Some mechanisms (often ported from the old days) are putting the incentives in the wrong place - blog post discussion

[pemerton]

Both spell component pouches and arcane focus/druid focus/holy symbol exist. You can completely ignore it for all normal play, so ignoring it gains you absolutely nothing. THERE ARE NO GAINS TO IGNORING JUST MATERIAL COMPONENTS.

But there are losses. Such as non-caster foes "disarming" by taking weapons and material components but not realizing that leaves some spells possible for clever players for the once-a-campaign jailbreak. And looking for scavenged ones - some spells like Sleep or Spider Climb they might easily find the components.

And as mentioned there is a separate design purpose for expensive components, and stripping that away willy nilly without giving thought to the changes that will bring is also a bad thing.

So yes, I can believe you that some can ignore just material components. But since that's a worst-of-all-worlds solution with no benefits and some detriments, I hope that's rare.

My assumption would be that those tables which ignore material components in general don't ignore the expensive ones that serve an obvious rationing purpose.

And I don't think the losses you point to are very severe. Material components are not a part of B/X D&D, do not generally figure in 4e (outside of the context of residuum costs for rituals), and are absent from other FRPGs I've played (eg Rolemaster, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer other than as buffs). The benefits of opening up scavenging or captors who are ignorant of spells with only V, only S, or only VS components, are in my personal view outweighed by the inanity of treating the spell component pouch as an endless bucket of cobwebs, guano, shards of amber and the like, and by the work of actually tracking them.

So I, personally, do find gains in an approach to spell casting that ignores them, and that uses simply words or gestures (or both) as the baseline for spell casting.

 

[tetrasodium]

Okay, I see the confusion. I was trying to make a general point about bonuses and penalties. I was not trying to make a specific point about 5E carrying capacity. So even if the point doesn't hold for 5E carrying capacity because you fell those rules are horrible, the general point can still be applied to other cases.

It's not just a matter of "feeling" that the 5e encumbrance rules are awful, I detailed reasons why that is the case in ways that encourages players to forget to track it in a way indistinguishable from ignoring it... It doesn't creat any interesting choice points by having only a single threshold and setting it to a point unlikely to ever be reached with normal play or even merely heavy packrating losdouts... Reaching that threshold makes a numerical change causes a numerical shift that simply doesn't matter in any way given the mechanical realities of things interacting with the numerical shift in the circumstances it can actually be plausible to encounter the threshold. Simply changing from a penalty to a bonus does not fix a badly desired rule that was built to be ignored.

 

[Blue]

This is objectively false.

Nope, it's not. Default should be baseline. Default shouldn't have to be handled as an exception every time.

This is a fundamental bit of design. Just because you can not recognize that does not mean it's a "bald assertion with nothing to back it up" as you claimed.

Feel free to look up the concept of design patterns.

 

[Blue]

My assumption would be that those tables which ignore material components in general don't ignore the expensive ones that serve an obvious rationing purpose.

Good. Still, as demonstrated earlier, that's bad.

And I don't think the losses you point to are very severe.

They are not. But when there are only negatives without any offsetting positives, the total is negative - it's bad design. Just because there could be more severe negatives doesn't suddenly turn it positive.

Material components are not a part of B/X D&D, do not generally figure in 4e (outside of the context of residuum costs for rituals), and are absent from other FRPGs I've played (eg Rolemaster, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer other than as buffs). The benefits of opening up scavenging or captors who are ignorant of spells with only V, only S, or only VS components, are in my personal view outweighed by the inanity of treating the spell component pouch as an endless bucket of cobwebs, guano, shards of amber and the like, and by the work of actually tracking them.

Yes, different games have different rules and different balance points and rules focus. I agree with you this truism is 100% true. It also has zero to do with the purpose of material components in games that have them - which is presupposed by the article.

So I, personally, do find gains in an approach to spell casting that ignores them, and that uses simply words or gestures (or both) as the baseline for spell casting.

Please detail these gains, since so far we have seen nothing but negatives for that.

 

[aramis erak]

The reason encumbrance matters in classical dungeon-crawling play is because it is the source of the crucial gameplay decisions that players have to make in that style of play: are you willing to risk more random encounters in order to be better equipped against the other kinds of dangers the dungeon presents?

I can't think of any old games (Pre-Mentzer D&D) that take encumbrance into direct account for encounter chances; the few which have it collaterally do so only by reduction of travel speed and thus more checks needed.
Some don't even reduce travel speeds for encumbrance.

It's not just carrots and sticks, but also chickens and eggs.

People no longer look for certain types of gameplay because the rules required for it to work are no longer supported by the game.

I concur, to a point.
In the case of D&D 5.X, what got dropped was because the players responding to the drafts didn't respond well to it. It's a decade too late to push that shift...

