It is a new thing. Rings of Wizardry were incredibly rare
These two statements seem contradictory. It cannot be
new if it was already baked in. Rarity doesn't matter for the same reason that "balancing" classes (races etc.) by making them really fragile early on but incredible powerhouses later doesn't matter: anyone who sticks with the game long enough will (a) get better at playing and thus mitigate those weaknesses, and (b)
try enough times such that eventually they get lucky. Law of large numbers and all that.
Sure, but then you are using a spell to conjure components for other spells--a higher "magic tax" if you will.
That seems to be beside the point. Magic can solve magic's own problems. What can a Fighter do to fix having all her equipment taken away? Nothing--other than just
enduring not having equipment until it comes back.
As is typically true, spellcasters are given both a weakness
and a way of getting around that weakness. Which was the point: ways of getting around caster weaknesses have been baked into the game from essentially the beginning.
Sure, they have, but again are rare in most cases! The Girdle of Many Pouches was my favorite magic item for this very reason!
See above. Rarity is irrelevant if the argument is "the game includes things to mitigate these problems." Are they present, or not?
But, in AD&D, if you failed your save, your then made saves for all your equipment. Do you know what the save is for leather against a fireball? 13 or higher. So, if I failed my save against an opponent's fireball (assuming I lived, since with lower HP was in question...), I had a 60% chance my GoMP would be destroyed!
Why are you standing in
fireball formation? This is, again, what I mean about being able to mitigate the weaknesses. Tactics
alone can significantly protect you from this issue. (Also: talk about an incredible
chore, rolling such saves! No wonder they didn't survive to WotC D&D.)
IME (anyway) you weren't meant to find ways around these problems, but you were always on the look out for them since they made the game easier for your character. A Bag of Holding was great to have, until you lost it (destroyed or stolen), at which time you lost everything in it.
I don't get how these two prongs are different. Doesn't a game "meaning" for you to do something only and exactly mean that that's what its rules incentivize you to do...?
I agree to a point, but in AD&D you either became more magical via magic items or spells, but only casters through spells, and then often temporary boosts until spells wore off (sure there were exceptions for really high level play).
What, then, does that tell us about the explicit and open antipathy for magic items from the MEGA vocal people back in the D&D Next playtest? Does this not explicitly mean that non-spellcasting characters were being told they weren't welcome in the cool kids' club anymore?
But in reviewing the two systems (and those spells) I've realized a big part of it is the automatic and "easy" nature of magic in 5E, as well as its prevalence in numerous non-caster classes.
The argument presented is that magic has always had
some degree of making things "easy," that degree has simply grown over time. It isn't a difference of quality, just of quantity. As for "numerous non-caster classes," there are only four non-caster classes in 5e, much to my chagrin. Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Rogue. Personally, I would have preferred if that list included Paladin and Ranger as well, because I like whatever supernatural power they access to work like that accessed by Barbarians and Monks: features, not spells. But that ship sailed a long time ago.
Magic has become more powerful in many ways as well. Yes, I believe some of this was for a desire to simplify some elements, but I really don't know why. It wasn't complicated IMO and was a factor towards balancing casters with other classes (along with requiring more XP and lower HP for magic-users).
"More powerful," or "less inhibited"? There's a difference. Greater power means accomplishing more with the same resources. On that scale, magic (
by far) reached its zenith in either 2e or 3e, depending on which specific spells you consider. "Less inhibited" means having fewer restrictions, difficulties, or complicating factors to deal with, and on this scale 3e is unequivocally the least-inhibited.
Also, see above. Rolling a save vs spell (or whatever) for
every single item on your person is an incredibly tedious thing. Likewise, rolling to see whether you're
allowed to get better at the core of your class fantasy is frustrating. It's not that these things are necessarily "complicated," as you put it, but that they are tedious, frustrating, distracting, or simply just
not very fun. It would be like, I dunno, saying that every time you try to fire a sniper rifle in Halo, you have to do a quick Simon Says minigame. People who don't use snipers don't have to do that, but snipers are one-hit-kill hitscan weapons with generous aim assist. It doesn't matter that Simon Says is a very simple game which demands very little of the person playing it: it's an annoyance. The annoyance is there in part to keep sniper rifles balanced, but it's an annoyance nonetheless. As with a great many things, people are
very bad at going for what they know to be rationally better for the health of the community in general instead of actions which selfishly benefit them right away but damage the community. The "tragedy of the commons."
In 5E, there are too many magical races, classes, and subclass for me. Spells are too easy, too accommodating, etc.
They've gone back to being more or less what they were in 3e. Heck, if anything, races are much
less fantastical than they were in 3e. Spells are if anything weaker and (slightly) more inhibited than they were in 3e. The only difference is availability--not ease or accommodation. So I'm genuinely stumped why you'd say this when they
aren't more than they were in 3e and are arguably less (due to things like Concentration.)
Really, lower levels were more about surviving to reach higher levels, at which point you might have a magic item which made managing most resources a non-factor.
Again, rarity is irrelevant, because people will keep trying until they can get such a thing. Which, incidentally, is another reason people wanted to skip past a bunch of the inhibiting or mitigating factors from early editions: everyone understood that you'd keep rerolling Bob (Bob XXII replaced Bob XXI after he died of ear seeker, who replaced Bob XX after
she died of a severe overdose of fire, who replaced Bob XIX after he died from falling damage, who...) until you succeed. If you're going to repeatedly make new characters and try again, much of the alleged excitement of high-lethality games drains away because it becomes a spin of the roulette wheel. Will the ball land on the right spot this time? Who knows, but you know it is essentially
guaranteed to do so if you keep spinning long enough, and there's no cost to spinning again.
That's why, paradoxically,
lowering the stakes can actually
raise the excitement and investment. Because then you can shift to a world where no, you
aren't guaranteed to eventually get what you want. There's an actual cost for spinning the wheel again and you may have to go home and admit defeat rather than playing until jackpot.
I don't think it was because such things were tedious (at least I know they weren't to me).
While it's fair that you didn't find them such, a lot of people did--and do. Inventory management, for example, is something that a number of computer RPGs do, and most players don't like it very much. Instead of being an area where if you do well, good things happen, it is an area where
unless you do well,
bad things happen. When there's no reward for success, only punishment for failure, it becomes hard to see why the mechanic adds value to the game.
Again, they haven't been doing it since the beginning in the fashion you describe IME. A lot of tables did choose to ignore such things because it wasn't important to them--their concern was more about combat or story points. To others it eventually became an after thought which would only occasionally become an issue ("Ok, you
had three weeks of rations and food in your backpack, but it was all destroyed in that
fireball so now your PC has no food or water...what will you do?"). And to some it remained a point of challenge on a more regular basis.
It doesn't really matter what the
reason for doing it was. The trend is what matters. And the trend has been present in every edition (except 4e, as is typical for conversations involving poly-edition comparisons.)
