What is your favorite items to receive or to give to your players?

[Zhepna]

Hi,

What is your favorites items to receive or to give to your players?

[Saintheart]

Compliments are always nice.

[Condé]

Really powerful items / artefacts way over your level, generally with a drawback. Then your players are afraid to use it, lose it or forgot about it for 10 levels then it is no longer that useful.

.. Or any item that is fuel to create some interesting story or player interaction.

[NerdHut]

I'm fond of unique items, in both directions. Classic items are great (Bag of Holding its a favorite for a reason), but getting something that stands out really feels good.

One of my favorites comes from the first year I was playing and my DM made a custom shield with me. I believe it was a +1 Animated Large Spiked Heavy Shield of Bashing. I named it Jeff.

One of the cool things about granting custom items as loot is that you can give weird combinations of effects at effectively half the price (since keeping it "costs" half as much as buying it). Or in some cases, you can combine things that normally aren't allowed, on DM fiat. Or you can give the 8 INT barbarian a set of glasses that let him make knowledge skill checks, with no added modifier.

[Eldan]

Feather Token: Tree. I get one whenever I can. If there's a problem you can't solve with a sudden tree (or several), you're not trying hard enough.

[Quertus]

Huh, I wonder if I can make a “top 10” list?

(Oh, this is the 3e forum. I’ve tried to fix my answers; if I missed something and they seem nonsensical, well, it’s because I was initially answering for general systems, not just 3e (although “d20” might have me covered…))

10) Convenience items

This is mostly extradimensional spaces, like Bag of Holding or Portable Hole. Not really “fun”, just enablers.

9) “Big deal” items

These are the items you can build a character around, like a Staff of the Magi, Spelljamming vessels, or that 2e throwing hammer.

8) Out of context items

Having a lightsaber in Star Wars, or a plasma rifle in WH40K is… ok… but having one in a fantasy world is just cool.

7) Creativity-boosting items

This is a catch-all category for things like a Ring of Prestidigitations, Decanter of infinite H2O, Cloak of Displacement where you can control where the image appears, or any other item that results in an increase in creativity in the game.

6) Famous items

This is the category for Excalibur or The Black Razor or the Valdus Crystal. Being the one to possess such a thing adds to a character’s cred.

5) Book of Infinite Spells

I just really love this one, k?

4) Chaos!

Wand Rod of Wonder? Deck of Many Things? Well of Many Worlds? Oh yeah! This is gonna be fun.

3) Trophy/Treasure items

This is very… character and game dependent, and normally lives around #7 or so, but *sometimes* that simple +1 sword or mundane broach is important because of who gave it to you / whose corpse you took it off of.

2) Unique items

A ring that gives its wearer a second head? A Wand that turns things upside down? A glove of infinite… small round things? Vestigial wings? A sentient ever-burning torch? 5 lbs of Dream? Yes, please.

1) PC-crafted items

I don’t mean Milo salt-grinding, I mean items whose components show thought and have history. An item that’s cool just from describing it, regardless of what it does (although its function should probably be similarly cool).

Senility willing, I’ll add examples of what I mean later.

EDIT; here’s kinda the bare minimum of what I’m talking about, as it involves the GM giving the party a single magical component, and the players making rather boring stock items therefrom.
So, suppose I took that mammoth horn, and carved it into a pair of Wands.

One Wand, I smeared with a paste made from 1000 hand-collected wasps and the blood and sweat of a dozen apprentice Wizards, and tipped with the adamantine arrowhead used to carve it. Will that fly for a Wand of Magic Missile? What if I did one step (the carving, the smearing, the tipping) on a battlefield where at least 1,000 lives were lost to arrows?

The second wand, I leave soaking in Dragon blood for a year and a day. I pull it out and set it on a dwarven hearth, and pull out a ruby, mined by my own hands during its bath, imbued with the spirit of a Fire Elemental. I break and powder the ruby over the wand, then grasp it, and thrust my hand and it into lava. Good for an Eternal Wand of Fireball? What if I add a core made from the heart of a sulfur elemental, and find an anthropomorphic bat Tainted Sorcerer, and use its intestines for the Dragon blood bath?

