D&D (2024) 2024 - Do magic weapons bypass resistance now?
- Thread starter Stalker0
- Start date
CreamCloud0
Hero
Noooo... don't do that, that'd be UNFAIR and DIFFICULT on those poor beleaguered spellcasters, don't you know how much they suffer?, you go around taking away their influence like that and they might have to * GASP * rely on the martials!
jgsugden
Legend
Dude.
I am done with this as well - but i am going to go back to two points I have made over and over and over and over and over and over ...
1.) You can't claim it doesn't work when people have been using it, and having it work, for decades. It isn't an opinion item. It isn't a preference issue. Water is wet. Fire is hot. This system worked and provided options that players and DMs used to great effect. Period. Without it in the rules, the rules take away those options. You're cutting the tasty sauce off the sundae.
2.) If you spent a quart of the effort you put into trying to be right despite the impossibility that your 'opinion' is right (see above), you could find the benefit I discussed above.
jgsugden
Legend
Think about that statement. Magic weapon. Not interesting. Magic. Not interesting.
Doesn't that strike you as ... wrong? Something magical that just doesn't matter?
Abilities like this were part of what was intended, and in games that used the mechanics well, did make magic matter in weapons.
If you think it is a good idea to take away mechanics that make magic weapons significant - think about the whole picture and consider you might be missing something. Really - give it thought.
I've been using lycanthropes as written for decades as well. I always make sure the group has silver or magic weapons because I've always thought it was stupid. While there are some delaying tactics if you don't have the proper weapons the martial types can't contribute much to the fight the vast majority of times. I've seen it again and again whether I'm DM or player and I'm glad it's changing.
It's no harm no foul that I find no benefit in your opinions, same as you find no value in mine. That's fine, we're just not going to agree on this.
I'm with @mellored on this one, a +1 weapon is kind of boring, especially when the main reason I can get it is to overcome immunity and it's just kind of assumed that you're going to get one fairly early on.
Give me a rope of climbing, boots of jumping, ring of feather falling, a bag of tricks, a hat of disguise? Those and a lot of other wondrous items that aren't tied directly to martial prowess are fun. Slightly better chance to hit and minor increase to damage? I won't say no but I don't get particularly excited by them.
mellored
Legend
Unless your going to rewrite all the casters to have less magic, and remove all the magical ability from all the races, then no.
5e isn't a low magic game. Neither was 4e or 3e. It's heroic fantasy.
Maybe 2e was, never played it.
Possibly due a shift due to real world technology. In the 1970's, the idea that you could pull something out of your pocket and talk to someone hundreds of miles away was fantastical. Now it's wierd if you can't do that.
And as such, our expectations of what "fantastic" is has risen.
Once per campaign, if the DM planned things correctly, and if you didn't die the first time.
But even then, you only need 1 creature to have it. One thing you can't defeat without a magic weapon. Then you have the magic item and can continue. And the rest is a waste of ink.
I had a "semi gothic" campaign where the devils were like rakshasa, immune to spell levels X and below. And magic weapons were rarer than standard.
A certain amount of telegraphing was needed "The cultists seem to have acquired a book of summoning lower level devils"
It was fun for an adventure style/duration.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
I'm reminded of the way golems used to be. Invulnerable save to a very specific list of spells, with odd resistances and weaknesses. If you didn't happen to know what spells worked on one, or had them memorized, your tactical options became very limited. And even for warriors, they required magic weapons to defeat, and sometimes very specific ones, like the Clay Golem, which required a magical blunt weapon, back when blunt weapons were among the worst weapons a warrior could wield, especially against Large-sized creatures.
So typically, you encountered a golem, quite possibly realized you had no conventional way to fight it, and that magic was an unreliable tool at best. So you try to flee from it and either come back at a later date better prepared, or tried to figure out how to lure it into a trap.
I've run encounters like this- one time, as a "side encounter", my players found a flesh golem standing over a camp of slain humanoids, guarding a large chest too heavy for anyone but the golem to lift. They quickly found they couldn't really fight it effectively, and it's attacks were far too brutal for them to stand up to.
