Alternate Spell Components...

[LoneWolf23]

Bought the Special Extended Edition DVD of Fellowship of the Ring, and watching the Gandalf/Sarumon fight made me realize something: In most media, spellcasters rarely go around tossing out handfulls of material components around to cast their spells. Most of the time, they have Staves or Wands or Amulets of Power. Said items rarely have powers other then allow the spellcaster to cast his spells, however.

So how's this for a variant on the Spellcasting classes: Instead of having to use material components, they can choose to gain a Unique Focus such as a Wand, a Staff, an Amulet or a Fetish, or to use expendable and easily replacable one-time use components.

Still need to work on the actual statistics for such an ability...

 

[FrankTrollman]

Material Components - even costly components - are not a meaningful balancing factor.

If you don't like using them - just drop them from the game entirely. They are there to promote a certain genre of wizard who fiddles with stuff - and to provide inane comic relief through puns.

If you want to have a "serious" game - the material components should be dropped entirely. Otherwise every time someone casts Tongues it can seriously disrupt the mood.

-Frank

 

[AeroDm]

If you want to have a "serious" game - the material components should be dropped entirely. Otherwise every time someone casts Tongues it can seriously disrupt the mood.

-Frank

Whats up with that? I though it was a clay ziggurat that shatters.

 

[FrankTrollman]

Whats up with that? I though it was a clay ziggurat that shatters.

Yes, you build a miniature Tower of Babel in order to speak with all the men of the Earth.

It's an old testament "easter egg" - which someone thought was funny in 1977. Ever since, it's just become a tired, tired pun. Lot's of spell components are like that to one degree or another - and "getting them" really doesn't enhance the enjoyment of them after playing with them for twenty-plus years.

-Frank

 

[rkanodia]

Yes, you build a miniature Tower of Babel in order to speak with all the men of the Earth.

It's an old testament "easter egg" - which someone thought was funny in 1977. Ever since, it's just become a tired, tired pun. Lot's of spell components are like that to one degree or another - and "getting them" really doesn't enhance the enjoyment of them after playing with them for twenty-plus years.

-Frank

One thing you could do would be to remove the material components for general casting. Then allow the various material components to be an option used for a bonus to the spell, maybe +1 save DC, or +1 caster level. Maybe even add your own 'clever' components for spells that don't have them. To stop this from becoming 'same as before, only with a bonus on every spell', make a rule limiting how many components you can have at a time - for instance, you must have been carrying a component for at least 24 hours before it becomes 'attuned' to your magical energy, and you can only have up to your Int bonus in attuned items. Also, make your players act out their usage of the material components - "I blow sand towards the enemy, putting them to sleep" etc. It might make for some good roleplaying, and possibly more interesting spellcasting villains.

 

[Li Shenron]

Bought the Special Extended Edition DVD of Fellowship of the Ring, and watching the Gandalf/Sarumon fight made me realize something: In most media, spellcasters rarely go around tossing out handfulls of material components around to cast their spells. Most of the time, they have Staves or Wands or Amulets of Power. Said items rarely have powers other then allow the spellcaster to cast his spells, however.

Well, there are many other things in D&D spellcasters that are quite arbitrary: arcane spell failure and preparing spells to name the biggest ones

If I understand correctly that you want to make the change for flavor, you can keep the gp expense by forcing the wizard to somehow charge its power item (let's call it "focus", no?) before he can use spells with costly material components. You should also fix a limit of max gp in the focus (depending on level) to cast those spells. This way you'll retain the extra spells costs for permanent spells for example, which may otherwise become too good.

I really think there won't be anything else to fix!

In any case, I think it's best to leave freedom to the players themselves about which exactly the component is.

 

[LoneWolf23]

I was thinking of having Focuses start out with basic abilities, and grow like Familiars would over time. A starting focus would just allow a spellcaster to throw spells around, but as the spellcaster progressed in levels, he could learn how to cast silent spells simply by pointing his staff, how to charge the staff with specific one-shot spells like a scroll, or even how to summon his wand to fly into his hand. An experienced wizard could even use said Focus as a Soul Jar in case his body was ever destroyed, and a Lich could turn it into a phylactery.

Said Focus could be just about anything: a Staff, a Wand, a Crown, an Amulet of Power, a Crown, a Ring... Just as long as it's possibly removable with a little effort and a grappling check.

The alternative to using Focuses would be gathering and expending ingrediants to prepare the spell. Not "standard" ingrediants like bat guano for a fireball, but rather ingrediants appropriate to the spellcaster's theme. A naturalist spellcaster (Ranger, Druid, Nature Cleric) could focus his magic through gathering herbs and plants to prepare potions and powders specific for their spells, while a necromancer would gather corpse parts, bones, dirt from a grave, etc.

