If you're enjoying the content here, check out our new site, Thoughtcrime Games. Thanks for visiting!
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
It’s down time. The players are sitting on a mountain of coins and the party wizard goes to work, casting rituals to outfit the party with exactly the magic items they need.
While this works well mechanically, it does reduce the “special feeling” associated with acquiring that excellent magic item. Call me old fashioned, but I like a game where finding a +1 anything is a big deal. It’s hard to get excited over a magic sword or an enchanted piece of armor if your party can produce them en-masse from a pile of gold.
Take away the do-it-yourself magical armory and you risk giving the party loot they never use. Maybe the fighter doesn’t want the movement penalty of that +2 suit of scale or maybe the rogue feels that sticking with short swords is, “more of his thing,” and foregoes the +1 flaming dagger you dropped in his lap.
Here’s a way to give your party exactly the magic items they want, without giving them that mass produced feeling. At character creation, let the PCs construct a magic item wish list that includes the items they’d like to have by level 5. Replace a few pieces of loot in your dungeon with items from the wish list. Try to give each magic item a bit of a history and some extra flavor. Maybe even redesign parts of the dungeon to require some of those items as a solution.
When the players find an item on the list, scratch it off. If they miss one of the items in the dungeon, put it in the rotation for the next dungeon. Once the players reach level 5, have them create a new list. Repeat this process every five levels. If the players don’t get everything they want, it’s not such a big deal. They’ll be repopulating the list in five levels anyway.
If you combine this method with a ban on rituals that create magic items, you get a campaign where every magic item is truly epic and worth more to the party than its weight in gold.
I started Dungeon Mastering with secondhand AD&D materials in 1996 and have run a vast number of D20 campaigns, from cliche' medieval adventures in a kingdom made of Lego bricks to fighting zombies and the mob in the mid 1930s. I try to make the gaming experience as enjoyable, fast-paced, and easy to play as humanly possible. 
This is exactly what we’ve been doing in our current campaign. We have a Campaign Blog and one of the sidebars is each PC’s Magic Item Wish List. The DM already told us that if we don’t update it every 4-5 levels that he’ll just use “random” treasure. Some of us keep the list up to date, others don’t care. The DM commented more than once that it makes his job much easier.
I wonder how many other groups have come to the same conclusion. Are dungeons the sole source of magical goods in your campaign, or can they be purchased as well?
In our games; there’s a divide. Either the campaign setting is one where magic is relatively common (FRCS, for example). In that case, items are random. Always. Want something else? Go to a major city and try to find a merchant that has the item you are looking for. Or better – hire a wizard to make one for you. The other side of this coin are campaigns where there’s no magic, or little magic. +1 Butter Knives are awesome! But that rarely happens – as players are encouraged, at the game’s start, to suggest or otherwise make it clear what sort of items they want. “My barbarian loves table legs, large clubs, and things that smash other things” “My wizard has a softspot for kewl bracers, amulets, and other fineries”. Nothing specific — but clear recommendations in game terms – not gamespeak – of what the players are hoping to find or looking for.
I kinda did something similar in my campaign. My group of 3rd level characters has a mixed bag so far. They beat up a band of brigands with +1 Short Swords, so everybody had a +1 Short Sword. Most sold theirs and turned the money into something else.
In the last game session, the party met a Fey spirit who gave them a Lightning +1 weapon of their choice. So, they got a magic weapon but the precise weapon was their choice.
I do a bit of everything in my games. I usually pick out what I think the player’s will like, and I also let the players shop around, and enchant if they feel the need.
I’ve been encouraging them to fill out a wishlist, but I think I’ve gone too good a job of picking the items because there’s not a huge sense of urgency to fill them out