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

[jgsugden]

I prefer a lower level magic item campaign. That scarcity of magic items is exactly why I dislike immunity like the Jackalwere's. At CR 1/2 I should be able to throw several of this monster at even a level 1 party but because they lack the proper equipment I never would... I try to avoid puzzles that have no solution, and for character that rely on weapons there is no solution other than to have something magic. It's also not creative or inventive to know you need a magic or silver weapon, it's just an equipment tax.

Hollywood disagrees with you. There are countless movies where the hero has no weapon that can hurt the monster... but they have to stop it anyways. That is exciting, cinematic and dynamic stuff around which to build a situation.

When you reduce the idea to, "I need my weapon to hurt the monster in order for my weapon focused PC to have any value" you're already missing the point. We want monsters to provide significantly different challenges. To do so, they have to have significant differences. We moved away from goblins, orcs, kobolds, gnolls and all other humanoids feeling like bags of hps for a reason - and it was because we want creatures to be distinctly different and this type of ability ENABLES significant differentiation that requires people to do more than just whack off with their weapon.

My experiences for over 4 decades disagrees with you. As I've stated over and over and over - you can't argue that the approach I advocate doesn't work because I've used it, and seen it work, for decades. This isn't up for debate - it is a fact that it DOES work if used well. Period.

If it doesn't work for you - consider that there are other ways to approach the situation, including the ones I discuss above, that can work.

If I'm being honest here: When I find games where DMs stick to their guns on this issue I see it as a red flag. It tends to be indicative of a DM that wants to control everything. They're the DMs that don't want PCs to do anything that is not in their checklist of abilities on their character sheet. They don't want the monster to get pushed off a cliff so they'll stop it. They don't want the shatter spell to collapse the ceiling on the monster. They don't want the ranger to lure the monster away from the rest of the PCs and then escape it. Instead, they want a proper exchange of HPs where the PCs should utilize roughly 40% of their resources so that they can handle one more 40% utilization before their next rest, in which they'll short rest and recover enough abilities for one more encounter. These DMs tend to be the DMs that are playing their own game and letting the players use some of their toys - they tend to not be the DMs that create a game with their players. So when a player tries to be inventive the DM makes it nearly impossible to work. This is not universally true - but it has a pretty darn high cooccurrence.

D&D is an RPG - a role playing game. Characters play a role in a story. Look at the great stories we have in books, movies, tv, comics, etc... The idea that a monster can't be beat with brute force is a common trope - and it works! It results in great stories. We have so many of them. This type of mechanic enables those types of stories - and based up[on over 4 decades of my experience - they can be used to tell fun and exciting stories ... and most specifically, fun stories where the players feel like they did something special. Something memorable. Not just another 48 damage over 3 rounds.

If you disagree with me I PROMISE you that you could benefit from trying to see it my way and giving it a chance. If you think you have, and it has not worked, ask yourself why it was worked for others. What might you try differently to see what it is like when it does work?

NONE of us are perfect DMs. We should all be trying to get better all the time. I've learned A LOT by reading these forums over the past 23 (gulp) years and applied it to my games. Whether it was mechanical interactions, storytelling techniques, hidden rule interactions, implications of the math behind the tables in the game (I was not the first person to note that you likely will not find a magic weapon before level 5 under the 2014 rules) ... we should be open minded and consider what people are saying ... and if you think something does not work and someone else says, "Hey, it worked for me and it was great," consider that you might be missing something.

 

[billd91]

I'm glad they made the change for multiple reasons. First, I've been in a game were we hit werewolves and the fighter couldn't do diddly-squat. He may as well have sat the fight out for all the use he was. Second as a DM I want to be able to use things like wererats against low level parties ... but if I wanted them to survive I had to give them magic or silvered weapons long before I wanted to.

