D&D 5E Revisiting material components - enforcing in a game focused on resource-management

5ekyu said:

My answer to your why not would be yes exactly why not get rid of them.

Do having little tarts in a pouch make your character more awesome?
Or was it the rotten eggs and skunk cabbage?
How many cups of water does your component pouch hold?

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Simple, component pouches are magical bags of refrigerated holding!

Going with a focus that can be charged up for the costly spells seems an obvious candidate.

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We'll be keeping the requirement for components with a cost associated as per raw. Basically the expensive gems are another specific focus needed to cast the spell, one which will be consumed.

MNblockhead said:

Simple, component pouches are magical bags of refrigerated holding!



We'll be keeping the requirement for components with a cost associated as per raw. Basically the expensive gems are another specific focus needed to cast the spell, one which will be consumed.

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Hey magical bags of refrigerated holding for 25 go, that's super. Now a detect magic can I'd all those mages and so forth.

Seems to me an awful fuss to emphasize spell components listed in raw and avoid trying to make sense of it instead.

But different strokes for different folks.

MNblockhead said:

If you are going to ignore material components, why not just do away with component bags and Material components all together?

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I can't think of a time in my games (going back to 2e days) where component pouches were more than just something that can be taken away so that you couldn't cast spells until you got it back. Usually this was when captured and held by the bad guys. It then becomes a plot point to get your book/pouch back to cast spells to escape the castle/camp/dungeon. If you just went whole hog and said "You need YOUR staff or wand or some physical item to cast these spells, some spells require you enchant YOUR staff more (representing one-time-cost components), and a few other spells actually DO require physical components (for consumed costly items)" it really wouldn't change our games at all.

Can you imagine how hard you could hose your wizards by having them fall into a stream and then checking for water damage versus all their piled up components? Lesse....the tarts are now mush, the spider egg case is gone, the guano is now poop soup, etc....

DS