D&D 5E Does/Should D&D Have the Player's Game Experience as a goal?

[Lanefan]

5E gives a gp value range for rarity. The Downtime rules in Xanathar's uses those values for buying magic items. It's not like there's no GP values in 5e magic items.

And, I would argue that 1e absolutely did have wealth by level. But, it was largely opaque. You were expected to be absolutely dripping in magic items at fairly low levels, compared to later editions. The paladin being limited to a mere 10 magic items was meant to be a heavy restriction. In a group of 6-8 PC's, you were expected to have close to a hundred magic items, fairly quickly.

Well, until the party ate a fireball or lightning bolt and failed their saves; on which that hundred magic items might fairly quickly become fifty rather charred magic items and a bunch of slag.

I've seen these cascading meltdowns before. They're like train wrecks - you don't want to watch but you can't look away.

And the modules certainly supported this as did the random treasure generation tables where you could easily get 4-6 magic items from a single lair.

Sure. And you may or may not be able to use half of them due to alignment, class, and-or proficiency restrictions.

But, as @pemerton rightly points out, the whole "Monte Haul" thing in the DMG and many, many sources throughout 1e and 2e meant that the system absolutely DID care if the party was overpowered.

Like I said before, you had to go pretty nuts before hitting "Monty Haul" status.

 

[Hussar]

ARRRGGGH!

Can we please stop getting wrapped up in the example? The point is, by making things explicit in the rules, by making things transparent, we make things EASIER for the DM to run the game.

Is that really a controversial point?

 

[Hussar]

Well, until the party ate a fireball or lightning bolt and failed their saves; on which that hundred magic items might fairly quickly become fifty rather charred magic items and a bunch of slag.

I've seen these cascading meltdowns before. They're like train wrecks - you don't want to watch but you can't look away.

Sure. And you may or may not be able to use half of them due to alignment, class, and-or proficiency restrictions.

Like I said before, you had to go pretty nuts before hitting "Monty Haul" status.

Meh. Nothing in the Monster Manual can cast fireball. Or virtually nothing. Who cares?

I'm sure you've seen it. I have no doubt you've seen it.

Have you seen it EVERY SINGLE TIME? No. You remember it because it was the exception, NOT the rule. I played AD&D (1e and 2e) for twenty years and I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone lost an item. It was just something that very rarely happened. You had to fail so many saving throws before you lost anything. I mean, a metal item vs fireball saves on a 6 or better. And the plusses of that item count. Plus the pluses you might have from magic armor and/or shield. IOW, you failed on a 1? And that was only if you failed your first saving throw. The odds of losing items to fireball were pretty darn remote.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, though, it depended so much on what those magic items were.

Magic armor and shield? Guess what, you're never failing another save vs AOE again. After all, those bonuses apply to your saving throw. The odds of losing a magic item when you've got a +2 suit of armor and a +3 shield meant that you virtually never lost items. Never minding that now your AC was in the mid negatives, meaning virtually nothing could hit you because they needed an 18 or better.

If nothing else, a natural 1 always fails a save.

And AC in the mid-neg's only gets you so far when the opponents are classed and levelled people just like you, only better.

Monsters aren't the threat* after a certain hard-to-define point. Other adventurers, or people/creatures that function like other adventurers, are the threat.

* - except Giants, who IME are always a threat.

So on and so forth. I find the whole "Well, you're going to lose all these items" thing to be very overblown. Number one, very, very few monsters in 1e actually HAD an AOE attack that would trigger saving throws.

Spellcasters and dragons, mostly. Liches have their 1/day big fireball. A few others have breath weapons, and a very few (e.g. Rust Monster, Remorhaz) can destroy items without hurting those items' owners very much.

Number two, those saving throws were generally pretty easy to make anyway. I'm sure it happened from time to time, but, most of the time? Nope. You just kept accumulating more and more and more magic items. Negative 7 or 8 AC. Girdle of Giant Strength meaning that you virtually never missed an attack and obliterated most things you hit in a round or two. On and on and on.

Breaking 1e was ludicrously easy.

Particularly once UA came out, yes. It's fixable, but it takes a fair bit of kitbashing.

 

[Lanefan]

Meh. Nothing in the Monster Manual can cast fireball. Or virtually nothing. Who cares?

I'm sure you've seen it. I have no doubt you've seen it.

