Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 4989638" data-attributes="member: 4720">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.</blockquote>

Verification