I can see what you're getting at here - you don't want to present the PCs with a challenge that can't be overcome. But I also agree with jgsugden here:

Hollywood disagrees with you. There are countless movies where the hero has no weapon that can hurt the monster... but they have to stop it anyways. That is exciting, cinematic and dynamic stuff around which to build a situation.

When you reduce the idea to, "I need my weapon to hurt the monster in order for my weapon focused PC to have any value" you're already missing the point. We want monsters to provide significantly different challenges. To do so, they have to have significant differences. We moved away from goblins, orcs, kobolds, gnolls and all other humanoids feeling like bags of hps for a reason - and it was because we want creatures to be distinctly different and this type of ability ENABLES significant differentiation that requires people to do more than just whack off with their weapon.

If the only solution your players (or you) can think of is an appropriate weapon for ablating hit points faster (or at all), then you've got a pretty limited scope. And, depending on your players, that might be appropriate. They might not have the kind of patience needed to suss out a different kind of solution. But then, that's why you always have freedom to choose the monsters you want them to encounter. They don't like lycanthropes or the trope is old and tired for you? Don't use them. There are plenty of monsters in the manual.
But designing for that common denominator of bashing through everything is a limited design scope as well. And the current rules on lycanthropes and their durability in 5e.2024, as well as the rules on silver weapons, are kind of lame and disappointing. The potential variety of monsters, coupled with some good encounter building advice, could be a means of enriching the game. And I hope they branch out a little more with this. I think it would make for a good DM toolkit hardcover for the 5e.2024 rules - which I hope is an idea percolating its way through the design team since it would be an ideal location for monster-building/modifying guidelines that are current absent from the updated system.

 

[Clint_L]

The big criticism of the published adventures was their absolute failure to follow the treasure guidelines...

If you followed the guidelines for treasure provision in the 2014 DMG, most parties did not get a magic weapon until around level 5 or 6...

Sorry, I was focused on reality rather than theory.

In reality, as many folks have expressed, the 2014 immunity to magic weapons attribute was usually a ribbon rather than a meaningful weakness. At least AD&D recognized the reality of the situation by adding gradients to the immunity.

 

[AlViking]

Hollywood disagrees with you. There are countless movies where the hero has no weapon that can hurt the monster... but they have to stop it anyways. That is exciting, cinematic and dynamic stuff around which to build a situation.

When you reduce the idea to, "I need my weapon to hurt the monster in order for my weapon focused PC to have any value" you're already missing the point. We want monsters to provide significantly different challenges. To do so, they have to have significant differences. We moved away from goblins, orcs, kobolds, gnolls and all other humanoids feeling like bags of hps for a reason - and it was because we want creatures to be distinctly different and this type of ability ENABLES significant differentiation that requires people to do more than just whack off with their weapon.

My experiences for over 4 decades disagrees with you. As I've stated over and over and over - you can't argue that the approach I advocate doesn't work because I've used it, and seen it work, for decades. This isn't up for debate - it is a fact that it DOES work if used well. Period.

If it doesn't work for you - consider that there are other ways to approach the situation, including the ones I discuss above, that can work.

If I'm being honest here: When I find games where DMs stick to their guns on this issue I see it as a red flag. It tends to be indicative of a DM that wants to control everything. They're the DMs that don't want PCs to do anything that is not in their checklist of abilities on their character sheet. They don't want the monster to get pushed off a cliff so they'll stop it. They don't want the shatter spell to collapse the ceiling on the monster. They don't want the ranger to lure the monster away from the rest of the PCs and then escape it. Instead, they want a proper exchange of HPs where the PCs should utilize roughly 40% of their resources so that they can handle one more 40% utilization before their next rest, in which they'll short rest and recover enough abilities for one more encounter. These DMs tend to be the DMs that are playing their own game and letting the players use some of their toys - they tend to not be the DMs that create a game with their players. So when a player tries to be inventive the DM makes it nearly impossible to work. This is not universally true - but it has a pretty darn high cooccurrence.