Have you seen it EVERY SINGLE TIME? No. You remember it because it was the exception, NOT the rule. I played AD&D (1e and 2e) for twenty years and I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone lost an item. It was just something that very rarely happened. You had to fail so many saving throws before you lost anything. I mean, a metal item vs fireball saves on a 6 or better. And the plusses of that item count. Plus the pluses you might have from magic armor and/or shield. IOW, you failed on a 1? And that was only if you failed your first saving throw. The odds of losing items to fireball were pretty darn remote.

Nitpick: while you might have got the bonus from your armour and-or shield on your initial save vs the effect, those things wouldn't help your items if you failed that initial save.

 

[AnotherGuy]

With regards to magical items, the idea I enjoyed a lot that came out of 4e was the ability to harness residuum from disenchanting.

It is a way (and a cool in-fiction way IMO) to deal with the world economy in a more realistic sense i.e. the character is unable able to sell it for its true worth (astronomical listed price) and they are struggling in-game to trade it for something of decent use/value - well they now have the ability to collect residuum.

Also, you can use that as part of the setting fiction for crafting magic items - perhaps permanent magical items have a terribly high cost, residuum becomes the best means to create the items you need.

EDIT: The use for the astronomical listed prices in the DMG may be the cost

- tempters (fiends) request for specific magical items, say instead of forcing PCs to sign soul contracts or do dirty favours, because they know that chances are the PCs will have to do something unsavoury to get their hands on that amount of money. Just an idea.
Another reason why I feel D&D needed to have mechanics that deal with a character's spiritual/emotional path - you have demons/devils and they're treated as just another monster. Anyways I'm rambling again.
- treasure hoarders (dragons, djinn etc) ask from PCs.
You may have an in-game fictional reason why dragons need/desire treasure besides the bog-standard.

 

[pemerton]

the game didn't break if your party had no* or nearly-no magic, nor did it break if your party had gone through a few classic modules and scooped all the rather-abundant loot from those. There was a wide "what/ how many magic items does the party have?" window within which the game worked fine; significantly wider than 3e I think.

I can't comment on 3E. 4e will work fine with nothing but inherent bonuses, and so to me doesn't seem very different (in this respect) from what you are attributing to AD&D.

Magic items were also much more easy come easy go in 1e

<snip>

4e and 5e have no item destruction that I can recall.

I can't comment on 5e, but magic items "went" quite a bit in my 4e game.

 

[Lanefan]

I can't comment on 3E. 4e will work fine with nothing but inherent bonuses, and so to me doesn't seem very different (in this respect) from what you are attributing to AD&D.

OK.

I can't comment on 5e, but magic items "went" quite a bit in my 4e game.

Curious - using what mechanic? I only have the first go-round of the 4e core books but I don't remember any item destruction rules in there. Was this something that came in in a later book?

 

[pemerton]

using what mechanic? I only have the first go-round of the 4e core books but I don't remember any item destruction rules in there. Was this something that came in in a later book?

Some items got turned into residuum, as per @AnotherGuy's post just upthread. Some were used by their owners to power improvised actions. I think some were lost in skill challenges (one member of my play group still remembers the magical mace that was sacrificed trying to jam a door open to avoid a water-filling-trap room.

 

[Hussar]

Another good example of why opacity doesn't work:

In 1e, when the PC's traveled to another plane, "Plussed" items would lose two plusses. Why? Well, the primary reason was that by the time AD&D PC's could actually travel across planes, they were basically minor gods and would curb stomp anything out of the books. So, to rein in the power levels of the characters, planar traveling dropped the plusses. Then you lost access to higher level cleric spells as well.

Basically all these things were added in to make the adventure challenging. Without these changes, double digit level characters were just so powerful that it wasn't any fun. Certainly wasn't much of a challenge by that point.

But, none of this was actually explained. Now, it was very obvious that this is why it was done. Even 14 year old me could figure that one out looking at something like Queen of the Demonweb Pits. Granted they wrapped it up in some in universe gobbledegook to make it look good, but, everyone knew exactly what was going on. It wasn't exactly subtle.

However, instead of just being up front and explaining why these changes were being done, they kept trying to bury the lede and pretend that it was somehow "logical" that your Holy Avenger just wasn't quite so holy, just because you happened to be on a different plane.

D&D has a very long history of trying to cover up very reasonable game rules with in universe explanations. I've never quite understood the need.