Once you’ve graduated from your @Training Wheels, you are able to create your own homebrew loot and distribute it on quests.

Item Approval Process

When you plan to give out items, you need to post them in #loot-discussion for other DMs to take a look. When you do, please make a thread for your quest items and ping the @Item Check role. This step is intended to give visibility of items to the staff if they have any balance or flavor concerns, or maybe they'll catch an unintended loophole in your wording.

Once the items are posted, give about a day or two for people to take a look at them, and please be willing to discuss and edit. Unlike quests (for training DMs), no official stamp or approval is needed - just use your best judgment. If no other discussions are happening once that period is up, then feel free to give them out!

As a DM, you yourself are not required to comment on other peoples’ items, only if you spot something worth discussing. Also, please be respectful and mindful to the DM - the goal here is to catch problems, not police content.

Other Rewards

Please be aware that non-item rewards, such as boons (or curses) should still be treated as items for the purposes of this page.

Timing Deadlines

In general, if you are giving out homebrew loot you must have your thread created, and items posted, within 1 week of your #xp-and-loot posting. Note that you just need the items posted - this should give you flexibility if you are having ongoing discussions about the items.

For particularly long and/or significant quests, you may take 2 weeks instead. If you do, say so clearly when you create your approval thread. Please use your best judgment on this, as we are doing our best to be flexible but would really like not to see this abused.

In either case, if you reach the deadline and haven't finished your items, just give out RAW loot or pay out the item budget in gold value instead.

Item Guidelines

For a full list of guidelines and in-depth explanations, please read Loot Guidelines. While these guidelines are not strictly mandated, we encourage all DMs to observe them and please stick to them whenever possible.

If you aren’t sure where to start balancing your items, here are a few simple standards you can observe:

• Reflavoring an existing RAW item or making minor tweaks (such as swapping a spell or damage type) is generally always a safe way to create an item of equal power level.
• Items that are powerful for their rarity bracket should generally require attunement, unless they are consumable or limited in use.
• Any item that has a stacking effect (e.g. +1 to all attack rolls) should require either attunement, or some specific way to invoke the effect. Otherwise, it becomes a persistent bonus that can quickly snowball out of control if and when that character receives similar items from other DMs.
• Items that offer damage are weaker than items that offer stronger spell or spell-like effects. For example, a +1 spell DC item requires attunement, while a +1 weapon does not.
  • This is because overtuned damage output can be more easily corrected with increased monster health, but saves usually can’t be inflated the same way.