For ten years, 5e Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters and players have dealt with ambiguous and contradictory guidance regarding magic items, but the revised 2024 Player’s Handbook suggests positive changes could be in store. In the 2014 version of D&D, the creation of magic items was described as a rare, lost art, and any magic items were relics of a bygone era of advanced magical knowledge. Unlike the prior two editions, players were instructed not to “expect” magic items, and DMs received conflicting instructions on what levels to make certain rarities of magic items available to their players' characters.

Clearly, the 2024 D&D DMG has magic items, but the more important question is whether it provides coherent and specific instructions on exactly when DMs should provide them to the party along with functional rules for buying and selling such items. Third edition D&D had specific “wealth by level” charts that made it simple for DMs, since all magic items had clearly listed prices. Fourth edition followed a similar model, with better guidance on specific item types a character should have at any given level to ensure their offensive and defensive capabilities were appropriate for the challenges they would be facing.

D&D's Martial Characters Require Magic Items To Fight

Spell Focused Classes Can Benefit From Magic Items, But Do Not Need Them As Badly

The presence of crafting rules in 2024’s D&D DMG might seem to help make magic items universally available to players who can afford them, but the massive time investments required to craft magic items do not mesh well with most campaigns. While downtime is extremely important for campaigns, few campaigns involve lulls of months or years in between each adventuring day. The revised PHB already gave reason to hope, as it contained its “wealth by level” chart in the PHB, while in 2024 this was only in the DMG. This makes it player-facing information, legitimizing it beyond solely DM-facing content.

When 4e D&D put its list of magic items and their prices in the PHB rather than the DMG, this went even beyond 3e's approach to make the purchase of magic items known and validated in the game. This was a boon for DMs, effectively offloading magic item purchases to players and letting DMs focus on their story, NPCs, world-building, and planning appropriate encounters, not worrying about the right loot to place in a dungeon. This gave players more agency as well, as buying magic items offered more control over a major aspect of their characters' growth and progression.

The 3e rules provided a mandated amount of wealth based on character level, and players would buy magic items, which were assumed to be available to them. The 4e system mandated specific tiers of the "big three" magic items, focusing on offense and shoring up defenses, along with additional gold for miscellaneous purchases. Both assumed magic items were readily available to buy.

The 2024 DnD Monster Manual changes balancing for higher-level monsters, but that will not change the fact that magic items were never truly “optional” in 5e D&D. There was a false narrative that a party could succeed with or without magic items, but in practice, this was not the case. Many monsters were resistant, or outright immune, to non-magical weapon damage, rendering classes like the Fighter and Barbarian either half as useful or entirely useless in certain encounters. Pure spellcasting classes gained less from magic items than martial characters, leading to a massive imbalance between class archetypes without magic items.

The 5e D&D Vibe Of Rare Magic Items Made No Sense

Player Characters Gain Unrestricted Access To Spells, Magic Items Logically Follow

While 2024’s DMG may offer better advice, one of the most important things it can advise on is to ensure a party has the appropriate wealth for their level and the ability to purchase magic items with that wealth. Since the tables shown in the PHB match what was the “high magic” table in the 2014 DMG, there are signs the designers have come to this realization — 5e D&D does not work without magic items. Beyond the obvious balancing issues between PCs and monsters, and martial and caster characters, 2014 D&D’s handling of magic items simply made no sense.

The suggested fictional “flavor text” that magic items are a rare and lost art was a decidedly low magic setting vibe that contradicted all the rest of 2014 5e DnD. The craft of making a +1 Dagger was described as something lost to the ages or an opus an archmage might struggle at for years, but other examples of spellcasting did not carry this same tone. There was no universal statement that resurrection magic is rare in D&D, or that the wish spell is a lost art from more advanced times. Magic items were singled out, bizarrely contradicting everything else.

The new books are already making some major mistakes in their design, like the 2024 DMG abandoning the adventuring day as a concept instead of providing guidance to DMs on how to facilitate multiple-encounter adventuring days. The already released 2024 PHB is a clear example of “one step forward, two steps back” in its quality of rules. While some things might simply be rough edges a DM can smooth off, the handling of magic items is too integral to both the fiction and balance of D&D to have a repeat of 2014’s bad design calls.

D&D Needs To Return To Mandated Magic Item Pricing

Prior Editions Got It Right With Clear Wealth By Level And Magic Item Price Lists

In an implied paradigm where any Sorcerer is free to learn Fireball simply by reaching level 5, a Fighter should not have a hard time purchasing a +1 Longbow. The third and fourth editions of D&D embraced this, acknowledging that if the game represents a highly magical world, then all characters must make that a part of their life, whether they are a martial warrior or a spellcaster. Classes like the Artificer were popular in 2014 5e in part because their ability to Infuse magic items provided a workaround for the lack of coherent rules on simply buying magic items.

The 2014 5e DnD magic item pricing guides were next to useless, as they were inconsistent from the Dungeon Master's Guide to subsequent supplements and presented prices as a massive range for a given tier of rarity instead of standardized prices like the two prior editions.

No doubt there are plenty of quirky optional rules, like the 2024 DnD DMG’s Shotguns that Push, futuristic ray guns, and other options that are unlikely to see regular use in most campaigns. A coherent crafting system is a promising start. D&D also needs clear guidelines for which rarities of magic items should be available to purchase based on character level and specific prices for those items, not broad ranges. While it is unlikely to snap back to the specificity of 4e, 2024 Dungeons & Dragons could at least return to the 3e paradigm as far as magic item prices are concerned.

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