D&D (2024) 2024 - Do magic weapons bypass resistance now?

[Will Brandiman]

I like the idea that you can come up against a creature where you swing at it and it has absolutely no effect. I feel that incorporeal creatures should be completely immune to non-magical weapons. If something can literally walk through walls, why on earth would it be harmed by a piece of metal? Similarly, poking an Iron Golem with a rapier should result in a bent/snapped rapier and an unharmed golem.

I also like the idea that certain specific substances can cause harm to certain creatures. Cold iron, silver, adamantium, specific types of wood etc. 3E almost got this right but then ruined it with the concept that 'magical weapons ignore all that'.

Vulnerabilities should be also used far more often but this can give players a 'I WIN' button in some cases. This can however be balanced out in the grand scheme of things by use of resistances, immunities, specific substances etc.

I also like damage reduction as a mechanic, where you have to do more than x amount of damage in a single attack before the creature is harmed.

Overall, there are many, many ways to make resistances, immunities and vulnerabilities interesting and challenging to players but 5e has steadily walked back from almost all of them.

 

[Bae'zel]

I suppose it would be easy enough to hack monster entries, provided you don’t bother with CR and all that jazz.

Especially if you’re running a “Witcher” type campaign.

I doubt that 5e will break if you give a werewolf immunity to everything, including magic weapons, unless they’re silvered. Or undead to everything unless it deals radiant damage.

In my campaign, I plan on giving vampires the equivalent of Troll regeneration (but weak to radiant instead of fire damage).

 

[Horwath]

they should have kept that magic weapons beat some resistance/immunity and maybe go to the 3E version with needing +X weapons for certain mosters,
I.E: all elder dragons can only be hurt by +3 weapons, all other magic weapons deal half damage and immunity to non magical weapons.

Vampire: immunity from nonmagical weapons,
resistance to magical weapons except if any part of attack deals radiant damage(IE smite) or it is magical silvered weapon. also vulnerability to radiant.

troll: resistance to all weapon damage unless a part of attack is fire damage

ghosts: immunity to nonmagic weapons, resistance to magic weapons unless they deal force damage as part of attack.

 

[Retros_x]

THAT is what we're robbing from the game when we take out all the rough edges. That is the type of success you get to experience when the rules say, "You can't" and you find a way to anyways. We lost some of that type of challenge in each edition since. "Fair" replaced "%$@#ed". Fair has advantages ... but what we lost also gave us something that could make the game moments iconic.

Loved your anecdote and completely agree with your point about fairness. I just want to add that when I want to play a fair game, I play chess. TTRPGs are never about fairness, they are about storytelling and exciting good stories are rarely about fair circumstances for the protagonists. Even in sport stories (fictional and real ones) the most exciting ones are the ones when an underdog manages to beat all the odds.

This goes of course into the old "combat as war" and "combat as sport" debate. I got into the hobby with 5e 10 years ago (although I dabbled a bit with other TTRPGS before that) and get drawn more and more into OSR for a reason I guess.

 

[jgsugden]

I randomly played an Artificer, which handed out +1 magic weapon buffs.
And your assuming the DM had a whole 20 levels planned out, and needs to be aware of Jackalwere before he starts a game.

Is it that hard to imagine that a DM might give a magic weapon for completing the first quest, then come up with Jackalwere's for the second?

And why wouldn't that work if it's a Silvered weapon instead of Magic weapon?

Then you do the trick twice, once with Silver and Jackalwere and once with Adimantium and Golems.

As was, once you got a magical weapon for Jackalwere, you spoiled the effect of the Golem.

You're going out of your way to argue exceptions when I'm talking about a real wide open general idea: THESE TYPES OF ABILITIES ENABLE OPTIONS. Including them gives the DM options to create more dynamic situations. Excluding them doesn't create that opportunity. More options. Not less. Listen to the Mean Girls: More is always better (excluding hemorrhoids, war, regressive taxes, etc...).

Whether the DM might or might not bother to put in the effort to utilize these options reasonably, or whether a PC elects an option that bypasses the restriction (which - by the way - is something that is given weight by actually letting it have a significant use ... making the selection meaningful rather than just being a slight notch up in accuracy and damage) are really not the point.

