YOU MEAN YOU GAVE A MAGICAL PLATE TO THE HALFLING BEFIRE GIVING A DECENT WEAPON TO YOUR BARB ???
What is hilarious is that a normal plate is like 1500 gold. This should be enough for at least 2 magical base weapons
5e’s balance point puts a massive premium on AC - it’s very expensive to improve AC.
… okay ? What does this says about anything ?
oh just… this is why full plate is so expensive in 5e - it’s for game balance rather than for the realistic fidelity of the setting.
Another example of the economics here are the rules governing how much income an artisan (such as a blacksmith) makes per day, compared against how long it takes to make a suit of full plate, and how much it costs. Even with the updated guidelines that an artisan “makes” 1gp per day, that means a suit of full plate is about five years worth of income, and many stores in big cities have sets just on the shelf.
These rules are a little complex, because the “take home pay” of labourers and artisans in the rules is after living expenses, and a blacksmith has to maintain rent on their forge, as well as purchase raw materials, but even factoring all that stuff in, the cost of full plate just doesn’t make economic sense in the context of the world, the high price is there because it increases one of your stats permanently - and to boot, it’s a stat that comes up constantly in play. A single point of AC is more powerful than a single point of almost any other stat in the game, with the exception of your class’ primary stat or your proficiency bonus.
Indeed. I think you are thinking it the wrong way. If it doesnt make sense in the economic aspect, do you know where it does make sense ? The gameplay aspect. The best armors of the game should be behind dungeons or paywalls to guarantee a level 1 or 2 doesnt go straight to it.
It doesnt make sense when you think of it as anything but a game. And its still a game. Its why in RE games you constantly find ammo and helpful items where there is no in universe reason to have them there at all.
Just like treasures in dungeons. How long would a world need to exist to have every dungeon ramsacked by elite warriors and mages ? A few years top. And most worlds are older, so it makes no sense to still have dungeons and loot in them does it ?
But its fun. Its a game and its fun to go and explore a fresh dungeon even if its very existence doesnt make sense in universe.
That’s what I said. It’s a game balance consideration.
Yeah. But if you start to think of it as part of a real world economy concept its not the same game anymore. But would you really prefer realistic conditions ? I mean maybe, everyone is different. But I dont think it would be fun for me personnally
There’s always been a bit of a tug-of-war between making a good mechanical game, and making a good storytelling environment.
If your aim is to tell stories, having consistent, intuitive worldbuilding helps a lot - it’s easier to immerse yourself in a world and tell better stories in a world if the internal rules of that world make consistent sense. The further you stray from this, the more barriers you erect to storytelling.
When you get heavily into storytelling/roleplaying within a fictional world, there’s always an element that involves exploring the aspects of that world and expanding its boundaries, asking questions like “what if?” - a poorly constructed world that doesn’t have consistent worldbuilding will collapse if you push too hard at the edges, whereas a world with consistent rules and systems will yield new ground to explore new narratives.
If your aim is to provide a balanced mechanical gaming experience, then it’s important to focus on game mechanics and balance a lot, in order to make everything fair, and to build a game that’s interesting to explore from a mechanical perspective. You want your rules to exist in a state where every element has a purpose, and they work together. You want anything that costs resources or investment to yield rewards that are in proportion to the cost you put into them, so mechanical choices are interesting and result in many different approaches.
For a game like DnD, it’s often the case that these two design goals are in conflict. Making an economy that’s balanced around the mechanical power of different magic items results in an economy where adventurers are earning tens of thousands of gold pieces for an adventure, and regular artisans are earning one gold piece per day. If the blacksmith has an income of one gold piece per day, how can it afford to buy an unneeded item from the party for hundreds, or even thousands of gold? where did that money come from?
So the question in your design is… where is that balance point? at what point does narrative consistency have to yield to mechanical balance, and at what point does mechanical balance yield to narrative consistency? - for most designers and for most tables, this is going to be personal preference, and the answers are different. You might find if one of these two principles “feels wrong” for you, it’s worth tweaking the world, or the systems or the economy to make a game that works better for your group.
I think 5e is unfortunate in that the specific systems of DnD bring these two halves of roleplaying into conflict shockingly often. A huge amount of DnD exists as vestiges and inhereted setting from older editions - to the extent where large portions of the game mechanics exist as they do because as a result of historical technical debt - there are aspects of 5e’s mechanical design and worldbuilding that fail to satisfy either design principle, doing both badly because they felt they had to… (e.g. why is “Fireball” just so much mechanically stronger than all comparably levelled damage spells? That’s not serving any mechanical or narrative design principle, it’s just inherited from older versions.)
