Review: D&D 5E Dungeon Master's Guide

[erik]

Here's what I see when I look at the helm pictures...

[RobbyPants]

and an Ioun Stone of Agility given to the kingdom by the gnomes. Rather than float as Ioun stones normally do, this crimson sphere has been bound to a clockwork ornery and set into a golden crown. It is said that it flares brightly whenever kobolds approach within 120 feet.

Translation: when worn, this item warns everyone but the wearer of the presence of kobolds.

Bonus: this item makes it impossible to ambush kobolds.

[GâtFromKI]

It is said that it flares brightly whenever kobolds approach within 120 feet.

What happens if the kobolds try to remain undetected by the helm (using 5e Stealth rules) ?

[nockermensch]

using 5e Stealth rules

>implying

[shlominus]

It is said that it flares brightly whenever kobolds approach within 120 feet.

What happens if the kobolds try to remain undetected by the helm (using 5e Stealth rules) ?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

It is said that it flares brightly whenever kobolds approach within 120 feet.

What happens if the kobolds try to remain undetected by the helm (using 5e Stealth rules) ?

+++Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

[Insomniac]

So what is the breakpoint for an item? If a +1 or +2 weapon costs 5000 GP, does a +3 weapon equal ten times the money?

It seems like the rules are completely half assed for this, like they don't even want you doing it. And didn't they do something funky with the craft times where normally a weapon with a minor enchantment would take a few days or a few weeks but they want weapons and magical items to take decades, maybe even hundreds of years to make and all be forged by dwarves monks like that dude in the Kill Bill movies?

"This weapon makes you mildly more likely to hit something and increases the damage done by 7 percent per hit. It took 390 years to make."

[OgreBattle]

The flavor text and history generator sounds fun, I'll have to check out the book just for that.

Any other games do that well?

[Grek]

So what is the breakpoint for an item? If a +1 or +2 weapon costs 5000 GP, does a +3 weapon equal ten times the money?

Yes. +1 is uncommon (50 to 500gp), +2 is rare (500 to 5000gp), +3 is very rare (5000 to 50000gp). That goes for weapons and armour. Its literally ten times as much to make a

It seems like the rules are completely half assed for this, like they don't even want you doing it. And didn't they do something funky with the craft times where normally a weapon with a minor enchantment would take a few days or a few weeks but they want weapons and magical items to take decades, maybe even hundreds of years to make and all be forged by dwarves monks like that dude in the Kill Bill movies?

The opposite, actually. 5E has magical items craft five times as fast as regular items. This means that it takes less time to craft +1 plate armour (2000gp at 25gp per day = 80 days) than mundane plate armour (1500gp at 5gp per day = 300 days). Ditto for +2 plate (6500gp at 25gp per day = 260 days), but not for +3 (51500gp at 25 gp per day = 2060 days = almost 6 years). It's incredibly stupid.

[Orca]

The opposite, actually. 5E has magical items craft five times as fast as regular items. This means that it takes less time to craft +1 plate armour (2000gp at 25gp per day = 80 days) than mundane plate armour (1500gp at 5gp per day = 300 days). Ditto for +2 plate (6500gp at 25gp per day = 260 days), but not for +3 (51500gp at 25 gp per day = 2060 days = almost 6 years). It's incredibly stupid.

That does sound like there are some exact prices rather than order of magnitude guesstimates. Is that right?

[Grek]

Chapter 6 (which is where the rules on crafting magic items are found) tell you to use the 50, 500, 5000, 50000, 500000 scale exactly. Chapter 7 (which is where the descriptions and rarities for all the magic items are found) tells you to use a range of values. Both say that the DM is free to alter any price at will.

[Grek]

We're now moving into the start of "Part 3: Master of Rules" with "Chapter 8: Running the Game", which is about the rules and how to use them. You might imagine that 5E's aversion to actually giving rules for anything important would be a severe hindrance here. And you would be right for the most part. This chapter has 27 pages of text, but only 19 pages which contain any useful rules text anywhere on them. Everything else (and a good proportion of the pages which do have something useful) is just unusable waffling about how the DM should come up with something.

Rather than go through every single section, I'm going to give the highlights. Top two mechanical sections, worst two mechanical sections and the two most glaring refusals to write mechanics.

Good Mechanical Section #1: Table Rules
This section is included, not because it will make your understanding of the D&D 5E ruleset improve nor because it is specific to this edition at all, but because it is a surprisingly good piece of writing about a topic most RPG manuals don't bother to cover at all: how to establish basic expectations for your campaign. There's a long checklist of things that various tables are or aren't OK with and options for the group to pick from, with the stipulation that, yes, you do actually have to pick one, as a group even, and then stick with that until you talk about it again as a group and change the group consensus on that topic. It's refreshing.

