D&D 5E The Decrease in Desire for Magic in D&D

[DEFCON 1]

I think we have different views of what constitute Stories.

I believe so. I'm using Story to mean the narrative. The narrative of the campaign, the series of events that the PCs pursue and accomplish. I'm not talking about character choices or the fluff of a particular class, feature, race, or whatever. Fluff is detail, but it is not narrative. Rangers being able to find shelter is fluff and detail... actually playing out at the table the Ranger and the party going out and looking for shelter, then setting up camp once they find it is narrative.

And while it's cool to play that out that narrative once... few players I would tend to believe would want to play that out at the table every single time they need to camp. I mean look at it this way... if the party is on a quest to march across the barony in 7 days to stop a wedding from happening... do they players want to play out those 7 days of being on the road, marching, eating, drinking, resting, and camping each of those seven days... or do they want to just get to the wedding in order to stop it? What's the story being played out here?

In old school AD&D... a game that was built around resource management and making sure you had the right tool at the right time... playing out those 7 days on the road was part of the game. In fact, oftentimes it WAS the game, because a lot of games back then wouldn't even have a wedding or any kind of event like that on the table. Those 7 days were heading towards a dungeon and that entire package was the "adventure".

But that's not how any 5E adventure paths really go anymore. Instead there's a story, a narrative, a throughline of events with a beginning, middle, and end, leading towards a conclusion. And in my opinion... the game was designed to facilitate that style of gameplay, rather than your prototypical dungeoncrawling.

Maybe I'm wrong? I dunno. This is just how I see it.

 

[Waller]

So, since I don't recognize your handle, or ever recall you commenting on my posts in the past, I am not sure what really prompts you to say this.

Sorry, I thought you knew that your posts could be viewed publicly by anybody on the internet. If you thought only people you personally recognize could see them, or had the right to comment on them, that’s not how the internet works.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why does it have to be that every night, in the absence of Tiny Hut? Can't the DM just say, "Shelter is plentiful on this leg of the trip. Don't worry about it unless you feel like describing it."

To me that is much easier, and feels more natural/less adversarial, than contriving a reason that Tiny Hut can't be used when you want to up the challenge.

Yeah that's exactly the approach most groups I've played with, which is like 20 groups at this point (albeit I've always mostly played with my main one) have taken. Sure, there's the odd outlier where a DM, particularly a new/inexperience DM, will want you to describe every bivouac, but most DMs just take the shelter for granted unless you're in a more tricky situation.

Whereas Tiny Hut creates a situation which is extremely difficult to ever make perilous or interesting. It's a damn silly spell just like Goodberry.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For groups who "don't care", the traditional way to handle shelter has just been to not go into it, just say "We find shelter", unless something wild is happening, in which case they probably do care.

Why does it have to be that every night, in the absence of Tiny Hut? Can't the DM just say, "Shelter is plentiful on this leg of the trip. Don't worry about it unless you feel like describing it."

Well... this is I guess the difference between you both and me. In my opinion... if you are going to handwave shelter, then it doesn't matter the reasoning for handwaving it.

Whether it's "Shelter is plentiful and thus you find shelter for the night in the wilderness" or "You set up your Tiny Hut in the wilderness"... the effect is exactly the same. Nothing is happening. No event occurs as a result of camping out overnight. You camp, it ends, you get up the next morning and move on. Why it didn't happen doesn't matter, because things that don't happen don't matter. At least not to me.

I guess it matters to you both though, so sure... having Tiny Hut as an available spell must suck and you both have to deal with that somehow. I get it. But what can you do? It seems like the only thing left is to just hope that enough people think like you do that there * is * a substantive difference between "You find shelter no problem" and it gets handwaved, and "You cast Tiny Hut" and it gets handwaved... such that WotC decides to remove or edit the spell in the update.

Maybe it will. I dunno. We'll just have to wait and see I guess.

 

[Mort]

Specific example to my last post. Someone posted about a campaign where magic is rare and viewed with suspicion.

From a Story perspective, this may seem great at first glance. Obvious spellcasters tend to have penalties in social encounters, as people shun them.

Applying this consistently though, creates problems from a story perspective. What about clerics ? Are devout people who worship gods are treated with superstition and disdain ? It’s pretty easy for a spellcaster to appear as a non-spellcaster, so it is pretty easy to avoid the penalties while still getting the benefits of being s spellcaster in a low-magic world. Like there being very few people who can counterspell or dispel your magic. Few places warded against the use of magic. Few people that would recognize a familiar in cat guise. Very few people that can see invisible. Etc.

Yeah, the whole "magic is precious and rare..." only works if spellcasters are somehow restrained/nerfed, otherwise magic "otherwise" being rare is a big benefit for the party casters.

Further, magic being rare is usually a much bigger hassle for the martials in the party - especially if the DM consistently throws things like resistant monsters and the like at them.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Why does it have to be that every night, in the absence of Tiny Hut? Can't the DM just say, "Shelter is plentiful on this leg of the trip. Don't worry about it unless you feel like describing it."

To me that is much easier, and feels more natural/less adversarial, than contriving a reason that Tiny Hut can't be used when you want to up the challenge.

I would say because, by default, it allows the players to opt out of getting attacked at night.

If the DM wants to change that, they can. You can easily house rule that LTH doesn't prevent movement through it, which makes it like the OG version (IIRC). If a player is fine with that style of game, they shouldn't take issue with that change. If they do, it's better to address that issue now than when their character is awoken by three hungry trolls.

