Magic Item Balance

u/DnD: Magic items per level?

This post also has a breakdown of roughly "by-the-book" how many items
PCs should have per level:

1 common consumable every level from 1 to 5.

1 uncommon consumable every level from 6 to 10.
1 rare consumable every level from 11 to 15.
1 very rare consumable every level from 16 to 19.
1 legendary consumable at level 20.
1 uncommon permanent item at level 4, and another at level 7.
1 rare permanent item at level 10 and another at level 13.
1 very rare permanent item at level 16.
1 legendary permanent item at level 19.

The DM Lair: 10 Ways to Reward Magic

Items without Breaking the Game in D&D
Strategy 1: Adjust Generosity by Level
At low levels, be frugal with magic items, and at higher levels, be more
generous. Over the course of several years of running four simultaneous
5e campaigns, and until recently two games a week, I have found that
magic items are most game-breaking at low levels but not so much at
higher levels. At higher levels, character abilities become very powerful,
and magic items have less of an influence on things. You'll also find that
the attunement mechanic starts coming into play at mid to high levels,
effectively limiting how powerful a group's magic item cache is. Having
lots of cool magic items is only so powerful when half of them can't be
used due to the limitations of only being able to attune to three magic
items at a time. So, my advice is to reward fewer magic items at lower
levels than the core rule books suggest you do, and then once your
players start to reach higher levels, say level eight or so, start to ratchet
things up a bit. By level 8, magic items become less influential on the
game, as long as you don't go nuts and give out way too many or starting
giving out very rare and legendary magic items too soon. If you decide to
go all loose cannon on me and revert back to giving magic items out like
candy and at high rarities, none of my advice can really help you.

Now, if you want to know exactly how many magic items to reward,
Xanathar's Guide to Everything does give specific numbers of magic
items to reward of which rarity, and at which levels. However, I suggest
cutting those numbers in half as a starting point and then see how things
go.

You can always ratchet things up later if needed. But if you give out too
many, it's really hard to tale them back.

Strategy 2: Ignore the DMG Magic Item Rarity

Table
Ignore the Magic Item Rarity Table in the Dungeon Master Guide. On
page 135 in the DMG, there is a Magic Item Rarity table that supposedly
tells you at which levels characters might begin to find magic items of
certain rarities. I suggest you ignore that table and go with the
recommendations I'm about to give you. Here's the thing: when the DMG
was first written, 5th edition had just come out. The game was young. It
hadn't been played or even play-tested a whole lot. The game developers
were under pressure from the suits in the C-suite to wrap things up and
ship the game out the door. And that table has NOT been revisited at all
over the years to account for more powerful player options that have
come out in splat books.

So by this point, that table is even less useful now than it even was when
the game first came out.
This is my recommendation for when you should give out certain magic
item rarities in your game: Begin rewarding common magic items at level
two.

Begin rewarding uncommon magic items at level four. And then for rare
magic items, those come along at level seven. Very rare at levels 11 and
above. And then legendary at levels 17 and above. This will start your
characters out on a slow roll with less powerful magic items at lower
levels, when they are most impactful, and then more powerful ones at
higher levels when they are still very useful, but not as crazy game
altering.

Strategy 3: Err on the Side of Too Few Magic

Items
Err on the side of giving out too few magic items. You guys, you can
always give out more magic items later if you don't give out enough.
However, it is exceedingly hard and impossible to take those magic items
back once you give them to your players. There's this thing that happens
when a player gets a cool magic item that they're excited about and
makes them more powerful. If you try to take it back, they'll surround you
and mortalize you. I don't suggest you try that. You're far better off not
giving them in the first place, and then if you're too stingy, give some
more. It's far easier, trust me.