They could flee from it, because apparently it's last command was to "guard the chest". My intention was for the players to come back later, when they had the means to defeat it, and claim the treasure it was guarding if they felt it was worth it.
But oh no, not my players! They were bound and determined to get that treasure, risking life and limb to get at the chest. They lured it as far away as they could, so the stealthiest party member could creep up on the chest and try to open it- only to find it was locked and magically trapped.
For three days they would engage with this thing, get the tar beat out of them, flee, rest up, and try again. The entire game had ground to a halt, and with each defeat, the players were getting more and more annoyed.
Finally, begrudgingly, they gave up, but they weren't happy about it. One of them finally got the idea in their head to ask how the other people at the camp died- they'd assumed the golem had gone berserk and killed them all, but with a good roll, after all that time, they found tracks that led them to what was left of the group of bandits who had attacked the campsite, only to find the golem was beyond their ability as well.
The party easily defeated the stragglers and claimed their loot, which included a barrel of smoke powder. This is when they got the bright idea to try and blow up the golem.
So once again, they lured the golem as far from the chest as they could, ran in, dropped the barrel, and then lured it back towards it, only for the party's Wizard to detonate it....with a Fireball.
The damage was nowhere near enough to kill the golem. But I was tired of this nonsense so I gave them the win. Of course, the explosion was big enough to destroy most of the loot on the dead corpses, and severely damage the chest (setting off it's own traps), which would only leave them with a fraction of the reward.
I was accused of being petty, denying them their hard-earned reward, after all their hard work. Rightly or wrongly, I compromised and let the magic items (sans scrolls and potions) survive, as well as the gems. The art objects were toast, and the coin was mostly ruined (Fireballs tend to do that).
This ate up an entire session, and I learned a valuable lesson about dangling doggie treats over a starving wolf's head, lol.
Maybe the way I set up the encounter was wrong, I don't know. A former DM of mine had always done things like this, and I was emulating them- letting the players safely encounter a threat beyond their means. They didn't have to mess with it, but if they did, and succeeded, they would earn greater rewards.
But somehow, every time I've tried it, it's gone horribly wrong. What I finally came to realize is, the game has changed. It's no longer a game of "can we defeat this thing we've encountered", but "how long will it take". Characters gain more abilities from their classes/races/feats. They are more resilient, and the game's design seems expected for them to take on even difficult challenges with a high success rate.
It's not the player's fault then, if they pick up on this, and expect the answers to encounters to be their abilities, and not their tactics. The days where you had to MacGyver solutions on the fly are pretty much gone, and a scant handful of monsters that refuse to follow this paradigm no longer have a place, and apparently the designers have decided to pound in some of these proud nails.
What worked in AD&D doesn't necessarily work in 3e, 4e, or 5e. You'd have to work hard to train your players to think like someone playing 30-50 years ago, and for what? You're fighting the system at this point, and you might just frustrate your players- I know I have!
It's not the same game anymore. Maybe you could twist and warp it into something that resembles older D&D, but why, when older D&D still exists?
The answer I get, more often than not, is that new players don't want to play older D&D. If that's so, why force feed it to them?
While there could be merit in the "puzzle monster", it runs against the grain of the modern game, and and in turn, confuses modern players. It becomes something that's too easy to get wrong, and too difficult to get right. So yeah, maybe it's time to go.
To those who know what they are doing, they can try to add puzzle monsters back into the game if they want to. That doesn't mean they should exist for people who don't know how to use them.
So typically, you encountered a golem, quite possibly realized you had no conventional way to fight it, and that magic was an unreliable tool at best. So you try to flee from it and either come back at a later date better prepared, or tried to figure out how to lure it into a trap.
I've run encounters like this- one time, as a "side encounter", my players found a flesh golem standing over a camp of slain humanoids, guarding a large chest too heavy for anyone but the golem to lift. They quickly found they couldn't really fight it effectively, and it's attacks were far too brutal for them to stand up to.
They could flee from it, because apparently it's last command was to "guard the chest". My intention was for the players to come back later, when they had the means to defeat it, and claim the treasure it was guarding if they felt it was worth it.
But oh no, not my players! They were bound and determined to get that treasure, risking life and limb to get at the chest. They lured it as far away as they could, so the stealthiest party member could creep up on the chest and try to open it- only to find it was locked and magically trapped.