Topics covered include:

• How do people differentiate IC speech from OOC speech?
• Can you retract something your character said or did?
• Who brings the food? Who pays for the food?
• Will the DM roll in the open, or is rolling secret OK?
• Do floor dice count, or do you reroll?
• Are any of the dice faces damaged? Is it OK to roll those?
• Do people decide their turn on their turn, or before their turn? ie. is it expected that you'll have already decided by the time your initiative comes up, or not?
• How are we going to handle rules disputes? Look it up, DM judgement, or DM judgement for 1 session, then look up before the next?
• If a player is missing, what happens with their character?
• Is Metagame Thinking (ie "the DM sure talked a lot about that door, let's search it again just in case") ok, or not?

Good Mechanical Section #2: Combat
The Combat section in the DMG is unlike the Combat section in the PHB, in that it A] doesn't talk about dice rolling at all and B] is full of actual definite statements about what can and cannot be done. Basically, this section is about how to do initiative well and how to adjudicate distances and cover when using square and/or hex grids.

For 5E, you're supposed to have either an Initiative Sheet, or a set of Initiative Cards which list the name, hit points and conditions of every monster on the initiative, listed in initiative order. The listed example is a set of 3 ogres:

Krag (ogre wf scar): 59 59 45 24 9 dead
Thod (ogre wf helm): 59 51 30
Mur (ogre who smells like poo): 59.

We also get a helpful picture of Mur vs some fighters:

There are similar versions for squares and two different size comparison charts.

Shitty Mechanical Section #1: Chases
Chases are something D&D has never really handled well. The basic "I move, then you move" nature of initiative makes a chase scene hard to do. This section tries to fix that, but fails dramatically. The basic premise is that once the DM declares a scene to be a "Chase" the special chase rules apply. You can't make attacks of opportunity against people who are in the chase with you, and at the end of every turn you roll 1d20 on the Chase Complication Table appropriate to your location. The results include such wonderful entries as:

"A large stained-glass window or similar barrier blocks your path. Make a DC 10 Strength saving throw to smash through the barrier and keep going. On a failed save, you bounce off the barrier and fall prone."
and
"A beggar blocks your way. Make a DC 10 Strength (Athletics), Dexterity (Acrobatics), or Charisma (Intimidation) check (your choice) to slip past the beggar. You succeed automatically if you toss the beggar a coin. On a failed check, the beggar counts as 5 feet of difficult terrain."
and fairly reliably produces action movie style results. The basic problem is how chases end.

A chase ends when one side or the other tops, when the quarry escapes, or when the pursuer are close enough to their quarry to catch it.

Bolding mine. Escape is defined as getting out of sight and then succeeding a Stealth check vs the Passive Perception of everyone chasing you. That's fine. But ending the chase as soon as someone moves adjacent to you is obviously stupid. That gets you right back to the original "I move, then you move" failure state we started with. Argh.

Shitty Mechanical Section #2: Social Interaction
This one gets included, not because it is unusually shitty for mechanics of its type, but because I know the Den loves social interaction mechanics. The procedure is 1. Choose Starting Attitudes, 2. Have a Conversation to adjust Attitudes, 3. Roll a Charisma Check on the appropriate Attitude table. NPC attitudes are set to either Friendly, Indifferent or Hostile at the start of the encounter based on what sort of encounter it's supposed to be. By default, these don't do anything. They just modify the check in step 3.

Each NPC gets a standard set of roleplaying hooks (ideal, bond, flaw, secret; same as a PC) which start out unknown to the players. If the PCs figure out one of these and frame the conversation appropriately they can shift the NPC's attitude one step in either direction away from their starting attitude. So, if you happen to know that the Orcs of the Kroglarp Tribe are really big on honesty and you start out by swearing on your honor that you are here on honest business, you might make a hostile group ignore you.

Step 3 has you roll a check to decide what the NPC is willing to agree to based on how friendly it is. By default you get exactly one try at this, but the DM may let you make a second to "undo a mistake" if the net result of the social interaction was that you made their attitude go down rather than up.

My basic problems with this is that A] it's a lot of work for the DM, and B] makes Wisdom: Insight checks into an always-applicable "avoid combat" button, as it lets you get the DM to tell you one trait for free on a DC 10 Insight check. Which is enough to get the NPC to Indifferent, which is in turn enough to make the Charisma roll to make a creature not attack become 0.

Nonmechanical Section #1: The Role of Dice
Fuck this section and fuck whoever wrote it. With one of those compressed air containers for cleaning out keyboards. The only good thing about it is the pun in the name. This is basically the worst aspects of 5E's dont-write-any-mechanics mantra distilled into six pages of mind numbing anti-rules.

Nonmechanical Section #2: Experience Points
This section points out that the default is to have players get experience for encountering and defeating enemies, based on the strength of those enemies. If a character is absent, they get no XP. It then goes on to point out that this is terrible and maybe you shouldn't use these rules at all. Gee, you think?