Now, there is a popular theory going around, promulgated by certain

sweaty-toothed madmen, that you should give out magic items to your
players right away and like candy because magic items are cool and you
don't know how long the campaign might last. Consequently, thanks to
these sweaty-tooth madmen, a common question I get on my live streams
is, "Luke, help! I gave my party too many magic items; now they are super
powerful and steamrolling the module, and I don't know what to do." My
response is usually, "Well, you screwed yourself over on that one, didn't
you?" Actually, I'll tell them they have two choices. One, live with it; suck it
up. You screwed up and gave your players too many magic items. Done is
done. Now, go through and adjust the difficulty of your campaign or all the
encounters in the module. That is your penance for listening to bad
advice. "Of course, how do I know it's bad advice, Luke? I'm a new
dungeon master; I don't know any better." Understandable, which is why
we have option number two: Confess to your players that you screwed up
and gave them too many magic items, and that it's breaking the game and
causing you loads of extra work. Ask them nicely and beg if you need to, if
they would agree with with giving you back some of their magic items
back or adjusting them to make them less powerful. And good luck; this
will feel like a nerf to players, and many players don't like that. But if you
have a reasonable players that understand your situation, they're probably
gonna be willing to work with you.

If you give out fewer magic items than the DMG or Xanathar's
recommends, everything will be okay. The rules are actually balanced for
zero magic items, and most groups will do just fine with no magic items
whatsoever. Don't believe me? Look at the "Are magic items necessary in
a campaign?" sidebar on page 136 of Xanathar's Guide to Everything. It
literally explains that characters and monsters in D&D 5th edition are
balanced such that PCs do not need magic items to keep up with the
power curve, except in very rare instances which rarely happen. In fact, I
would argue that with the new character options coming out in books like
Tasha's, character options that are more and more crazy powerful, magic
items are less necessary than they were before. The truth is that 5th
edition characters are super powerful all by themselves. They don't need
magic items coming out of their ears on top of things. So, give out magic
items sparingly, and then every couple levels of play, take an inventory of
what everyone has and see if some more magic items should be given
out. Players do like magic items, so you don't want to cut them off
completely.

Just don't be a moron and give them out like candy unless you are a
veteran dungeon master and know how to handle the resulting power
imbalance.
Strategy 4: Beware of Deceptively Powerful
Uncommon Items 👍
Beware of magic items that claim to be uncommon but are actually far
more powerful. For example, winged boots are not uncommon; they are
very rare in my book. They essentially give you unlimited flying during an
adventure due to how the magic item is worded. However, Wings of Flying
(listed right below winged boots, by the way) are significantly less
powerful, giving you less flying time, and yet Wings of Flying are rare.
Being less powerful than Winged Boots, which are uncommon. I
sometimes just don't know what folks are smoking at times. The fact is,
many uncommon wondrous magic items are more powerful than they may
seem due to creative ways that players use them. You learn this from
experience or from reading up on them on the internet. And the more you
play the game, the more you realize that item rarity actually doesn't seem
to correlate too well with how powerful a magic item is. I mean, it should
according to how the DMG describes rarity, but in actual game play, it
really doesn't. Now, you can chalk this up to a lack of playtesting or a
failure to incorporate playtesting results into the alpha and beta drafts of
the rules. You might point out that game developers play the game far
less than they probably should. You might blame the suits for making
changes and poking in things they know nothing about. But at the end of
the day, the fact of the matter is that you can't trust rarity as a judge of an
item's power.

As I was researching this topic, I stumbled upon a very useful article

online called "Sane Magical Prices" (pdf) (web link). Basically, lots of
people had a big discussion about relative magic item power and then
priced them out, with the least powerful items being worth the least gold
and the most powerful items being worth the most gold. Now, I'm not
suggesting you necessary sell magic items or even use the gold pieces
they listed as an indicator of what a magic item should sell for. The
primary usefulness of what they did, in my opinion, is that they ordered
the power of the various magic items in the DMG based on gold piece
prices. So, you can at a glance see the relative power of the various
magic items. And this is super super helpful for dungeon masters,
especially new ones.

