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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6143419" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not that het up about it. I'm just surprised by what appear to be straight-faced suggestions that including these joke material components isn't simply a matter of mere taste (leavened with a high degree of fondness for past editions) but something of objective value which can teach new players the fun of fantasy RPGing.As if those of who started with B/X or earlier editions - which had no material components - didn't work out that the game can be fun!As if material components are more important to people's play experiences than (say) warlords, or inspirational healing, or metagame resources for players of martial PCs, or other stuff that is deemed too much a matter of contentious taste to include. I'm also reminded of Plansecape, in another couple of recent threads. 4e players lose most of the basic mechanical architecture of their edition, but we can't budge on Planescape or on Gygax's joke material components.Hence my comment up thread - is D&Dnext the unity edition or the nostalgia/grognard edition?This doesn't really tell me why we're spending book-space, and design effort, on including these things.The only people who want to be told that a Confusion spell uses nutshells as its component already know that, because it's written in their old PHBs. The new game doesn't need to repeat that information.In terms of setting out a framework for abstract, or player-chosen or GM-determined spell components, WotC could do worse than emulate the discussion of options for spellcasting "idioms" in the Burning Wheel rulebooks.(I commented upthread that a lot of this stuff is really taking Gygax's actual play output and recycling it as input for new players. I'd rather have rules that offer me techniques to generate my own fun output. BW does that. Telling me that the material component for the Confusion spell is three nutshells does not do that.)</blockquote>

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