Confirmed: Magic items and summoned monster stats in PHB

[Wormwood]

So in other words, the DM decides when you run out of arrows because its dramaticly appropriate to the story?

I prefer it when the player decides that sort of thing.

 

[Mallus]

Really? What story is not made up of minutia and simulation? What story's success is not examined in the light of these benchmarks.

The Ramayana? The Old Testament?

DM: Don't bother me with minutia! They're some orcs! You fight them and win....

A perfectly valid response, depending on the level of the PC's. Handwave non-challenges unless the goal is to showcase the power of the protagonists cf. mooks-as-party-foils.

If you ignore keeping track of ammo, why bother keeping track of gp? Or hit points? Or AC, for that matter?

Because not all bean-counting is of equal importance? Some things are significant, others less so, some not at all. Moreover, certain aspects of play lose significance as character's level, as the game moves from The Black Company to the Justice League in medieval drag.

You have notices this change in the overall timbre of play, yes?

 

[AllisterH]

I can see both sides of the argument for magical items in the PHB (the monster summoning though? I'm firmly 100% behind WOTC on this one).

On the one hand, it makes me somewhat leery of a player simply buying a vorpal weapon or some other outlandish weapon.

Yet at the same time,I honestly can't see why things like Potion of Cure X wounds are
NOT in the PHB especially given their costs in relation to normal gear (full plate costs 1500 gp and unless the campaign world is Athas or some other non-standard/lost in time setting, I haven't heard DMs say "You can't buy that..you only get it on a quest!") and the fact that it is an item EVERYONE (PCs and NPCs) would buy.

 

[Wormwood]

You have notices this change in the overall timbre of play, yes?

I can't be the only D&D player who has looked at his 15th level character sheet and noticed the flask of oil and torches I bought at 1st-level.

 

[Celebrim]

Let's be completely blunt here. No more beating around the bush.

What is the difference between 'not keeping track of arrows' and not keeping track of other minutiae, like gold, hit points, the distance between a PC and his foe, and so forth? It's not about 'caring about the story'. It's not about making the game better.

It is entirely that most players natural, expected, and perhaps even necessary desire to win encourages them to accept 'you have unlimited ammunition except when I say so', far more readily than 'you don't have any gold unless I say so' or 'monsters have the hit points remaining that I say that they have'. In other words, most players by thier natural inclination are more likely to accept fudging on thier behalf than they are fudging that they feel might actually work against them. Anytime the fudging might actually work against them, you'll find that they are exacting sticklers for every little minutiea. They'll want an exact accounting of the treasure down to the last brass ring. They'll pause the game to recalculate thier attack bonus just in case that they forgot something. It isn't that they ignore ammunition or encumberance or food because they think it will make for a better story. It's that these things they naturally 'forget' to do anyway not merely because they are time consuming or hard (because generally they aren't), but because they feel it only penalizes them. And, when you tell them that they can forget about it anyway they are relieved because now they don't feel guilty for having been 'forgetting' about it.

The needs of the story are hardly entering into the calculation.

For me, as a player, I feel like when I fudge my hitpoints, or my ammunition, or 'forget' to keep track of my encumberance, as so many players I know do - I feel like I'm cheating myself. Some players feel like that, and some of them don't. For me as a DM, I feel like the archer who tells me how boring it is to keep track of ammunition is unconscioiusly cheating his friend with the greatsword by stealing the spotlight in his desire to always be successful.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

Ultimately, relying on Wonder through Obscurity Of Game Elements is not a particularly good approach. Having compelling characters, interesting story elements, and a compelling adventure hook seem much more important. And no amount of rules knowledge is likely to to impair those things.

END COMMUNICATION

QFT. Again. And sigged as well.

On the tracking minutia - well, it really depends on the situation doesn't it? Do you really bother keeping track of food at all times? In towns? During down time?

Or, are you like most DM's and only track it when replacing whatever resource is suddenly a problem? Running out of arrows only becomes a problem if you can never get more arrows. Most PC's simply loot a couple of bodies and they're off to the races again.