Strategy 5: Modify Attunement Rules

Change how attunement works. Since attunement is a limiting factor in
how many magic items that require attunement a PC can use at any given
time, and since magic items that require attunement are often far less
powerful than ones that don't require attunement, changing some of the
rules around attunement can be useful to us. In the rules as written, any
given character can attune to three magic items at a time. And attuning to
a magic item that requires attunement takes a short rest (which lasts one
hour) and can't be interrupted; otherwise, the attunement process must
begin again. Also, unattuning from an item requires a short rest. So, if a
character is maxed out at three attuned items and wants to swap out one
item for another, it takes two short rests: one to unattune an item and the
second to attune to the new item.

Now, the first rule we can change is how many magic items a character
can be attuned to at a time. And I suggest changing this to an increasing
scale whereby at lower levels PCs can be attuned to fewer items, and
then as they gain levels, it increments. Specifically, I would do this: At first
level, a PC cannot attune to any magic items at all. So they are limited to
using magic items that do not require attunement. And there are lots of
common and uncommon magic items that don't require attunement, so
there are no worries there. At 3rd level, a PC gains the ability to attune to
one magic item at a time. At 6th level, a PC can now attune to two magic
items at once. And then 9th level, a PC can attune to three magic items at
once. And then, of course, you stop there. You never let them attune to
more than three magic items. Don't go crazy and loose your mind on me
here. Somebody's down on the comments: "Oh, this is great, and then
they just can do more and more and more." No, don't go that way. Doing
this allows you to perhaps give out magic items a little more readily if you
want to, as long as they require attunement, but limits the PCs in how
many they can use in the lower levels. And then once they get into the
higher levels where magic item power is less of a factor in game balance,
they can attune to three magic items per the core rules.

The next rule you could tweak is for how long attuning to a magic item
takes. Instead of a short rest, you could say it takes a long rest to attune
to a magic item. And if you did this, I would say that over the course of a
long rest, a PC could both unattune from a magic item and attune to a
new magic item. Now, what this does is limit PC power a bit by making the
cost of swapping attuned magic items higher and something they
probably can't do in the middle of delving a dungeon.

Finally, if you really want to limit the amount of magic items PCs can use
in your game, you could make it so that all magic items require
attunement. That way, any given character could only use up to three
magic items at a time. And you could use the previous two rule tweaks as
well to limit things even more. I'm not sure I recommend going this
overboard crazy with limiting how many magic items PCs can use. Those
rule changes are fairly heavy-handed, though they could be okay for
certain campaigns, especially a campaign that the dungeon master is
specifically billing as low magic. For campaigns like that, they could be
very appropriate. Otherwise, they might just be al little bit too much.

Strategy 6: Don't Blindly Copy Experienced DMs

Ignore how experienced dungeon masters reward magic items in their
games. So you're like watching Critical Role and other D&D shows run by
professional game masters who often have tons of experience?
Awesome, me too. Those shows are often very entertaining and fun to
watch. However, don't check your brain at the door. Recognize two things:
First, those are experienced dungeon masters. What works for them and
what they know how to do won't necessarily work for you, especially if you
are an inexperienced game master. Second, they are running a D&D
show whose primary objective is entertainment value for the viewers. How
they do things should be taken with a large grain of salt for dungeon
masters who are running D&D games and not D&D shows. Because there
is a difference, a big difference. This piece of advice actually applies to
almost everything professional dungeon masters do, which means that it
also applies to rewarding magic items. So, your favorite dungeon master
claims in his videos that he loves giving out tons of magic items to his
players, does he? That's great for him; he's experienced. He knows what
it means to his game for the PCs to be even more powerful, and he knows
how to balance encounters appropriately as a result. But if you're an
inexperienced or new dungeon master, do you know how to do that? If
not, you'd better think twice about doling out crap tons of magic items like
he does.

The same thing applies to advice you may find on the internet or the
advice from us talking head YouTubers. Just because I say I do a thing, or
another video advice guy says he does a thing, does not mean you
should do that same thing. Evaluate all advice through the filter of your
own experience and knowledge. Also, consider if the person is giving
advice to new DMs or experienced DMs, or if the person is just saying,
"This is what I do." An experienced DM saying, "This is what I do," is
probably less helpful for new DMs, unless the person says it will work for
them too.

