Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9479769" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I remember in the first childhood basic D&D game I ran, I made 'Bags' of infinite arrows a mainstay magic item (don't remember if I didn't know what a quiver was/was called, or was going for a reference to bags of holding). There's a reason to want such a thing. It 'solves' the issue of ammo tracking. That has parity with things like bags of holding, which solve the encumbrance tracking issue. Same with Light cantrip and Goodberry spell for illumination and sustenance tracking.  While it would be good to fill out the roster (although I think Hank's bow is sufficient for this task), I'd also argue that it would instead be good to remove the other three instead. Replace them all with a sidebar optional rule about just not tracking encumbrance, food/water, ammo, or light if you do not want to. This is as trivially easy as radio buttons on D&D Beyond, or session 0 table agreement for pen and paper players. The Bag of Holding made sense in oD&D (and has been legacy ever since). There, you might have wanted to start out tracking every pound of encumbrance and every copper spent on arrows and torches (those careful resource management decisions supposedly so important to the game); but then when you are getting bored of it for a campaign switch to handwavium as you leave the dungeons for hexcrawling*. There you can, oh look, just happen to have accumulated enough bags of holding not to really have to worry about it anymore. If instead you want to just not track such things in your game at all, special magic items (and spells) aren't really needed, just don't do so. *I use this as my break point because BX and later had a fixed allotment of encumbrance for food and basic survival gear, and did not change that for the Expert rules, suggesting perhaps by the time you might want to pack extra rations we maybe weren't looking too closely at the encumbrance rules.The situation where it was what saved the day is going to be rare enough that you won't know to keep the auto-hit weakbow* around and not the set of stonemason's tools, or the vial of gelatinous cube goo you collected in adventure #2, or whatever. I think half of groups (particularly if you don't track encumbrance) have/had 'that one guy' who does run around with all those things, waiting for a use for them. At least until there are some consequences or they get made fun of for it or something like that. *I'm assuming you can't sneak attack with it. Otherwise I know lots of rogues who would love to have the thing, 1d4 base damage hardly matters when assuring you get your SA damage in.I don't think people really mean preclude. Instead it tends to be a situation of conservation of focus. A game can include multitudes, but generally end up focusing on a subset of the possible. You can have survival*/tactics games with story just like you can have games focusing on treasure-hunts where you also save the world or the like, but generally one play loop or the other is going to get short shrift. *although if the overall survival rate of an individual character is too low, then it limits the stories somewhat to group-goal type things rather than those based on individual goals or relationships</blockquote>

Verification