D&D 5E Natural Weapons, How Much Value Is There To Actually Having Them?

[FrozenNorth]

I was talking about visitors to the city. While they might very well allow an old man his staff, they're not necessarily going to allow a group of well armed mercenaries to do the same. A craftsman might be allowed a hammer but a fighter might not. It makes sense that in a world where even a dagger can be a powerful and dangerous magical weapon, that guards might be wary of allowing dangerous looking strangers even that much.

As someone who actually enforced this (not at the scale of cities, but at the scale of municipal buildings and palaces), natural weapons are pretty useless even in this case.

Let’s put aside what I expected the players to do (which they didn’t): put their weapons in Leomund’s secret chest for retrieval in cast of emergency.

Barbarian: impacted, unless grabbed a table leg for an improvised weapon;
Bard: relied on cantrips
Cleric: relied on cantrips
Druid: Wildshape, and relied on cantrips;
Fighter: impacted except for the Eldritch Knight, who summoned his weapon through Eldritch Bond (or grabbed a table leg for a weapon);
Monk: they’re happy that everyone is in the same boat as they are.
Paladin: Smite doesn’t care that you are punching for 1 pt damage;
Rogue: used Sleight of hand to hide dagger
Ranger: impacted (unless used Sleight of hand to hide dagger)
Sorcerer: relied on cantrips
Warlock: relied on Eldritch blast, except for the bladelock, who simply summoned his weapon to his hand;
Wizard: cantrips.

Out of 12 classes, 3 were impacted, and even they had really easy ways to mitigate the effect of not bringing weapons with them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am a girl ^^.

Ah apologies I will remember this!

Has Wizards ever detailed any playtest they do internally? Or has Crawford ever made his philosophy on this stuff known?

They've never given any real details, but they have claimed to playtest internally and do closed playtests previously. I they used to list some playtesters in the original three books but after The Incident* I think they've taken the names out on the digital editions and probably later printings. We don't know much about how much or what they actually do, and I don't think internal playtests can have had much influence on this, because it's been consistent since the beginning of the edition.

* =

Spoiler: Details of The Incident

One of the playtesters was an edgelord RPG developer called Zak S, he got #MeToo'd, and inexplicably Mike Mearls, then head of D&D, decided to immediately, like with blazing speed, step in and, totally unasked for, act as judge and jury, contacting the accusers, trying to convince to give him the details of the accusations. They gave him this on the condition of promises of confidentiality, and then, whilst this is disputed, it really looked like Mearls accidentally or intentionally passed them on to Zak S, which was the exact opposite of what he promised. The whole thing was completely and utterly insane. No professional, reasonable person with even an ounce of common sense would ever have done what Mearls did. And WotC's lawyers and PR team would definitely not have let him had he run it by them. As a result he stopped posting on social media entirely (seemingly at WotC's request), and was silently replaced as head of D&D by Ray Winninger, a fact that wasn't made public until nearly two years later. Mearls was, in classic "failing upwards" fashion secretly promoted to a more senior WotC position but one with zero contact with the public. WotC then removed all references to Zak S from the PHB and any other books, and I suspect removed all the other names as a precautionary measure, because certainly now it just says "tested by 175,000 D&D fans!" or something to that effect.

 

[ECMO3]

I got a Kobold Wizard right now, and I get very little mileage out of my kobold-ness, lol.

What I like to do in these circumstances is lean into stereotypes for comic relief. The best two examples are a Kender and a Kobold I played.

With the Kender Paladin I obviously did not want to be stealing from other PCs. But I played with Kenderness in that she was severely naieve at times. She did not even really know what Deity she worshiped. She was Neutral Good but carried around holy symbols of two good gods and one evil god. When we got an omen that "Takhisis is watching us" which is supposed to be forboding. She took it to mean "Takisis is watching over us" and supprting our efforts to topple her army. She spent the rest of the campaign telling the dragonarmy bad guys that they had the Dragon Queen all wrong and just didn't understand

My Kobold Bard was played in a homebrew campaign that happened after Tyranny of Dragons after Tiamat was banished back to Hell. In her backstory she was part of that failed attempt. She was convinced that the meddeling knights really screwed up the world. She was convinced they were taking "donations" from the good citizens of Ferun to bring Tiamat in. How this played out is any time they came across a Dragon - good or evil - she tried to save it and was convinced it was good, but not in a way that would hinder the party. She also refused to work with the Lords Alliance (the aforementioned Knights).

That might not work at some tables but it was pretty good on those two and let me put some character into my character in a way that was not disruptive.