Starting a high magic campaign and need some advice.

[Spacehamster]

We are a couple of friends that after a quite long break are going to start playing again, setting is a sand box type game, probably 40% exploration, 50% dungeon crawl and 10% social/city play set in a high magic setting. We will be starting at level 8 and will take turns as DM and I will be starting it off.

But my question is what magic items would be fitting to start with at 8? 1 rare and 1 common? Also we will be using point buy, scrapping variant human and give everyone a free feat. Will also make my character to have him ready for my turn as player he will be a wood elf orphan with elven accuracy as free feat, ability scores: 8/18/14/10/16/8 and his 8 levels are 6 champion 2 rogue(assassin when hitting 3) his feats: alert and sharpshooter from 4 and 6 fighter.

Expertise in perception and stealth. Additional question is what magical items to take if going by 1 rare and 1 common? Magical longbow and an item enhancing stealth comes to mind?

[LeonBH]

Among the magic items, Helm of Teleportation is the top choice. It lets you cast a 7th level spell thrice a day, and serves as an instant escape button or chase button.

[Blacky the Blackball]

According to my homebrewed WBL table (which is a reasonable match for the guidelines in the DMG and Xanathars) an 8th level character is likely to have around 23,775gp worth of items and wealth.

If you care how I arrived at that number, check out the tl;dr below...

The way I worked that table out is by combining 4e-style Treasure Parcels with Milestone Experience (the idea being that you get treasure in parcels - although the DM can obfuscate that for realism - and when the party has received all their treasure parcels for the level that's the milestone that triggers going up a level). I decided what would be in each parcel by firstly taking the metric of the guidelines for how high level a party should be when they start finding items of a given rarity on p135 of the DMG. For example, that table says that you can find your first uncommon item at 1st level; so to make that possible (assuming you find an uncommon item and nothing else) the sum of the parcels for a single first level character must total 500gp. Similarly, that same table says you should find your first Rare item at around level 5 - so the sum of the parcels for a single fifth level character must total 5,000gp. And so on for Very Rare and Legendary.

Sticking those fixed points on a graph in Excel and drawing a curve through them gave a value for the sum of the parcels (per character) for every level from 1st to 20th. I then went through the long task of creating (by hand) three treasure parcels for each of six characters for each of the twenty levels. Assuming a 4-character party, the parcels mean that the party will always find its first item of a given rarity at the appropriate level and the parcels for the rest of the party will contain an equivalent value per player in lower rarity items and money.

Comparing my numbers with the random treasure tables was tricky, since the tables are so random, but on average they give a comparable amount of treasure. Similarly, now that Xanathars is out (it wasn't when I created my tables) and has its own guidelines for treasure I've been able to compare with that too. In total, by 20th level, my parcels have given out a roughly equivalent amount of treasure to what Xanathars says the average should be (in fact they give out slightly less); but the distribution is a bit different - my parcels give out a higher number of weaker items and a smaller number of more powerful ones whereas Xanathars is the other way around.

As for the Wealth By Level numbers; since I had tied gaining levels directly to the acquisition of treasure parcels, I knew exactly how much treasure a character would have acquired by the time they reach a given level. Clearly some of that would be lost (trading unwanted items for more suitable ones at a loss; using up consumable items; spending money on other things) so I took a simple figure of 25% as the amount they would have lost/spent, and assumed that a character would still have the other 75%. In the case of an 8th level character, they would have acquired a total of 31,700gp worth of treasure by level eight, so can be assumed to have 23,775gp worth of treasure left after losses, trading, and other expenses.