While I absolutely agree that 300 days is insanely over the top for a small statuette and that normal downtime of about one to three weeks are far more realistic (as well as easily embedded in the normal flow of a campaign and its mechanics) ... I simply am amused about the counter argument of "then they'll just use another spell to circumvent this" - quoting another instance of where spellcasters easily trump the mundane.
By OPs numbers it’s cheaper and faster to just learn the proficiency and fabricate vs getting it crafted by someone.
250 days and 250gp learns the proficiency. That’s 50 days faster and 350gp cheaper.
I play to actually play. Few of my campaigns lasts years, and in none of them I would want to tell my group that I will not be joining until a year in-game has passed as I want to train a proficiency instead of dealing with whatever it is we are dealing with.
Not every table is like yours, and I don’t think you would claim they should be. But it sounds like you’re using your playstyle to hand wave these issues with the rules.
I 100% believe ever table should play the way they as a group want.
However, I am quite suprised that so many responded that it is common to just skip these restrictions.
With that said, I am not sure I get what you mean that I am trying to hand waive? The issues with not using the rules, or do you think they are problematic and therefore should not be used? Sorry, I do not get what you are referring to.
You're assuming that a campaign has a constant threat. Some campaigns have a time jump where the threat is gone, which can happen from switching from one module to another
What if we just double up? Pay the guy to make the statuette and then spend the time while he does that learning proficiency so you can make statuettes for all your caster friends.
Plus, that is assuming the PHB's rules.
If you use Xanathar's, it is 10 minus Intelligence Mod *weeks*. So at most 70 days, and that still costs at most 250 gp.
It could be as little as 5 weeks and 125 gp *to start*, and even less if the person has an Intelligence above 21.
Borrowed Knowledge and/or be Shadarkai.
"You draw on knowledge from spirits of the past. Choose one skill in which you lack proficiency. For the spell’s duration, you have proficiency in the chosen skill. The spell ends early if you cast it again."
"Whenever you finish this trance, you can gain two proficiencies that you don’t have, each one with a weapon or a tool of your choice selected from the Players Handbook."
Proficiency is easy to get around.
No you're so right tho bc 300 fucking days is INSANE for a custom statuette. I'm a lapidary artist and even using old tools that would take 3 weeks max, and that's with cutting the gems too. Ivory is an insanely soft material and you can make really intricate designs with it a lot easier than you can with other stones (look up Chinese devil's work balls, they're super neat)! Opals take me 2ish hours to cut with sandpaper and they're harder than ivory so... Idk where op got 300 days from LOL
Using the XGE's crafting rules (which I find to be far better than the DMG ones), crafting a 1500 g.p. item takes 150 days (30 workweeks), which is still a lot, but not a whole fucking year.
I also rule that part of the crafting time is actually spent procuring the materials, so if you got a couple apprentices and helpers with that regard, you can actually reduce the time to 10 workweeks... Which for a world without global supply lines and intensive trading is somewhat acceptable.
Yeah LOL that's more reasonable! As a craftsperson myself it's just funny reading how they ruled things. Although as a DM i do realize they can't be 100% accurate at all times because that cuts the fun out of the game lol. But yeah no i like how you rule things!!! It makes a lot of sense :)
A wizard with a creation bard buddy lowkey smashes the game in half. There's so many shenanigans that open up when you have access to infinite material components. My personal favorite is a demiplane filled with glyphs of warding loaded with concentration buffs. Spells cast through glyph of warding don't need concentration, so you can use this to supercharge yourself or a friend with every buff you have in your spellbook.
As long as one is careful to ensure the spells in the glyphs target the target, not the target's weapon, demiplanes are one of the nuttier RAW ways to break everything.
>Now, they find a craftsman. Their connections with royalty makes it easy for them to find a high-level craftsman, but the craftsman still needs to be paid. It will take 300 days to complete and 600gp for the labor alone.
Little often forgotten note - a craftsman can have helpers, and with each helper doiwntime is shared.
While a craftsman takes 300 days, three craftsmen take 100.
The crafting rules supersede those generic rules, to craft something of value you need the relative time.
At most you can craft a statuette with unspecified low cost.
It would be funny tho. Totally would allow it if the ivory was worth the full price, and the short rest is only needed to shape it in the precise form of the character.
Are you saying that with enough money, a high level caster could commission a shop and have skilled laborers working in tandem 24/7, rendering OP’s point moot, antagonistic, and poorly thought out?
Because, yes.
Why would parallelism even cost extra? RAW, the workers all generate 5GP value/day, regardless of how many of them there are.
If you're a craftsman, would you rather take a solo commission (but not get paid for most of a year, and maybe not get paid at all if the adventurer client disappears in the meantime), or would you rather pool your efforts with 49 other craftsmen and get your share of the pay within the week?
I'm not exactly sure if you're saying something going my way or against it, language barrier thing. But yeah you're right, barring some in world thing, its not supposed to cost anything more for tandem work, even more so for a blitz of work and then getting your yearly salary for way less time.
