Willie the Duck
Hero
Again, this is why I absolutely hate these conversations. Selective quotes and selective memory. First it was about fighters being able to use all weapons, now it's ogres that always hit your backpack with every attack.![]()
I am going to universalize this and say that many to most participating in the 'how high-/low-magic was the game' tangent have been very good at selectively interpreting both rules written and implied intent to their pre-assumed stance. I'll state again that I think it is a foolish because the one standard about that era was that there was no standard. All the different interpretations over ogre club hits isn't going to more greatly influence total magic items than other factors -- how often a DM would include rust monsters, how often PCs died in ways that made their magic items unrecoverable vs. salvageable, how often the adventure of the week was 'you are taken prisoner, awaking in a cell with none of your gear'. These kind of things will add a 'x 1d1000%' modifier to the acquired magic item totals while we are bickering about how common something that may or may not shave off 10% of potions actually happened (or even more uselessly, whether people ought to have been ruling one way or another).Again, I have to say, this is why I get so annoyed with these conversations.
I've been very, very careful, all the way along to be absolutely clear that I'm only talking about my own table and my own experience. I am in no way claiming that the way I played is in any way the "right" way or anything like that.
Yet, both @Maxperson and @overgeeked have tried quoting the rules at me over something that I've never heard even suggested in the past. Now, if that's the way it worked at your table? Fantastic. Whatever works. But, these attempts to claim that this is the "right and true" way to play the game, "Hello. Anyone using that item saving throw chart does. (@overgeeked above) is just so wrongheaded. No, not everyone played this way. No, this is not the only possible interpretation of the rules.
These conversations would be SO much more productive if people would stick to their own tables and experiences.
I don't remember it really being mentioned much (or at least repeated much in areas we re-read a lot) what the potion containers were made of. I know at some point we got old enough to have had field trips to frontier-era settlements and seen how sheet-glass windows (where present) differed from modern ones even hundreds of years later than the era D&D vaguely approximated. That lead us to realize that medieval castles wouldn't have had a lot of glass windows, and maybe modern day glass bottles (this would have been in the early 80s, when soda pop usually came in glass) might not have been the standard. I think we figured out metal and pottery containers quickly after that and inter-mixed those with glass. I think somewhere along the line a leather vail was mentioned in a Dragonlance novel or the like (or maybe we just read about goat-skin bottles and the like) and we realized that lots of stuff bitd were carried in animal skins/organs. I think we started with all-glass (and plate glass windows and toilet paper and toothbrushes) and ended with (when relevant) random determination between all sorts of (mostly medievally accurate) options for containers. And then things like The Complete Thieves Handbook came out with all sorts of options like hidden compartments in everything and tar paper to help you break glass windows without making noise and things started drifting towards 'medieval accurate, if James Bond's Q was alive at the time' and half the potions would have been housed in someone's elaborate hands-free potion-feeding device or the like.Most modules that I've seen do tend to describe potions that you find as being in glass, so my guess is that's why people default mostly to that despite the DMG saying it's possible to find them in other materials.
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