Funny story. During my time running World's Largest Dungeon, where we were very careful to track ammo because purchasing more was impossible, the archer Favored Soul never once ran out of arrows. 53 sessions that character survived, plunking arrows as fast as she could in every fight, and there were lots of them, and not once did she run out of arrows.

Was it really time well spent pissing about making her count something that never once mattered in over a year of gaming?

 

[Mallus]

I can't be the only D&D player who has looked at his 15th level character sheet and noticed the flask of oil and torches I bought at 1st-level.

And the war-dog.

It times like this I really miss AD&D.

 

[hong]

It is entirely that most players natural, expected, and perhaps even necessary desire to win encourages them to accept 'you have unlimited ammunition except when I say so', far more readily than 'you don't have any gold unless I say so' or 'monsters have the hit points remaining that I say that they have'. In other words, most players by thier natural inclination are more likely to accept fudging on thier behalf than they are fudging that they feel might actually work against them. Anytime the fudging might actually work against them, you'll find that they are exacting sticklers for every little minutiea. They'll want an exact accounting of the treasure down to the last brass ring.

I know maybe 2 players like that. It's amazing what you can achieve when you set out to foster a non-adversarial approach to gaming.

They'll pause the game to recalculate thier attack bonus just in case that they forgot something.

This is why I don't play with players who spend 10 minutes figuring out what to do each round.

It isn't that they ignore ammunition or encumberance or food because they think it will make for a better story. It's that these things they naturally 'forget' to do anyway not merely because they are time consuming or hard (because generally they aren't),

But they are boring.

but because they feel it only penalizes them. And, when you tell them that they can forget about it anyway they are relieved because now they don't feel guilty for having been 'forgetting' about it.

And what, exactly, is the problem with not feeling guilty?

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Tracking ammunition is just as important as watching your HP values in my game. I can think of at least three different scenarios where my players have been "locked down" and surrounded throughout the countryside. Reserving their arrow pool was important, due to that they had nothing else on them and/or needed range in order to gain a foothold or move further out of the red zone.

 

[FireLance]

So in other words, the DM decides when you run out of arrows because its dramaticly appropriate to the story?

No, the DM decides whether or not it is worthwhile to track details like arrows and food and gold. Do games which have an abstract wealth mechanic like d20 Modern fail to create good stories because the minutiae of how much money the characters have on them at any one time is not tracked?

Again, story narratives don't really offer a good analogy to the sort of story creation which is being created within a game, and the game needs are different than story creation needs.

Agreed, but the post I was responding to did not make such a distinction. In any case, I simply disagree with the premise that minutiae are required for a good story or a good game. Every story or game glosses over certain minutiae, whether it is going to the bathroom, keeping track of rations, or accounting for every last piece of ammunition.

Besides which, as long as we are talking stories, Legolas runs out of arrows practically every time that they fight. He's always scavaging for arrows on the battlefield. He's almost always forced to do 'knife work'. He's always firing off 'his last arrow'. Gimli is pretty much always catching up to him in effectiveness because Legolas doesn't have unlimited ammunition. I don't think that Tolkien decides merely that it is dramatically appropriate for Legolas to run out of arrows at some point. Pretty much universally, he decides that its dramactically appropriate for archers to run out of arrows and there is rarely a battle with archers where they don't.

Is there any battle in which it is not explicit that Legolas is forced to scavenge arrows from the field? I hope you realize that we are talking about the guy who was so careful with verisimilitude that he can have Sam realize that more time passed in Lothlorian than it seemed like because of the phase of the moon.

I quickly checked through my copy of the book, and I think that Legolas was involved in the following fights:

1. The fights in Moria
2. The fight with the Urik-Hai during which Boromir died
3. The battles at Helm's Deep
4. The battle of the Pelennor fields
5. The battle at the Black Gate

In the above fights, I could only find references to Legolas running out of arrows or scavenging for them during the Uruk-Hai fight and at Helm's Deep. So, I wouldn't say that there was anything "always" or "explicit" about Legolas running out of arrows or scavenging for them.