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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Undrave" data-source="post: 7939764" data-attributes="member: 7015698">Why even have character abilities then? I think this is a result of the designer not being able to make tracking these things interesting, thus nobody ever bothered to track them so they just made them irrelevant to speed it up. Tracking torches and rations is bookkeeping and that's not an interesting challenge. Even picking who holds the torch isn't much of a challenge once you solve it one time. And Darkvision makes torches unnecessary before even taking a cantrip <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> That said, Goodberry takes a spell slot and at lower level that could be a problem. Only if you consider attrition beyond the base Unit of Challenge of one day. Hit Dice don't regenerate during the day and they're one of the few resource that doesn't fully restore at the end of the Unit of Challenge, instead giving you HALF your HD back. Don't forget that if you take damage while at 0 HP you AUTOMATICALLY fail 2 death saves. Not 3, 2. That's a deliberate decision to make 0 HP a ticking clock and not an auto-death. Let's say the DM scores a crit and brings you character from full to 0 HP in one single attack. Scenario A: You're dead. Your allies can't do anything about it, so they go on without you and you sit back and watch them play with different tactics. Bad luck. Maybe the Mage pops an extra Slot he wasn't gonna use on this combat to make up for you dropping. Scenario B: You're unconscious. Your allies need to position themselves so the enemies can't attack you, they'll drop what they do and try to heal you or make you stable, you're making death saving throws and feeling nervous. There's tension between finishing the combat, while dealing with your absence like in scenario A, and protecting your defenceless form. Cantrips exist because when you play a class you want to PLAY THAT CLASS. A spell caster that can only caster one spell a day is not a spell caster to me. By being able to do MAGIC all the time you feel more magical.  I will agree with you that something is missing, but I think it's because they didn't replace the old system with something new. See, I'm not a fan of the way DnD uses immunity and resistance. Like, I'm a fan of Pokémon (I've played every gen since the beginning) and in that game I favour challenging in-game trainers with neutral Pokémon rather than go all out on the type coverage... But even there type match-ups are more interesting in Pokémon because of the reciprocity. Aside from the Barbarian and a few spells it's hard for PCs to be on the receiving end of the Imunity/Resist/Weakness system. If, for exemple, using a weapon (or Cantrip) that does X damage type made you vulnerable to damage Type Y you'd have an interesting trade off and, again, tension. But damage in DnD is basically just a key for the monster-shape key hole, otherwise resistance just becomes like adding extra HP. You could give a monster more HP instead of resistance and no one would notice the difference. So yes, Cantrip devalue the 'threat' of resistant monster, but I personally don't find that we lost anything particularly interesting or of value, but I do wish we'd gotten something else in return. Something more dynamic. I think that was a problem starting with 3e so this isn't anything new. I don't think the number of spell slots mean anything, it's more the impact of each individual slot that matters. If you had 20 spells slot but all you could do with them is cantrip level effect, it doesn't really have the same impact. In that respect I feel like 5e Spell Slots are less impactful than 3e Spell Slot (or 4e Dailies for that matter, of which you had less).Exept for HD that only recover at half-per unit. But that's really the point of a unit of challenge, you start relatively fresh at the start of each so it's not really an issue. It's just that you don't like the choice of Unit of Challenge and that's totally fair. I can respect that. Heck, I think in most circumstance the base game IS easy for its unit of challenge, but that's a decision based on approachability of the game. What IS missing is more interesting tools to increase the difficulty. I just don't agree with your choices of tools to increase that difficulty. Ideally yeah, but the game has trouble even balancing ONE temporal unit of challenge, so I find it hard to believe they would be able to pull off multiple units in a single game. There's not standard length for an Adventure, or a Campaign for exemple, so how do you balance out the mechanics so that player have the ressources to overcome the challenge? Let alone balance it so one character doesn't obviate the participation of others? At best you'd need a type of reset mechanic (AKA rest types) for each different unit of challenge AND each classes would need a suite of ressources that fit each unit of challenge (AKA an AEDU style system) with maybe the ratio between each tweaked to avoid samey-ness. It's a tough act to pull off to begin with, but doing all that while keeping the game as light and approachable as 5e? I think that it would have taken a LOT more play testing. I'd still be curious to see it though. I agree!</blockquote>

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