But there are people still looking for, and finding, mechanical support for many of 5E's dropped mechanically supported playstyles. No rules for training up between levels. No rules for running one's lands. WotC trimmed back a lot. And 3PP's have added splats for most such things.

If anything, the fact that the "Hickman Revolution" happened during the age of 1e AD&D and B/X-BECMI, where dungeon-crawling or procedural world-sim play were still what the mechanics of the game supported and encouraged, belies this assertion.

ISTR reading that the campaign behind the creation of the DL setting wasn't even a D&D campaign. Certainly, knowing that the main caste of the novels were in fact PCs, they don't feel like D&D characters... Raistlin feels far more like he has a disad of chronic illness but an otherwise normal Con than the Con 6 or lower that AD&D would require...

Also, it isn't Hickman's revolution, per se. The «ignore the minutiae» epic tale was already embraced by other game engines at the time... FGU's Starships & Spacemen, Chaosium's BRP/WoW, Hero Games' Champions. Hickman just brought it firmly into the limelight of AD&D play as a valuable playstyle, especially with the Good/Evil tracking in DLA.

Not a few games lacked encumbrance at all by 1985...
A few even lacked lethal combat...

Spoiler: Lethal Combat absent

SJG's Toon, R.Talsorian's Teenagers from Outer Space.

 

[pemerton]

Please detail these gains, since so far we have seen nothing but negatives for that.

The benefits of opening up scavenging or captors who are ignorant of spells with only V, only S, or only VS components, are in my personal view outweighed by the inanity of treating the spell component pouch as an endless bucket of cobwebs, guano, shards of amber and the like, and by the work of actually tracking them.

 

[the Jester]

I concur, to a point.
In the case of D&D 5.X, what got dropped was because the players responding to the drafts didn't respond well to it.

I'm not quite sure I agree with this- the playtest didn't include things like encumbrance, random encounter rules, or the like; it was pretty much entirely pc classes. Even the monsters were laughably underdesigned, and it's pretty clear that the final monster designs didn't have a lot in common with the playtest versions.

We didn't reject rules that would have better enabled a dungeon survival playstyle (for instance) because they were never presented to us. At least as far as I recall.

 

[the Jester]

I want to add something to the discussion of encumbrance- every set of encumbrance rules we've had post-1e is super duper easy on the pcs. Realistically, if you have 40 lbs of armor, a shield, and four big weapons (greatsword, longbow, maul, spear), plus a backpack with 10 days of food, a change of clothes, rope, torches, whatever, AND a bunch of coins- that bag of 500 sp weighs another 10 lbs- you're going to be waddling around and knocking things over every time you turn around because the stuff is not just heavy but bulky. 1e was explicit that 'encumbrance value' was more than just weight- it factored in things like the fact that your pole arm is 10' long.

I'm not sure what the satisfying answer is, or if there is one, but this is an area where the pain of tracking it exceeds the value of keeping up with it. It can change every few minutes as you expend items and pick up treasure. This is an area where computer-aided play has a major advantage.

 

[tetrasodium]

I want to add something to the discussion of encumbrance- every set of encumbrance rules we've had post-1e is super duper easy on the pcs. Realistically, if you have 40 lbs of armor, a shield, and four big weapons (greatsword, longbow, maul, spear), plus a backpack with 10 days of food, a change of clothes, rope, torches, whatever, AND a bunch of coins- that bag of 500 sp weighs another 10 lbs- you're going to be waddling around and knocking things over every time you turn around because the stuff is not just heavy but bulky. 1e was explicit that 'encumbrance value' was more than just weight- it factored in things like the fact that your pole arm is 10' long.

I'm not sure what the satisfying answer is, or if there is one, but this is an area where the pain of tracking it exceeds the value of keeping up with it. It can change every few minutes as you expend items and pick up treasure. This is an area where computer-aided play has a major advantage.

It's not that difficult to get an item that weighs x pounds and after glancing at your sheet to see the current value you have written down for encumbrance add x to it. After adding ot subtracting the weight of a single item you just gained or lost it's a trivial matter to use the eraser and if a pencil to erase the current value just before using the point of the pencil to update it.

 

[the Jester]

It's not that difficult to get an item that weighs x pounds and after glancing at your sheet to see the current value you have written down for encumbrance add x to it. After adding ot subtracting the weight of a single item you just gained or lost it's a trivial matter to use the eraser and if a pencil to erase the current value just before using the point of the pencil to update it.

That is a lot of math for some players, and I don't know that the mental hassle of remembering to do that every time is something we can expect from players. I don't think it has ever happened consistently in my experience.

So while it might not be that difficult in theory, in practice, it seems to be.