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

[erik]

You do realize there's a difference between a public building and a disposable necklace charm, right? I'm uncertain if you're being disingenuous or if you are just accidentally being stupid?

The New Jersey State House didn't take 120 years to build because of the loving craftsmanship and as an intended plan. It was repeatedly expanded for further use and at one point partially burned down and needed rebuilding.

I'm not saying some items couldn't take generations to make, but that shouldn't be the standard because it is stupid.

Not even a child would be satisfied with the notion that Liches and Elven Archmages aren't an existential concern because they're busy hobbyists for hundreds of years. A Lich may be working on their doomsday device or amassing a zombie dragon army or something for a hundred years, but saying that they were working all that time on a couple bottles of Sovereign Glue is insulting.

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.

You're confusing different things.

People didn't mind having plenty of magic items, they minded that they were required for vertical power. You had to invest all your funds in boring bonuses to stay competitive rather than fun knot-cutting items that gave a horizontal spread of abilities.

To address that you have to address how players get their bonuses. If you sever the mandatory level up bonuses from items then you go a long way towards making items awesome again.

But none of that has anything to do with how long it takes to build items. That's a separate problem that has two fronts:
Player creating an item is too slow (it won't ever happen)
NPC creating an item is too slow (it won't ever happen)

Saying that NPCs are idiots who spend their lives making shitty items doesn't even address PCs, and it is a piss poor solution for NPCs as it strains credibility.

Two simple options that work:
You can drastically reduce the time per GP and not make it increase in orders of magnitude as 3.x had done, even the most expensive wondrous item only took 200 days to make, which might be doable between adventures over the course of a campaign year.
Or you can just sever item cost from time altogether, and just make the times much more reasonable and based upon the type of item (single use, charges, daily, at will). If high level mages can cast high level spells just as quickly as low level ones, it makes sense that they can create low level items as quickly as high level ones.

5e is clearly designed to keep PCs from creating items. Whether it further encourages DMs to be capricious and restrict items found is an exercise left to the reader.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

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.

You're cherry-picking, and you know it. Don't start with that nonsense. The book makes it so that most weapons, armor, and combat-based magic items take months, years, or decades to create.

Nobody is going to spend over six months or over five years crafting a submachine gun.

Magic items are the "technology" of D&Dland. When it comes to defensive and offensive technology, nobody spends between 6 months to 55 years working on a single weapon, unless it's so powerful that it changes the current of a war. Few of the magic items in the DMG do that.

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.

Liches don't retire to their lairs to spend 8 hours a day, every day, to spend five-and-a-half years crafting a single shitty weapon...that is SLIGHTLY more effective than a mundane non-magical weapon.

And I certainly don't remember a time that Liches "auto-conquered" the world in 3e. It must be some other game you're thinking of.

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.

SOMEONE has to custom craft these items. Why should NPCs be the only one to have all the fun? I reject the idea that only NPCs can create awesomely useful stuff. Fuck that with a spoon.

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.

I'll be honest. If it doesn't do something in terms of game mechanics, then I don't really give a fuck. If it doesn't help me to kill a Chain Devil, Vampire, or Black Dragon (or whatever).....then who cares?

This is D&D, not Candyland.

Me: HAY, GUISE....I'M FUCKING A HOOKER!
Guys: Cool!! Are you in mid-thrust?
Me: I am! And I'm drinking three-day old grog. And I'm eating a CHICKEN LEG!
Guys: Oh, my God.....I need some chicken.

Pretending to eat and fuck can be nice, but I still want an item crafting system that makes logical sense. 5e fails to deliver. When you're crafting magic weapons for a war, you can't spend years dicking around. For fuck's sake, they made Sherman tanks much faster than this. It's just insane.

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.

DMs are under no obligation to allow "building bots" in their campaigns. And the only Eberron-based "building bot" I know of is the Dedicated Wright. That Homunculus potentially speeds up magic item creation, but still doesn't make such crafting anywhere near instantaneous or effortless....especially since XP costs, gp costs, and time still apply to crafting magic items.

If your Dedicated Wright is crafting you a Cube of Force, it still takes a couple months for your sidekick to craft it.

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.

Please don't.

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.

I won't say much about 4e, but the "lots of people" that complained about 3e players with "too much magical bling" were either grognard BITCHES who incessantly BITCHED about 3e FOR YEARS, or whiny power-tripping DMs who didn't know how to manage their campaigns. Let me tell you something:

Both groups have always hated player agency. Always have, always will.

Never listen to grognards or power-tripping DMs. They're the last people to know or care about what most gamers actually want.

