It’s a commonly held belief that D&D 5e breaks down once you get to higher levels.
Whilst there are a large number of reasons behind this, I’ll be talking about one of them in this post, and why it’s important to consider when giving out magic items and other boons to your players.
Complexity versus depth
Complexity and depth are core levers when designing any game. As a long-time hobbyist game designer, they are a balancing act that I often find myself grappling with.
Complexity is all about how many different things a player needs to understand and keep in their head. Generally it’s a bad thing as it makes the game harder to get into.
Depth is all about how many meaningful options a player has when making a decision. Generally it’s a good thing as it provides the player with a more interesting array of decisions to make.
The two are highly correlated, but part of the art of game design is trying increase depth whilst not increasing complexity too much. This also holds true when running a D&D game, albeit with less direct control and more constraints.
Removing choices
That’s great and all, but what exactly does all of this have to do with giving out magic items?
In each round of combat your players have to make choices. When they explore the world or face a tricky conversation, they have to make choices. Magic items will always add complexity to those choices. But how they impact depth is more nuanced.
Example #1 - Wayfarer’s Boots
The variation in depth that magic items can bring (or even remove) is best illustrated with an example. Let’s say you’ve got a melee martial in your party, maybe a Tabaxi fighter. Given the Tabaxi’s Feline Agility - which grants double movement speed for a turn at no action cost - a reasonable first item to grant would be something like Wayfarer’s Boots, giving them an extra 10ft of movement speed. This first item gives some variance in choices, but doesn’t actually do as much as you might expect: it essentially only adds choices on combat turns when an enemy is in that extra 5ft-20ft area that the player otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach.
This extra boost of mobility helps reinforce one of the player’s core fantasies to play a super-speedy character, so let’s say we do opt to give them the Wayfarer’s Boots.
Example #2 - Broom of Flying
Our campaign progresses and the players level up. Our Tabaxi fighter is being left behind a little so we decide to give him a bit of a boost.
Mobility is his thing, so how about a Broom of Flying?
Flying around the battlefield certainly makes our Tabaxi feel more powerful, but what’s the impact on player choice now?
Well, assuming there weren’t any other players in the party with infinite flight, we’ve now nullified any out-of-combat challenge which involves verticality, as they can just fly up or down to where ever they need to get. This may give them some extra choices in niche scenarios, but we’ll have to plan around it and think about possible loopholes much more carefully.
When it comes to combat, flight can be very problematic. Terrain and map design is one of the most useful ways to force interesting and unexpected choices onto your players: ambushes from above, splitting the party, blocking the party in a confined area with melee attackers. Elevation and obstacles in map design generate hundreds of interesting moment-by-moment decisions for your players to make, decisions that our Tabaxi player no longer cares about because he can fly around the map at high speeds.
Perhaps our Tabaxi really needs a power boost, so we give him the Broom of Flying.
Example #3 - Mobile
Our party have just overcome a major point in the campaign, so we decide to give them something special: an extra feat.
This decisions really helps grant more agency to the players and lets them grow their characters in a direction that they want. But as Sid Meier once said, given the chance some players will optimize the fun out of the game.
In line with his mobility-focused goals, our Tabaxi picks the Mobile feat - gaining 10ft of extra movement and immunity to opportunity attacks if they perform a melee attack on an enemy.
Adding the extra movement speed added very little depth. Adding flying removed some depth in most cases. Adding immunity to opportunity attacks effectively takes all positioning-based choices away from the player. Before our Tabaxi still had a trade-off to make when choosing where to move - namely whether to risk an opportunity attack, disengage or stay put. Now, unless they are overrun, it’s highly likely that our player will simply attack and move away.
By adding these three magic items, we have gone from giving the player tons of choices about where to position themselves (both in planning for the current turn and future ones) and whether to play offensively or defensively, to allowing the player to position freely with little-to-no consequences and always play offensively even when running.
What can you do?
Given the above examples, it may sound like I’m advocating for no magic items at all. That’s not the case.
When you give out magic items, be very cognisant of how they impact the depth of player choice - will it increase depth of choice or decrease it?
One approach is to aim for items that fill tight niches rather than those that grant broad powers. Items that buff specific tools, grant boons against certain enemy types, or only work in specific environments. The aim with these kinds of items is to make them innocuous enough that players forget about them, but strong enough in a given niche situation that they allow players to come up with clever solutions. The depth these items bring is built upon the idea that they are only useful in a very small number of scenario. When the party has a decent number of these niche items, working out when a given item is useful and when it isn’t requires a lot of thought.
If you must give widely applicable, powerful items then you have a few options. The first is to make the item give a strict boost in power to something the character already does (e.g. your smite does an extra 1d8). These items are boring, but they help the player feel more powerful and are almost guaranteed not to restrict player choice.
The second option is to ensure that the item is very limited use. Instead of the Broom of Flying we could have given Wings of Flying, which would’ve restricted the flight to once per 12 hours. By forcing the item to have very limited uses, the depth comes from the choice so of when to use it, rather than how it’s used.
The third (and far less common) option is to give the item a drawback. The depth in this case comes from weighing up if the cost is worth the payoff. This approach is risky, as if the drawback is too weak then it may as well not exist, and if the drawback is too strong then the item won’t be used. There is however, the interesting side effect that a drawback may become a benefit in certain niche scenarios; when a player finds a situation like this and exploits it, it’s a huge win for them.
Hopefully this gives you some ideas for how to distribute magic items in your next campaign. The complexity versus depth concept can be applied in lots of other scenarios too, so go out there and experiment!