D&D 5E Joke Material Components

[I'm A Banana]

I'm of the opinion that one should never take a game that involves a group of grown men pretending to be magical elves very seriously, so I'm into it. D&D has whimsy and goofiness, and that's part of its flavor and appeal. These things also echo the practice of sympathetic magic. If you want a Grimdark game of Serious Business, it's easy enough to change or delete or abstract away, and it's a lot harder to put these things in when they're left out.

Wizards in D&D are academics, and are creatures of metaphor and linguistics and pseudo-science. They're also performing elaborate song-and-dance routines in front of monsters in order to shoot them with fire and lightning.

I don't think they hurt much, at any rate.

 

[RangerWickett]

In my playtest, I made the material component for Hold Person be dried sloth testicles. Mostly just so I could tie the party to a village that had a sloth ranch.

 

[Alzrius]

In my playtest, I made the material component for Hold Person be dried sloth testicles. Mostly just so I could tie the party to a village that had a sloth ranch.

Philistine. Everyone knows that the dried sloth testicles are the material components for slow.

 

[Starfox]

Philistine.

This!

 

[Tuft]

Wizards in D&D are academics, and are creatures of metaphor and linguistics and pseudo-science. They're also performing elaborate song-and-dance routines in front of monsters in order to shoot them with fire and lightning.

I don't think they hurt much, at any rate.

Far from all spellcasters are academics; I'd like to e.g. imagine an sexy enchantress in a sleek, slinky dress, and still capable of magic without 100 bulging, lumpy pockets, and without the stench of one-week old cream tarts, rancid grease or bat dung lingering around her.


I'm a visual person, and a hobby illustrator. I like to imagine what my characters look like, and like to draw them "true" - that means with all their stuff. Leaving something out would be, well, cheating. When I was playing WoW I absolutely hated all the mismatch armor you were running around in, and how *ugly* it was.

When the Magic Item Compendium came out for 3.5, all items had descriptions. Those usually involved lots of garish colors and F/X. Another gamer/illustrator friend could never quite figure out if a PC equipped with all that mismatched "finery" would look like a clown or a hobo...

 

[DEFCON 1]

This has nothing to do with "default" or "not default"... but everything to do with saving space and saving time.

Putting a material component line in the spell description saves space and saves time. That's what matters. If MCs were not "default" and you didn't have them in the spell description... then you'd have to have an entire section of another book listing every single spell all over again, along with the material components listing for each of those spells. Thereby wasting space in that book that could be used for other purposes... and wasting time making people flip back and forth between different books to find all the information they need to play the game.

We ignore lines of information all the time when they serve us no purpose for our games. I ignore alignments when I read monster stat blocks. I ignore weights when I read equipment lists. I ignore components when I read spell descriptions. But I'm not going to be so daft as to think they shouldn't be included right there with all the other information in the stat block, equipment list or spell description. If people use them, they should be right there at hand for them. Shunting all those things to other books is ludicrous.

 

[Starfox]

While I support your idea to use what you want and put a blind spot to the rest, in practice people expect "rules as written or make a note of it". That gets to be a whole lot of notes. If something mainly causes friction, I prefer not to have it.

Then again, Next was once supposed to be about optional modules you assemble into your own game. Is that idea still afloat?

 

[Neonchameleon]

They are flavour - but negative flavour, and actively harm immersion in quite a few games. And the best case scenario is that they will cause a groan or rolled eyes.

 

[Starfox]

To be honest, I've not strictly kept the line between joke components and other material components. Much of what has been said here seems to apply to all material components, not just the silly ones.

 

[Tuft]

They are flavour - but negative flavour, and actively harm immersion in quite a few games. And the best case scenario is that they will cause a groan or rolled eyes.

Note that even though anyone can houserule to their hearts' content, when WoTC write scenarios for the rest of us they have to go by the book. And it would be a pity if you cannot have either an evil wizard or the PCs do an infiltration mission because "spot the component belt" would short-circuit the whole thing...