Pricing Magic Items - Part 7
Header Art: Dungeon Master’s Guide by Wizards of the Coast
For the final spreadsheet, check out Part 8.
We have reached the end of this series! I won’t bore you with my yammering, but if you are curious, I go over a few last-minute changes I made below. For those who might be new, if you click the button below, you’ll be able to download an Excel file that has the items listed out, along with the item’s abilities worked out in the spreadsheet. If you hate the prices I’ve put in there, you can easily adjust almost all of the major numbers in a separate tab, allowing you to find the perfect totals for your table. Even if you don’t sell magic items, this is still very handy as it can easily show you the power differences between each item, giving you an idea of how strong something is compared to the rest of the magic items.
Sentient weapons and artifacts were not priced.
Here are the previous posts in case you want to reference them, some of the information may be outdated as I adjusted things as I worked.
Part 1 / Item Rarity, Restoring HP with a Consumable, Damage with Consumable (no save), Damage with Consumable (with save), Magic Weapons
Part 2 / Spell Levels & Spell Scrolls, Conditions with a Save
Part 3 / Permanent Items, Magical Enhancements, Armor Class
Part 4 / Items with Semi-Permanent Damage, Permanent Damage, Increase Ability Scores
Part 5 / Pricing out the “A” items in the Dungeon Master’s Guide
Part 6 / Pricing of the first 100 items
Part 7 / Pricing all of Dungeon Master’s Guide and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
Part 8 / Pricing all of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, the most up-to-date sheet
What’s New
Because one can never be prepared for everything, there were a few new things I hadn’t priced out before I started this journey.
Mithral
I didn’t forget about it, but I did forget to price it out. So… I guess, I did forget it?
Anyway, all this does is remove the Strength requirement on armor and doesn’t impose disadvantage on Stealth - which is useful for mithral plate armor, but if you are wearing mithral plate armor, you probably aren’t going to be that good at stealthing anyways (except, I guess, Dex based fighters). With that in mind, I set the price for Mithral at 1,000 gp plus the armor cost, you’d then multiply it by the rarity and then attunement multipliers. For plate, you are looking at a 4,125 gp - and your armor isn’t even magical at that price… unless it is. Mithral armor is considered a magic item (or at least shows up in that area of the book), but it doesn’t state mithral (the material) is magical so, that’s up to the DM.
Shared Charges Cost
There were quite a few items that offered a shared pool of charges that a variety of spells could use. Originally, I was just going to pick the highest level spell and how many times you could cast it to determine the price of the item, and while I still did that, I kept thinking about it. Those items didn’t just offer a powerful spell to be used a few times, but rather gives some versatility to the caster. With that in mind, I decided the easiest way to add in an extra charge for the versatility was to add up all of the spell levels and then multiply that by the base spell cost (30 gp in this case).
So this means that if an offers a 6th-level spell, and x3 2nd-level spells, then you would base the cost of the item on casting the 6th-level spell however many times you can with a fully charged weapon, and then add all of the spell levels together (in this case: 12 spell levels) and then multiply it by the base (30 gp x 12 = 360 gp). It’s not a huge increase in cost, but it does help account for the versatility an item gives you.
Another, actual example, is the staff of power. We do the base cost off of casting globe of invulnerability three times with charges each day, plus a variety of other bonuses for a total of 39,420 gp. By adding in the cumulative spell levels (36), we increase the cost of the staff to 42,660 gp. It isn’t a huge boost to the cost but does help account for some power you get in versatility.
Spell Levels & Concentration
The main driving force of an item’s cost is based on what power the item has compared to spell levels. There isn’t a one-to-one spell for every magic item, but most of them are fairly close or you wiggle about it so its close enough. A big thing, though, is that the items allow you to ignore concentration on certain effects, like flying, spider climbing, enhanced abilities, and more. With that said, I decided that I’d simply increase the comparable spell level by 1 to account for the fact you don’t have to concentrate on the spell. This means that winged boots isn’t based off a 3rd-level fly spell (for a total of 4,500 gp), but rather a 4th-level fly spell (for a total of 6,750 gp).
In addition, I also added in up to 10th-level spell for any effects that outstrip a 9th-level spell, which is probably going to be reserved for legendary or artifact grade items. I didn’t use it in the supplied spreadsheet, but it is available for those who have stronger items, think that my idea of certain power levels of items is wrong, or are trying to price out an artifact or other powerful item I hadn’t covered in this.
Conclusion
I hope that this spreadsheet is helpful for you, even if you plan on never selling magic items. Just having a numerical cost associated by the item’s strength is just very helpful to quickly gauge whether you should be giving a staff of power to your players at Lv3. If you see anything that just looks wrong, like maybe an item has the wrong associated power level, please let me know! If you think my prices are too low, then feel free to share what you change in the backend of the spreadsheet! Everything is laid out there not to confuse you, but to help you adjust everything to your preferred tastes.
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