Strategy 7: Favor Consumable and Rechargeable

Items
Reward more consumable and rechargeable magic items. You can still
have a game full of magic items. You can still be generous with magic
items, even at low levels, when you give out consumable single-use
magic items such as potions and scrolls. Because it can only be used
once, its power is very limited and cannot by definition be permanently
game-breaking, even though it could influence one specific encounter, of
course. You can also take more powerful magic items like wands, and
instead of having them regain all their charges at dawn each day, you can
say they have a fixed number of charges, and when they are all used up,
they are gone. You can also make magic items rechargeable. Basically,
you take any magic item and put a cap on how long its magic functions for
any given day. That belt of giant strength—well, it only works three times
per day for one minute each time. Efreeti chain—same. It only works a
certain number of times per day and for a limited duration each use. And
then it must recharge. Many magic items already work this way, so you
can add a little homebrew to others to make them have a similar
functionality, thus allowing you to reward them without them having as
powerful and affecting on game balance.

You can also add a game mechanic for recharging those magic items. So,
take wands. They don't automatically recharge every day at dawn, but a
wizard could expend a 3rd level spell slot to recharge a wand of lightning.
For every 3rd level spell slot they expend, the wand regains one charge.
Efreeti chain could be recharged by casting fireball into it, or by
submerging it in flowing lava. A belt of giant strength could be recharged
by casting enlarge into it, or by filling up a reservoir in the belt's buckle
with a large lock of giant's hair that the characters must somehow
procure. You can use your creativity to make this recharge mechanic
pretty interesting and cool for your players.

Strategy 8: Use Items That Scale with Character

Level
Use magic items that gain power as the characters level. There are a
couple ways you can do this. First, you can give the characters
personalized magic items that are intended to grow in power as the PCs
grow in power. So at level three, the magic sword doesn't do much at all.
At level six, though, it becomes plus one sword, and then at level nine, the
user gains resistance to fire damage. At level 12, the user can cast fireball
three times per day. At level 15, the sword becomes a plus three sword. At
level 17, the user can cast wall of fire three times per day. And that's just
one example. Use your creativity to come up with mechanics like that for
magic items you give your players. Just bear in mind that if you do this,
the PCs should get far fewer magic items because those they do get will
gain power as they level up. You might even consider enlisting your
players' help in designing these custom magic items that power up. Find
out what they want to be able to do and give them a say in designing the
magic item's features. Does this take some of the mystery and awe out of
the game for them? Yes, it sure would, because they know everything the
magic item will eventually be able to do. So, I personally probably wouldn't
do that; it ruins a bit of the fun for them in my opinion, but it is an option.
Because it's fun not knowing what you're gonna gain at certain levels. And
the magic items suddenly does X thing, and you're just like, "Woo!" But if
you know what it's gonna do, it takes a lot of that mystery and suspense
away.

Next, you can have magic items be "depowered." That is, they've lost
some of their magical power, and they must be powered back up through
some game mechanic that you determine. So, those boots of flying right
now can only help the PC jump twice as far or twice as high. But if the
characters go on a quest to the mountain of Yundofar and obtain a feather
of a roc, they can have a local wizard use that feather to imbue magical
flying into the boots. However, the boots still only give a very limited
amount of flying, and another quest would be needed to power them up
some more. Now, before you get all hyped up on this idea, let me give you
a massive word of warning. Doing this could easily cause your entire D&D
campaign to become nothing more than quest after quest of the players
just trying to level up their magic items. So that module you were running?
Yeah, just forget about that. All your PCs care about now is powering up
the magic items you gave them. This is an example of something that
looks great on paper, but in actual practice might not work so well. At least
not if you do it for lots of magic items. It would work great for one magic
item in the game, especially if the magic item is important to the main plot
line and must be powered up in order for the group to defeat the final
villain. If used for something like that, it could be super cool.

