without warning into a trapped area
2. The DM compares passive perception to static DCs and describes the PCs avoiding or triggering the trap
3. the players write down damage on their character sheet, or take some trivial action like walking around a pit or stepping over a tripwire

That’s why the trap-sprung-without-warning doesn’t work very well. When you remove the player’s ability to react to a situation, D&D becomes a game about comparing passive DCs or about performing methodical danger-avoidance routines – and the game begins to fall apart.

Traps work best when they’re telegraphed.

The odd detail

Remember the list of my favorite trap setups I gave above? The common thread: they all include an odd or mysterious element that invites exploration.

The odd detail can be an obvious clue to the nature of the trap – rubble on the floor below a collapsing ceiling trap, or a dead thief near a poison needle trap – but it can also just be a specific detail that cries out for investigation: a chalked arrow on the floor, or a door painted with a woodland scene. It doesn’t matter much what the detail is, just so it stands out enough to attract the players’ interest.

It might seem like telegraphing every trap makes it too easy on the players. After all, players can just choose to ignore or steer around anything with a suspiciously lush description. Not to worry! Odd details are like catnip to D&D players. Characters come from miles around to stick their heads in the sphere of annihilation trap.

The odd detail is the missing piece of D&D traps because it indicates to the players that there’s something to actively investigate. Without it, traps are just something DMs inflict on characters. You’d much rather have traps be something the characters inflict on themselves!

investigating traps

How do characters deal with traps? Once you’ve indicated that there’s something that may be worth investigating, the players can choose their own course of action. All the DM has to do is react. This brings traps back into the classic D&D paradigm from the PHB: the DM describing a scene, the players stating their actions, and the DM adjudicating the results. As an added benefit, players can organically choose between using old-school player skill and modern character skill, just as they can in other open-ended D&D scenes.

Given a suspiciously odd detail, players will generally act in one of three ways:

countermeasures

Once players are aware that they may be in the presence of a trap, they have two choices.

What I’m suggesting involves work for the DM. Basically, every trap becomes a micro-puzzle. D&D is flexible: players who don’t relish puzzle-solving can roll a few dice to have their characters solve it. But whether the players take a new-school or old-school approach, every trap is the better for a few memorable, specific details.

trap solutions

Here are the “puzzle solutions” to the traps I mentioned at the top of the page.

training your players

Players need to learn that every trap will be marked with a clue. No matter how many traps you spring, that will prevent them from wasting their time searching barren rooms for traps. “You’re in a ten by ten room. Door to the left, door to the right.” There must NEVER be a trap in a room described like this! There’s nothing interesting or off-beat that signals that this is an investigation scene.

Players also need to learn that there can be benefits from interacting with weird elements in your dungeon. Otherwise, every suspicious scratch on the floor will make your players run the other way. Luckily, D&D has a strong built-in slot-machine-like reward system. Treasure! In standard 5e D&D, about 1 in 5 monster encounters come with a treasure hoard, and lots more carry some incidental treasure. Treat traps just like any other encounter. It’s easy to litter treasure around a trap:

traps in the Inspiration app

Of course, my Inspiration app is chock-full of traps. I’ve got something like 80 trap types, from the basic pit trap to the rolling boulder to the demon-possessed item, and each trap is further detailed with 3 or so “odd details”. That’s something like 250 unique traps. None of them are very complex, but I hope they’re just puzzling enough to give your players a moment of uncertainty.

Here’s how I construct the traps, and here are some samples for use at your table today.

trap template

I use a modified version of the trap template presented in Xanathar’s Guide.