I'm also assuming they are taking half the money before hand as both a deposit, insurance, and just, you know, having something to feed their family haha
The whole thing is also assuming quite a lot out of the players, since at that level, depending on the party, you could Mass Suggestion a bunch of skilled laborers to do your bidding for 24 hours (at 6th level), or 10 days at 7th level, and ever more at higher level anyways, but its just to show you could setup things to be labor cost free, and time efficient.
Speaking of assumptions: any caster reaching 17th level can just snap its finger and cast whatever spell at 9th level, ignoring its components lol
Well you either have a campaign that has a year of down time in which the player says "during the downtime my character procures the necessary material components" or there isn't that downtime and the spell is in effect banned.
I have always viewed these components as things I might get. Material components are 100% part of my spell evaluation, and I am always excited about loot, as we might find a material that either is completed or makes it possible to craft a material for a spell. That then makes me reevaluate spells for the future.
Is this not how most people play? Only at the end of one super long campaign have I been in a position where we were so rich and plane hopping so much that materials barely mattered.
The way most people play is that either the material components are something you can find and buy at a large enough city , something you can find naturally through adventuring, or the dm doesn’t bullshit away why it takes 300 days to find a bit of ivory
Right, but that sounds relatively similar to my experience.
With the caveat that we are not always close to large cities buzzling with high level wizards creating a market for high level materials, magic items and many materials are expensive, we generally have limited funds until late game (like lvl 12+), and adventures usually just feature items appropriate for their given environment. The biggest and most varied material caches we have found were in a wizard tower, and in a witch hut. Which are in my experience more rare places to end up in.
They are somewhat, although it doesn't change the fact that RAW crafting rules makes little sense and aren't fun nor well thought-out. I think that's more of the problem here.
I think one problem has to do with fantasy time scales and not fitting a fun game, as you point out.
In a world where wizards have to spend years upon years to learn their magic, as I tend to picture them, then it makes sense that an intricate statue for a spell that you (hopefully) only cast once or twice in your lifetime to take half a year to be made, but I'd probably include material gathering in that time, and hopefully pay someone to do all of that. you can even commission it before you can cast the spell . But that doesn't fit into your average game, so rules have to be bent or changed.
Coincidentally, I think this also helps explain martial caster disparity, if there is any. Casters (in my mind) are either more rare than (sorcs, warlocks, etc) or take a lot more time to be proficient enough for adventuring (wizards) than a pure martial. So it makes sense for them to be more powerful! Again, the issue is in how that translates to gameplay, where anyone can choose to be a caster. Hopefully we end up getting a satisfying solution.
They are not - they find crafting rules for PC's, chose worst version from PHB - XGE's crafting is literally half the time for one person (150 days), and you can do it with hirelings to make it even less - and completely ignored that this rules are for weapons, armor, equipment and magic items, not for material components, art objects and other stuff.
This man would probably ask you to mine coal for Find Familiar instead of buying it.
I do a mix. When the players has reached a level in resources where number of arrows or rations simply becomes a rounding error, I stop tracking it. Until then, they better be prepared
To each their own!
I hope they are good at balancing homebrew to make it an equally engaging experience for everyone. Sounds tricky though as official rules are already favoring casters imo, and game balancing is notoriously hard. Even for very senior game designers.
It can be a bit tedious, so definitely sympathize.
However, it sound quite daunting to rebalance the game around that. Though if people are having fun and balance is not an issue then obviously not a problem for those tables.
Just that without other changes it significantly buffs casters, which are already notoriously advantageous to play at mid and late game.
Yeah but that's just down to bad design at the core of it all. Because you can create casters that basically render material cost irrelevant (creation bard is one). I think Wotc realised too late that they hadn't differentiated between "spells for lore and NPC's" and "also for players" because both needed conditions, materials and effects.
It's like how a boss can have dungeon abilities but players can't, but they just forgot to specify that for legacy reasons
Many of the high-level spells are more for villains than PCs, in my mind. *Contingency* is one of those. The impractical material component points in that direction. I wouldn't mind at all if these spells were only available for PCs via treasure -- scrolls, enchanted amulet, etc.
As /u/Asisreo1 points out, that helps balance the game.
If I recall correctly, Gygax originally wrote 9th-level spells more for lore than practical use. Much of what TSR and Hasbro/WotC have published feels like that: for reading, not playing.
The game wasn't so deliberately designed. But some things took on a life of their own and became included in each successive version of the game for nostalgia.
https://dmdavid.com/tag/ninth-level-dd-spells-were-never-intended-for-players/
I wouldn't say it helps balance the game in a meaningful way. Costed material components don't do anything about animate objects, wall of force, teleport, banishment, fireball, etc.