And my calculations are not based upon "maximum prices". My calculations are based upon the actual prices in the actual book.

On page 129 (within the DMG), it specifically says that a "Rare" item costs 5,000 gp, and that the crafting progresses at a rate of 25 gp increments per day. That means it takes you 6 months + 20 days to enchant a Chain Shirt +1 or enchant a Potion of Frost Giant Strength (which lasts for 1 hour, provides 23 Strength, and is then forever useless).

If my Wizard is fighting a war, then he doesn't have over 6 months to fuck around on a weak or temporary magic item of dubious value. And even worse, based upon 5e's economy.....I CAN'T EVEN SELL THE WRETCHED ITEM FOR FAIR VALUE. And this is because WoTC tossed all logic out the window, and said that most offers you receive for an item you want to sell (assuming you WANT to sell), will be for half its value or less......which means that you probably won't make any money for most magic items you craft and enchant. Of course, this is assuming you make your DC 20 Investigation skill check to find that buyer after multiple days of searching.

And if you want magic items to be "an extra", then go play something gritty (like Conan, or Warhammer). What you want is fine for a variant, but it's totally wrong for D&D.

Dungeons & Dragons operates under the premise that you will adventure specifically for loot (gold and magic items). And since someone somewhere crafts these magic items, it is quite LOGICAL that the PCs would eventually be able to craft these magic items THEMSELVES. D&D is certainly flexible enough for you to do other things, but ripping out most of the potential for magic item accumulation is short-sighted and stupid.

It satisfies the people enamored with E6, and deceives the grognards into loving it, because the game was cynically and superficially repackaged in a shiny OSR coat.

But 5e is really just a festering turd.

[Whiysper]

I don't post much, and I don't usually do this, but....

But 5e is really just a festering turd.

Quoted for fucking truth. I've just run a year-long game, which worked(ish) because a) I can eyeball CR quite well, and b) I've run D&D since AD&D, so I can just use the 3.5 mechanics where the 5e ones haven't been fucking written.

This edition is a ripoff. 6e isn't getting my pre-orders. Consider me once bitten!

oh, yeah, OT, the crafting rules are indeed bloody useless - that's evident in core only when looking at healing potions compared to healer's kits, or how long it takes to craft the 1d4 damage poison, let alone Lich-crafting only magic items. Not that you'd really bother, because +3 damage as the best weapon can go fish. Chipping through 500-odd HP takes long enough without damage being so piss-poor in player hands.

/rant_off

[maglag]

You do realize there's a difference between a public building and a disposable necklace charm, right? I'm uncertain if you're being disingenuous or if you are just accidentally being stupid?

The New Jersey State House didn't take 120 years to build because of the loving craftsmanship and as an intended plan. It was repeatedly expanded for further use and at one point partially burned down and needed rebuilding.

I'm not saying some items couldn't take generations to make, but that shouldn't be the standard because it is stupid.

Not even a child would be satisfied with the notion that Liches and Elven Archmages aren't an existential concern because they're busy hobbyists for hundreds of years. A Lich may be working on their doomsday device or amassing a zombie dragon army or something for a hundred years, but saying that they were working all that time on a couple bottles of Sovereign Glue is insulting.

Law of statistics. Given a thousand liches over a thousand years, at some point some soreveign glue will be created. People have wasted their lifes doing much more stupid things.

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.

You're confusing different things.

People didn't mind having plenty of magic items, they minded that they were required for vertical power. You had to invest all your funds in boring bonuses to stay competitive rather than fun knot-cutting items that gave a horizontal spread of abilities.

To address that you have to address how players get their bonuses. If you sever the mandatory level up bonuses from items then you go a long way towards making items awesome again.

But none of that has anything to do with how long it takes to build items. That's a separate problem that has two fronts:
Player creating an item is too slow (it won't ever happen)
NPC creating an item is too slow (it won't ever happen)

Saying that NPCs are idiots who spend their lives making shitty items doesn't even address PCs, and it is a piss poor solution for NPCs as it strains credibility.

Two simple options that work:
You can drastically reduce the time per GP and not make it increase in orders of magnitude as 3.x had done, even the most expensive wondrous item only took 200 days to make, which might be doable between adventures over the course of a campaign year.
Or you can just sever item cost from time altogether, and just make the times much more reasonable and based upon the type of item (single use, charges, daily, at will). If high level mages can cast high level spells just as quickly as low level ones, it makes sense that they can create low level items as quickly as high level ones.

5e is clearly designed to keep PCs from creating items. Whether it further encourages DMs to be capricious and restrict items found is an exercise left to the reader.