Here. Have a picture the character chosen to illustrate the "Madness" section. Because contemplative=batshit insane, or something.

[Grek]

And we're back as I manage to muster up enough guilt regarding leaving this unfinished to overcome my waning enthusiasm for the review. My ability to give a damn about 5E has been slipping, so lets choke out another chapter in hopes of never having to think about this edition again:

Chapter 9: Dungeon Master's Workshop
This chapter is nominally about producing content for 5E. Given the nature of this edition, producing content is one of the major tasks for a DM. You're never going to see a second monster manual, or class expansions, or even a new official rulebook. Whatever rules you desire which have not been written already are rules you need to provide for yourself. As such, you might be disappointed to find out that the majority of this section is actually just poorly thought out optional rules of the sort you might see in Unearthed Arcana. Proficiency Dice would fit right in alongside Armour as DR, honestly.

Besides the Proficiency Dice optional rule (turn your +3 into a +1d6, or a +5 into a +1d10) we have a bunch of Skill Variants which replace the skills in the PHB. One suggests Ability Check Proficiency, (You are Proficient in Strength and add +3 to all Strength checks.), while another uses Background Proficiency (Argue with your DM as to whether this is a skill someone from your background would be good at.) and Personality Proficiency (Argue with your DM as to whether someone with your personality would be good at this.) They're all uniformly terrible for what should be obvious reasons.

We also have Honor and Sanity systems. While marginally better than those found in Unearthed Arcana (you're not rolling to see if you develop necrophilia as a result of seeing a Beholder) treating them as ordinary ability scores that you take in addition to and possibly at the expense of Intelligence or Strength is an incredibly bad idea.

For spooky campaigns, we have the Fear & Horror rules. All Wisdom saving throws are also saves vs fear, while anything particularly horrifying is a Charisma save vs insanity. Particularly offensive is the quote"

You might also call for a Sanity check when a character tries one of the following activities:

• Deciphering a piece of text written in a language so alien that it threatens to break a character's mind
• Overcoming the lingering effects of madness
• Comprehending a piece of alien magic foreign to all normal understanding of magic

Can I make brief aside about how terrible it is when people try to write cosmic horror into their stories when they don't understand cosmicism or horror? Here's a hint: Failing to understand something isn't the source of horror in those stories. It when you do understand what you're looking at that you become afraid. For fucks sake, the response to the horrifying revelation is never supposed to be "I don't get it! How can this be? My mind, it must be unravelling!?"

After the sanity rules, the DMG presents a bunch of healing variations. Fast healing, slow healing, "realism", all that jazz. Notably
the fast healing option is named "Healing Surges" because it was on the design document that something has to be called healing surges, no matter whether it resembles 4e healing surges or not. There's also variations on how long rests take, ranging from 5 minutes of rest to heal all damage to 7 days to get your spells back. There is, of course, no discussion of the fact that changing how rests work changes both of these sliders at once. Want to make healing easier, but not regain spells every time you do? Good luck with that!

Next up is firearm rules. Did you know that a grenade does 5d6 damage out to 20', DC 15 for half?
Why, with just a sixpack of grenades, you could slay the dragon all by yourself. Did you also know that antimatter does necrotic damage? Who knew! Then comes "Plot Points" which are a FATE style narrative control mechanic. They are a shockingly bad idea, as one of the things you can spend them on is Become DM. Spend a plot point, the DM is now controlling a PC and you are now the DM. After that comes initiative ideas (all of them are bad, including side initiative, mostly due to bad math) and a bunch of optional injury rules in case you wanted to lose a foot or something on a critical hit. Then comes Morale rule and Massive Damage rules. They're all just sort of there and I can't bring myself to critically analyze them. Its rules salad for an edition that is itself rules salad. Are they good? Are they bad? I can't tell anymore.

The only maybe decent rules added are new combat actions. Climb On, Disarm, Overrun, Tumble, and "Mark". Mark is an obvious 4Eism and isn't actually an action per say, but the idea that if you hit a creature you get advantage on AoOs against it isn't a bad one in and of itself. They're otherwise mostly things your DM would probably have let you do already by analogy to 3E or 4E, but its good to have it written down somewhere that 5E rules interpretation is supposed to run on glosses of previous editions.

The rest of the chapter is a guide to making monsters. Because this book is monstrous to me, I'm going to run through the monster creation system in hopes of making a DMGolem. Wish me luck!

Step 1: Expected Challenge Rating. Pick what CR you want your monster to be. Well, it's 5th edition, so let's go with CR 5.

Step 2: Check the table to find out what this means. In this case, it means we have the following basic statline: Prof Bonus +3, AC 15, Hit POints 131 to 145, Attack Bonus +6, Damage/Round 39 to 44, Save DC 15.