For three days they would engage with this thing, get the tar beat out of them, flee, rest up, and try again. The entire game had ground to a halt, and with each defeat, the players were getting more and more annoyed.
Finally, begrudgingly, they gave up, but they weren't happy about it. One of them finally got the idea in their head to ask how the other people at the camp died- they'd assumed the golem had gone berserk and killed them all, but with a good roll, after all that time, they found tracks that led them to what was left of the group of bandits who had attacked the campsite, only to find the golem was beyond their ability as well.
The party easily defeated the stragglers and claimed their loot, which included a barrel of smoke powder. This is when they got the bright idea to try and blow up the golem.
So once again, they lured the golem as far from the chest as they could, ran in, dropped the barrel, and then lured it back towards it, only for the party's Wizard to detonate it....with a Fireball.
The damage was nowhere near enough to kill the golem. But I was tired of this nonsense so I gave them the win. Of course, the explosion was big enough to destroy most of the loot on the dead corpses, and severely damage the chest (setting off it's own traps), which would only leave them with a fraction of the reward.
I was accused of being petty, denying them their hard-earned reward, after all their hard work. Rightly or wrongly, I compromised and let the magic items (sans scrolls and potions) survive, as well as the gems. The art objects were toast, and the coin was mostly ruined (Fireballs tend to do that).
This ate up an entire session, and I learned a valuable lesson about dangling doggie treats over a starving wolf's head, lol.
Maybe the way I set up the encounter was wrong, I don't know. A former DM of mine had always done things like this, and I was emulating them- letting the players safely encounter a threat beyond their means. They didn't have to mess with it, but if they did, and succeeded, they would earn greater rewards.
But somehow, every time I've tried it, it's gone horribly wrong. What I finally came to realize is, the game has changed. It's no longer a game of "can we defeat this thing we've encountered", but "how long will it take". Characters gain more abilities from their classes/races/feats. They are more resilient, and the game's design seems expected for them to take on even difficult challenges with a high success rate.
It's not the player's fault then, if they pick up on this, and expect the answers to encounters to be their abilities, and not their tactics. The days where you had to MacGyver solutions on the fly are pretty much gone, and a scant handful of monsters that refuse to follow this paradigm no longer have a place, and apparently the designers have decided to pound in some of these proud nails.
What worked in AD&D doesn't necessarily work in 3e, 4e, or 5e. You'd have to work hard to train your players to think like someone playing 30-50 years ago, and for what? You're fighting the system at this point, and you might just frustrate your players- I know I have!
It's not the same game anymore. Maybe you could twist and warp it into something that resembles older D&D, but why, when older D&D still exists?
The answer I get, more often than not, is that new players don't want to play older D&D. If that's so, why force feed it to them?
While there could be merit in the "puzzle monster", it runs against the grain of the modern game, and and in turn, confuses modern players. It becomes something that's too easy to get wrong, and too difficult to get right. So yeah, maybe it's time to go.
To those who know what they are doing, they can try to add puzzle monsters back into the game if they want to. That doesn't mean they should exist for people who don't know how to use them.
I'm not sure it's really "kid's nowadays" or even a new phenomena. I think it's always been pretty group dependent even going back to AD&D or before. I still run encounters now and then where the players know they can't win and have to look for alternative but it's not going to be "get X to defeat Y" it's more how to sneak around, avoid, distract, run away to get reinforcements, something other than defeating the enemy using the direct approach where you can win because you managed to obtain the whisk broom of infinite sweeping to take on the legendary dust elemental.
We all have different approaches and preferences of course. But if I did have a gargantuan dragon turtle that could only be defeated by the spatula of flipping, I'm going to have an NPC or tome explicitly tell them. They may see the turtle taking out a well fortified fort first but I will probably also just flat out tell them that they're overmatched and that they have little or no chance of winning in a direct attack. Then, if they decide this is something they need to deal with there will be options to find what is needed. Similar to how I thought wererats made sense as antagonists for lowish level characters a while back so I ensured they had silver weapons. I'm just glad I don't have to do that from now on unless I want it to be a truly special standout threat.
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