D&D (2024) Uncommon items - actually common?

[Jfdlsjfd]

Grinding them down would be an incredible burden. But IMO the entire issue is silly since if you had such things in a magical world you would have spells like Drawmij's Grinding Gyro or something which would be used to grind rubies and diamonds into dust for spell use... But we don't have spells like that.

Do we? I guess they are not in the PHB because no player would ever memorize it and it would be a waste of space on a printed book. In my worlds, most casters have their memory full of :

1. Spells with practical use for non-adventurers. Calenthil's Coffee-Refilling Cantrip. Bigby's Cat-Retrieving Hand (tm). Selenious Scroll-Searching Sorcery. Pandectus's Papers-Grading Power.

2. Spells used for their research, often on an obscure topic. A spell that let's one taste a plane. A spell that analyzes the magical efficiency of an effect, a part of an optimization to get an effect of the 5th level spell to 4th level that might take the wizard whole life to complete...

3. Inferior versions of printed spells. Going by the idea that PCs are extraordinary, they are at least very competent in their job. So other wizard know spells, but worse. I once had a PC wizard to scribe an inferior version of magic missile, which was exactly like magic missile except one missile launched every round instead of all at once. They witnessed the spell launched by the NPC wizard and misevaluated the damage amount (he finished two foes out of sheer luck) and pestered him to learn the spell... I can see the world filled with cleric that can cast cure wounds, but it takes an hour to heal instead of a round. A spell of eagle's splendour that cause the caster to sprout warts for 3 days afterwards... The PCs are extraordinary in that they are lucky enough to learn the most efficient version of each spell, which happens to be the one in the PHB.

 

[ezo]

Do we?

No, we don't... at least I don't.

 

[Oofta]

Do we? I guess they are not in the PHB because no player would ever memorize it and it would be a waste of space on a printed book. In my worlds, most casters have their memory full of :

1. Spells with practical use for non-adventurers. Calenthil's Coffee-Refilling Cantrip. Bigby's Cat-Retrieving Hand (tm). Selenious Scroll-Searching Sorcery. Pandectus's Papers-Grading Power.

2. Spells used for their research, often on an obscure topic. A spell that let's one taste a plane. A spell that analyzes the magical efficiency of an effect, a part of an optimization to get an effect of the 5th level spell to 4th level that might take the wizard whole life to complete...

3. Inferior versions of printed spells. Going by the idea that PCs are extraordinary, they are at least very competent in their job. So other wizard know spells, but worse. I once had a PC wizard to scribe an inferior version of magic missile, which was exactly like magic missile except one missile launched every round instead of all at once. They witnessed the spell launched by the NPC wizard and misevaluated the damage amount (he finished two foes out of sheer luck) and pestered him to learn the spell... I can see the world filled with cleric that can cast cure wounds, but it takes an hour to heal instead of a round. A spell of eagle's splendour that cause the caster to sprout warts for 3 days afterwards... The PCs are extraordinary in that they are lucky enough to learn the most efficient version of each spell, which happens to be the one in the PHB.

I regularly assume there are spells out there that the PCs don't know about. It's like a soldier driving a tank and someone moving a lot of dirt having a bulldozer. You can put a bulldozer blade on a tank and it kind of works if you have no other option but you aren't going to war in a bulldozer.

So a lot of non-PC magic is going to be ritual based or take several minutes to create different, similar, or even occasionally superior, effect as a spell that a PC could achieve. It's the difference between being a theoretical physicist and an engineer; superficially similar with some shared language and constraints but significantly different implementation.

The rules for D&D do not define every aspect of the worlds we build.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Do we? I guess they are not in the PHB because no player would ever memorize it and it would be a waste of space on a printed book. In my worlds, most casters have their memory full of :

1. Spells with practical use for non-adventurers. Calenthil's Coffee-Refilling Cantrip. Bigby's Cat-Retrieving Hand (tm). Selenious Scroll-Searching Sorcery. Pandectus's Papers-Grading Power.

2. Spells used for their research, often on an obscure topic. A spell that let's one taste a plane. A spell that analyzes the magical efficiency of an effect, a part of an optimization to get an effect of the 5th level spell to 4th level that might take the wizard whole life to complete...

3. Inferior versions of printed spells. Going by the idea that PCs are extraordinary, they are at least very competent in their job. So other wizard know spells, but worse. I once had a PC wizard to scribe an inferior version of magic missile, which was exactly like magic missile except one missile launched every round instead of all at once. They witnessed the spell launched by the NPC wizard and misevaluated the damage amount (he finished two foes out of sheer luck) and pestered him to learn the spell... I can see the world filled with cleric that can cast cure wounds, but it takes an hour to heal instead of a round. A spell of eagle's splendour that cause the caster to sprout warts for 3 days afterwards... The PCs are extraordinary in that they are lucky enough to learn the most efficient version of each spell, which happens to be the one in the PHB.

All of those things make sense, but it would be nice if one of the books ever mentioned that such magic exists.

 

[ezo]

All of those things make sense, but it would be nice if one of the books ever mentioned that such magic exists.

They make sense if you want to run and/or play in an "uber-magic-modern-D&D" setting instead of the "classical-medieval-fantasy D&D setting".

 

[Oofta]

All of those things make sense, but it would be nice if one of the books ever mentioned that such magic exists.

It may exist in some campaigns and not other's. It's up to the author(s) of the world to decide what makes sense. It always has been.

 

[Minigiant]

All of those things make sense, but it would be nice if one of the books ever mentioned that such magic exists.

It may exist in some campaigns and not other's. It's up to the author(s) of the world to decide what makes sense. It always has been.

5e was more or less designed in its schedules that DMs and 3PPs were supposed to create magic obscure or unused by adventurers.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It may exist in some campaigns and not other's. It's up to the author(s) of the world to decide what makes sense. It always has been.

And yet they almost never do...

 

[Micah Sweet]

5e was more or less designed in its schedules that DMs and 3PPs were supposed to create magic obscure or unused by adventurers.

Do the D&D 5e books say that anywhere?

 

[TwoSix]

And yet they almost never do...

My settings do. I generally run settings with a fair amount of magitech, and the details of the extent of magitech and how they work at an economic and cultural level is already fleshed out.