How Many Magic Items Should You Give Your Players at the Beginning of a New Campaign?

Ahh, magic items. One of my favorite things to have as a player and one of my biggest headaches as a GM.

Like a lot of people, I usually do not start my new campaigns at level one. Don't get me wrong, for folks new to the game, I think it is fantastic! The first few levels are an excellent introduction to a lot of the core mechanics of 5e but my players have been playing for a long time. So I usually start off at level three. That is when most of the classes begin to differentiate themselves and when you can really start to customize a character. One of the things that my players always ask, without fail, during session zero is "Lorelock, how many magic items do we get?"

It is a kind of tough question to answer, the DMG does have a section on rarity and outlines what level characters should be before they get a certain rarity of item, but that does not really answer the question posed.

So, if we are starting at level X how many magic items should I give my players?

Here is my quick and dirty method for figuring this out. Some of it is based on the rarity table in the DMG, some of it is based on experience and feedback from many a campaign, and some of it is probably based on other people's posts about the topic that I have read. I wish I could give proper credit but I can barely remember how old I am let alone the author of a Reddit post I read almost a decade ago. If you are reading this and a part of it seems like a post you wrote in 2015 or so, please let me know.

A little bit about the below table.

Type is broken into two categories; Consumable and Non-Consumable. Consumables are any items like potions and scrolls that have a set number of uses. Non-Consumables are any item that does not have a set number of uses like a Bag of Holding or +1 Greatsword.

I assume that there are 4 sessions per level and that, in each session, a character will consume one consumable item. This helps to prevent bloat with health potions and spell scrolls.

Items by Starting Level

Level	Consumable	Non-Consumable
1	0	0
2	1 Common	0
3	1 Common	0
4	2 Common	1 Uncommon
5	2 Common	1 Uncommon
6	1 Uncommon, 2 Common	1 Uncommon
7	1 Uncommon, 2 Common	2 Uncommon
8	1 Uncommon, 2 Common	2 Uncommon
9	1 Uncommon, 3 Common	2 Uncommon
10	1 Uncommon, 3 Common	2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
11	1 Rare, 1 Uncommon, 3 Common	2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
12	1 Rare, 1 Uncommon, 3 Common	2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
13	1 Rare, 1 Uncommon, 3 Common	2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
14	1 Rare, 2 Uncommon, 4 Common	2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
15	1 Rare, 2 Uncommon, 4 Common	2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
16	1 Very Rare, 2 Uncommon, 4 Common	1 Very Rare, 2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
17	1 Very Rare, 2 Uncommon, 4 Common	1 Very Rare, 2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
18	1 Very Rare, 2 Uncommon, 4 Common	1 Very Rare, 2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
19	1 Very Rare, 2 Uncommon, 4 Common	1 Legendary, 1 Very Rare, 2 Rare, 2 Uncommon
20	1 Legendary, 1 Very Rare, 2 Uncommon, 5 Common	1 Legendary, 1 Very Rare, 2 Rare, 2 Uncommon

This is, by no means a perfect system but I have found that it is a good baseline for starting beyond level 1.

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