Step 3: Fuck with those numbers so they "fit your concept" of the monster. Since the DMG is so big and heavy, and misses so many points, I'm going to give it 1 hit point per page (for a total of 320), but give it a much lower attack bonus. Also, it does just 1 damage, because papper cuts.

Step 4: Figure out the real challenge rating, ignoring the results from Step 2. 320 hit points says it should be CR 17. But that would imply an AC 4 points higher, so we move the CR down by 2. Because math. Damage per round suggests that it is CR 0. But the attack bonus is 3 higher than that, which means we increase the CR by 2. Now we take the average. Apparently something with 320 hit points that does one damage a hit should be CR 8. I don't think that's actually true.

Lets try again with the rules lablled "Creating a Monster Stat Block" instead.
Name: DMGolem
Size: Small
Type: Construct
Alignment: Chaotic Stupid
Ability Scores: Uhhh. 10 for all physical, 0 for all mental!
Expected CR: 5. Proficiency bonus is +3
AC: 15
Hit Points: 5d6 (18)
Vulnerabilities: Slashing damage.
Resistances: None
Attack Bonus: +5
Damage: I can't do this step beacuse it doesn't say whether "Overall Damage Output" means on hits, or on attacks. I don't think the authors knew either. Oh well!

We also have Spell Creation, Feature Creation, Race Creation, Item Creation and Background creation. I am... not willing to pretend any of this is anything other than a meaningless farce anymore. So you're not going to see Invoke Insanity Rules spells, the Coastal Wizard Feat, playable DMGolems, a Manual of Derp or a Dungeon Master background. Because none of these rules actually work.

Next time, we start up with the appendices! Maybe. If I can bring myself to care.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Ok, I can almost see the plot point become DM thing working. Mostly because 5e is so hard core on DM worship that having a 5mind table fighting over who gets to be God this week is actually pretty funny.

[Mord]

You're never going to see a second monster manual, or class expansions, or even a new official rulebook. Whatever rules you desire which have not been written already are rules you need to provide for yourself.

Wait, what? I obviously missed a memo; has WotC already pulled support for 5E or something?

[CapnTthePirateG]

The 5e policy is not to release splatbooks but to try to survive on adventure paths.

5e defenders claim this is to reduce bloat.

[name_here]

I don't know about officially, but the staff has been cut to the point of barely keeping the lights on and products aside from a handful of adventures paths have been conspicuously absent from release schedules.

[Night Goat]

When you bring up the lack of content on other forums, 5anboys come out of the woodwork to claim that 3e and 4e failed because they had too many books. This is what 5anboys actually believe.

[Mord]

The 5e policy is not to release splatbooks but to try to survive on adventure paths.

5e defenders claim this is to reduce bloat.

"Bloat" in this context means "revenue" I guess.

[MGuy]

When you bring up the lack of content on other forums, 5anboys come out of the woodwork to claim that 3e and 4e failed because they had too many books. This is what 5anboys actually believe.

All of this all the way down. They believe that the lack of rules really 'streamlines' the games and prevents arguing over the rules. They believe that the problem with 3E is that it gave players 'too many options' which stifled creativity because people would just make characters aimed at doing what they want to do in the game instead of engaging with the 'roleplay'.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

So what is the breakpoint for an item? If a +1 or +2 weapon costs 5000 GP, does a +3 weapon equal ten times the money?

That's right. For example, let's say you're an 11th-level Wizard with the Guild Artisan background. This background provides you with Tool Proficiency (one type of artisan's tools), so you choose Smith's Tools as that proficiency. For you, a +3 greatsword costs 50,000 gp to enchant (because it's a "Very Rare" item), and costs another 25 gp to craft in your smithy.

So if you're crafting and enchanting this weapon entirely by yourself , it will cost you a total of 50,025 gp. If you instead purchase a normal greatsword in a store, and then enchant this normal weapon after purchasing it....it will cost you a total of 50,050 gp. You receive the smith's tools (20 gp value) for free, provided that you have the Guild Artisan background.

So either you or someone else has to craft the greatsword (50 gp value). If you craft it, it will take you 10 days to do it.

The time that it takes to enchant a +3 weapon is 2,000 days.

Roughly converted, that's about 5 years + 5 months + 25 days. If you craft it before enchanting it, then add an additional 10 days to that. So it will take you approximately five-and-a-half years to create a +3 greatsword (give or take a few days, depending on whether or not you craft it yourself before enchanting it).

It seems like the rules are completely half assed for this, like they don't even want you doing it. And didn't they do something funky with the craft times where normally a weapon with a minor enchantment would take a few days or a few weeks but they want weapons and magical items to take decades, maybe even hundreds of years to make and all be forged by dwarves monks like that dude in the Kill Bill movies?