Strategy 9: Reward Flavor Over Power

Reward magic items with more flavor than power. Just because you're
giving your players magic items doesn't mean they have to be super
powerful. You can easily give them strange and exotic magic items that
have lots of flavor and backstory and even do something cool and
interesting, but that doesn't have much use in combat or contributes very
little to combat. A bag of holding falls into this category, as do paper birds.
You can now carry bunches of stuff and not worry about inventory
management. Yay! You can send messages over long distances. That's
useful and fun, but doesn't require the game master to beef up the
combats one bit. You can also design homebrew magic items with minor
magical abilities but with lots of history and backstory that ties into your
game world or the campaign. Things can be cool without having to be
powerful. And this allows you to reveal interesting bits of lore about your
world or the campaign plot in a unique way, as opposed to information
dumps by NPCs, for instance.

Strategy 10: Beef Up the Game

Just beef up the game. Let's be honest here: making the encounters more
challenging is not that hard. So, you can be generous with magic items,
ignore everything I just said, and then add an additional monster or two to
encounters if the PCs are particularly powerful due to magic items. You
can increase the monster hit points or, even better, increase their damage
output by giving them an additional attack. These are super simple and
quick adjustments that you can make to the game, even to pre-made
modules that you are running. This isn't brain surgery. It literally takes
seconds to do, and you can even do it on the fly during the game.

Now, many people will tell you that instead of just increasing monsters'
stats (like hit points and DPS) or increasing the number of monsters, that
what you should do is make the monsters fight more intelligently. And this
does work, as long as you know how to do this. Though I will argue that it
is much harder to do in actual practice than it is to tell you to do it. Not
only is this more challenging to pull off than simply increasing the number
of monsters or beefing their hit points or damage output, but most new
dungeon masters don't know how to do this. So that sort of advice is not
very useful to many DMs. However, if you do want to learn how to make
monsters fight more intelligently, there are two ways to do it: Number one,
years of experience. Or number two, you can read "The Monsters Know
What They Are Doing" by Keith Ammann (link down below). You can get
the book off Amazon, or you can read his blog. Both are excellent and will
help you learn how to have your enemies fight more tactfully in combat.

