D&D 5E Material Components: How Hard to Find in Your Games?

[5ekyu]

So, just a bit of curiousity here about how others run games.

Many material components are mundane easily available items and the spell components pouch can be full of them.

Some have a cost but also have rather mundane commonplace availability.

But there are a few where it seems like there is a question of "availability" that goes beyond (or may go beyond) just the in-game effects and costs and could also involve time and circumstance.

EXAMPLE: 200gp diamond. Are these ubiquitous and on every shelf in general stores or are these things you have to hunt for, found only in bigger cities at expensive stores and then in limited supply?

EXAMPLE: Ruby worth 999gp (i wonder if it should be held upside down?)

EXAMPLE: A vial of blood from a humanoid killed in the last 24 hours. (Seems obviously not something you can buy ahead of time)

etc etc etc...

So, my question is how difficult do you in your game make the acquisition of material components of non-mundane types for your casters and do you allow a "spellcasting focus" to be used as a more or less generic solution to the more difficult to have (though not defined cost in GP - see blood above) cases?

Trying to get more of a sense of the division (of this forum GMs set) along the spectrum between "pricey components are just a tax on spell casting" view on one side to the "getting non-common components is a story element that plays a big role in gameplay and story" view on the other end and all points between and off-shoots and tangents.

NOTE: Not advocating either way, no right or wrong, just curious as to how much the differences in 5e campaigns are between the campaigns.

Thanks!

EDIT - oh and a sentence or two about WHY or how it has worked out would also be fantastic if you are so inclined.

 

[jasper]

If I was doing homebrew it would depend on how large the city was. As I doing AL I think only the blood vial will be a problem.

 

[Nailen]

In our game we have pretty much hand-waved the components as the players all make a point of having an arcane focus. Perhaps we are understanding the rules incorrectly.
The exception being priced items. The 200gp diamond is for casting Glyph of Warding, I believe. We had quite the discussion in our Phandelver campaign about how we might obtain one in order to cast. We figured a visit to Waterdeep or Neverwinter would allow us to find a jeweller who would either have such an item, or be able to source it for us.

The humanoid blood is an interesting point. I suspect we would have skimmed over it as a requirement as there's no monetary value involved. Is it for some necromancy-type spell?

 

[iserith]

In my current Planescape campaign, it's slightly harder than normal to buy stuff, including spell components. Because I wanted to increase the amount of time spent in the exploration pillar in a city-based campaign, the PCs have to spend some of their time exploring the city to find locations of note. (They're not from Sigil nor are the players familiar with the setting.)

Among those are places they can "Skin a Razor" (buy and sell) - shops, markets, and the like. But a given location only allows for the buying and selling of certain things and the outcome of the buying and selling is usually uncertain plus, given that uncertainty, there's a chance that the item the PC seeks is unavailable or more costly than normal. Further, if a PC chooses to undertake the Skin a Razor task, that means he or she is doing that for a number of hours and not performing some other task which may be useful, such as "Scan the Chant" (gather info), "Scour the Cage" (find new locations of note), "Try the Taps" (gain unspecified allied contacts), or others. Add a timeline for the advancement of the antagonists' agenda and suddenly all of this city task stuff becomes a great deal more meaningful. Will you have enough time to do what you need to do before Bad Stuff happens?

Notably, this makes the buying and selling of anything a bit more involved than other campaigns I've run, so it's not limited to just making it harder on spellcasters to find their components.

 

[mikal768]

I generally try and keep it "logical". I.E. will a small village in the middle of nowhere have any single item worth 200 gp, let alone fine gems worth that much, let alone a 999 gp ruby?
What kind of location keeps freshly killed humanoid blood on hand? Etc. etc.

On the flip side, I also don't remove the ability for a PC to get those items if needed. Sure the small village may not have a diamond, but there is a dwarven mine a few miles away who may be willing to trade. And the larger cities which are used to dealing with the needs of eccentric higher level casters can almost always be reached if needed. If you need it now well... as the saying goes, an ounce of prevention can prevent a pound of cure. If you have something that's costly and you know it, get it ahead of time.

Even the more "exotic" needs like the humanoid freshly killed can be met if you're resourceful and/or evil enough to find the right groups... though generally that's just easier to do the old fashioned way.

 

[5ekyu]

In our game we have pretty much hand-waved the components as the players all make a point of having an arcane focus. Perhaps we are understanding the rules incorrectly.
The exception being priced items. The 200gp diamond is for casting Glyph of Warding, I believe. We had quite the discussion in our Phandelver campaign about how we might obtain one in order to cast. We figured a visit to Waterdeep or Neverwinter would allow us to find a jeweller who would either have such an item, or be able to source it for us.

The humanoid blood is an interesting point. I suspect we would have skimmed over it as a requirement as there's no monetary value involved. Is it for some necromancy-type spell?

NOTE AFAIK by RAW arcane focus would solve the blood just fine and whether or not folks follow that was why i included it. RAW only mentions the exception to spell focus for defined GP COST components and technically it does not have that.

it is for the summon demon pair of spells - lesser and greater but maybe others as well. i just recall it on those.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The stories of my last four campaigns have not focused on equipment-- be it acquisition, retention, encumbrance, etc-- and thus I haven't concerned myself with how/when the PCs might have acquired expensive material components for those games. When it's come up, the player of said PC would say "I probably picked it up at the last city we were at" and I'd go "Yeah, probably" and thus we were good to continue.

That's not to say this is how all my campaigns would go though. Certain games might take supplies, equipment, encumbrance, spell components etc. as an important part of the campaign's story, and thus I would keep track of these things and make sure the players knew they had to keep track of them too. Any Tomb of Annihilation campaign I decided to run would have supply management an important part of the gameplay, since I would want adventuring through a jungle to feel different than another type of game. And thus finding water, keeping equipment repaired, and of course finding/keeping enough spell components would be a part of that.

 

[Nailen]

The stories of my last four campaigns have not focused on equipment-- be it acquisition, retention, encumbrance, etc-- and thus I haven't concerned myself with how/when the PCs might have acquired expensive material components for those games. When it's come up, the player of said PC would say "I probably picked it up at the last city we were at" and I'd go "Yeah, probably" and thus we were good to continue.

This is how it is at my table most of the time...

 

[mikal768]

This is how it is at my table most of the time...

See that's boring to me. Part of the game is making sure to be prepared. That means remembering to actually have enough food and water to survive a journey, or the ability to find/create/teleport out if not.

And part of the game's balance comes from more expensive/exotic components.

 

[DEFCON 1]

See that's boring to me. Part of the game is making sure to be prepared. That means remembering to actually have enough food and water to survive a journey, or the ability to find/create/teleport out if not.

And part of the game's balance comes from more expensive/exotic components.

If the story of your campaign cares about character preparation out in the wilderness, then making sure to keep track of that stuff is an important facet of that and I agree it should be a part of gameplay. But other campaigns' stories just don't concern themselves about that kind of thing. To each their own.