Dungeons & Dragons 5e: Best Magic Items for Bards. Bards in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition need magical items that'll complement their inherent abilities, which means more than just a new lute. For finding magic I use the 'selling magic items' table (DMG) but in reverse. So instead of finding someone to buy an item at X price:actual price, they find someone selling an item at Xprice:Oprice. (Should they manage to get a cheap legendary item i throw a curse on it.).

Over in Google Plusville, +Levi Kornelsenmentioned the absence of a magic item economy in 5e. This is a core design assumption on WotC’s part, and they haven’t been shy about it. In most settings I agree with this choice, but in his post he’s specifically talking about Eberron. That setting gets to be the exception, because it internalizes the magic item economy of 3.x and renders it into industrial fantasy – both low-end magic items (tools to make life easier) and large-scale magic items (lightning rail!) are essential to Eberron’s feel. Large-scale items are created at the speed and inflationary whims of Plot, but low-end stuff needs support, and the definition of “low-end” scales by level. The ideas I’m presenting here are only for people who want to introduce that approach to money and the economy.
Levi was good enough to present five basic actions that he felt were critical acceptance criteria to anything that wanted to call itself a magic item economy.

Buying magic items from an NPC
Selling magic items to an NPC

This one is already covered in the DMG, though I’ll review its handling of the task

Commissioning an item for an NPC to make – that is, outsourcing the Crafting action
Disenchanting a magic item (and presumably getting something that has a use)
Salvaging something useful from abandoned workshops

Buying

In 3.x and 4e, the game’s default assumption is that you can turn an appropriately large pile of cash into the magic item you want; in this way you might look at your choices on magic items as part of your “build.” Oh, sure, you still get magic items other than your optimal choices from adventures, and maybe some of those are things you want to use. Likewise, not all DMs support a magic item market. I was usually pretty uncomfortable with it, and tried to present it as something more than a straightforward transaction.

3.x and 4e did not – in any particular rule or guideline that I recall, anyway – deal with the merchant’s profit margin. Maybe the DM includes one, and maybe the DM assumes that the list price in the DMG (3.x) or PH (4e) is intended to be the merchant’s asking price. In 3.x, there’s still room for the list price to include a profit margin, because that’s how the magic item crafting rules work. In 4e, not so much: it costs exactly as much money to make something as the list price, plus time.

For 5e, the “list price” is explicitly a function of rarity, which is to say power level. The treasure tables are arranged so that rarity also signifies “number of these that exist in the world,” but a one-off item that has not yet been duplicated is not intrinsically legendary or unique in a rules-terminology sense. Since economies don’t make sense if production cost equals purchase cost, I’ve got to build in a surcharge. Magic items of uncommon rarity and higher are “big-ticket” in the overall economy we see in the PH and DMG – luxury goods by any definition of the word. Conveniently, it’s easy to figure out 10%, 20%, 50%, 100%, and 150% surcharges on 500, 5k, 50k, and 500k prices.

Digression: On p. 135, the DMG presents cost ranges that are a little complicated to resolve against the fixed numbers presented in other rules, and suggests that a merchant might require a service from the PCs as part of the transaction. The PCs of my 4e game remember with some chagrin the magic item they received in exchange for cash and a service – the service turned out to be a quest that took them twenty-something sessions to complete, and the PC who received the item had to quit the game to move to Canada within two sessions of receiving the item (they got the item up-front, and were bound by contract to the quest).

I’d like to turn this into a full Downtime Action, in the same way that Crafting and Selling magic items are Downtime Actions. This needs some guidance to the DM as to what kind of surcharge would be appropriate, and maybe some way for the player to influence the outcome too. Dungeon World and Apocalypse World influence my thinking here, as I find myself phrasing this as a PBTA-style move.

When you spend some time searching a marketplace for a particular magic item, you can find a source for it, but they almost never have or admit to having it on hand. Choose two:

Your source gets it to you fast (1d10 hours for common, days for uncommon or rare, weeks for very rare or legendary)
Your source gets it to you cheap (default surcharge of 50%)
Your source gets you exactly the thing you want, with no chance of flaws or discovering that it’s actually a cursed version of the item

If your source gets it to you slowly, add 2d10 to your roll. If you source is expensive, the default surcharge is 100%. If your source is not so reliable, things get… interesting. I have all kinds of minor-to-major drawbacks I am happy to suggest, from taking an extra d12 damage whenever you take damage of a particular type to suffering disadvantage on all rolls with (skill) to… well, you can read the Scroll Mishap and Potion Miscibility tables on p. 140 just as well as I can. I’ve never liked silly or humiliating drawbacks; I think thorny tradeoffs are a lot more compelling (and I can get all the humiliation I need some time that I’m not playing a game of heroic adventure).

I realize that most PBTA moves would have gone something more like “10+, choose two; 7-9, choose 1; 6-, screw you and the horse you traded for this cursed item.” 5e downtime actions aren’t usually dice-driven, unless they’re d100-based, and I felt that this was a hard enough choice as-is. The thing that probably makes a lot of players uncomfortable here is leaving it entirely up to the DM whether “unreliable” means “drawback” or “outright cursed,” but Dungeon World gets away with that kind of trust for the GM, so let’s not assume that D&D DMs are less trustworthy.

The other complicated thing here, the part I’m not sure how to resolve, is at what point the PC pays various portions of the price, and is there room for identifying the item and renegotiating the deal if you’re not happy with a flawed item? Payment should probably be half up front, half on delivery. No refunds, and the seller had better have some serious goons backing him up, or skip town after basically every sale. If they can enforce the “no refunds” thing, then okay.
Does the seller allow the PC to cast identify (or have someone else do it)? For a full-scale deconstruction of fantasy economics and the identify spell, Multiplexer on Critical Hits is doing some astoundingly creative work – even if what she’s writing isn’t the feel you want in your campaign, it’s worth a read. Anyway, my concern is that identify unravels the interesting tradeoffs of the whole thing. On the other hand, it only protects you from cursed items; if the item you’ve purchased has an odd drawback, you’ve still paid half up front, so you either pay the rest of it to get something that is probably still okay, if imperfect – or you recognize a sunk-cost fallacy for what it is. Maybe you start over with different priorities, and maybe you don’t.
Finally, the player-side predictability of getting exactly what you want in exchange for either more time or more money might not be ideal for some games. It does take mystery out of the process, though for Eberron that’s working-as-intended. Still, if that’s a dealbreaker for you, add a fourth choice to the list above, but still only let the player pick two: Your source gets it for you without breaking any laws or pissing anyone off. Congratulations, now you have some thorny choices (and maybe crafting it yourself starts to sound a lot better).

Commissioning

When you arrange the commissioning of a particular magic item, you can find someone with the ability to make it, as long as the Minimum Level to craft the item (DMG, p. 129) isn’t more than two levels higher than your character level. Choose two:

Your source has the means to craft it faster than 25 gp per day (default 100 gp per day).

Not that it’s particularly important how they’re accomplishing this, but in Eberron it’s completely plausible that a magic item, location, or NPC-class fea

Dmg Buying Magic Items 5e