Trap Name: The best trap names end in “OF DEATH”, but I leave the prefix up to you.
Challenge Rating: D&D 5e traps don’t have a challenge rating; instead they have a level band, like 1-4, and a degree of severity, like “moderate” or “deadly.” I think this is a mistake. It’s insufficiently granular – even a moderate level 1-4 trap will probably kill a first-level character – plus challenge rating is a tool we already have from monster design! Combining trap recommendations plus my 5e Monster Manual on a business card math, we come out with the formula that a single-character trap should do about 5 damage per CR, while a multi-character trap should do about 3 damage per CR.
Description: A sentence to sum up the trap.
Clues: This is where you put the odd detail that will get the characters’ attention. No trap is complete without one! In my case, to increase the usefulness of each trap in the Inspiration app, I’m providing three possible clues per trap. I hope that this will make the same pit trap feel different if encountered again.
Investigation: What can the characters learn by investigating the trap? I try to include both normal search check results (what the characters learn with a Perception check) and specific, guaranteed-to-succeed actions that will automatically net a clue.
Trigger: What action causes the trap to go off.
Effect: What happens when the trap is triggered.
Countermeasures: What actions the players can take to avoid or disarm the trap. Again, when I can I include both skill checks that will disarm the trap and specific actions that will automatically defeat it.

Here are two examples:

Name: 30-foot-deep locking spiked pit trap
Challenge: 6
Description: This 30-foot-deep pit has a cover which snaps shut to seal its victim inside. It has wood or metal spikes on the bottom.
Clues: A trail of faint footprints abruptly end. (DM note: In this case, there is a corpse in the pit.) OR: an arrow is scrawled in chalk on the floor. (DM note: The arrow points to the pit. It was drawn by a denizen who was worried about forgetting where it was and falling in.) OR: The center of the room is dusty; the floor at the edges of the room is clean. (DM note: The clean area is well-traveled and safe to traverse.)
Investigation: A DC 14 Perception check reveals that foot traffic avoids the pit cover. A DC 14 Investigation check reveals the hidden pit trap. A DC 19 Investigation check not only reveals the pit trap, but discovers a hidden lever, loose brick, or catch which opens the pit lid. A character who taps the floor notices that it sounds hollow.
Trigger: A creature steps on the trap cover.
Effect: The trap cover swings open like a trap door, or swings on a pivot. The victim falls into the pit, taking 10 (3d6) falling damage and 11 (2d10) piercing damage from spikes. The spring-loaded (or weighted) cover then swings shut and locks. The cover can be opened with a DC 18 Strength check; from inside, with a DC 16 Dexterity check using thieves tools, assuming there is sufficient light; by breaking the cover, which has AC 20 and 20 hit points; and sometimes by finding a hidden lever which opens the pit.
Countermeasures: Once the pit is detected, an iron spike or similar object can be wedged under the cover to prevent it from opening, or it can be magically held shut with Arcane Lock. Or you can walk around.

Name: ice-breather trap
Challenge: 12
Description: This trap breathes a blast of cold whenever someone speaks the word “ice”.
Clues: The room is cold. A ten-foot-tall statue of a barbarian or frost giant dominates the room. The statue appears to be made of ice. (DM note: The ice is magical and does not melt.) OR: The room is cold. There’s a carving of a polar bear on the wall. On the bear’s head is a rune. (DM note: The rune says “ice” in Giant.) OR: The room is cold and contains a marble statue of a fur-clad elf. As you enter the room, a Magic Mouth spell animates the statue’s mouth: “Speak not my name at any cost: a river’s skin in the season of frost.”
Investigation: A DC 15 Perception check reveals that the mouth is nearly clogged with snowy ice crystals. A spell or other effect that can sense the presence of magic, such as Detect Magic, reveals an aura of evocation magic around the statue.
Trigger: The trap activates when someone speaks the word “ice” in Common.
Effect: The mouth releases a 30-foot cone of cold. Each creature in the blast must make a DC 17 Dexterity saving throw, taking 38 (7d10) cold damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Countermeasures: Placing an obstacle in front of the mouth deflects the cold blast. A successful Dispel Magic (DC 15) cast on the mouth destroys the trap. Not saying “ice” also works.

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