D&D 5E Magic Items, and what it says about the editions

[CapnZapp]

It's going to take far, far, far more than that for 5E to support all previous playing styles

Sure.

But I happen to think that one important playing-style is the 3rd Edition playing style where you don't spend a lot of downtime, instead pouring your gold into magic items.

 

[CapnZapp]

It's going to take far, far, far more than that for 5E to support all previous playing styles

As an addition, I hope you're not talking about 4th edition.

For your sake, not mine. I am resolutely convinced 4th edition was an aberration, a venture into a playing style that D&D never before and never after will support.

 

[CapnZapp]

It's going to take far, far, far more than that for 5E to support all previous playing styles

One more thing.

The wilderness or hexcrawling playing style. It would be nice if 5th edition added explicit support for a variant where the parameters of short and long rests were not fixed, but instead left up to the scenario writer or DM.

So you could have, perhaps, 8 hour short and 7 day long rests while out trekking across the landscape. Then, when the same party in the same campaign do enter the dungeon, you switch to 1 hour short and 8 hour long rests.

And for the longer, months-long, travels; where you switch one map for the next, you instead do the variant where you can only rest when and you find specially marked places on your maps. Freshwater ports perhaps for ocean voyages. Oasis for desert treks.

The idea is that if you need perhaps fifteen encounters to gain a level, and you feel it is best balanced if the party can have up to two long rests and six short ones, but no more, that this should remain the same regardless of how long it actually takes to gain that level.

If you're dungeonbashing, you might gain the entire level in a single day. Solution: five-minute short rests and 1 hour long rests.

If the adventure is joining a caravan that will take three months to cross the Bones Desert, you will only be able to rest when you find oases. And there are only a small number of them.

In one case, you have fifteen encounters in a single day, and the rest durations allow for that.

In the other case, your fifteen encounters are spread out over several months. A full week might go by without seeing any other creature, let alone having an encounter. And in all that time, you won't have even a short rest.

All in one and the same campaign. Not that you choose one rest variation, and then stick to that. The idea is to have different rest durations in the same campaign, because most campaigns are better off with varying adventures. Sometimes you have a dungeon. Sometimes you rescue a princess. Sometimes you clear out the Badlands of monsters. Since these scenarios have wildly varying needs for how often you have encounters, the rest durations are left undefined by the rules, so they can change according to the needs of each scenario.

Yeah. That playing style would be neat to have official support for. Such as a written variant in some DMG2 kind of book.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This, ultimately is my problem with your example and with the potential design flaws of previous editions where having a +X weapons was a requirement, is that those situations are much rarer for casters due to their flexibility. ...
There are a lot of design philosophies that have lent themselves to this since since 2nd edition. 3rd had the assumed wealth by level, so you could reasonably assume to be able to damage enemies around your level, and could overcome the flat value to at least deal some damage.

And 3.5 changed resistances around, to materials, not just enhancement bonuses, and made them more manageable, as well, so you could conceivably just power through them. Add Inherent Bonuses (I'm sure 3.5 had them somewhere, eventually, but I can't remember where) to take the place of enhancement in low-magic games, and you can do without magic weapons almost entirely - though there'd still be a big versatility gulf between casters and non-casters with both itemless.

4th needed magic item bonuses for math reasons, but didn't have the same damage reductions in place outside of epic level foes.

Inherent bonuses (PH2) could fill in the math smoothly enough, and items weren't otherwise desperately needed for the classes to keep up with eachother, so low/no magic could work fine.

5th has the rare creature with true normal immunity, but much more common is resistance, and even the ones that require magic only require +1.

5e largely eliminates the 'need' for magic items, by factoring them out of expected advancement - and by giving all classes access to magic of their own.

The scenario is not about the wizard running out spells at low level and having the fighter do most of the lifting, it's about one class or the other being unable to contribute in a meaningful way*. Even at first level, those sleep spells can be very useful, and the slings still deal damage, yes? The only way it would be comparable is if wizards could only take HP damage at low levels and not make any attacks of their own.

In the classic game (say 0D&D, B/X, early 1e), yes the 1st-level wizard out of spells didn't contribute in any meaningful way. He could throw some darts (slings weren't on his list), or a dagger or risk melee, but it would rarely make a difference, and he was very fragile. That would balance out the wizard's dominance at higher level. 5e doesn't go for that kind of balance-across-levels, so a 1st level wizard is just fine, with more spells, more flexibility, & more hps than a 1st level 1e wizard, and at-will cantrips that can be meaningful even when out of spell slots.

One more thing.