D&D is an RPG - a role playing game. Characters play a role in a story. Look at the great stories we have in books, movies, tv, comics, etc... The idea that a monster can't be beat with brute force is a common trope - and it works! It results in great stories. We have so many of them. This type of mechanic enables those types of stories - and based up[on over 4 decades of my experience - they can be used to tell fun and exciting stories ... and most specifically, fun stories where the players feel like they did something special. Something memorable. Not just another 48 damage over 3 rounds.

If you disagree with me I PROMISE you that you could benefit from trying to see it my way and giving it a chance. If you think you have, and it has not worked, ask yourself why it was worked for others. What might you try differently to see what it is like when it does work?

NONE of us are perfect DMs. We should all be trying to get better all the time. I've learned A LOT by reading these forums over the past 23 (gulp) years and applied it to my games. Whether it was mechanical interactions, storytelling techniques, hidden rule interactions, implications of the math behind the tables in the game (I was not the first person to note that you likely will not find a magic weapon before level 5 under the 2014 rules) ... we should be open minded and consider what people are saying ... and if you think something does not work and someone else says, "Hey, it worked for me and it was great," consider that you might be missing something.

We're all just expressing opinions here. In my opinion immunity to non-magical weapons does not work well in D&D. Either it's an insurmountable obstacle or it's meaningless. What works in movies or books works because lycanthropes are unique creatures and the protagonists of the stories will get access to silver and aren't actually in danger until they get access.

I have no idea what you're talking about with the controlling DM tangent. One of my issues is that pushing a werewolf off a cliff accomplishes nothing other than delaying the werewolf's return, something that I've seen while playing when the fighter didn't have magic or silver weapons. Collapse the ceiling? Same thing. If the werewolf can dig their way out they are completely undamaged. I allow and encourage plenty of out-of-the-box solutions but immunity to non-silver or magical damage is not a challenge as far as I'm concerned, it just means certain characters are irrelevant to a fight until the moment they pick up the "correct" weapon and then completely ignore the immunity.

 

[AlViking]

I can see what you're getting at here - you don't want to present the PCs with a challenge that can't be overcome. But I also agree with jgsugden here:

If the only solution your players (or you) can think of is an appropriate weapon for ablating hit points faster (or at all), then you've got a pretty limited scope. And, depending on your players, that might be appropriate. They might not have the kind of patience needed to suss out a different kind of solution. But then, that's why you always have freedom to choose the monsters you want them to encounter. They don't like lycanthropes or the trope is old and tired for you? Don't use them. There are plenty of monsters in the manual.
But designing for that common denominator of bashing through everything is a limited design scope as well. And the current rules on lycanthropes and their durability in 5e.2024, as well as the rules on silver weapons, are kind of lame and disappointing. The potential variety of monsters, coupled with some good encounter building advice, could be a means of enriching the game. And I hope they branch out a little more with this. I think it would make for a good DM toolkit hardcover for the 5e.2024 rules - which I hope is an idea percolating its way through the design team since it would be an ideal location for monster-building/modifying guidelines that are current absent from the updated system.

But there is no alternate solution. You need damaging spells, magic or silvered weapons. That's not creative, it's an equipment tax and yet one more reason to never play a martial character. I could see giving lycanthropes regen that stopped by silvered weapons or some variation on the theme. To me the creative use of a lycanthrope is to have the sweet old lady that sells flowers be a ravenous monster when the moon is full or the wererat that shifts form and scurries away into a hole in the wall.

I don't think there is a perfect solution, I've just never really cared for immunity to silvered or nonmagical weapons.

 

[James Gasik]

All this talk about how were-creatures against low-level parties is a meaningful challenge, something designed to force the players to come up with inspired solutions, is all well and good, but in my experience (having played the game since the late 80's), it rarely works out that way.

My first experience was with wererats. A fairly weak enemy, apparently considered perfectly cromulent to use against low-level adventurers. When we originally encountered them, we thought they were just a band of thieves- then they assumed their ratman forms and the true nightmare began. Turning to run, our melee were already engaged, so they couldn't retreat without opening themselves up to free hits. They didn't make it.