IMO, it's a good change because it provides players with greater agency WRT the style of game they play.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well... this is I guess the difference between you both and me. In my opinion... if you are going to handwave shelter, then it doesn't matter the reasoning for handwaving it.

No, that's a category error on your part because you're confusing hand-waving with a spell forcing you to ignore something.

You don't hand-wave because of Tiny Hut. That's straightforwardly incorrect to say - an outright misstatement. Rather Tiny Hut forces the DM to, in the vast majority of situations, not make any issue of shelter or finding a camp or whatever. It plus Goodberry means survival is, by two spells - one level 1, one level 3, pretty much entirely invalidated.

Spells forcing you to do something is not "hand-waving". That's like saying me saying "All the orcs just die!" is the same as the PC fireballing the orcs.

Hand-waving is voluntary. It is circumstantial. It happens when it make sense, and only then. If it's not going to be interesting or dramatic or meaningful to look at shelter the DM can choose to handwave it. But with the Tiny Hut, it doesn't matter if shelter would an interesting or dramatic or meaningful concern, shelter is just DELETED from things that can be an issue.

Do you understand the category difference and how it's not opinion? They're literally different things.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Well... this is I guess the difference between you both and me. In my opinion... if you are going to handwave shelter, then it doesn't matter the reasoning for handwaving it.

Because one version ("you find shelter") allows you to stop handwaving when there's an interesting reason to, and the other version ("I cast Tiny Hut") does not. I don't know how to say it more simply than that.

 

[tetrasodium]

It should be noted that back in the 80s, PC were quite a bit simpler mechanically, and monsters usually were too. As a result, combat went faster. So maybe you could achieve #4 under those conditions.

I agree but even if you expanded it out to three or four it still kinda worked because there was probably more story from social/exploration squeezed into a lower encounter pool. 5e has longer encounters and expects the GM to cram in more of them

Not trying to be rude but I am honestly unable to process what you're even trying to say here. It just seems contradictory and confused. Like what are we talking about with "NPCs offering powerful healing potions/cure items"? Like what is that? That's not something from 5E. That's maybe a 3.XE/PF thing? Arguably?

2edmg pg120 "A potion of healing is a fairly necessary item, something the DM may want to be readily available to the characters. Therefore, it
should be cheap, costing no more than 200 gp."
Healing potions have been a thing for a long time 4e was it's own thing but in 2e & 3.x adventuring was dangerous enough that an NPC shopkeeper saying something like "we have a bunch of those better greater healing potions" or "we got a new wand of cure moderate wounds if you're looking to buy!" Now IME an NPC pushing things like greater & better potions might get a player to buy one 150gp2d4+4 greater potion & just top it off with whatever they need for as comfortable 4 or so of the regular ones in their pack. Those things were rare and important. Now the high magic baseline of death saves+healing word's extreme power the PCs don't care.

5e encourages the players view death as something chained up & caged in the locked basement of another building so don't feel any urge to buy the powerful healing stuff the NPC is pushing like they did when they knew it could be breathing down their neck at a moment's notice. That results in a situation where the GM looks like they hit the PCs with a train if they actually introduce a situation where the group might need those better healing potions to avoid the severe consequences they now have no way of even diverting thanks to a lack of investment in other areas like the now superfluous buff/debuff/control abilities too.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Do you understand the category difference and how it's not opinion? They're literally different things.

Okay... that's fine. I'm not "handwaving" camping encounters when the players have Tiny Hut and Goodberry. We want to remove that word from what's happening, then that's cool.

But guess what? If I still don't have campaign encounters involving sleeping overnight then it doesn't matter what we call it. I'm good with saying I'm not "handwaving" those encounters... I am just CHOOSING to not put any in front of the players. And that is true regardless of whether they are camping outdoors in a Ranger-made shelter, OR in a Tiny Hut. Because again... all that matters to me is the end-result. If the end-result the next morning is nothing happened overnight... then nothing happened overnight and why nothing happened overnight does not matter-- Tiny Hut or man-made shelter.

Now... if we want to argue that I as the DM am probably more prone to not putting an encounter in front of the players because they are in a Tiny Hut... I will accept that argument. That might very well be true. If the party was out camping and not in a Tiny Hut maybe I might be more willing to throw a nighttime encounter their way? To be honest, I have no real idea what they answer to that is, because as a DM I just find the whole D&D process of worrying about camping to be tedious. But I will concede that could be true.

But then again... any time there's a situation where I feel like an encounter could/would/should occur to people inside a Tiny Hut... I can get one to happen regardless-- a simple Dispel Magic can take care of it. If I feel like at this moment in the narrative it's time for the party to see what happens when they don't have their Hut... Dispel Magic sends it away and combat potentially engaged. And thus the Story and Narrative is upheld... that one time when their Tiny Hut didn't save them was the time they were harassed by someone who could dispel it.

Like I said... if some of you wished you could have more "attack the party while they're sleeping" encounters, then of course I understand why Tiny Hut blows. Or if you wished to have more "attack the party from the darkness when they can't see the monsters", then of course I understand why Darkvision blows. But that's just not 5E. Those two tropes apparently just don't hold enough water anymore to make the designers want to allow for them in the rules. And there's nothing we can do about it except remove the offending bits from the game on our own.