Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9364510" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Yeah, the magic item pricing guidelines were a particular hobgoblin, and when they tried to address it, it actually made some people more contentious.  "Healing belts are too cheap!  They make it so you're always at full hit points when combat starts!", and so on.Which I never saw an issue with- the monsters start at full resources, don't they?  But this move towards making D&D encounter-based instead of day-based attrition (which was seen with the Warlock, the Book of Nine Swords, and other places in later 3.5) was not embraced by many.Which made 4e doubly contentious.  If you liked the idea of not having to balance "adventuring days" that much, it was great!  If you preferred the old "wear them down until they can't go on", not so much- even though that did still happen once you ran out of healing surges, it apparently felt way too generous for some.Personally, I loved Reserve Feats and Eternal Wands, since it made my job easier.  Not enough emphasis was placed on the principle that consumables shouldn't effect your Wealth By Level, so players avoided them like the plague.  And it didn't help that some charged items were heinously expensive- nobody wanted a Staff of Healing when you could load up on Wands of Lesser Vigor, lol.Encumbrance though.  Yikes.  I get why it exists, I mean, you want to limit how much loot PC's take out of the dungeon, especially in 1e, where that's experience points and the ability to pay for training, but once those no longer were factors, it remained as a nod towards the very realism that Gary lambasts in the DMG (for a guy who felt arguments about realism were problematic, he sure liked to make rules that reflected real-world problems, lol).Even though now, if you don't want your players to have too much treasure, you can just...not give it to them, and it really doesn't effect a whole lot.Or give them a sea of platinum pieces and see if they can come up with a good use for it, lol.And yeah, obviously even in 1e, encumbrance was one of those things like light sources, shelter, and readily available food and water that just stops being a factor after awhile.  Gary offered multiple "mega capacity" magic items, spoons that make gruel, ioun stones that let you survive without food or drink or even air (if my memory serves), portable iron towers, and that's before we even get to the spells!The ability to "opt-out" of exploration challenges was present from the very beginning of 1e, which always struck me as odd when fans of the old school wax nostalgic about the rigors of survival.  Did they just not use such things?  Was nobody casting goodberry or create food and water back in the day?I know one of my earliest 3e characters, a Cleric, started a campaign in the desert, where the DM fully expected us to struggle to survive, but armed with a spell list that let me resist the environment for 24 hours, remove fatigue, create water (and later food!), I became a survival expert without any points in the vital skills, soon supplanting the Ranger entirely, and the DM finally just threw up his hands and shifted gears as I kept finding solutions to problems in my spell list.And then by the time we had Warforged, I think most DM's exploded when you could play a race from level 1 that basically didn't care about all these low level hassles.  Poison?  Fatigue?  Drowining? Starvation?  Ha!  I'm a superior metal man, fleshbag!</blockquote>

Verification