My problem is, if crafting magic items (safe work) becomes easier than looting them from other people's dead bodies (which risks you getting murderized or worst), then pretty much every typical fantasy story becomes impossible to tell.

Sauron will not start a war to retrieve the One Ring, he will just craft a new One Ring.

Adventurers will not brave ancient dungeons for legendary items, they'll just craft them.

There'll be no tournament to gain that +5 sword of rulership, whoever is interested in that weapon will just craft one in their spare time.

You're cherry-picking, and you know it. Don't start with that nonsense. The book makes it so that most weapons, armor, and combat-based magic items take months, years, or decades to create.

Nobody is going to spend over six months or over five years crafting a submachine gun.

Magic items are the "technology" of D&Dland. When it comes to defensive and offensive technology, nobody spends between 6 months to 55 years working on a single weapon, unless it's so powerful that it changes the current of a war. Few of the magic items in the DMG do that.

Now you're cherry-picking. In our world:
-Soldiers do NOT craft their own guns/tanks. Workers craft the technology. In specialized factories. And the designs were usually done by specialized teams. So that's at least three groups of people involved. What you're asking is that only one person designs the tank, builds it over a fireplace, then knows how to pilot said tank with maximum efficiency. No, wait, you're saying that any one can do it. Everybody should be Tony Stark now? When did the discussion change to Marvel comics?
-Often the guns/tanks jam and need constant maintenance. Magic items laugh at entropy.
-Pretty much all soldiers use machine guns or better. Even piss poor pirates from 3rd world countries can get their hands in machine guns and more often than not rocket launchers. Are you now claiming that even the lowliest bandit in D&D should be packing magic swords?

Liches don't retire to their lairs to spend 8 hours a day, every day, to spend five-and-a-half years crafting a single shitty weapon...that is SLIGHTLY more effective than a mundane non-magical weapon.

And I certainly don't remember a time that Liches "auto-conquered" the world in 3e. It must be some other game you're thinking of.

In 3e nobody by default nobody managed to become a lich because shades killed everybody before that with their low CR etherealness and spawn multiplication.

Also anyone can get any item they want with Wish chains and, well, I guess we can stop pretending 3e itself works without an heasy dose of houserules.

SOMEONE has to custom craft these items. Why should NPCs be the only one to have all the fun? I reject the idea that only NPCs can create awesomely useful stuff. Fuck that with a spoon.

NPCs aren't having all the fun. Those NPCs who decided to become super crafters are the NPCs who aren't adventuring or other stuff. They, you know, specialized.

Why would anyone settle as a blacksmith/shopkeeper when everybody and their mother can craft stuff just fine on their own? Are you claiming that there can't be legendary artisans working in isolated places for some peace?

I'll be honest. If it doesn't do something in terms of game mechanics, then I don't really give a fuck. If it doesn't help me to kill a Chain Devil, Vampire, or Black Dragon (or whatever).....then who cares?

This is D&D, not Candyland.

Me: HAY, GUISE....I'M FUCKING A HOOKER!
Guys: Cool!! Are you in mid-thrust?
Me: I am! And I'm drinking three-day old grog. And I'm eating a CHICKEN LEG!
Guys: Oh, my God.....I need some chicken.

Pretending to eat and fuck can be nice, but I still want an item crafting system that makes logical sense. 5e fails to deliver. When you're crafting magic weapons for a war, you can't spend years dicking around. For fuck's sake, they made Sherman tanks much faster than this. It's just insane.

What's insane is claiming that soldiers arrived at the beach at Dday, pulled an hammer, and each crafted a sherman tank for themselves using just the surrounding scrap on the spot to overrun the enemy bunkers.

Specialized worker teams in specialized factories under the guidance of very smart people and with the support of a network of resources made sherman tanks pretty fast.

DMs are under no obligation to allow "building bots" in their campaigns. And the only Eberron-based "building bot" I know of is the Dedicated Wright. That Homunculus potentially speeds up magic item creation, but still doesn't make such crafting anywhere near instantaneous or effortless....especially since XP costs, gp costs, and time still apply to crafting magic items.

If your Dedicated Wright is crafting you a Cube of Force, it still takes a couple months for your sidekick to craft it.

That's funny, since in the next paragraph you'll be compaining about "whiny power-tripping DMs ".

Anyway you admit the DM needs to change the rules for the system to work in 3e? If not for building bots, for exp-free wishes and planar binding chains and shadowcalypse and a lot of other crap.