Still working on how such things would cost, though.

 

[FrankTrollman]

Seems appropriate here as well:

Costly materials don't balance anything, which is why they are a bad idea.

The amount of character "wealth" - in terms of game mechanically affecting stuff such as tools, magical objects, and adventuring equipment is to the most important extent alloted to the party by the DM.

If the players expend some of that casting spells, the DM will have to make up for it in the placement of more equipment in treasure piles if he wants to maintain the game in the manner he was planning in terms of relative "wealth".

If the DM did not have a goal for party "wealth" - then any semblance of balance with regards to party "wealth" is a hillarious joke. And if the DM did have a goal for party "wealth" he's going to have to take costly material component expenditures into account.

In short, if the game is even attempting to be balanced in terms of equipment - the cost of the costly material components factors out of the equation - it simply gets added to expenditures and to income and never gets heard from again.

-

However: why should we care anyway?

As things currently stand, characters get their money bins filled at level 9 when the Wizard gets Fabricate and the Cleric gets Plane Shift.

That's a stupid way for your monetary woes to go away, but why should they really be there at that point anyway?

You're a level 9 character. At this point, you've overcome approximately one hundred and four obstacles - any one of which could have been the major plot hook for a fairy story. Sooner or later, you're just going to marry the Princess and become the Prince.

And that level is ninth level. At ninth level you qualify for "Land Lord" - where you simply take a feat and arbitrarily become the Prince.

That doesn't kill adventuring possibilities. Prince Charming still adventures, he just doesn't stop in the middle of assaulting the Witch Queen's Black Tower to figure out how much the tapestries are worth on the black market.

Eventually you just need a motivation for adventuring other than "amassing money". Dragons should have enough gold to sleep on. Slaying even a halfling-sized dragon therefore should be netting you a tenth of a cubic meter of gold - or roughly two hundred and eighteen thousand, two hundred and ninety five gold pieces. You don't have to do that twice to not need more gold for anything other than bathing or sleeping on.

The only meaningful way to make people not strip-mine the worlds of imagination is to make them no longer care about money by the time they get there. When you get to the legendary adventures of 9th-16th level characters, there should be statues with ruby eyes the size of your head, bridges made entirely out of amethyst, and tremendous gateways made of high-quality bronze.

And if you are actually trying to screw people for individual gold pieces at that level, they will stop the adventure in order to strip all the jade out of the forgotten shrine, loot the golden flatware of the lycanthropic and insane lord of the valley, and pry all the moonstones out of the eyes of the statue garden of the chapel of silence.

Prince Charming doesn't do that because he is the Prince, and he already has arbitrary amounts of wealth. Unless player characters also get arbitrary wealth they will strip the scenery for cash.

"Gold Piece Value" just isn't a limiting factor to Legendary Characters. It can't be. If they for some reason needed cash - they'd just go get it.

And while there's a certain cache to playing "Scrooge McDuck" or "The Quest for More Money" - these are comedies for a reason. You just can't take a story seriously if the primary motivation is supposed to be cold hard cash once the character has already captured four dragon hordes.

If the story is going to even attempt at Drama instead of Comedy - character wealth must become abstracted at Legendary levels. It just doesn't work to try to worry about characters' budgets down to the gold piece at levels 9 and up.

-Frank

 

[Saeviomagy]

The simplest way is to simply say

"you can describe the focus or material component for a spell in any way you see fit"

That way when someone buys themselves a bag of material components, they can instead say "the gp I expended represents the intricate carvings on my staff, which I need to work my magics", or "It represents the tattoos which run up my arms and across my back", or whatever.

Expendable components simply need to be taken good care of - instead of diamond dust for stoneskin, it could be a rare magical tatooing ink which gradually fades (the player buys 10 doses at a time).

Simply put - if it's mechanically the same, the flavour is mutable.

 

[Tywyll]

Seems appropriate here as well:

Why should we care anyway?

-Frank

You know, Frank, that's an excellent article. I love it. BAck in my 2nd ed days, the party of the three year campaign I ran were more or less backed by the nobles and the queen of the country. There was relatively little monetary reward, certainly there was a dragon hoard or two, but on the average, the adventures were done for the main reason of, "because its the right thing to do." They found their magic items, they got payed by the royals for the fiddly stuff, and they focused on the story.

I loved that.

Enter 3rd Ed, with a percise gold to level equation of balance, and the ability to create your own magic items if you have too much gold. Suddenly, that sort of adventuring is more difficult to run. YOu have to worry about party wealth and balance in order to correctly assess challenge ratings and all that nonsence. *sigh* I miss the old days sometimes.