My 2nd-level Cleric was loaded up on nothing but Cure Light Wounds (as the older, wiser players had advised me to do), so I valiantly tried to keep my allies alive as we retreated, pursued by wererats. One by one, the party members fell, until it was down to me, struggling to stay alive.

Miraculously, I did manage to escape the wererats- we'd come across a trap earlier, a tunnel rigged to collapse, that the Thief had luckily managed to help us bypass. I got to the other side, triggered the rockfall (burying a few wererats under debris), the lone survivor.

Then the DM decided to check to see if I'd succumbed to the curse. Turns out, I did, and became a wererat, which meant that the first time I changed, I got myself murdered by my new adventuring companions. Yay.

Much later, in a Ravenloft game, we found ourselves beset upon by a pack of wolves- but oh no, some of the wolves turned out to be wolf-men! We had a +1 dagger, while the rest of us scrambled to figure out some way to damage the foes- the Thief used his sling to launch silver pieces (the DM was kind enough to let them do d3 damage with a -1 to hit).

Not that it mattered, because we discovered silver didn't work on it. Oh no, it's a Wolfwere! Out came the iron cooking utensils, pots, pans, and whatever else we had on us. Unfortunately, this was a Greater Wolfwere- if you didn't take it to 0 in one turn, it would heal all damage done to it completely! Another TPK brought to you by the Ravenloft Monstrous Compendium Appendix!

The next time this happened (still in Ravenloft- I'll never understand why the setting is so popular, when all it seems to do is pit nerfed, magic-poor PC's against impossible-to-kill monsters), we were ready. We had silver. We had iron.

Oh. It's a Loup-garou, not a wolfwere or a werewolf. Ok, so what do you need to kill it? We had no idea until after it killed us all.

Gold. It was vulnerable to gold weapons. You can't get more ridiculous than that- who would make a gold weapon as anything more than a display piece? Do you know how soft gold is?

The next encounter was with the werewolf magic-user in White Plume Mountain. It was her and her Fighter boyfriend. We had magic weapons. Absolute slaughter.

You get the idea.

I'm not saying that you can't run an encounter with were-critters in a low-magic environment. But so much can go wrong, and the Monster Manual entries never say "hey, uh, you need to be careful with this critter". It's like how in 3.5, your 1st level adventurers could encounter a Wight and be instantly killed by it's ability to hand out negative levels. Or a cockatrice turning you to stone.

Hell, even in 5e, shadows are still an absolute nightmare to deal with- tons of resistances, able to move through walls, and a way to kill you that bypasses hit points and can't be easily dealt with, while potentially nerfing your character's ability to fight into the ground.

There's so much that can go wrong when using enemies like this, even if you're an old hand at DMing. And if you're not? Yeah.

I have lots of experience with how an encounter with these kinds of monsters can be a train wreck against unprepared parties, and an absolute joke against prepared parties. "Puzzle" monsters in general just encourage absolute paranoia among players, to the point that they are convinced every statue is a construct waiting to come to life, every bunny rabbit is a horrible monster, every treasure chest is a mimic, and every beautiful NPC must be pure evil.

To those DM's who have had positive experiences with this sort of thing...who cares what the monster manual says? Just change them for your campaign and good luck to you!

Me? I'm happy to see the tail end of critters that are more likely to TPK a party before their characters can even effectively figure out how to defeat them (let alone flee).

 

[CreamCloud0]

the idea of different material weapons and gear do appeal but not really in the 'you need silver/iron/magic/ect... weapon to deal real damage to X creature' way, but more in the 'mythril weapons have expanded crit range, adamantine weapons have an extra damage die' way that lets you customize your playstyle with them.

 

[jgsugden]

Sorry, I was focused on reality rather than theory.

In reality, as many folks have expressed, the 2014 immunity to magic weapons attribute was usually a ribbon rather than a meaningful weakness...

