In the 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide, there are magic items that I think are the most obvious upgrades a player would want for their character. Often, the first weapon a martial character gets that isn't part of their starting equipment is a +1 weapon of some sort. The +1 offers a little boost to hit chance and damage, and also gives the player a weapon that can get through resistance to nonmagical weapon damage.
While officially, the stance of Wizards of the Coast is that you can run a D&D campaign with no magic items, I sort of take issue with that - if you face down Baphomet at the end of your campaign, and your Fighter is still just using a regular Halberd, they're not going to be able to do anything to him.
But spellcasters also had some items that were similar. The Wand of the War-Mage buffs spell attack rolls for any caster class while also allowing them to ignore partial cover. This is a decent, but perhaps not amazing bonus given how many casters instead use saving throws for their spells.
The stand-out, though, is Rod of the Pact Keeper. In addition to getting a free Warlock spell slot once a day, this boosts spell attacks (which are probably more important for a Warlock than most casters, to be honest) as well as the spell save DC.
In my Descent into Avernus game, given that it was in Adventurer's League, I got a +1 Rod of the Pact Keeper as soon as I hit level 5. By the end of that campaign, when we were all level 13, I had a spell save DC of 19. And if I had a +3 Rod, I could push my DC above 20 by level 9.
Spell save DCs get a bit funny when they're over 20. It's at that stage that a creature that doesn't have a positive to that saving throw bonus simply automatically fails.
As a player, this is a fantastic feeling. Knowing that your Synaptic Static will always do full damage and its secondary effect against any dumb monster is great. And I do think that in a lot of strategy games, creating scenarios that are deterministic is often a path to success.
Is it too powerful, though?
I think the game is built to withstand some of these imbalances. Consider the Tarrasque - it's designed to be the biggest, baddest monster in the Monster Manual, and while the two primary dragon gods have joined it at the CR 30 level (or rather, avatars of them - a god should probably be CR Infinity,) they're a good benchmark to look at.
The Tarrasque, unlike the Aspects out of Fizban (or the sort of "real body" from Tyranny of Dragons for Tiamat) might be a beast of legend, but it's actually mostly just a dumb animal. It has an Intelligence score of 3, which is about the level of a dog. (Weirdly, they put Crows and Owls both at an Int of 2 - a Crow should probably be significantly higher, though owls are, apparently, actually pretty dumb as far as birds go).
But the Tarrasque still winds up getting a +5 to its Intelligence saving throws, applying its enormous proficiency bonus (9) to that save. And I think the reason is to make sure that it can, at least sometimes, succeed against a foe's Int save - if it didn't have that, you'd be guaranteed at a failure with a DC of only 17.
Anyway, I'm way off topic.
The Rod of the Pact Keeper was a pretty huge bonus for Warlocks, giving them the only way to get a higher spell save DC outside of a Robe of the Archmagi (and the two can stack, which means that a Warlock could theoretically get a total of +5 to their DCs, allowing them to cap at 24).
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, though, made that ability to get a significant boost to your DCs easier for other classes.
Artificers got All-Purpose Tools. Clerics and Paladins got Amulets of the Devout. Bards got Rhythm-Maker's Drums, Sorcerers got Bloodwell Vials, Druids and Rangers got Moon Sickles (which work as both +X weapons as well as +X to spell attacks and save DCs,) and Wizards got Arcane Grimoires.
All of these come in +1, +2, and +3 varieties, and all of them raise save DCs along with spell attacks.
The only people left out of this were Monks.
Monks have sort of weird scaling with magic items. There are a couple items I think are unquestionably nice to have for a Monk - Bracers of Defense, for example - but a Monk A: doesn't wear armor and B: makes a significant proportion of their attacks without weapons.
Granted, I think there's an image of the Monk always attacking with their unarmed strikes that ignores the fact that they can, actually, get a pretty huge boost from wielding weapons. Those two primary attacks work just fine if you're using a weapon, and so having a +X Quarterstaff or something is a perfectly valid and effective use of your attack action. Even when your martial arts die catches up with the damage dice of those weapons, you can still get a big benefit from the magical properties they have.
My Adventurer's League Drunken Master Monk got a Sunblade from one of the adventures he ran. There are a lot of weird nuances to the way that that weapon works for him - it's technically a +2 Longsword, which is not a weapon monks get. But, the character is a Wood Elf, and thus is proficient in longswords. Also, the Sunblade explicitly says that characters who are proficient in shortswords are also proficient in the Sunblade. But, it's still not a monk weapon, and thus while I can make the two attacks with it, I can't make my martial arts attack. But then, with the Tasha's rules, at level 2 (and the Monk is level 12 at this point) I can choose a specific weapon that I'm proficient with and as long as it lacks the Special or Two-Handed property (and the Sunblade is just Versatile) I can make it a monk weapon. (The character was created during an earlier season of Adventurer's League, though, so I actually don't know if this is kosher.)
If we ignore the arcane rules of AL, ultimately this means that yes, my Drunken Master can wield this lightsaber and do all his cool monk stuff with it.
So, the Sun Blade's +2 bonus (not to mention its extra d8 versus undead targets) will still benefit me as a monk. But my unarmed strikes will never go beyond a +11 (at level 17) to hit and a +5 to damage (without somehow boosting my Dexterity beyond 20).
And, before Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, I would never be able to boost the save DC against my Ki abilities beyond 19 (at level 17, with 20 Wisdom and a PB of 6, you could get it to that).
Enter the Dragonhide Belt. Like all these prior items, this comes in +1, +2, and +3 varieties. It also lets you, once a day, recover a number of ki points equal to a roll of your martial arts die, which is some nice gravy on top.
Increasing your ki save DC is definitely useful - one of the biggest things a Monk brings to the table is Stunning Strike, and while a lot of higher-level monsters start having pretty massive Con modifiers, a successful stun can really reshape a battle.
I do wonder, though:
There are just a handful of things left out here: Eldritch Knights and Arcane Tricksters don't have an item they can use to increase their spell save DCs. That is, admittedly, a very narrow subset of playable characters.
But I was also looking in a post a few days ago about all the classes that have weapons they conjure or summon as a class feature. The Monk doesn't get to boost their unarmed strikes, and a Path of the Beast Barbarian never gets to boost their claws, bite, or tail. A Soulknife Rogue, while still very powerful, never gets to boost their Psychic Blades.
Now, I could imagine just saying that that's part of the balance of the classes. But the vast array of spell DC upgrades for nearly every spellcasting class (again, with the exception of EKs and ATs) makes me think this is less of a deliberate balancing choice and think that instead, it might be that there just truly is a gap in itemization.
Do we need to cover these edge cases? Perhaps it would be overkill. But on the other hand, this might undercut some subclasses (or even classes, like the Monk) that would otherwise thrive. I mean, I'll admit that I think a Soulknife is still probably going to be very good (and Rogues de-value those damage boosts on their weapons given that they make fewer attacks and so much of their damage is in Sneak Attack) but it does seem annoying to me that there's this one little issue with the way the subclass works.
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