Wizards in 4E have been 'neutered' argument...

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I don't know, whipping out the cold iron morningstar and the oil of magic weapon is always good for a laugh when you run into a lich.

Good for a laugh when playing with people who have been playing D&D for 15+ years. Good for a lot of strange looks and "Wait, what? I need what to even hurt this thing?" when you play with adults who are new-ish to the game.

That is, of course, unless you build an entire adventure around acquiring weapons to bypass immunity, making it into a standard literary MacGuffin situation, but if you're going to do that, you might as well make it a neat magical doodad or ritual that strips the lich of some power rather than making sure everyone who might want to hit the bad guy has a special weapon. The first feels mythic, cinematic, and fun. The second is taking away the cool magic weapon they found and replacing it with a crappy one for no good reason.

All these rules about weird immunities make perfect sense when you learn them at age 8 or while high in college. Liches and ghosts are apparently under every rock such that run-of-the-mill adventurers are going out of their way to get the standard issue item that will bypass their immunities.

Because that's just how the world works. We know we're gonna bump into one of those eventually, amirite? And there's a blacksmith in every big town who knows how to make anti-lich, anti-demon, and anti-ghost weapons. They're just everywhere.

This doesn't smash verisimilitude with a big, fat cold iron morningstar?

This is how much sense they make:
Picture how completely confused and thrown out of the film the audience would have been if when the orcs in Moria attacked, Aragorn told everyone their steel would be useless against Moria orcs, and they need to pull out their cold iron weapons.

If they were in a D&D-based world, Eowyn would have been able to hurt the Witch King not because of prophecy, but because she was the only one with a <insert magic metal here> weapon.

Having an anti-Lich weapon and an anti-ghost weapon and an anti-dragon weapon and so on ad nauseum is a huge D&Dism that came out of nowhere. It's a codification of the old quest for a special material schtick that takes away all the potential wonder and coolness of such.

 

[Nifft]

Having an anti-Lich weapon and an anti-ghost weapon and an anti-dragon weapon and so on ad nauseum is a huge D&Dism that came out of nowhere.

No. It came out of folklore.

"No silver bullet for the golf bag", -- N

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

In other news, this...

The utility of unlimited disposable ponies is phenomenal.

...is the best thing I've read all week.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

No. It came out of folklore.

"No silver bullet for the golf bag", -- N

Collapsing it all together is the D&Dism.

In folklore you don't have a group of people who carry bags and bags full of this stuff. You have Jack the Giant Killer. You have someone who kills werewolves specifically. You have George who kills dragons pretty specifically.

And only occasionally do these even require special metals or magics. Actually... pretty rarely until Hollywood starting popularizing specific ones in this century.

By collapsing all this into one person, and doing it for EVERY D&D character, you turn those individual little mystical neat ideas and turn them into a set of uninspiring rules that everyone just knows.

Instead of discovering that the big evil Lich you are trying to stop is resistant to mundane weapons, you hit a certain level and say "I might start bumping into Liches. Time to get a cold iron morningstar. I'll put it next to the silver-tipped arrows for werewolves."

We're all characters in that awful Van Helsing movie, apparently. Or we're running a scene out of Abbot and Costello meet Dracula.

 

[Garthanos]

We're all characters in that awful Van Helsing movie, apparently. Or we're running a scene out of Abbot and Costello meet Dracula.

Something can have mythic and cool sources but have its treatment be tacky and unimaginative can't it.

 

[Nifft]

Collapsing it all together is the D&Dism.

In folklore you don't have a group of people who carry bags and bags full of this stuff. You have Jack the Giant Killer. You have someone who kills werewolves specifically. You have George who kills dragons pretty specifically.

And only occasionally do these even require special metals or magics.

I'll certainly grant you this, but IMHO it's a symptom of the sheer quantity of fights a D&D character goes through relative to how many a character in folklore is expected to experience.

I mean, Jack the Giant Killer kills one giant. Likewise, Bard of Dale kills one dragon (though his black arrow is of an unspecified material, it is none the less the only thing that works against Smaug). In their settings, it is a big deal to kill one monster. In D&D, it's just a boss fight on your way to the next level.

D&D suffers from the sheer quantity of combat: you need multiple conflicts per session, and combat is the best modeled type of conflict, so you end up with multiple combats per session. If you want to have lycanthropes in your campaign, the PCs will conflict with them at some point, and if the PCs have a conflict, you'd better be ready to resolve at least some of these conflicts via combat. So, silver weapons all around.

Same for fey, incorporeals, and golems.

To remove golfbag syndrome, you need to do one of two things:

1/ Create another conflict resolution mechanic of equal utility to combat. Exalted 2e did this with social combat, and I love it for that. If you can't kill something, it's still possible to convince that thing to go away.

2/ Limit campaign scope such that fighting "special material" dudes will happen once, and afterward, the game will end. (This is what a lot of fiction does.)

Cheers, -- N

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

This is moving pretty far off topic, but I think rather than limiting campaign scope, a solution is to just nix most of the immunities so that the very rare monsters that have them feel special, rather than it being expected, run-of-the-mill, and boring as heck.

Does the run of the mill lycanthrope really need to have special materials used to kill it?

When there's one, maybe two wolfmen in the entire story, that makes perfect sense. When there are forests full of them, and the were-rats are invading every sewer system in the world, just let a regular old sword kill them without the hullabaloo.

When you over-apply magic it becomes mundane.

 

[Garthanos]

I'll certainly grant you this, but IMHO it's a symptom of the sheer quantity of fights a D&D character goes through relative to how many a character in folklore is expected to experience.

I mean, Jack the Giant Killer kills one giant. Likewise, Bard of Dale kills one dragon (though his black arrow is of an unspecified material, it is none the less the only thing that works against Smaug).

Nyeah bilbo used a unspecified warlord/rogue trick to pass a boost to Bard remember the talking bird... the attack was just a culmination that got through the last hit point with an heirloom weapon which may have cost twice as much because of fine workmanship... and Bard used his "Heroic Exertion" spending the max amount and a daily... which critted... very impressive but hitpoint loss is sometimes an invisible process and Smaug was weakening from volleys of arrows... which seemingly failed to find a chink but wore down the villainous luck of the beast ;

Jack had a divine blessing he was invoking... and similarly rolled a crit

A closer example in legend is Beowulf.
Few characters in fiction and legend rely as much on doodads as D&D heros.. Beowulf figured out a chink in the seeming invulnerability of his enemy at such a horrid cost ... but it was something he had with him all along the might of his own two hands.

 

[Garthanos]

Does the run of the mill lycanthrope really need to have special materials used to kill it? .

Make it so ... radiant damage stops the vampire regenerating and prevent use of power x

Make it so ... silvered weapon weakens the were for a round after hit.

Banes dont have to be save or die like absolutes... just useful.

 

[Nifft]

When there's one, maybe two wolfmen in the entire story, that makes perfect sense. When there are forests full of them, and the were-rats are invading every sewer system in the world, just let a regular old sword kill them without the hullabaloo.

So, an inverse werewolf law? I could dig that.

In general, though, D&D is very much a game where you are expected to go from being a guy who runs away screaming "OH CRAP" the first time you meet a type of foe, to eventually being a guy who wades through legions of them on his way to his real target. That's a general effect of levels.

There certainly are ways to model this other than equipment: you could have a feat ("Anti-Lycanthrope Tactics") which allows you personally to punch through their DR, but that has its own disadvantages.

No solution is really perfect.

Cheers, -- N