Modifying Magic to Suit Your Needs

When I began my current campaign, I was planning things out and was reminded of an aspect of the game that doesn't fit my personal tastes well. It will come as no surprise that I like magic in my game, but it was always so hard to equip NPCs with interesting magic. They might have a +1 weapon or something, but then their level of suitable gear for their level, and they can't have any more. Worse, at higher levels, like the mid-teens, it's impossible for them to carry around something really cool, like a staff of power. They can never "afford" it.*

This makes them less interesting opponents, and it makes the PCs' treasure list at the end of the adventure somewhat boring as well. Who needs a pile of +1 swords?

Further, I've never been quite happy with the dichotomy between the prices of magic items and mundane things. In my campaign, for example, you can get a masterwork dire weapon ("dire" is a template from Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed). While you need to take a special feat to use it, it's better in many respects than a +1 magic weapon while costing less.

So I decided to tweak the system a bit. My solution isn't for everyone, of course. I'm telling you about it to show you how flexible the system can be, not so that you'll necessarily adopt my fix.

First, I cut magic item prices in half across the board. That means a simple potion of cure light wounds (a common commodity in my campaign city of Ptolus) costs only 25 gp. This puts such a potion within the reach of the middle class of the city, changing the way people look at life, death, and injury (on the flip side, I've done away with raise dead in the game, so the only way to bring someone back to life is the 7th-level resurrection -- which, in fact, I've replaced with the Arcana Unearthed spell raise the dead). But I digress...

Second, I took a look at the charts in the DMG showing the appropriate amount of treasure for both PCs and NPCs. By cutting magic item prices in half, I accomplished what I wanted to do at the mid and high levels, but I didn't want low-level characters walking around with a lot of magic. In fact, what I really wanted was the opposite. Low level PCs and NPCs might have some potions or scrolls, or perhaps other limited-use items, but that's it. This required a further tweak.
So I altered the NPC gear chart (found on page 58 of the DMG, page 127 for v.3.5), changing the first five levels to look like this:

Then I use the table as-is for levels 6+. But (making things even more complicated), I institute the rule of thumb that for the first five levels, permanent items (not potions, scrolls, wands, or other finite items) count double as far as NPC gear goes. Effectively, this puts those items back to their original value. So, my NPCs aren't going to show up with magic weapons unless they're at least 4th level. This could conceivably cause a strange "bump" at 6th level, making it feel as though suddenly NPC equipment doubles. To avoid this feeling, I give NPCs of levels 1 to 5 only limited-use items most of the time. This smooths out the whole thing. It also means that at 6th level, with 5,600 gp and prices halved, an NPC with a permanent-use magic weapon could easily have a +1 flaming sword rather than just a +1 sword. Thus, we go right into the interesting stuff.

In feel, the result is not a "low-magic" game at low levels, but the PCs don't often find themselves with a lot of redundant items (multiple rings of protection, for example). And at mid and high levels, there's more opportunity for me to introduce interesting items as treasure.

Third, and trickiest of all, I decided that I would use almost no standard magic items from the DMG other than the utter basics: potions, scrolls, wands, and magic weapons and armor. They exist in the world (well established in my previous Ptolus campaigns), but I just don't equip any NPCs with them. This is simply an attempt to keep magic and treasure interesting.

Sometimes, the items I introduce are variations on standard items, but with a new wrinkle: perhaps an extra power, perhaps a drawback or a limitation. For example, the PCs found what they thought was a cloak of resistance +1, a very common magic item. But in fact it also had the special property of being able to add +5 to a single save, and then lose all power for 24 hours. This made it more powerful, but -- more importantly -- it made the item more interesting. Likewise, they have a ring of protection +1, but it can't be worn by a spellcaster, or it screws up her spells.

Weird stuff like that is fun because it makes the players think of interesting uses for things. For example, they were making plans for using the ring as a means of capturing and subduing a wizard -- they just couldn't figure out a sure-fire way to make her keep the ring on, however.

This approach to magic items means more work for me, but that's okay, because making up new items is fun. And I can always fall back on stuff from the Complete Book of Eldritch Might, for example. The real reason I do it, though, is the reward I get in seeing the players deal with more interesting treasure than the standard set of +1 items and the same old items they've all seen in their games for decades.

Like so many things involving DMing, it's a lot of work, but ultimately worth it all.

* This of course, isn't entirely true. The standard way of dealing with the problem is to under-equip a number of encounters so that you can then over-equip one. This gets tricky, however, because you can over-equip one to the degree that the PCs can't beat the encounter, and then end up with only the treasure they can glean from the under-equipped foes they've already met. Plus, it can get monotonous designing encounter sets the same way each time.