I won't say much about 4e, but the "lots of people" that complained about 3e players with "too much magical bling" were either grognard BITCHES who incessantly BITCHED about 3e FOR YEARS, or whiny power-tripping DMs who didn't know how to manage their campaigns. Let me tell you something:

Both groups have always hated player agency. Always have, always will.

Never listen to grognards or power-tripping DMs. They're the last people to know or care about what most gamers actually want.

You know, there are lots of people who simply don't feel like needing to pull an excell sheet to custom-craft their gear or be severly left behind. Which is what will happen in 3e unless you apply a crapload of house rules.

I've seen plenty of campaigns that start with "Ok, I got myself an artificier cohort and then load him up with crafting discount feats from a dozen different books and here's some other crafting discount special rules and now I have multiple times over my expected WBL with pre-game crafting, here's multiple pages with the calculations if you want to check."

And my calculations are not based upon "maximum prices". My calculations are based upon the actual prices in the actual book.

On page 129 (within the DMG), it specifically says that a "Rare" item costs 5,000 gp, and that the crafting progresses at a rate of 25 gp increments per day. That means it takes you 6 months + 20 days to enchant a Chain Shirt +1 or enchant a Potion of Frost Giant Strength (which lasts for 1 hour, provides 23 Strength, and is then forever useless).

If my Wizard is fighting a war, then he doesn't have over 6 months to fuck around on a weak or temporary magic item of dubious value. And even worse, based upon 5e's economy.....I CAN'T EVEN SELL THE WRETCHED ITEM FOR FAIR VALUE. And this is because WoTC tossed all logic out the window, and said that most offers you receive for an item you want to sell (assuming you WANT to sell), will be for half its value or less......which means that you probably won't make any money for most magic items you craft and enchant. Of course, this is assuming you make your DC 20 Investigation skill check to find that buyer after multiple days of searching.

So you're saying that when a war starts, what the PCs should do is open up a crafting-selling business?

What game are we talking about now? Because I could swear that when a war starts in a D&D campaign, the players are supposed to go out there and fight.

And if you want magic items to be "an extra", then go play something gritty (like Conan, or Warhammer). What you want is fine for a variant, but it's totally wrong for D&D.

But market simulator 2015 is totally fine, right? Screw stabbing orcs in the face for loot and glory, Aragorn will open up an armor franchise.

Dungeons & Dragons operates under the premise that you will adventure specifically for loot (gold and magic items). And since someone somewhere crafts these magic items, it is quite LOGICAL that the PCs would eventually be able to craft these magic items THEMSELVES. D&D is certainly flexible enough for you to do other things, but ripping out most of the potential for magic item accumulation is short-sighted and stupid.

Dungeons and Dragons also operates under the premise that generations of wizards magicall bred all kind of crazy monster hybrids for no discernible reason. Sometimes those hybrids even turned against the wizards. That there's been a lot of insane mages crafting/breeding inefficient stuff is the very first premise of D&D, since it's also what creates adventures (that owlbear who ate its creator is guarding a scarab of cleanliness).

And since you mention it, before 3e the item creation rules were even more harsh, with the crafter needing to sacrifice ability scores to build basic stuff. But nobody complained that some NPC had to sacrifice 1 Con to create that magic sword the party just found.

[erik]

My problem is, if crafting magic items (safe work) becomes easier than looting them from other people's dead bodies (which risks you getting murderized or worst), then pretty much every typical fantasy story becomes impossible to tell.

Sauron will not start a war to retrieve the One Ring, he will just craft a new One Ring.

Some items can take longer. But single use items are quickies.

And your examples are terrible by the way. Fractally awful. I was worried that I could have contracted forum ebola from your posts.

Sauron started a war because he wanted to rule the world, not retrieve his ring.

And you're talking about Sauron's one ring, a phylactery which you don't get to just replace.

That item is possibly the most powerful item in a setting, which incidentally we don't know how long it took to forge, possibly not much longer than forging and marking a mundane ring.

And we're talking about sovereign glue. Do you not see the difference?

Glue shouldn't be legendary by any stretch of the imagination. And 1 hour buff potions aren't something that should take more than a work day to create. Making permanent level appropriate items should take maybe a few weeks for a character. None of this ruins adventuring or the magic item economy. While there were problems with 3e magic items, none of the problems were "oh noes, creating items is too fast and nobody wants to adventure!" despite it being orders of magnitude faster than 5e.

The people who can make awesome items quickly aren't likely to be creating thrones made of +10 swords, because they have better things to do. Spending a few weeks making a level appropriate item is fine. Having a character sit out an adventure to make something relatively badass that they could have gotten adventuring is appropriate since it keeps people closer to on par.