Comments
"Giving away too many magic items..." There are several ways a DM
can correct this in-game without seeming heavy handed. When I
DMed, if the magic items were causing the party to be OP for their
level and the campaign encounters I had planned I would nerf them in
a variety of different ways:
PICKPOCKET/CUT-PURSE/MUGGERS - Good for getting rid of
small magical items like wands, rods, or other objects stowed in
a bag, pouch, backpack or tuck in a belt when not being wielded.
When the characters split up in town to do their own thing to
prepare/resupply for an adventure a lone character gets targeted
by a thief or group of thieves when they see the character
spending a lot of money. Stealth approach would be to just have
a high level thief pickpocket the item while the brute force
approach could be 4-5 people brawl with the character attacking
by surprise, in one round, one of them grabs the
bag/pouch/backpack (or the item tuck into the belt) while the rest
make an attack and then the next round they all run off in
different directions into the crowd and/or duck through a hidden
door nearby.
KENDER PARTY MEMBER - If the campaign is set in the
Dragonlance Realm or a custom world (like mine) that allow
selection of the Kender race as playable characters, then I would
sometimes temporarily deny the use of small magical items by
making the Kender character(s) the scapegoat. In one campaign
a player chose to play a Kender, the magic item I needed to nerf
was carried by another character. That character hadn't used it in
several days (game time) and doesn't discover it missing until the
next time he reaches into the bag for it. When they metagame
and assume the Kender character has it, I tell them he doesn't
have it and I remind them they were in town to resupply. I
typically roll dice once or twice behind the screen when nothing
seems to be going on and the players assume I'm setting up for
the next random encounter or "unknown-yet-to-be-revealed"
event. So they assume, the magic item was lost to the above
pickpocket scenario. After several days/battles pass the item
"reappears" in the Kender character's bag when he reaches into
it for something else during a major fight.
DESTRUCTION - Magic items are tough to break but not
indestructible, weapon breaking techniques still work. A Rust
Monster (or pack of Rust Monsters) shuffling through the
corridors of a dungeon was always a good way for me to nerf any
character with magical weapons and armor made of metal. An
Ogre/Troll/Giant swinging a large weapon rolls a 20, everybody
knows the minimum damage would be enough to kill any of the
characters at their current HP, instead what happens the
character takes half/no damage, gets knocked back/prone, and
the magic shield or weapon in their hand is destroyed when it
takes the brunt of the damage that should have impacted the
character.
CAPTURED/KIDNAPPED - Whether captured by accident or on
purpose this was always the perfect excuse to strip away magical
weapons, armor, and items from the party. They might get back
some of them back depending on who captured the party along
with when and how they escape, but the headache-causing
culprits conveniently get redistributed to captors that are no
longer around by the time the party breaks free.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF COMFORTABLE SITUATIONS -
When I use to DM, one of my house rules was metal armor had
to be removed for at least 8 hours to get proper rest. Sleeping in
metal armor imposed -2 on all rolls the second day, the effects
were cumulative so sleeping in armor a second night imposed -4
on all rolls on the third day, -6 for the fourth day, etc. and the only
way to eliminate the penalty was to sleep/rest at least 8 hours out
of armor for the same number of nights spent sleeping in armor.
This was for 1st/2nd Edition, long before the fatigue rules in the
later versions. Once out of the magical armor something would
happen (a night ambush on the campsite or sudden natural
disaster) that wouldn't give the character a chance to don or grab
the armor before being forced to abandon it. Sometimes I'd set
up a social situation (like a formal invite to a dinner/audience with
a person of importance) where armor, weapons, and full
adventuring gear would be inappropriate, and then have their
room at the inn get ransacked by thieves while they were away.
HEAT METAL - Another way to get rid of pesky magical metal
armor and weapons was to have enemy spell casters hit them
with heat metal, force them to drop the weapon and/or strip the
armor and then create a situation (arrival of reinforcements,
natural disaster, etc.) where they would have to abandon the
battlefield and unable to retrieve anything dropped. Another way
to get them out of metal armor was to have them traveling trough
desert terrain during summer which would have the same effect
as heat metal but instead of combat rounds the effects would
manifest by hour increments. Then follow up with a battle, chase,
or other situation where the character would be forced to
abandon the magical armor and unable to retrieve it.
CLIMBING/FALLING - Was able to strip away troublesome
magical items when characters would fall from a cliff face or high
wall. When they fail the check that would kill them, I'd say "okay
roll again" and if they passed I'd say "Your scabbard momentarily
snagged the wall slowing you enough to grab an outcrop as you
fell, but the impact ripped your belt away and you lost the
weapon and all the pouches on your belt" or if the pesky magic
item was in their pack i'd say "Your backpack snagged something
momentarily as you were falling, it was just enough to slow you
while falling you grab an outcrop with one hand but the strap on
that shoulder broke and your pack slipped off before you could
grab the wall with your other hand and keep the other strap on
your shoulder. You lost your backpack and everything in it."
SWIMMING/DROWNING - Once played in a party as a Halfling
thief that got thrown into a mile wide river by a green dragon
(random encounter) and when I hilariously notice that swimming
was not one of my proficiencies (again this was 1st/2nd Edition) I
had to strip my backpack and leather armor to get a better
chance to rise back up to the surface and try to avoid drowning.
Didn't have any magic items in that instance, but I used that
lesson as DM to strip away magic items and armor from players
by having them fall into deep water such as a lake or ocean and
it would often force them to do what I had to do, strip off
backpacks and heavy armor/shields to lighten their weight and
keep them from drowning. Having a lurking creature in the water
with them that they were trying to get a way from at the same
time provided the "have to abandon and cannot retrieve"
situation to make the loss complete.
BRIBES/EXTORTION - Who would have guessed the pesky
magic item I'm trying to take a way from the character just
happens to be the asking price of a more powerful NPC/creature
that the party is trying to bribe for a critical outcome
As long as I didn't pull the same thing every time, my players
pretty much just chalked it up as "bad luck" for the events that
surrounded how they lost a magic item. Though, they knew what
was happening when the same "bad luck" situations would pop
up for a different set of their characters in a different party three
or four campaigns later.