The wilderness or hexcrawling playing style. It would be nice if 5th edition added explicit support for a variant where the parameters of short and long rests were not fixed, but instead left up to the scenario writer or DM.

I suppose it'd be nice if it were explicit that the DM was not limited to choosing or creating a module with different definitions of rests, but could (should!) instead rule on the time/consequence/benefits of rest like he can rule on anything else.

So you could have, perhaps, 8 hour short and 7 day long rests while out trekking across the landscape. Then, when the same party in the same campaign do enter the dungeon, you switch to 1 hour short and 8 hour long rests.

Nod.

It's going to take far, far, far more than that for 5E to support all previous playing styles

Sure - the Warlord, for instance - but, workable make/buy guidelines should certainly be part of the effort.

 

[Charles Rampant]

All in one and the same campaign. Not that you choose one rest variation, and then stick to that. The idea is to have different rest durations in the same campaign, because most campaigns are better off with varying adventures. Sometimes you have a dungeon. Sometimes you rescue a princess. Sometimes you clear out the Badlands of monsters. Since these scenarios have wildly varying needs for how often you have encounters, the rest durations are left undefined by the rules, so they can change according to the needs of each scenario.

Yeah. That playing style would be neat to have official support for. Such as a written variant in some DMG2 kind of book.

I'm using this exact system for an upcoming campaign set in Waterdeep. Urban, investigative adventures? Overnight short rests, 1 week long. Trips into Undermountain? 5 min short rests, 1 hour long. Adventures out into the Dessarin Valley or Savage North? 1 hour short rests, overnight long rests. All of these have their place, and, as you say, once you've crossed the rubicon of breaking the 'verisimilitude' element of rests being attached to a fixed time interval, it makes far more sense to pick and choose the most appropriate one for each environment.

Ultimately, short/long rests function to give shape to the 'drain party resources' element of combat. The link between time and resting obscures that basic fact, and gives rise to issues like:
* "how do I have 6-8 encounters in a single day when my players don't want to?"
* "the party spent 24 1/2 hours in the dungeon, only 1/2 of which was actually dungeoneering"
* "How do I accommodate the desire to not TPK the party who need a long rest, but also justify why the bad guys don't just bumrush them for spending 8 hours napping after two and a half minutes of fighting?"

The last one, in particular, drove me nuts in Princes.

 

[Aenghus]

As an addition, I hope you're not talking about 4th edition.

For your sake, not mine. I am resolutely convinced 4th edition was an aberration, a venture into a playing style that D&D never before and never after will support.

I disagree, for one. 4e is and continues to be my favourite version of D&D. Wizards of the Coast seem to have made a policy of reaching out to different groups with each new edition by making major changes, in an attempt to maximise their player base and sales.

I don't want to derail this thread or restart edition warring, just remind people that there are fans of every edition of D&D out there. Tolerance matters most when dealing with people you disagree with.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't want to derail this thread or restart edition warring, just remind people that there are fans of every edition of D&D out there. Tolerance matters most when dealing with people you disagree with.

It was a major goal of 5e to be D&D for everyone who ever loved D&D. That necessarily includes each and every edition. So far, it's done an excellent job of evoking 2e, and by extension the rest of the classic game, but it could do with quite a bit more support of modern versions.

 

[CapnZapp]

[MENTION=32659]Entsuropi[/MENTION]:

Yeah, I guess what drives me nuts is that everybody goes nuts if you suggest you can't rest the same way in two wildly different stories.

Yet, they have no problem whatsoever with fifteen minute workdays, the way the 6-8 workday is a paper construct that either is trivially easy to circumvent, or the DM forces it down the players throats, and the strange patience of smarter monsters...

When the only thing you need to solve all these problems is to accept that resting is a narrative construct, not a simulationist one.

 

[Helldritch]

As an addition, I hope you're not talking about 4th edition.

For your sake, not mine. I am resolutely convinced 4th edition was an aberration, a venture into a playing style that D&D never before and never after will support.

I am also absolutely convinced of the same. More over, I am also convinced that 4ed was built to please wow players in a futile attempt to bring them from PC gaming to tabletop games. The way it was built was screaming WoW!!!!!! It has been quite a turn off for many D&D longtimers. We did give it a try, but we reverted back to 3.5 after about a year.

 

[Uchawi]

Every version of D&D has problems with overabundance of magic, but 4E was the first version to try to equalize the playing field, regardless of magic. That speaks volumes for what I want in an RPG. With that stated, there are alot of problems with 4E versus the other editions, so I am not stating 4E was the best edition by any means.