Adventurers will not brave ancient dungeons for legendary items, they'll just craft them.

There'll be no tournament to gain that +5 sword of rulership, whoever is interested in that weapon will just craft one in their spare time.

You brave dungeons and tournaments for things stronger than you can make (or stronger than you can make in a reasonable amount of time). It's that simple.

[OgreBattle]

How about mundane people crafting mundane poisons and applying it to mundane weapons, how is that handled.

[Omegonthesane]

Y'know, "lose permanent ability scores to create items" would have been so so much of a better approach to meet the design goal "PCs never create items but you can see why NPCs would".

Beyond a certain point time is just so much more valuable it's not even funny. I mean, your stats are temporary anyway, they only last until your dying breath, your magic swag might be able to go somewhere that you personally can't. Spending 30 days and 1 Con is something you can imagine an NPC doing to create a permanent item (or a PC if they just hit their maximum age and have moral objections to becoming a lich). But, 55 years spent wanking to Haruhi creating your LEGENDARY SOVEREIGN GLUE is enough for the kingdom you were meant to sell it to to have fallen to revolution twice over.

The system at my old larp group had something like that, where magic items required the investment of actual magic points from the creator that were only returned when the item was destroyed or (where applicable) used. Naturally my conclusion after a while was evil liches farming humans to be magic item crafters so they could have permanent street lights.

[Grek]

How about mundane people crafting mundane poisons and applying it to mundane weapons, how is that handled.

The basic poison in the PHB is 100 gold and therefore takes 20 days to craft. Unfortunately, the effects of this poison are not specified in sufficient detail to be usable. See, poisons in 5E inflict the "Poisoned" condition, and also list a save vs some effect, usually with a low DC. But is this save done once? Is it done every round that you have the Poisoned condition? When do you recover? How long does Poisoned last, anyways.

None of these questions get answered, and the answers your DM is likely to fill in for you are not answers that make Poison worth 100gp a dose.

[Vaegrim]

None of these questions get answered, and the answers your DM is likely to fill in for you are not answers that make Poison worth 100gp a dose.

Poison, Basic. You can use the poison in this vial to coat one slashing or piercing weapon or up to three pieces of ammunition. Applying the poison takes an action. A creature hit by the poisoned weapon or ammunition must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or take 1d4 poison damage. Once applied, the poison retains potency for 1 minute before drying.

While it certainly doesn't seem worth 100gp, there aren't any unanswered questions about how it WORKS. You make the save when you get hit by the poisoned weapon, fail and you'll take 1d4 more poison damage. It doesn't inflict a condition.

The DMG adds poisons which have questions though, four "types" of poison (only one of which is unambiguous in it's effects). Most people assume Basic Poison is the standard for Injury poisons (action to apply to 1 weapon or 3 ammo, lasts 1 min before drying), but it doesn't actually SAY any of that. While Inhaled poisons say they fill a 5ft square, there's no mention of how to deploy them (thrown vial like acid maybe?). Again though; poisions that inflict a status say what status, how long they last, and how often to make saves. Often they use the phrasing "save or be poisoned. While poisoned you're also X", so that removing the poison condition also cures the other condition (and anyone immune to the poison condition is also immune to the side-effect).

http://media.wizards.com/2014/downloads ... _257_8.pdf

They also have an alternative to crafting poisons of harvesting them from poisonous creatures; with an actual written down DC and everything. It is quite possibly the most usable thing in the DMG, and it's a free preview.

[Windjammer]

Remember monster stat blocks in 4e? How they had no lootable equipment, no utility magic, and how even 'languages spoken' got dropped (and skills be damned)? This was not purely a simplification - it was a reduction of the width of mechanical interaction between a monster and the world of D&D (comprised of the natural environment, other monsters, and PCs). So much so that, when a bear was not a monster but an animal companion, we had a new statblock for that - which was just as reduced as monster-bear, except in different ways. Gone was the bear stat block summarizing how the bear interacts with the world.

5e is basically the same for the PCs, across the board. Magic item crafting has been removed from the set of options PCs can draw on to meaningfully interact with the environment. You get shiny pictures, some flavour text to lull you in, and 1d20 things you can write into your background story with zero mechanical results, but it's window dressing.

I thought this was obvious. Why expect the system to do any different with magic item crafting? 5e is still 4e in many regards, and next to the removal of interesting utility magic across the board, the parallels just multiply. It speaks bounds of its player base to associate this rule set with the OSR. Gygax was a dick to players, and wrote mean modules, but he didn't emaciate their PCs by stacking the ruleset against them.