It is like saying we should avoid seatbelts because in some accidents they do not help. They help far more often than they don't, so we want to have them. Here, these features allow many situations in which they can be beneficial ... a few individual exceptions where you do not see the value does not mean they are a bad idea.

If you include these options in monsters, the things I discuss above are options. If you exclude them, they are not.

It absolutely does work if it is a silvered weapon restriction instead of magic, btw ... but they stripped the abilities in many cases, such as the Jackalwere, they did not limit them to silver, iron or other materials. However, it makes a magic weapon less "magical" when it is useless against low level foes. Finding a MAGIC weapon should feel MAGICAL. Too often it doesn't. People find a magic longsword and shrug it off saying, "Yeah, I'm just using 2 handed weapons. Wizard, you're an elf ... do you still get longsword proficiency? No? Anyone else want it?" That was not the intent of the idea of inserting magic into the game. In too many games the idea of a magic weapon is taken for granted. It is just an advancement mechanic where people expect to get it. As we strip the unique benefits of it by removing monster resistance/immunity, it makes the game more bland.

If you want to continue arguing I'm going to recommend you return to my prior posts and read them. As discussed above, you have not addressed the core of my argument. The merits deserve reflection, consideration and evaluation before sidestepping and dismissal.

 

[Stormonu]

As an aside, magic weapons feel like they have become so useless in 5E that I've been considering of late to change them so that for each +1, they get +1 to hit and +1d6 to damage to make them feel worth (and perhaps exciting) keeping.

And now, remembering that Magic Resistance exists, I don't feel quite so bad about keeping BPS Resistance/Immunity around.

 

[Rune]

My experience runnining a level 1-20 campaign with magic items in 5e was that, pretty quickly, resistance to nonmagical B/P/S weapons equated to no resistance. The fact that so many high-CR monsters had such seemed like a waste of ink. Worse, really, since that resistance was factored into the CR.

 

[Stormonu]

My experience runnining a level 1-20 campaign with magic items in 5e was that, pretty quickly, resistance to nonmagical B/P/S weapons equated to no resistance. The fact that so many high-CR monsters had such seemed like a waste of ink. Worse, really, since that resistance was factored into the CR.

A lot of that is to gate-keep the more powerful monsters out of the reach of lower level characters, honestly. Generally things like demons and devils are "high-level" foes, and by making them immune/resistant to non-magical BPS is a way of saying "wait until you're more heroic/higher level to fight these foes - they are a danger mere mortals can't handle!".

If you look at the 2014 monster creation rules, you'll notice as the CR goes up, the less effect non-magical BPS has on a creature; pretty much by CR 10 it's assumed a creature has that resistance as pretty much standard operating procedure.

 

[billd91]

My experience runnining a level 1-20 campaign with magic items in 5e was that, pretty quickly, resistance to nonmagical B/P/S weapons equated to no resistance. The fact that so many high-CR monsters had such seemed like a waste of ink. Worse, really, since that resistance was factored into the CR.

I'm not entirely sure that its impact was all that heavy, though. If (big if) the monsters followed guidelines, the most significant impact resistances had on effective hit points (and thus CR) was in the low CRs (1-4) and the effect reduced as more characters were expected to have magic weapons.

That said, as practical matter at the table rather than a theorycraft one, one of the areas I found where monsters were most lacking for their CR was in hit points. I almost always beefed up the hit points in any significant monsters in an encounter to make it more of a challenge to my players. So, it's entirely possible the impact of resistances was still to heavy in the CR calculations.

 

[Stalker0]

My experience runnining a level 1-20 campaign with magic items in 5e was that, pretty quickly, resistance to nonmagical B/P/S weapons equated to no resistance. The fact that so many high-CR monsters had such seemed like a waste of ink. Worse, really, since that resistance was factored into the CR.

I would agree with you the majority of the time. That said, there are some fun tricks you can do to bring that immunity back in. Anti-magic fields, have something that disarms the PC of their weapon. You could have some thing where the PC has to insert their sword like a key in a lock, but then a monster battle comes out so the weapon is not available at that time. As just a few ideas.