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I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Exactly. The one major issue with homebrew for me are magic items. The game doesn't define their power level much and it's very difficult to understand how to create them at a balanced rate.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15je74qMiYxSEnF43zp2UkEoSk3LqRymMbxruPVGQ-i4/edit?usp=sharing
I've got you. So there are two things you need to understand.
Official magic items are probably THE worst balanced and designed thing in 5e. It's like WotC didn't really want them to be part of the game and REALLY didn't want you to be able to craft them. Official item balancing is complete trash and should be wholly ignored, including rarity tags. (Case in point: Ring of Warmth [Uncommon] is a directly better Ring of Cold Resistance [Rare], Flametongue is Rare while Frostbrand is Very Rare, Ioun Stones suck major dick, etc)
The most important thing for pricing your magic items is to ask how much a plain +1, +2, and +3 weapon costs. Those are very basic items with clearly defined power levels, and you can determine the value of other items by comparing them to those basic weapons. In my games, a +1 weapon is 500gp, a +2 weapon is 6,000gp, and a +3 weapon is 80,000gp. That means that not only can I give all my other items fair prices, but if I compare my pricing to say, OneDnD where a +1 weapon costs 800gp, then that means I know that to maintain intended balance for a OneDnD adventure I should increase all prices by 60% (One of my friends runs the OneDnD prices for their low magic world, so this trick can be really helpful).
Anyways that document there has about 200 items that I've been making whenever I'm bored, so feel free to look around and steal some stuff.
Thanks! I love finding stuff like this where people create items and price then. I'll make great use of it. My favorite thing at a first glance:
I also use this sheet someone made for official item prices that seem the most consistent to get a feel.
Not a bad list. It definitely operates on a different train of thought to mine (and mine was admittedly influenced by the bad advice regarding these items' prices in the DMG)
My principle form the DMG was that Uncommon items cost between 100 and 1,000, Rare items are between 1,000 and 10,000, and so forth.
My secondary philosophy is that every extra effect on an item costs exponentially more than the last. Mostly to prevent people from making uberweapons on the cheap.
In any case, feel free to reshuffle my prices.