Unless, you know, you followed the guidelines as I discussed and PCs did not get more than intended magic weapons.

We're all just expressing opinions here.

As discussed, this is not an opinion situation. You can't say that it does not work as an opinion when there is objective proof that it can, does, and has worked well for decades. That is like saying that the earth is flat in your opinion. As with so much of D&D - it works well when utilized as intended. The designers talked about these mechanics and about how they are intended. What I describe is 100% the intent, and as mentioned, there is 100% proof that it can work well.

In my opinion immunity to non-magical weapons does not work well in D&D. Either it's an insurmountable obstacle or it's meaningless. What works in movies or books works because lycanthropes are unique creatures and the protagonists of the stories will get access to silver and aren't actually in danger until they get access...

You claim it does not work, and then describe a way in which you can use it quite well - giving them access to the tool they need as part of the adventure after they first encounter the challenge.

Example: 3rd level PCs. No magic weapons. They are traveling an hear screams from a nearby farm house. They investigate and learn that a half human / half hound type creature dragged off one of the children after putting it to sleep. The PCs make some knowledge rolls and know it is a Jackalwere. The father in the house grabbed his grandfather's axe and ran after the monster moments ago ... and if the PCs follow they'll find the father deceased and the special axe lying at the ground by the beast - which has a wound that does not appear to be healing. The PCs have to go right at the beast to get the weapon (and use spells, etc...)

 

[AlViking]

Unless, you know, you followed the guidelines as I discussed and PCs did not get more than intended magic weapons.As discussed, this is not an opinion situation. You can't say that it does not work as an opinion when there is objective proof that it can, does, and has worked well for decades. That is like saying that the earth is flat in your opinion. As with so much of D&D - it works well when utilized as intended. The designers talked about these mechanics and about how they are intended. What I describe is 100% the intent, and as mentioned, there is 100% proof that it can work well.You claim it does not work, and then describe a way in which you can use it quite well - giving them access to the tool they need as part of the adventure after they first encounter the challenge.

Example: 3rd level PCs. No magic weapons. They are traveling an hear screams from a nearby farm house. They investigate and learn that a half human / half hound type creature dragged off one of the children after putting it to sleep. The PCs make some knowledge rolls and know it is a Jackalwere. The father in the house grabbed his grandfather's axe and ran after the monster moments ago ... and if the PCs follow they'll find the father deceased and the special axe lying at the ground by the beast - which has a wound that does not appear to be healing. The PCs have to go right at the beast to get the weapon (and use spells, etc...)

You're contradicting yourself aren't you? Characters shouldn't have easy access to magic weapons at low levels while simultaneously saying that the solution is to get magic weapons. What if they simply aren't available? I played Curse of Strahd a while back and our fighter could not purchase nor did he find a magic weapon. He had zero options to significantly help in fights vs lycanthropes. Meanwhile my wizard was completely unaffected. We even shoved the werewolf off a cliff and the only thing that bought us was a few minutes to heal up before it returned.

I think the magic equipment tax is boring and adds little or nothing to the game because the player has no control over whether or not they have access to the required weapon. If the DM provides opportunities to get the weapons, they're all good. If not, they SOL and there's nothing they can do about it. In my opinion, of course.

 

[James Gasik]

Also, knowledge rolls to know if something is a Jackalwere, for example, have not always been enshrined in D&D rules- in 5e, for example, it's all up to the DM whether you can make the roll or not, let alone at what difficulty. You still have DM's who don't want players to know things like "use fire against Trolls" without in-game experience, after all.

I remember many DM's in the 3e-4e era being quite annoyed that the rules not only enshrined monster knowledge checks, but with DC's the players could know about and reliably hit. "Ruins all the fun if they can just look at a monster and go, 'oh, it's vulnerable to cold and immune to fire, and you need an adamantine or magic bludgeoning weapon to bypass it's DR'".