The Magician's Nephew

 Magic items!
The soul of a D&D campaign. In previous editions, the reason characters get out of bed in the morning. To find them, or to find coins to but them. Magic items is where it (was) at!

A Magical Desert
By comparison, 5e is a desolate void, a bleak plain of emptiness, when it comes to magic. As I mentioned in my first post, the accrual of magic items and coin, gem, art wealth are two separate items. I can understand the idea of wanting a newer, sleeker, faster-playing edition that places much less emphasis on trinkets and doodads and their resultant maze of bonuses that can bog down a game. 

I cannot understand, however, how this can fit, themeatically, with the idea of the Forgotten Realms (which is seemingly the default campaign setting for this edition). In the Realms, as any reader of novels knows, everyone and their brother is outfitted with magical items. Nobility wear rings and whatnot to prevent scrying, protective wards and magical swords and more abound. The Realms certainly does have a thriving economy for buying and selling magical devices, armor, and weapons. To have such a strangely flat treatment of such an integral part of the D&D experience is one oddity about 5e, to my mind. One that we shall strive to correct.

Again, we have a few places where we can get a glimpse of how things should shake out, if the designers had been more obvious. The two spots happen to be the same places where we got our glimpse into the PC wealth question.

Place the First.
The treasure tables. Rolling the number of times suggested on page 133 of the DMG results in coins, gems, and art, yes; but it also results in a steadily increasing diet of magical goodies. The various Treasure Tables all feature (by and large) different types of magic items. This can assist in understanding the underlying economy a bit better, too. For instance, Table A is 90% common mgic items. Table B is over 50% what I've taken to calling uncommon "charged" magic items (single or limited usage, like a potion). Table C is made up of mostly rare charged items, but also has some uncommon (permanent) magic items, too. And so on and so forth. Once all is said and done, by 20th level, each character should have: 1 legendary item, 1 very rare item, 1 rare item, 2 uncommon items, and 5 each of the very rare, rare, uncommon, and common "charged" items. This is stuff gained as magical items via treasure hoards...it does not account for the magical items the PCs will buy using the money (coins, gems, art) they also gained.

Place the Second.
The Starting Equipment table on page 38 of the DMG talks about gold and magic items. Presumably one would use one's gold to buy more (or better) magic items, as well. But the explicit mention that in a Standard Campaign a character made at 11th level would be expected to start with two uncommon magic items, for instance, is something. A High Magic Campaign would up that to three uncommon and one rare item, by comparison. The last snapshot we see on this table, for a High Magic Campaign, suggests a 17th level character, built from scratch, would have three uncommon, two rare, and one very rare item. Fits pretty well with the hoard results from above.

Bonus Mention.

Back to Chapter 7: Treasures for this last piece of the puzzle. Specifically, page 135. Here we see a table talking about Magic Item Rarity. It has a bunch of information we'll wind up using. The first is a comment about what level character should be able to get their hands on what rarity level of magic item. This will help us understand the things a bit better. 

For instance, a rare magic item should only be acquired by a 5th level or higher hero. Don't worry too much about this, as the random treasure tables take this into account, more or less. Tabel G, for instance, has rare (permanent) magical items. You are very unlikely to get to roll on this table between Challenge 0-4 (and then only once). Once into the Challenge 5-10 category and beyond you'd get more chances. 

Similarly, just as the Magic Item Rarity table implies, you don't have a real shot at a legendary item until you get to roll on Table I, in the Challenge 17+ table.

Each PC's Magical Stockpile

I cobbled all of this information together to give us a glimpse at what PCs should find when. The first table shows, roughly, what each PC should have at each stop along their journey to 20th level. The red entries show the information from the Magic Item Rarity table: no very rare items before 11th level, for instance. As you can see, the 20th level row shows 5 each of the "charged" magical items and the other assortments as previously discussed.

All Together Now

For a DM actually trying to build magical hoards to give away that will keep the heroes on the straight and narrow, here is a scheme that could work. In this case, take the number of PCs in the party times the numbers in the various rows to see how many of such and such level magic item you should have given, total, by now. Assuming the PCs share, this will work out.

Using the example of a party of 7 PCs, the resultant total looks like this:

So, when the party of 7 PCs is just leveling up to 8th level, you should have given them a total of 40,817.03 gp worth of coins, gems, and art and a total of 23 common "charged" magic items, 11 uncommon "charged" magic items, 11 uncommon (permanent) magic items, 4 rare charged items, and 2 rare (permanent) magic items.

When they (roughly) split that up they will be (roughly) on pace for the wealth by level.