They don't want you to craft magic items. Take note that the time needed to craft magic items is NOT listed in the "Crafting Magic Items" table in the DMG on page 129. It's not there (but listed below instead), because they want people to completely gloss over how stupid it is, which subtly discourages DMs and players from having characters actually craft items....at all. I get the intention that we're only intended to FIND magic items that the DM allows us to find, and rarely craft items ourselves. However, the fact that these rules make the creation of most magic items so monumentally vague and inconvenient, logically means that finding most magic items is nearly impossible. There's no precise formula for crafting a +3 weapon (or any other item). The DMG only mentions some vague bullshit, under "Crafting A Magic Item", on page 128:

"To start, a character must have a formula that that describes the construction of the item. The character must also be a spellcaster with spell slots and must be able to cast any spells that the item can produce. Moreover, the character must meet a level minimum determined by the item's rarity, as shown in the Crafting Magic Items Table."

There's more bullshit like that (if you want to craft a Wand of Magic Missiles, then you probably need to be able to cast the Magic Missile spell), but it doesn't go too much further in detail beyond that.

Multiple casters (that meet the minimum caster level, and that theoretically possess the right spells) can speed up the time it takes to enchant magic items, but not enough to make a real difference.

"This weapon makes you mildly more likely to hit something and increases the damage done by 7 percent per hit. It took 390 years to make."

The most rare magic items take the longest time to enchant. "Legendary" items like Sovereign Glue, Universal Solvent, Vorpal Swords, Spheres of Annihilation, or Swords of Answering take a VERY long time to enchant:

20,000 days= (54 years + 9 months + 20 days)

Of course, that doesn't include the extra time to non-magically craft these items before enchanting them.

After looking through this, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of the magic items in the book would never be created. 90% of the items would not exist in treasure piles, or ever be enchanted.....because the process of enchantment is painfully slow, and tremendously vague. There are no clear guidelines for crafting, and even if you suck your DM's cock for the formula to enchanting a magic item......it will still take you months, years, or even decades to create most of the items in this book.

The only magic items that would ever be enchanted are a handful of weaker miscellaneous items, the occasional Potion of Climbing or Potion of Healing (the weakest kind of healing potion), and some +1 shields and +1 weapons. Magic armor takes too long to be enchanted, and isn't strong enough to bother with. An obsessed maniac might bother creating +1 plate armor, but that's it. The rest of the magic items don't provide enough of a return on your investment in time and money to even bother crafting at all. Most items just take way too much time to enchant.

Those two potions above are the only ones that would be created. They're consumables, and the other potions require weeks, months, or years for you to create (usually months).

Eventually, I'll do a breakdown on the time it takes to craft each magic item (maybe in another thread).

But as you can see, these rules are frighteningly bad. This is literally some of the most awful garbage I've ever seen in an rpg product. And somehow, people are eating this shit up....and calling 5e a great game.

[maglag]

After looking through this, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of the magic items in the book would never be created. 90% of the items would not exist in treasure piles, or ever be enchanted.....because the process of enchantment is painfully slow, and tremendously vague. There are no clear guidelines for crafting, and even if you suck your DM's cock for the formula to enchanting a magic item......it will still take you months, years, or even decades to create most of the items in this book.

The only magic items that would ever be enchanted are a handful of weaker miscellaneous items, the occasional Potion of Climbing or Potion of Healing (the weakest kind of healing potion), and some +1 shields and +1 weapons. Magic armor takes too long to be enchanted, and isn't strong enough to bother with. An obsessed maniac might bother creating +1 plate armor, but that's it. The rest of the magic items don't provide enough of a return on your investment in time and money to even bother crafting at all. Most items just take way too much time to enchant.

Those two potions above are the only ones that would be created. They're consumables, and the other potions require weeks, months, or years for you to create (usually months).

Playing Devil's advocate here, you seem to be thinking too much in human terms. Yes, for us 50 years is a lot of time.

But in D&D you have elves living multiple centuries and immortal creatures that you can point a rod of destruction at, and they'll craft those stuff as downtime hobbies because there's no TV or internet so they need some way of entertain themselves.

This is, in fantasy stories you always have the big items taking a lot of time to craft and not easily copied by mortal means.

I personally despise the "You must craft everything you own yourself" mentality that's been spreading over games everywhere for the last years. People stop thinking of the loot they find as "Oh that seems cool" but rather as "I'll disenchant it for more raw materials to upgrade my stuff in a 5 minute break."

A world where your full gear is crafted during the weekened will be the world where you never find any old relics because everything is always being broken apart for spare parts to craft customized shinier version in demand.

Now some people will scream "Grraah then the players must beg to the DM for level-appropriate gear", but that's a lie half the time in 3rd edition. Because casters don't need freaking level-appropriate gear to win D&D 3rd edition forever. Even a wizard could go all 20 levels without ever finding a new scroll to add to its spellbook and they would still curbstomp every challenge of their level. Heck, 99% of 3rd edition items are "You can replicate this spell", so if you're a caster you have yourself covered.

