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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7497696" data-attributes="member: 4937">These days, I could handle it by providing the players character sheets that did item saving throws for them with a button push (all my players use the excel character spread sheets I provided at the start of the campaign anyway).  The reason I've never gone hard core on item saving throws even though I conceptually love the idea of that is the design headaches it presents to the DM if they are running anything other than the semi-competitive haven/delve format that D&D was designed around.   It's hard enough to keep all the elements implied by a character's 'inventory' balanced as it is without regularly destroying a portion of that inventory.  How do you balance treasure acquisition around the idea of different items of different materials for different classes being destroy at some sort of assumed rate?   R And then from a verisimilitude standpoint, if that is regularly happening to the PC's then you'd expect magical treasure to be logically far rarer in the environment rather than more plentiful, so you have an even bigger disconnect between treasure acquisition/placement and the logic of its presence in the environment.   Plus, from a pure player satisfaction standpoint, being left naked by a saving throw is actually harder to recover from than dying.  Just like permanently maiming a character is something that you should really hesitate to do, destroying the 'rewards' of a player's play is not really something that makes the game more fun for the player.   Not everyone is going to enjoy 'ultra-hardcore' mode any more than most people play video games in 'ultra-hardcore' mode.  There is this weird sort of aspect of PnP games that even though they offer so many other potential aesthetics of play than challenge, you can't actually use that as an excuse for squashing basics aesthetics of play like affirmation because really above everything else that 'illusion of success' is the main reason people play.   You can't really reliably substitute 'narrative', 'discovery', 'challenge' or whatever except as they feed into 'affirmation' and expect players to continue in the game for hour after hour.   Maybe you can manage a one off where affirmation isn't part of it and explore failure and frustration as a core part of gameplay, but that doesn't work for a game that expects say 600 hours of investment (which is probably minimally what has been put in by my players on me 3e campaign).  So really, 'taking away their stuff' regularly just doesn't work however realistic it might be - even if we ignore the book keeping aspect of it.</blockquote>

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