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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alatar" data-source="post: 6993688" data-attributes="member: 38424">That is certainly true. In our current campaign, we have a party of 7. Four of the 7 are casters. And this is an all-melee party, not by agreement; it just happened that way. The life cleric is the least melee oriented of the bunch, but even she finds herself jumping in. Peer pressure, I guess.I guess it depends on how you skin it. If it's a party of "adventurers" who just happened to get thrown together by happenstance, and all or most of them sling magic as a matter of course, then yeah, this is a world where magic is dirt common and the fact that there isn't a Ye Olde Magic Shoppe in every town square is a sign of a dysfunctional economy. But if this is a Suicide Squad, X-Men, Justice League assortment of rare to unique individuals, carefully assembled by some guiding force in the world, then no Magic Shops.Of course, neither of those scenarios is contemplated in the majority of campaigns. Magic is rare and wonderous. Most of us heroes use it daily. The contradiction that these two facts about the world embody will go unexamined. Disbelief is suspended.That last option is the one we play. Four out of 7 party members are magic slingers. Magic items exist. No one knows how they were made, and in 11 levels of play we have encountered but a few of them. There are two or three +1 weapons in our party of 7, and this is our high magic campaign.All-melee parties are really fun by the way. I won't claim that ranged isn't superior in some ways to melee. I'm sure that DPR-wise that's true. This thread and the other one attest to that. But melee is probably more fun. Melee combat is less repetitive, more tactical, more immediate, visceral, immersive. I'd rather play a melee battlemaster with the Shield Master feat, trip attack, menacing attack, and riposte than a ranged sharpshooter/crossbow expert battlemaster with trip attack, pushing attack. precision attack and commander's strike. DPR is meaningless hair-splitting in this regard. It will seem like either battlemaster is slaying mightily. The DM is going to strive to walk the same knife edge regardless of whether the party is strong or weak by any objective standard.Which is to say, I see no problem with cantrips in the current regime. Part of that may be the shared philosophical approach that my group of players takes toward the game. We have been at it, as a group, since 1981, and we have always accepted the game presented to us. We don't houserule at all. We do ignorerule sometimes. Weapon speed was never a big thing. My 11th level battlemaster is still working on the field rations that came with his starting equipment. But that's about the extent of it. In 4e and 5e, there are hardly any rules to ignore. In 1st edition AD&D there were plenty of rules that begged to be ignored. But we've never really changed stuff. We've always played under the assumption that the folks who were paid real money to spend 40 hours a week designing the game were going to be orders of magnitude better at it than we would be. When I was a little kid, my father taught me the deal with criminals. He pointed out that the cops don't have to be really smart or particularly good at their jobs. They just have to show up for work 5 days a week. They work in shifts, around the clock. They get medical, dental and pensions. They get paid vacations. Criminals don't stand a chance. When it comes to game design, we're the criminals.So, I guess I don't accept the unstated premise of this thread, which is that anyone here is likely to improve the game by fiddling with the mechanics.Cantrips are what wizards do when they are running low on the cool stuff. There is one class that specializes in one particular cantrip, and they have to sell their soul to the DM to do it. And comparing cantrips to what we had in 3rd edition is silly. At 16th level in 3rd edition, wizards were chasing down demigods across the planes of existence. They were spanking krakens. Cantrips? They didn't need no steenkeen cantrips.</blockquote>

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