And if we're speaking tome then the martial classes all get huge numbers anyway and then you add the tome feats and you'll be curbstomping the opposition unless the DM customizes every encounter.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

After looking through this, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of the magic items in the book would never be created. 90% of the items would not exist in treasure piles, or ever be enchanted.....because the process of enchantment is painfully slow, and tremendously vague. There are no clear guidelines for crafting, and even if you suck your DM's cock for the formula to enchanting a magic item......it will still take you months, years, or even decades to create most of the items in this book.

The only magic items that would ever be enchanted are a handful of weaker miscellaneous items, the occasional Potion of Climbing or Potion of Healing (the weakest kind of healing potion), and some +1 shields and +1 weapons. Magic armor takes too long to be enchanted, and isn't strong enough to bother with. An obsessed maniac might bother creating +1 plate armor, but that's it. The rest of the magic items don't provide enough of a return on your investment in time and money to even bother crafting at all. Most items just take way too much time to enchant.

Those two potions above are the only ones that would be created. They're consumables, and the other potions require weeks, months, or years for you to create (usually months).

Playing Devil's advocate here, you seem to be thinking too much in human terms. Yes, for us 50 years is a lot of time.

But in D&D you have elves living multiple centuries and immortal creatures that you can point a rod of destruction at, and they'll craft those stuff as downtime hobbies because there's no TV or internet so they need some way of entertain themselves.

This is, in fantasy stories you always have the big items taking a lot of time to craft and not easily copied by mortal means.

50 years is a long time for anyone. In that span of time.....cities can be sacked, gods can be forgotten, new nations can be formed. The idea that just because someone is immortal means that this person will spend 55 YEARS crafting a single item that can only affect its environment in a very limited way doesn't make any sense.

We're not talking about characters spending 55 years to create a giant magical boat that transports a million people to another Prime Material Plane.

We're talking about taking 55 YEARS to craft a single Scarab of Protection.

This is an item that provides you with advantage on saves against spells. It's also a 12 charge item that protects you against necromancy spells, enabling you to turn failed saves into successes....and once you do that 12 times, it crumbles into powder.

Now.....would you spend 55 years of your life crafting that item?

NO, YOU WOULD NOT. Nobody would. You wouldn't invest that much time or money enchanting it if you were a lich, you wouldn't do it if you were an elf, and you wouldn't do it if you were anybody else either.

It's not nearly enough of a return on your investment of time and money.

And as for immortal liches or long-lived elves......they are still part of the world, not separate from it. Thus, they don't usually have the luxury to spend years crafting a single item. There are usually interruptions. It's nearly inescapable.

I personally despise the "You must craft everything you own yourself" mentality that's been spreading over games everywhere for the last years. People stop thinking of the loot they find as "Oh that seems cool" but rather as "I'll disenchant it for more raw materials to upgrade my stuff in a 5 minute break."

I LOVE a robust crafting system. It makes things so much more interesting, and makes me feel more connected to the game setting. It makes me feel like I created something of actual value in the setting, so I am more fully part of it.

Look, I understand not wanting to saturate your campaigns with magic items, and I also understand your contempt towards the idea of people treating magic items in a casual way....but let's be honest here. Once every PC in your adventuring party has at least a couple permanent magic items, plus a couple more temporary items.....players are going to inevitably take these items for granted anyway. That's human nature. People ALWAYS take things for granted once they've had those things for a while. And if you object to that, then you object to one of the core assumptions of D&D.

Look at any D&D adventure module from the 1970's until just recently before 5e. All these adventure modules were saturated with magic items, even the "old school" ones. Now that magic items are so rare, there's very little for us to actually spend our money on.

Now we mostly buy non-magical mundane items that we don't actually care anything about. And what good are coins when they don't buy me anything I actually want?

A world where your full gear is crafted during the weekened will be the world where you never find any old relics because everything is always being broken apart for spare parts to craft customized shinier version in demand.

For most characters in D&D 3.5, it usually takes longer than a weekend to craft "full gear".

You can craft weak magic items over the weekend, but there are so many more magic items that take either weeks or months to create. My 10th-level Wizard in D&D 3.5 would spend 18 days to create a +3 sword. That time is reduced to two weeks if you allow the Exceptional Artisan feat from Eberron. And even then, there are tons of magic items that require much more time than that to create.

Now some people will scream "Grraah then the players must beg to the DM for level-appropriate gear", but that's a lie half the time in 3rd edition. Because casters don't need freaking level-appropriate gear to win D&D 3rd edition forever. Even a wizard could go all 20 levels without ever finding a new scroll to add to its spellbook and they would still curbstomp every challenge of their level. Heck, 99% of 3rd edition items are "You can replicate this spell", so if you're a caster you have yourself covered.

