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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7967094" data-attributes="member: 18">People can only go by their experience and best guess, and I don't think there's any research on whether people ignore spell components, but from my experience and from all discussion of D&D, for the last thirty years, on all formats, with all people, I think it's fair to say "Over 51% of (hence "most") groups ignore spell components outside of extremely specific situations". Is that a guess, not a fact? Yeah absolutely, but it's the result of my experience and reading an awful lot of discussion on this topic over a very, very long time.Those specific situations would be:1) The caster is affected by Silence. (V)2) When the caster is tied up and has had their stuff taken away. (S)3) When a material component costs a lot of money. (M)Just look at any thread where people get talking about how spell focuses actually, RAW, work and so on on the 5E reddit or even places like here or GitP, and it really quickly becomes obvious that most people just go with "what makes sense to them", and totally ignore the RAW aside from the above (some go further and just start making up their own rules which don't correspond with the RAW). The 5E reddit is usually particularly full of "What really? That's dumb..." about how spell components are supposed to work (particularly re: focuses), and whilst it's still far more "hardcore" than your average D&D group, is at least somewhat more reflective of the general audience. And they sure aren't following these rules tightly.Exactly! Yet most people would think that it did, because that would make way more sense and loads of people play it that way.It's a bit like the perverse and confusing limit on what spells you can cast in a round. Instead of going with something simple that made sense, they've created an almost impossible to remember (and I'm normally extremely good at remembering obscure rules) scenario involving the specific order spells and cantrips are cast in and so on. And to no apparent point, either. Like, there's no dangerous situation eliminated by adhering tightly to those rules. It just seems arbitrary.</blockquote>

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