Welcome to our series on homebrewing! In these articles, we’ll cover off worldbuilding, making items, designing stories, and developing spells, characters, and everything else you could possibly want to create yourself.

Homebrewing is both challenging and rewarding, and there are always a number of factors you’ll want to account for.

How do I homebrew an item for 5E?

Whether you’re creating a campaign from scratch or building on an official adventure, creating items can be one of the funnest parts.

You might want to reward an evil fighter with a dark, screaming sword – or tempt the wizard into a trap in the hopes of a tome that grants him additional power.

But creating an item is more than just throwing some ideas down. You need to think about:

• Damage and stat increases
• The action economy, if it allows unique actions
• Interactions with other items and abilities
• Whether it overrides other character abilities
• Attunement vs Non-Attunement
• Rarity (it’s only vital if you’re producing a guide you’ll share with others, but you still need to know if it’s an artifact or not, and rarity can help you decide price if your players decide to sell the item)

Damage and stat increases

One of the most common features to tack onto an item is making a weapon with extra damage.

+1, +2, and +3 weapons are core to the gameplay in 5E. Players love upgrading their attacks – but if you’re homebrewing something, you want to give them a little bit more. Maybe splash on some additional fire damage or a force impact.

But you need to be aware of what effects that has. Giving an extra 2d4 fire damage on a dagger might seem innocuous, but you’ve also got to account for characters getting critical hits and doubling the number of dice each turn, or making as many as 5 or 6 times with the same weapon using features like Action Surge.

In some cases it may be better to give flat increases to damage, like a +4 bonus, as that avoids the doubling involved in criticals. It completely depends on what level of power you’re looking to give your weapon.

For comparison, always look at other weapons of the same rarity to see what level of damage they do.

The same applies to stat increases. Too much AC at lower levels can render your tanks unstoppable, while giving boosts to an Ability Score can be a gamechanger. Most items that offer +2 to an Ability are artifacts!

Action economy

Unless you’ve spent a lot of time playing around with homebrew, you might not have heard of the term action economy.

Action economy refers to how turns are broken down in combat. Most characters will get 2-3 attacks of some sort, a bonus action, and a reaction. What these are changes from class to class, but it generally looks similar overall.

The problem comes when homebrew tampers with the number of actions of any type that the players get. Giving an extra reaction might seem fine, but once you give it to a player with Sentinel or Mage Slayer, you’re giving them an extra attack per turn, which can significantly put the battle in their favour.

Likewise, you don’t want items that slow characters down, for the most part. It might be a cool idea to give a powerful sword that stops characters using bonus actions, but if they decide to use it, it’ll mean their turn ends up being faster and they spend less time playing, which can make them unhappy.

Interactions with other Items and abilities

This has been touched on in other sections, but items don’t exist by themselves, and you need to remember that. If a character picks up an item that gives them +2 to Wisdom, and then you give them another item that adds +2 to Wisdom, you’ve dramatically empowered them, not only unbalancing your game, but depowering other players by comparison.

That’s a fairly obvious example, but more subtle ones exist too. Like in the case of the dagger with an extra 2d4, players with extra attacks or Action Surge might completely break an item that’s completely balanced for one attack.

You might take pity on a Warlock with few spell slots and give the party an item that provides an extra spell slot at level 5 – and then realise your mistake when they give it to the Sorcerer who turns that into piles of Sorcery Points.

It’s hard to account for every ability in the game or every item in play, and it’s likely that you’ll run into some broken combinations. Even the core game isn’t perfect. But you should try and be aware of common interactions, like:

• Action Surge
• Extra Attack
• Sorcery Points
• Resistances
• AC Stacking
• Feats

Overriding player abilities

There’s more than balance at play. You need to pay attention to what abilities players have and what roles they cherish.

Say you have a party of a wizard, a rogue, and a fighter. The wizard deals with intelligence checks and magic, the rogue deals with traps and locked doors, and the fighter deals, with, well, fighting.

You might want to give them an item that helps unlock doors – a magic key, for example, that uses intelligence to make checks. It’s fairly balanced, by itself – but suddenly you’ve taken a lot of the rogue’s role and given it to the wizard. The wizard gets to do more, but the rogue won’t be having as much fun.

The same applies with other character abilities. If you replicate things like the barbarian’s rage, or monk’s ability to run on water, you might be treading on player’s toes.

Pay attention to whether your item “steals” from existing classes and decide whether it’s fair to do so.

Attunement vs Non-Attunement

This one’s a little easier. Magic items in the books are either “requires attunement” or not – but what divides the two?

It can be a little vague in places, particularly where items are designed for specific classes, but here’s a good rule of thumb:

Attunement items give passive bonuses to characters, like advantage on checks, or stat increases.

Non-Attunement items only work on activation, without any passive bonuses at all.

Rarity

Rarity is a little tricky, because there’s no clear line, particularly when you’re introducing unusual effects in your items.

The best way to decide on rarity is to look at other items of the same rarity as you plan and check:

• How many features the item has. More features = higher rarity.
• How much damage the item does. Higher damage = higher rarity.

Get started

This is, of course, only a rough guide to what you need to consider when homebrewing an item. There are lots of opportunities and ways to benefit your characters.

Play around with limitations, like weapons that only grant bonuses against certain enemy types, or items that grant advantage under certain conditions.

Offer up unusual concepts that don’t just provide buffs, but different ways to play – like walking through walls, or hovering briefly when they jump.

Just make sure to check against other items and test your homebrew as much as possible – your players will love you for it.