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Very recently I made a huge miscalculation during my D&D campaign.

The players in my D&D campaign were chasing after several pieces of a broken magical item. They had been spending their time researching in the capital and were slowly finding more info about these pieces.

They eventually found out that one piece was being protected by an adult green dragon, so naturally this team of 4 level 6 adventurers went on to take it from the dragon.

What I had planned was a stealth encounter where they would have to sneak by the dragon slowly, while trying to get closer to his huge gold pile where the fragment was, and possibly reward them with a minor magic item.

However, they decided to rush forward and kill the dragon for reasons unbeknownst to me. They somehow succeeded; nat 20 after nat 20 they kept destroying the dragon and eventually succeeding. So naturally they took his entire gold pile of gems and magic items back to the capital and have now gotten themselves a huge amount of other magic items and have blown the balancing system completely out of the water.

Encounters that should be around their difficulty have suddenly become way too easy, and puzzles and problems have become even easier with all of their new magical items. I know if this continues they will become either bored or they will become power obsessed murder-hobos.

I have no idea how to actually balance this back without striping them of their magic items completely (which I know will piss them off). How can I correct this mistake and balance things back out? What can I do to get things back on track?

Consider that "sudden, undeserved wealth" is a fantastic story hook.

The party is now famous. Against all odds they defeated the dragon and spent its treasure with abandon at all the best shops in town. The tale is going to spread of a band of adventurers and their dragon's hoard. Bards are going to sing about it in taverns far and wide.

This kind of thing is going to attract attention, not all of it good. The party is famous for having lots of cool stuff, but they're also heavily rumoured to have acquired it more through luck than skill. Somebody, maybe more than one somebody, is going to see this as an opportunity.

Who can they trust? Can they trust anyone ever again?

So, your first mistake was allowing the players to go to Fantasy Costco and freely spend their wealth on magic items. Magical items aren't purchasable by default; the only things players can buy are what you say they can buy. The Dungeon Master's Guide discusses this on p.135.

But it's done, so what can you do to fix it?

1. They might be cheating (intentionally or not).

My first thought is that there are some kind of shenanigans going on here. Even having a lot of items should really only increase the characters' capabilities so much because of the way bounded accuracy and attunement (DMG p.136) work. If the items are allowing the party to punch way above their weight class, it makes me suspect something isn't quite right on the "following the rules" side.

Look carefully at each item and make sure they aren't exceeding the limits on how many attuned items they can use at once. That's the single largest balancing factor that prevents magic item abuse. To wit, each character can have only three items attuned, and only one of any specific item. (This rule is somewhat tucked away in a specific paragraph of the DMG, so sometimes players don't realize "requires attunement" has some specific limitations beyond being unable to easily hand the item around to other PCs.)

Make sure the players are accurately tracking how many charges their items are using and recovering. Sure, a staff of frost might let you use cone of cold long before you should have access to it, but that also spends 5 of its 10 charges, so two shots of that and it's dead, and it only regains 1d6+4 per day. Plus it's attuned, so see previous point on that front.

2. Wait it out.

If they're hitting harder than expected, it might not actually be a big deal. Increase the difficulty of their fights a little -- add a few extra monsters to each fight, or use slightly tougher monsters. They'll gain more XP for each fight, which means they'll level up faster, and they'll soon be back on the right level for the amount of stuff they have. The problem will rapidly become less of an issue. So your best bet might just be accepting that they'll be unusually tough for their level for a while, and just adjust for it.

3. Talk it out.

If you can't wait for them to just naturally even out, maybe the best thing is just an honest discussion with the players. "Hey, I made a mistake when I let you buy all that stuff, and it's messing up the game. We need to fix this, but I don't want to impose a fix on you. So can we come up with a story together that removes the strongest items from your characters?" You can back up that it was a legitimate mistake on your part by pointing out that the DMG specifically says all magic item purchases are up to the DM to allow. You didn't actively stop them from buying those items, but you weren't really aware of what you were allowing and that you had the means to put on the brakes, either.

Maybe your players will resist losing their power fantasy, but in most groups the players are more than willing to work with you on something like that, and may come up with a much more interesting story than anything you could've made on your own. (And I find that surprising the players with story twists is overrated anyway.)

Or, depending on the group, they might be willing to just hand-wave it and downgrade or remove some of the items without actually acknowledging that they did so in-character. That +2 sword was actually a +1 sword all along, the Wand of Lightning Bolts was a Wand of Magic Missile from the start, and Cloak of Protection? What Cloak of Protection? This is just my usual traveling cloak. (You can negotiate whether the excess gold just disappears, or if it gets credited to them so hey, they have a chest of treasure they can use for buying stuff later, or they retroactively acquire a small barony or something.)

