```metadata
title: 'Rule Variant: Automatic Progression'
description: >-
  An alternate set of rules to let item bonuses automatically scale at certain
  levels for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, inspired by Pathfinder Second
  Edition's Automatic Bonus Progression rules.
tags: []
systems:
  - 5e
renderer: V3
theme: 5ePHB

```

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# Rule Variant: Automatic Progression
## The Rule
Magic items no longer give you an additional bonus to your AC, attack and damage rolls, or save DC. Instead, starting at 6th level, your weapon attacks count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage. Addititonally, choose one of the following boons to gain:
- ***Enhanced Attacks.*** You have a +1 bonus to your weapon attack and damage rolls.
- ***Enhanced Focus.*** You have a +1 bonus to your save DC and spell attack rolls.
- ***Enhanced Protection.*** You have a +1 bonus to your AC while wearing armor or while benefiting from your Unarmored Defense feature, if you have it.
- ***Enhanced Shielding.*** You have a +1 bonus to your AC while wielding a shield.

At 12th level, you can choose a second boon to gain, and the bonus from your chosen boons increases to +2. At 18th level, you can choose a third boon to gain, and the bonus from your chosen boons increases to +3. Whenever you gain a level, you can choose to replace a boon you have with another boon from this selection.

## The Reasons Why
Despite official claims to the contrary, magic items are very much not an optional component to *Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition*: higher-level monsters are implicitly balanced around the AC and attack roll bonuses of magic items, and martial classes need magic items from a fairly early stage to avoid dealing half damage to monsters who resist nonmagical attacks.

This implicit need for magic items can make life harder for a DM, who needs to make sure party members get the magic items they need, lest they fall behind (which also makes low-magic adventures more difficult to run). Many interesting magic items also find themselves abandoned when their bonuses become too low: rewarding the party with flavorful loot thus always risks seeing that loot discarded later on.

To this effect, the above proposes to let the party automatically scale in a manner they'd expect from items: this should alleviate pressure on the DM to provide a steady feed of magic loot, and would also allow magic items to remain relevant for much longer. A DM running a low-magic campaign could even use this to let the party scale without any magic items at all.

{{note
#### Art Credits
- [Background](https://imgur.com/a/SKmRN) [page](https://imgur.com/a/TW79K) [stains](https://imgur.com/a/OZt2m) by [Aeron Drake](https://www.reddit.com/user/AeronDrake/), [QalarValar](https://www.reddit.com/user/qalarvalar/), and [flamableconcrete](https://www.reddit.com/user/flamableconcrete)
- [*Vengful Aura*](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/58o9m1), by [Tomasz Chistowski](https://chistowski.artstation.com/) (Page 1)
}}

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