Then I powder all the scrap mammoth horn bits. I take the head of a mace, wielded by a Cleric of Saint Cuthbert for at least 10 levels, and melt it down, forging a ring from a bit of the metal. I soak the ring in a bath of anthropomorphic rhino Monk drool, imbued with the powdered mammoth horn. Good for a Ring of the Ram? What if I add runes carved by a dwarven smith?

[Metastachydium]

Compliments are always nice.

You are awesome!


Feather Token: Tree. I get one whenever I can. If there's a problem you can't solve with a sudden tree (or several), you're not trying hard enough.

Hell, yeah! #ThinkGreen!


Deck of Many Things? (…) Oh yeah! This is gonna be fun.

So long as you're not terribly attached to the PC you're holding it with…

[Buufreak]

The crab sub. Its just such a silly thing, but players somehow love it every time.

[Telonius]

To give: Trident of Fish Command, but it requires some backstory. Early on in the campaign, have them witness an argument between researchers arguing whether the current landmass was once underwater, one of them using a Trident found high on a mountaintop as an example. The other researcher says it could just as easily have been carried there by adventurers. (Two-fer on the joke, "Are you suggesting tridents migrate?")

Throughout the campaign, every time you have a treasure hoard in someplace that really shouldn't be underwater, you can put a random aquatic-themed item in there.

[Rynjin]

I really like the Ring of the Ram. Simple, effective at low levels, fun to play around with.

I'm also partial to making customized scaling magic items, similar to the Legacy Items (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/legacy-items/) from the later Pathfinder Adventure Paths.

They start off as fairly standard items, but "evolve" whenever players do something cool.

[Crichton]

It's not particularly exciting, but I like to give at least some of the party members a Heward's Handy Haversack. Then proceed to be (quasi)strict about encumbrance and weight. Not to the point of drudgery, but enough to encourage immersion for the players. Where are you carrying X? What all do you have in your pack right now? What actions will it take to stow/retrieve things? Not so much as to be tedious, just to get them thinking about what it's like for their characters to actually be living in that world moment to moment.

[Thurbane]

I'm a big fan of multipurpose/utility items, so things like Pouch of Survival, Rod of Surprises, Useful Buckler, Rod of Lordly Might etc.

Sadly, they are often priced too high, and by the time you can afford them, they aren't as useful. Still, MIC fixed this a little with a few items.

[KillianHawkeye]

One person in my gaming group absolutely LOVES the decanter of endless water, and will always find a way to integrate it into whatever our plans are if the party has one. :smallamused:

[loky1109]

Every adventurer needs to have rope.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

There are a few I really, really love.

This (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?177889-Brainstorm-for-Psionic-Tricks-Tactics-and-Combos-Handbook&p=23285432&viewfull=1#post23285432) is one.

This (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?634999-3-P-What-Weapon-Combos-Would-You-Consider-Truly-Legendary) is another.

I like using mix-and-match items that are fun combinations of other items' abilities where the abilities themselves are twisted by the combination just enough to make the item more than the sums of its parts.

Also, stacked weapon crystal abilities are always fun, depending on the exact combinations, of course.

[ElderDarren]

(For Context)
In the games I run, the DM-NPC is typically some type of crafter that they can leave with their wagon or whatnot while they go adventuring nearby.

My players love when they get quirky items that I've custom-tailored to them. A sorcerer in my game recently got a Spell-Arm (magic pistol) that allows him to cast Firebolt. He can already cast firebolt... but he loves that he can now "cast" it silently, and that its his.

Personally, the favorite item I ever rolled was a Ring of Telekinesis. Ended up dominating that characters build because the ability to Violent Thrust CLxBlades at my enemies was just... cool.