4. Hit them in the dump stat.

I don't mean this literally, but rather, aim for where the characters will be weak. This is an adjunct to #2, really, but I want to call it out in specific as a strategy apart from just 'make the encounters harder'. If you can't or won't remove the items and they're playing legally, then upping the challenge is your main response, but you can also look towards what kinds of challenges you use. If they're getting a big power boost from magic items, it probably means their damage output is higher than expected, but their HP and saves won't have changed much from the usual for their level, so that's probably their most vulnerable point.

The characters are very likely to be 'glass cannons' -- that is, they hit hard, but can't take much damage in return. One or two tough monsters that can just soak the hits and deal out big damage will be a bigger challenge than a swarm of smaller monsters that don't hit as hard, even if they have the same encounter rating, because the total damage of a horde drops off as members get killed, while a big monster remains dangerous until it loses that last hit point.

I'm not saying you should kill the party, just that you may need to adjust encounters to focus more on big beefy enemies in this case.

Level Them Up

In early versions of D&D, characters would earn experience points for gold pieces gained. Although this wasn’t the most popular rule, it did serve a useful function: it brought characters’ innate powers “along for the ride” with sudden material success. In this way, it helped keep the game balanced.

Right now, you have a 6th level party equipped like a much higher level party. If you throw monsters/challenges at them suitable for the typical 6th level party, that can be a cake walk. If you throw much stronger monsters at them, they might easily be killed.

If you give them a couple more levels (over the next few play sessions) their innate abilities (notably, hit points) will come more in line with their equipment, and on-level monsters (or monsters of slightly higher CR) will pose an appropriate challenge.

Get familiar with their new equipment

You’ve discovered it can be challenging to run a game for well-equipped characters, but this same problem can happen whenever characters gain magical powers, such as spells. Fireball can wipe out an interesting encounter in a single round. Spells that allow characters to read thoughts can short-circuit mysteries.

To keep things interesting, you’ll need to get familiar with the ways your characters can subvert the obstacles that used to be challenges, and switch things up appropriately. (They might be able to just walk up a castle wall, but finding the portal to the Feywild can still be a challenge.)

Read a Published Adventure or Two

The ways to make trickier encounters suitable for more power characters are not necessarily intuitive. But published D&D adventures provide lots of example to borrow from, or at least provide inspiration. Out of the Abyss and Tomb of Annihilation are two challenging adventures that come to mind.

Usually this sort of problem can be solved by making the encounters larger. Instead of fighting three CR2 giant boars, make them fight six CR2 giant boars -- et cetera, et cetera. Usually when I do this, I adjust the combat difficulty dynamically: if the first three monsters go down too fast, I tell the players that three more were hiding in the bushes.

If your problem is that the characters have too much AC, you might need to make the individual monsters actually harder: give all monsters +1 to hit, or make sure to use monsters that don't target AC. For example you could replace the CR2 giant boars with CR3 hell hounds, and trust that their fire breath would reliably deal damage even against high-AC targets.

So far as magic items go, you should start by checking the attunement rules. You wrote that your players all have lots of magic items, but remember that each can only be attuned to three magic items. How many of those magic items require attunement?

Also: it might be too late for this advice, but you're not required to sell the group magic items at all. In many settings, magic items are just really rare and cannot be bought for money.

One solution I use sometimes is to end the campaign. Who's the final villain for your group? Give them a chance to fight him early, and when they win, tell them the campaign is over and they have won. Then tell them you're starting a new campaign, in the same setting, which they will use new characters for. I do this sometimes (not always in the same setting) and I find it's a good way to reset character progression without annoying my players.

Walking around with all that wealth on your person is dangerous, foolish and heavy (even magic bags have a limit, right?). Suggest that they put most of it in a bank. Then blow up the bank.

I'm only half joking.

Story time

My own adventuring party had for some time been in the employ of a secretive information trader's (simply known as "Handelsmannen" (en. "The Trader")) organization which is based in Sigil. Stashing our money in a vault managed by this organization was a good idea. They have high security and despite their secrecy they were trustworthy.

We thought that this setup would continue for a long time as we were racking up points with the organization, which we could use for their services (instead of being paid money) and we were expecting that we would soon get our first level 3 mission (mission and service levels were unrelated to character levels). Then one morning Sigil was invaded by armies entering from portals all over the city. The Trader's building was in magical flames which could not be put out and spread to anything it touched (I'm so glad I was wearing gloves). We managed to escape with the characters we cared about, but there's no going back to Sigil right now and the vault is probably already looted.

The lesson

I don't think that the DM did this to remove a large portion of our wealth. It was just a new direction he was taking the story in and our money was simply collateral. But you could do it for that reason. Unexpected story directions like this would make for a fun cover for wealth draining. (Maybe it really was the DM's plan all along!)

You'll have to deal with the magic items differently though, as your PCs are probably wearing them. From my understanding, they shouldn't have come across so many and so powerful items just by having a lot of money. In 5e magic items are supposed to be rare. Only a few people sell them and they don't really advertise that they do. The more powerful the item your players are looking for is, the deeper they need to infiltrate and more contacts they need inside the secret clubs that deal in magic items.