Or magic items to encourage shenanigans, looking at you Alchemy Jug
You never know what players will do with two gallons of mayonnaise per day until they have it.
Sometimes you just need to apply mayo to the barbarian so they have a crispy crust when seared.
Other times your want to fill someone’s desk drawers.
Giving your monsters magic items so the game is in a contant powercreep snowball freefall
Elden Ring
Welcome to nethack, where even scrolls of genocide (removes entire monster classes upon reading) are considered to be not overpowered.
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Treantmonk’s Guide to Wizards and part 2 is a good guide for how to play wizards that can be ridiculously OP without directly doing much (if any) damage.
As a GM this has always irritated me about other GM’s complaining their players are too powerful. My dude, you’re literally omnipotent. Your players cannot be too powerful, because you are all-powerful. Just throw bigger baddies at them. You only have to worry if one player starts getting way more powerful than the rest of the party. Then you either have to make sure everyone is cool with that asymmetrical dynamic or buff everyone else up to their level. But a party cannot be too powerful, it’s just a lack of GM creativity. /rant
Edit: Dear GMs, downvoting this won’t make it less true. Relax your grip on the narrative and you’ll be surprised how much more fun everyone has.
I’m working on a Tome of Forbidden Spells just to see what my players will do with weird magic
I was thinking more jokey. Not necessarily creepy, just weird. My plan was to make rules for all the weird meme spells like Greater Baja Blast
For me, balance issues are never the party vs. the monsters. I can tweak the monsters to make the encounters more challenging. Players want to feel powerful! Give them the tools over time to build the character they want to build.
It’s power disparity within the group that has always been the biggest problem. If you have players that are very knowledgeable about the game and know how to build optimally, other players may feel like their character isn’t good at anything because the more purposefully built characters will seem to be able to do so much more.
I usually have to balance that with custom feats or items to even things out. Disallowing multiclassing in 5e in my new campaign also helped. Too much front loading that encourage dips for the sake of dipping.
Wow, all this wonderful discussion off a silly meme, it warms my heart. Happy gaming everyone, just remember as long as everyone is having fun (GMs too) you’re doing it right.
The coolest magical items don’t “break the scaling” anyway, because they do cool weird stuff, rather than just giving you spells or numbers.
My players need golf bags and caddies for all the shit they have. I love handing stuff out. It’s fun.