For something like… “the cost of plate armour” I really think WotC dropped the ball though - the reason the “mechanical design goal” and the “narrative design goal” are at odds is purely a result of the values they assigned to some items in the PHB, and those numbers propagating through the rest of the design, because mechanical purchases and treasure values have to make comparative sense.
Original core doesn’t define gold values for magic items, and it doesn’t provide recommended treasure packages or income curves (older editions provided these things to help DMs figure out how much treasure to give.) - the only real things that have defined gold costs are “starting gold”, “living expenses” and “mundane adventuring gear”
So you could, for example, simply divide the value of every item in the “adventuring gear” table by 10, and keep the costs of living, and the incomes of NPCs the same. This wouldn’t make any significant difference to gameplay - you’d just give out 10% of the money… but it’d bring the economy of adventuring more in line with the economy of the rest of the world, and allow players to operate with numbers that’d “make sense” when contextualized against the rest of the setting. In essence, it’d be a net zero mechanical change, but a significant narrative improvement.
I often think about the fact that AC is intentionally so hard to increase but sometimes gold is necessary like a paladin (or good loot, but it’s often expected that they’ll save for plate), while a monk can increase theirs just by leveling.
I don’t really have any AC critiques over this, but I have issues with gold and exactly how much should be given out. I now know that to earn 1500 gp is about a level 6 thing, but I don’t know why, or even where I learnt it, I could easily be off by levels due to giving out the wrong loot, or a PC who roleplays spending their gold is mechanically harmed compared to a player with similar vices from another class. I’m not even sure how I’d handle this differently, except the more I learn 5e, the more scared I get of gold and time.
I can see a situation where a campaign centers around making monsters feel threatening and intentionally depriving a largely martial party of magical weapon. I’ve never ran a ghost or werewolf that is actually a problem due to either a spellcasting party or I already offered magical weapons. I kinda wish I had, because it would make that item feel much more exciting.
Meanwhile there are items like cast-off armour that don’t really offer a major mechanical bonus, or even just an artificer or forge cleric making their armour magical themselves.
Well… just make it invulnerable to magical damage then. Only weak to normal damage. Bingo, fun problem to solve.
One monster that’s invulnerable to magic and one that’s invulnerable to mundane in the same fight.
Question from someone, who never played a Pen&Paper RPG. How do you handel obscure things as a DM? Do you make up the rules on the spot, or is there a database of obscure decisions, or is the rulebook exhausting enough to include this kind of stuff?
As a DM, ordinarily there are no rules for using fellow PCs as improvised weapons or for attacking incorporeal creatures with magic items other than weapons. However, there are a few things to consider with this approach:
- If a player is reduced to doing this, they likely do not have any other magic items at hand that would make suitable improvised weapons (An aside - how do you have a party member with magic armor and another with no magic weapons or implements that might be used as weapons? Maybe follow this combat up with a discreet review of the PCs magical equipment and equalize if there’s a large discrepancy)
- it’s funny as hell
Based on these two facts, assuming 5e rules, I’d let it work as a two-handed weapon attack, but the attack is made with disadvantage because the plated halfling with magic armor was not properly balanced for combat, and if it connects, it deals 1d4+STR mod damage to the ghost, and half of that to the halfling.
Step 1 : ask a player if they have any ideas Step 2 : do a google search for about 30 seconds to see if you can find something easily Step 3 : Rule with your guts, take a note of it to check between session, and MOST IMPORTANT STEP say this : I’m going to rule this like that for now and I’ll check in between sessions for a correct ruling. Do not use this here today as a final conclusion in a later session please.
100% this. The most important thing in my opinion is to to make a good-faith effort to get an accurate ruling (steps 1 & 2) but barring that just make a quick ruling that won’t slow the game down and move on with the fight. Keeping the game moving along is an important role of the DM, and no player enjoys sitting there while two other people debate the minutiae of a potential ruling. It’s happened to me a few times where I’ve started a session with the players saying “Last session X happened, but it turns out Y should have happened. X will still stand as happenex, but in the future it will be handled as Y.”
This varies hugely from DM to DM.
When you’re at the table, the most important thing is to keep the game running. Keeping the game moving and everyone playing is more important than “getting the rule right” - so there’s a number of ways to do this - and different tables have different feelings, but here are some options.