And if we're speaking tome then the martial classes all get huge numbers anyway and then you add the tome feats and you'll be curbstomping the opposition unless the DM customizes every encounter.

What the fuck does D&D 3.x have to do with the fucked-up magic item crafting system in 5e? Nothing.

This crafting system is a total disaster. Even the most diehard 5e fanboi can't pretend that this is anything other than garbage. Look at the time it takes to craft items, then do the calculations. Most of these items would not logically exist based upon the time and money it takes to create them.

Here's a little table to give you an idea how long it takes to enchant magic items in 5e:

Item Rarity..............Enchantment Time
Common..................................4 days
Uncommon.............................20 days
Rare....................................200 days (6 months + 20 days)
Very Rare..........................2,000 days (5 years + 5 months + 25 days)
Legendary......................20,000 days (54 years + 9 months +20 days)

Under these rules, a Greatsword +2 would require approximately 7 months to first craft and then enchant.

I've found only two "Common" items in the entire DMG: Potions of Climbing and Potions of Healing. Most other potions are "Rare".

Weapons +1 and Shields +1 are "Uncommon", while Armor +1 is "Rare". A Ring of Invisibility is classified as "Legendary". I'll eventually get into this item by item, but just consider the implications of this poorly-written crafting system, because this doesn't feel like D&D any more to me.

[erik]

Yeah, that's beyond fucked. Cost should have nothing to do with how long it takes to make something.

Long lived or not, wasting half a century on an item non-stop is stupid. Doing it for a shitty expendable item is insane.

If crafting didn't take like all day every day I could see a cool mechanic for having some sword get worked on for generations, maybe with seasonal rituals or somesuch to have a family pouring their soul and talents into it incrementally taking it from +1, to +2, add a special power, to +3, etc. That's how magic weapons and armor should be, taken as relics each with their own history.

Expendable items should be quick to make, full stop. If you are powerful enough to make a ring of 3 wishes then it's something you should be able to bang out over a weekend tops. Writing a single spell on a scroll shouldn't take longer than an hour.

[maglag]

After looking through this, I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of the magic items in the book would never be created. 90% of the items would not exist in treasure piles, or ever be enchanted.....because the process of enchantment is painfully slow, and tremendously vague. There are no clear guidelines for crafting, and even if you suck your DM's cock for the formula to enchanting a magic item......it will still take you months, years, or even decades to create most of the items in this book.

The only magic items that would ever be enchanted are a handful of weaker miscellaneous items, the occasional Potion of Climbing or Potion of Healing (the weakest kind of healing potion), and some +1 shields and +1 weapons. Magic armor takes too long to be enchanted, and isn't strong enough to bother with. An obsessed maniac might bother creating +1 plate armor, but that's it. The rest of the magic items don't provide enough of a return on your investment in time and money to even bother crafting at all. Most items just take way too much time to enchant.

Those two potions above are the only ones that would be created. They're consumables, and the other potions require weeks, months, or years for you to create (usually months).

Playing Devil's advocate here, you seem to be thinking too much in human terms. Yes, for us 50 years is a lot of time.

But in D&D you have elves living multiple centuries and immortal creatures that you can point a rod of destruction at, and they'll craft those stuff as downtime hobbies because there's no TV or internet so they need some way of entertain themselves.

This is, in fantasy stories you always have the big items taking a lot of time to craft and not easily copied by mortal means.

50 years is a long time for anyone. In that span of time.....cities can be sacked, gods can be forgotten, new nations can be formed. The idea that just because someone is immortal means that this person will spend 55 YEARS crafting a single item that can only affect its environment in a very limited way doesn't make any sense.

We're not talking about characters spending 55 years to create a giant magical boat that transports a million people to another Prime Material Plane.

We're talking about taking 55 YEARS to craft a single Scarab of Protection.

This is an item that provides you with advantage on saves against spells. It's also a 12 charge item that protects you against necromancy spells, enabling you to turn failed saves into successes....and once you do that 12 times, it crumbles into powder.

Now.....would you spend 55 years of your life crafting that item?

NO, YOU WOULD NOT. Nobody would. You wouldn't invest that much time or money enchanting it if you were a lich, you wouldn't do it if you were an elf, and you wouldn't do it if you were anybody else either.

It's not nearly enough of a return on your investment of time and money.

And as for immortal liches or long-lived elves......they are still part of the world, not separate from it. Thus, they don't usually have the luxury to spend years crafting a single item. There are usually interruptions. It's nearly inescapable.

There's people out there who spend 50 years taking care of a pretty garden. The pretty garden will not transport a million people anywhere to the material plane. The pretty garden will not save you against necromantic effects 12 times. The pretty garden will go to shit once that person is gone unless somebody else keeps taking care of it.

People have spent 120 years making a single building with no special effects. It's not the tallest/toughest building in the world nor the president/pope/supreme general's personal home nor an impenetrable fortress nor a super research facility. People still spent over a century building it. Multiple people.

