D&D General Huge Equipment Lists: Good, Bad, or Ugly?

[Pedantic]

I'd love more games to treat gear as a preparation system. Deciding what to bring and then how to use it to overcome problems is one of the best places for player expression. The issue has usually been that gear is just entirely outclassed by other resources, so it's not worth engaging with as a system.

 

[borringman]

Meaningful equipment is fun. My groups have had good times with "right place, right time" use of equipment.

Nerfing Greek "alchemical" fire to the point that it costs, on average, 20gp per hit point of damage (!!!) is, why even have it in there. If you need to cauterize a troll, regular oil is 0.2% the cost and much safer to handle.

Also in 5E, the morningstar and war pick are functionally the exact same weapon, but the former weighs twice as much and costs triple.

And as @jmartkdr2 points out, since 5E's survival rules are so sparse (and largely obsoleted with rituals anyway), most of the survival equipment serves no mechanical purpose whatsoever.

I'm a big fan of "crunch", but that doesn't mean I enjoy reading phone books. When faced with lines and lines of items with little functional or diegetic value, my eyes glaze over.

So at least specifically wrt to 5E (the elephant in the room), the equipment lists aren't all that large. The problem is that the vast majority are a waste of time.

 

[Reynard]

I'd love more games to treat gear as a preparation system. Deciding what to bring and then how to use it to overcome problems is one of the best pages for player expression. The issue has usually been that gear is just entirely outclassed by other resources, so it's not with engaging with as a system.

One of these days I want to run an honest to goodness expedition campaign and all that entails: workers, supplies, determining routes, building bridges along the way, all of it.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

I love equipment lists if they are full of useful stuff. NOT if they really want to tell you how much a leather belt costs rather than just assuming you have one.

(Ideally, mundane equipment would be the spell list equivalent for non-casters, with something to make it so that casters are not in a position to make as much use of them)

2024 is certainly better off than 2014, as we now get rules for stuff like what manacles actually do. I just put up a thread about the combat-relevant ones from the Thief Rogue perspective, and while the list could use more stuff (and some stuff is just pointless), it's such a nice feeling to have more rules support for their class feature.

 

[CreamCloud0]

(Ideally, mundane equipment would be the spell list equivalent for non-casters, with something to make it so that casters are not in a position to make as much use of them)

this sort of parallel i think is perfect, you don't need items for every spell out there but there's certain basic effects that martials can barely even attempt to replicate, pick out a list of the core essential spell effects that really divide the line and write up some gear that replicates spell effects in the same 'stamina over potency' design of martials,
a caster has 20ft cube of web, a martial has a 15ft square of fixed DC throwable tanglenet that can be retrieved after battle,
a caster has comprehend languages, a martial has a book of translation indexes they can use with INT checks,
a caster has remove curse, a martial has purification powder that they can make an arcana or religion check with.

 

[GreatestHonor]

I think larger equipment lists are a good way for players to save on magical resources a lot of the time. While some pieces of equipment will naturally overlap in what they can do, they are almost never the same. Plus, not evey shop is going to have every possible piece of equipment, so similar to shopping for magic items, you can determine what is and isn’t available.

 

[Staffan]

I prefer having mundane equipment needed for basic functionality in a field to come in kits with all the things you need to do that thing at the level the game expects you to. For example, if fishing is a thing in this game, I don't want to have to buy a fishing net, a fishing rod, so-and-so much fishing thread, so-and-so many lures, and whatever. Just sell me a fishing kit. Same with thieves' tools: I don't want to buy so-and-so many regular lockpicks, long-handled lockpicks, magnet, listening cones, and whatever else might be involved in opening a lock. Just get me thieves' tools.

Now, it can on occasion be cool to have specific equipment that goes above and beyond the standard stuff. The adamantine drill mentioned above would be a cool example.

 

[Aldarc]

this sort of parallel i think is perfect, you don't need items for every spell out there but there's certain basic effects that martials can barely even attempt to replicate, pick out a list of the core essential spell effects that really divide the line and write up some gear that replicates spell effects in the same 'stamina over potency' design of martials,
a caster has 20ft cube of web, a martial has a 15ft square of fixed DC throwable tanglenet that can be retrieved after battle,
a caster has comprehend languages, a martial has a book of translation indexes they can use with INT checks,
a caster has remove curse, a martial has purification powder that they can make an arcana or religion check with.

Casters have the same access to equipment lists as martials.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Casters have the same access to equipment lists as martials.

Yep. By default, everything non-casters get, casters get as well. If this was a stricter class system, you could just say 'you trained with other things' and not let casters know how to use, say, shovels, but that's not the 'let's do 3e multiclassing again' direction they chose to go with.

2024 makes a tiny concession in that the usable items use Dex to set their DC (or Athletics/Sleight of Hand checks for a few), so casters won't be using the items with maxed stats. Not that they'd want to, because the items are quite low on the power level, but that's a separate issue.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A huge equipment list CAN be good, but often is not.

You need the equipment to be truly different in qualitative, not just quantitative, ways. This is part of why I have been (veeeery slowly, or rather, very fitfully) working on 4e-based "build your own weapon" rules. They're about 80% finished, and because there really isn't much difference between 4e and 5e when it comes to what weapons do, they should be inter-operable with 5e. I cannot guarantee that they would play nice with 5.5e's mastery properties, but what I've seen doesn't seem to conflict meaningfully.

5.0 has more than a few useless items (e.g. the Trident, which is just a heavier, more expensive, harder-to-use Spear), but thankfully didn't go for reams and reams of items when its system simply can't support that level of detail on item stuff.

A lot of games want to have a diverse range of items. Unfortunately, most of them simply make an extensive range; few actually put in the design effort to make them diverse and worthwhile, rather than fiddly and often irrelevant.