- If your table cares heavily about “getting the rules correct” you can look it up. Some players place a lot of value on “getting the rules right”, they want to know for certain what the rules of the game they’re playing are, and it’s important to them to have a consistent ruleset to play within. For tables with this mindset it can be worth taking a moment to look up the rule, so long as people are happy with the flow of play being interrupted. This is an exception to the general “Keep the game running” priority.
1a) 5th edition doesn’t have hard and fast defined rules for *everything" (in this case you could use “improvised weapon” rules and treat the halfling as an improvised club)
1b) A lot of DMs are much more happy to “let something slide” if the player isn’t gaining any significant mechanical advantage from doing it… So interesting note: in 5e, ghosts are only resistant to damage from non-magical weapons, not immune, so “swinging an improvised halfling” is less good as an attack than just using your weapons. Lower expected damage, lower chance to hit, might damage the halfling. Since the player isn’t even getting an advantage from doing this, many DMs would be happy to just let it happen.
Assuming you want to keep the game going, here are some other options.
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If the game doesn’t have a rule, you can use a rule you know from another game. 5e often doesn’t have strictly defined rules for niche situations, but 4e and 3e often did have rules for those things. I often use an older rule I remember if 5e doesn’t have a rule for it.
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Go with your gut. Just decide what you think should happen given your understanding of the game world and metaphysics, then go with that.
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If your table likes it, use the “rule of cool” and just allow anything that is funny or interesting or cool.
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If you’re convinced a rule exists, but you can’t remember it, a really good practice that I recommend is as follows:
a) In the moment, let the player do the thing in the fashion that’s most favourable to them.
b) Let the table know, this is a one-time ruling for the current session, not a house rule that’s permanently in play
c) Make a note of the situation in your DM notes
d) After the session, do the research to look up the rule, and take the time to figure out how you think it should work. (If you have mechanically minded players, they might be interested in helping with this kind of thing.)
e) Let the players know what the rule will be going forward. \
Fundamentally, what’s most important here is NOT what method you use, but that your players know how you run the game and are happy with it. Any approach can work if the table likes that approach, and different approaches work better for different groups. There’s no “right” or “wrong” answer other than “what works best for your group.”
Best way is to do what the meme says. Make a snap judgement and roll with it. If a player objects, look it up post-game and make a modification. Don’t retcon what happened, but give a bonus/penalty to a player in order to keep things in line. Or create a scenario in which the ruling would be correct and give the players a hint to discover why.
Sorry what do you mean with your last sentence, “create a scenario in which the rule would be correct and give a hint”?
Never played pen and paper, this question fascinates me.
The beauty of pen and paper is that the DM is writing the game code on the fly. Let’s use the ghost example above. Normally you need magic to deal damage to incorporeal creatures with weapons. Let’s say your players found a mysterious ring (signet ring for the local rogue guild), but as the DM you know it’s not actually magical. Since it was a clever idea, you allow the ring to deal 1d4 magical bludgeoning damage when you punch wearing it. You planned for them to find some other magic item but they found the ghost first. If they don’t have another source of damage, they could die. You decide it’s more fun they can punch a ghost, rather than hint to them they should run away.
So now you have a choice, do you decide the ring actually is magical, and change other plans you had, or do you decide that the ghost has a specific connection to this ring, so it allows damage to be dealt. Maybe it’s the ghost’s engagement ring and they were murdered by their fiancé. So, is it ALSO the signet ring, or will you guide your players to the guild some other way? Does it make a plot hole because of how they found the ring or what some NPC said about it? Maybe that magic weapon you planned for them to find is the actual key to getting into the guild.
It basically just goes on and on like this, for the whole campaign~
Oooh, really nice answer. Thank you!
If the attack normally should not work but the DM decide to allow it, this would mean that the DM adds something like a new weakness or another mechanism to deal the damage in a way that follows the rules
Google it to see if someone else has a reasonable answer. If not then try to come up with one yourself based off of other rules in the game.
Removed by mod
I think you should be able to make unarmed attacks against ghosts. After all, you have a soul. There’s a ghost fist inside your flesh fist. You should be able to hit them with that.
If you allow that magic platemail, any magic item should work. Save all your useless and cursed magic items to use in fights as improvised weapons. That also means there’s no a reason people would be keeping cursed weapons for you to find in their loot.
Take Path of the Giant and swing your full size companions around for extra reach.
Honestly, I’d let him cook
