Chapter Seven
For the Adventurers Who Have Everything: Upgrades
Let’s say your party has reached the higher levels, into the low double digits, and they’re fairly well-armed. Nearly every attunement slot the characters have is filled by an item that has been central to their battle strategies, and a few of them even have replacements they swap in for particular situations (e.g. Slippers of Spider Climbing for missions when stealth is paramount and fighting needs to be avoided at all costs). Their rewards are increasing just as they don’t need to buy anything, even the shiny magic items on sale at the annual Waterdeep Wizard’s Flea Market. Even items that offer small but real improvements aren’t enough to shake the coins loose from their pouches, and the only things they would be interested in are either well beyond their resources or not for sale at any price.
Enter upgrades.
The upgrade concept is simple: pay a spellcaster to make a current item more powerful. The upgrade should bump the item up one rarity level (common to uncommon, uncommon to rare, etc). The cost in gold should be equal to the difference between the current level and the upgraded level of the item. So, for example, if an uncommon item costs 2,500 gp and a rare costs 40,000 gp, the cost to upgrade an uncommon item would be 37,500 gp.
The time to incorporate the upgrade should also be the difference between the rarities. Thus, two hundred days to make a rare item minus twenty days to make an uncommon one means 180 days to upgrade from uncommon to rare. As with creating a magic item, this can be reduced if multiple casters work on the task.
(Note: An upgrade from rare to very rare would take about 5.5 years of 11th-level caster time. This is a difficult service to find, to say the least, and you would not be wrong to say it doesn’t exist, the same way it’s extremely rare that someone would make a very rare item just to sell it. Upgrading from very rare to legendary would take almost fifty years of 17th-level caster work, and just as legendary items are not made for sale, it’s not plausible to think someone would do such an upgrade either.)
Although you can decide to allow whatever type of upgrade you want, the easiest system is to limit characters to two types of upgrade:
+1 bonus (weapon, armor, and shield only, max +3)
Remove attunement requirement
These limitations are for game balance purposes. Weapons, armor, and shields are designed to have certain bonuses at certain rarities (accounting for other properties they may possess), which means adding +1 while boosting rarity by one degree works exactly as the system is designed. Removing an attunement requirement lets characters improve in a way many players enjoy (who doesn’t like swimming in magic items?) while leaving the items as designed, meaning you don’t have to gauge what type of added capability is fair to account for a jump in rarity.
It’s also quite reasonable to tell players that magic items are difficult to alter once made, meaning only the most straightforward upgrades are possible. +1s are as straightforward as it gets, and removing an attunement requirement doesn’t change the item’s function in any way, just how long it takes to start working and how well it works with other pieces of gear.
Dude, those are NOT upgrades of equivalent strength.
I agree. In truth, I imagine +1 upgrades will only be added to uncommon weapons that are particularly good for the user, such as a Rod of the Pact Keeper +1, or maybe a Trident of Fish Command for someone who’s roleplaying Aquaman. Even then, the character has to be loaded with cash and have zero interest in buying anything they can’t carry for this to make sense.
The desirable upgrade is the attunement break. Eventually, a character may have three very good attuned items and then find a fourth that’s very good or perfect for them. They can’t turn down this fourth item, but the first three carried them through everything. It’s a painful choice, but one which is enforced in order to maintain game balance.
That begs an obvious question: how does offering this type of upgrade not throw off game balance?
The financial resources required are no less considerable than when the party wants to buy a new item. It costs 37,500 gp to upgrade an item from uncommon to rare. As shown in the income tables above, a party can’t easily afford that until they’re taking down CR 11-16 monsters. In a party of five, any given person would have to complete five such missions or dungeon dives just to break attunement on a single piece of uncommon gear. Sure, people in a smaller party could do it more often, but each person in a smaller party can use the juice.
The character needs to part with the piece of gear for the time it takes to upgrade. How many magic items will a character want to hand over at one time, assuming there are enough spellcasters available to work on them all? Even if they have the money and the available spellcasters, is said adventurer going to take six months off while three different casters upgrade their three most important pieces of equipment, or run around with a +1 longsword and their battered old splint mail? Alternately, a team of casters could get the work done faster (as with custom work). You won’t find many of those, however, and they can only work on one thing at a time.
Because of 1 & 2, the weakest gear will usually have its attunement broken, not the strongest. If a character has a Staff of Power, a Sun Blade, a Ring of Free Action, and a Cloak of Protection, what’s the most likely thing the character will break attunement on? It can’t be the Staff, because that’s very rare. The Sun Blade and the ring are rare, thus it would cost over 500,000 gp and 1,800 days of caster work to upgrade each of them. The cloak is uncommon, reducing the cost and wait time considerably, and is really the only plausible candidate to have its attunement broken. Thus, the next time a nice piece of attuned gear comes along, the character will again have to choose which of the best things to keep, because only the cloak lacks its normal attunement requirement.
Removing attunement from items that normally have it makes a character stronger in relation to the weakest of the attunement items, not the strongest. To use the same example from #3: if a character has those four items, the ability to use them all doesn’t mean the character has access to a Staff of Power when they otherwise wouldn’t. If forced to pick three of those items, they would take the Staff of Power every time. It means they have extra access to a Cloak of Protection, for +1 AC and +1 to saving throws. Useful? Sure. Game-breaking? No.
Even if the unattuned uncommon item is especially useful (e.g. replace the cloak with Gauntlets of Ogre Strength), all that does is shift which item is the weakest. In this case, it would be an additional Ring of Free Action. Very good against some foes, pointless against most. The character would be a terror in some encounters, but even then it shouldn’t be game-breaking. If they’re the only person with that kind of power boost, then the party’s average power level isn’t dramatically higher. And, if everyone has four very good attunement items with one upgraded in this way, they’re high enough level for the enemies to be able to deal with them. (A party of four that each spent the money to upgrade one uncommon item to break attunement would have to be level 13 to afford it, even if they never spent much on anything else.)
If an item doesn’t have attunement, that means anyone can pick it up and use it right away—including the bad guys. This probably won’t happen much, but if you can get the item out of the character’s hands, it can be a fun twist on something that the PCs will initially perceive as purely beneficial.
The numbers might be fair, but nobody is going to wait six months in game for an upgrade. The campaign will be over.
If the campaign is moving at a good pace and it isn’t going to take six months in-game for everything to wrap up, then you’re right. There won’t be any upgrades to the PCs’ items unless the PCs can find a whole bunch of wizards and other casters willing to work on these tasks for them. That’s absolutely fine, and it’s up to you whether or not that happens.
However, you can allow casters to make upgraded items and have them ready for sale. These will probably be quite rare, since a lot of people might want the strength of an ogre but very few have lived long enough to both need and understand the usefulness of attunement-free items. There may well be a story behind it, even something simple like an adventurer asking a wizard to break the attunement on an item and never coming back for it. As you can imagine, that’s not likely to happen often (pretty much only if the adventurer dies before picking it up and no next of kin is around to come get it). But offering the occasional item that no longer requires attunement is a good way to get the interest of PCs who are already set and possibly introduce items they might not think about buying otherwise, even at a much lower cost.