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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8783499" data-attributes="member: 6877472">D&D has always been a game about choice.  If players were tired of being snuck up on while they rested, they could choose to play Elves.  Tired of blundering around in the dark and fiddling with torches?  They could choose to play Dwarves.  Tired of low level threats like starvation, poison, and disease?  Well maybe they could choose to play Warforged.And you can get these kinds of protections from class as well.  Paladins and Monks could be immune to disease.  Druids could be immune to poison.  And that's before even getting into spells- alarm, endure heat/cold, goodberry, leomund's tiny hut, water breathing, mount, heroes' feast, word of recall, etc. etc., if there's a problem, you can eventually find a solution, before even bringing magic items into the equation.And those items existed- rings of sustenance, rings of warmth, boots of the north, bags that can conjure pocket change daily, the sky's the limit.  Subject to the whims of dice, DM's, and adventure writers, of course.Players have always been able to find ways to opt out of things about the game they don't care for.  Or they can choose to opt into things that they do.And the game has been written that way for a very long time.  If you feel that there are too many magic options that are allowing people to trivialize some aspect of the game that you like, it's not like they came out of nowhere.  Or that, even existing forces players to use them.They employ these options either because they want to, or they've never known another way.  I've talked to my groups in the past about whether or not they'd like to try a more gritty play style, where tracking resources and dealing with survival challenges are more important.  But it's a hard sell, because what they want to play is a fantasy game, not a real life simulator.  Even my friends who play Dark Souls and similar games, known for extreme difficulty, are happy as clams when they discover exploits that trivialize challenges.  For them, playing D&D is about having power over the world, something that we often don't have in real life.A few years back, in fact, one of my friends wanted to run a sandbox game where wilderness exploration and gathering resources to build a settlement would be a key factor (this was Pathfinder 1e).  I'm sure nobody will be shocked to find everyone had ranks in Survival and other useful skills, which quickly trivialized the proceedings.In a discussion with my friend, he griped about it.  "I mean, you told them what the game would be like, you should have expected them to make appropriate character choices.""Yeah, but I didn't expect them to be good at it.  It takes all the fun out of it."It seems sometimes that what we want is for our players to be bad at something so we can watch them fail.  But players tend to enjoy being able to overcome obstacles the DM places in front of them, and unfortunately, D&D is designed in a way that, typically, once you've gained the ability to overcome an obstacle, it's never threatening again.</blockquote>

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