Liches and long-lived elves who remove themselves from the world to go pursue their own hobbies are a staple of fantasy.

Otherwise, they just auto-conquer the world, since they, you know, will have centuries of pratical experience and knowledge over you. But they don't, meaning that long-lived elves and liches just love to spend their extra time in not very efficient hobbies.

I personally despise the "You must craft everything you own yourself" mentality that's been spreading over games everywhere for the last years. People stop thinking of the loot they find as "Oh that seems cool" but rather as "I'll disenchant it for more raw materials to upgrade my stuff in a 5 minute break."

I LOVE a robust crafting system. It makes things so much more interesting, and makes me feel more connected to the game setting. It makes me feel like I created something of actual value in the setting, so I am more fully part of it.

Look, I understand not wanting to saturate your campaigns with magic items, and I also understand your contempt towards the idea of people treating magic items in a casual way....but let's be honest here. Once every PC in your adventuring party has at least a couple permanent magic items, plus a couple more temporary items.....players are going to inevitably take these items for granted anyway. That's human nature. People ALWAYS take things for granted once they've had those things for a while. And if you object to that, then you object to one of the core assumptions of D&D.

Look at any D&D adventure module from the 1970's until just recently before 5e. All these adventure modules were saturated with magic items, even the "old school" ones.

I don't disagree with plenty of shiny loot from the enemy dead bodies. But that's very different from custom crafting everything yourself.

Now that magic items are so rare, there's very little for us to actually spend our money on.

Now we mostly buy non-magical mundane items that we don't actually care anything about. And what good are coins when they don't buy me anything I actually want?

What kind of person wouldn't want more hookers and booze and fancy food?

Or fancy art/real estate. Real world rich people spend money on extravagant stuff and luxuries all the time.

A world where your full gear is crafted during the weekened will be the world where you never find any old relics because everything is always being broken apart for spare parts to craft customized shinier version in demand.

For most characters in D&D 3.5, it usually takes longer than a weekend to craft "full gear".

You can craft weak magic items over the weekend, but there are so many more magic items that take either weeks or months to create. My 10th-level Wizard in D&D 3.5 would spend 18 days to create a +3 sword. That time is reduced to two weeks if you allow the Exceptional Artisan feat from Eberron. And even then, there are tons of magic items that require much more time than that to create.

You know that Eberron has building bots that can craft your stuff inside a bag of holding while you're adventuring, right? Add some more time and crafting shenigans and gear will be ready pretty fast.

Now some people will scream "Grraah then the players must beg to the DM for level-appropriate gear", but that's a lie half the time in 3rd edition. Because casters don't need freaking level-appropriate gear to win D&D 3rd edition forever. Even a wizard could go all 20 levels without ever finding a new scroll to add to its spellbook and they would still curbstomp every challenge of their level. Heck, 99% of 3rd edition items are "You can replicate this spell", so if you're a caster you have yourself covered.

And if we're speaking tome then the martial classes all get huge numbers anyway and then you add the tome feats and you'll be curbstomping the opposition unless the DM customizes every encounter.

What the fuck does D&D 3.x have to do with the fucked-up magic item crafting system in 5e? Nothing.

We'll get to that in a moment.

This crafting system is a total disaster. Even the most diehard 5e fanboi can't pretend that this is anything other than garbage. Look at the time it takes to craft items, then do the calculations. Most of these items would not logically exist based upon the time and money it takes to create them.

Here's a little table to give you an idea how long it takes to enchant magic items in 5e:

Item Rarity..............Enchantment Time
Common..................................4 days
Uncommon.............................20 days
Rare....................................200 days (6 months + 20 days)
Very Rare..........................2,000 days (5 years + 5 months + 25 days)
Legendary......................20,000 days (54 years + 9 months +20 days)

Under these rules, a Greatsword +2 would require approximately 7 months to first craft and then enchant.

I've found only two "Common" items in the entire DMG: Potions of Climbing and Potions of Healing. Most other potions are "Rare".

Weapons +1 and Shields +1 are "Uncommon", while Armor +1 is "Rare". A Ring of Invisibility is classified as "Legendary". I'll eventually get into this item by item, but just consider the implications of this poorly-written crafting system, because this doesn't feel like D&D any more to me.

Lots of people in 3e and 4e complained that characters had too much magic bling and magic loot was too common. In particular people complained that characters shouldn't need magic items.

5e had in its design goals that magic items should be an extra, that the character classes should be able to hold their own. Now I'll agree that they failed on that. But if your plan is for the PCs to don't need magic items to succeed, you can't then follow up by showering them with magic bling.

This is, your calculations are based on the maximum prices. But if you want a campaign where magic items are more common, then you should be using the minimum prices that the DMG provides. The max values are for those people who indeed want magic items to be pretty rare and harder to get.