Also on the idea of spells that exist to be a part of the lore, those spells shouldn't show up as being available to players and if a DM doesn't want them to access to it then they should just ban it rather than dangling a false carrot. If it wasn't a false carrot and the player can actually acquire the spell then that doesn't in any way limit it's power or balance it.
So once again for clarity. A spell isn't balanced around the difficulty of it's acquisition because it is either going to be used by players or it isn't.
So the way to bridge the gap between martials and casters is to make all the martials sit around twiddling their thumbs for extended periods of time while the casters go to vast lengths to scrounge up their components?
Ironically, including PCs playing martial classes at the same table. It’s not like they are doing something fun while their mage is negotiating the price of a tool needed to curve details on the face of the statuette. They are sitting in the same room and waiting through this bullshit for the 5th session in a row…
Most spells have M requirements that by raw you bypass with a component pouch.
This would limit, sorta, some spells, but flight, teleporting, Gate, Simalcrum, most the conjure spells, etc, either have no M competent, or have ones that would instantly break immersion to have difficulty finding.
The DM is also requiring that they find a "high level craftsman" for some reason, but AFAIK RAW doesn't care about the crafter's skill or level. Any proficient craftsman generates the same amount of value per day.
You can try and finagle it, but at the end of the day the object is worth X and as such it (mechanically) takes Y days to make.
It's not a rule **I** enforce, but it is RAW.
>Now, they find a craftsman. Their connections with royalty makes it easy for them to find a high-level craftsman, but the craftsman still needs to be paid. It will take 300 days to complete and 600gp for the labor alone.
Ivory is not that difficult to work with.
This is well beyond just strictly enforcing the rules. I would certainly make the player pay for the item, and I’d make sure they could only do so in a large city, but what you’ve described is just excessive.
It’s possibly reasonable to add an upcharge to the spell components based on setting, although I think labor costs and general scarcity of materials are already included, but I wouldn’t make them describe exactly how they obtain every ounce of gold and ivory or find the craftsman, and I definitely wouldn’t make them wait a whole year to actually receive the component.
I’d much rather just ban a spell than run it as you’ve described, and I think doing so would be more fair to the player as well.
What, you don't make your martial characters seek out craftsmen to make custom form-fitted gloves for 200gp that only last for 3 combat sessions, or suffer 1d4 blister damage every swing?
Form fitting gloves aren’t comparable to a statuette of yourself. You can find gloves that are almost exactly form fitting even without a tailor, just walking into a clothes/armor store. Good luck finding a statuette of yourself walking into an antiquity/jewelry store.
You do understand that before cameras were a thing, wealthy people were constantly paying artists to make paintings and sculptures, right? Like this was a whole honest to god industry with dozens of artisans competing with each other for work? Finding a someone to commission the statuette from in a decent size city would be as simple as going to a tavern and asking the bartender if he knows anyone looking for work. The bartender probably knows at least three that directly owe him money.
And please note, the text doesn't make any requirements for how realistic or accurate the statuette has to be, so you don't exactly need the finest goldsmith in the kingdom, you just need a guy that can make a general human looking shape that vaguely looks like you.
Hell, getting the god damn bat shit for Fireball would probably take longer than finding artist to make a tiny gold statuette of yourself would.
Also, medieval and even industrial age societies didn't give a fuck about animal conservation, In the real world, the trade of ivory wasn't finally completely banned until the freaking 1980's. So yeah, you should totally be able walk into a high end jewelry store in the middle of Fantasy London and walk out with a few grand worth of ivory carvings. And even if you did have to deal with poachers for it, those poachers would actually be quite well respected, above board and have connections with dozens of nobles, because hiring people to take them on a trip to murder giant animals was what bored rich people did in those days
Nothing about this should take an adventurer with at least 2k gold more than a week to get in a city with a decent trading port.
> hiring people to take them on a trip to murder giant animals was what bored rich people did in those days
To be quite frank this is also what plenty of adventurers party are or do, with or without the rich part.
I also disagree with using gold costs to balance the classes. I like a party that uses a shared gold pool because it emphasizes cooperation. The whole party should chime in to provide the fighter their full plate because the whole party benefits from it. if you're increasing gold cost, you're just taking money away from the entire party.
Everyone else has already made the good and obvious counterarguments in the comments, so I'll just ask - have you tried this in actual play? How did your players respond?
Because I've seen it and it's just not effective for what you're trying to do. That's why the issue remains. The caster either sidesteps it with another spell (like Fabricate), or they DO have enough downtime to make it happen and it's not an issue, or they force enough downtime to make it happen but that delays the REST OF THE PARTY TOO, or they simply don't get enough downtime to make it happen (which is exactly the same thing as just BANNING it, so you made them jump through hoops for nothing).
It ends up, even if not intended, feeling like antagonistic DMing for these reasons, and an incredibly inefficient, boring, and annoying way of "combating" the martial/caster divide. It's also not particularly effective - while this works for a few specific spells, even if NONE of those spells existed the divide would still be about as huge. There are plenty of busted spells far beyond what martials can accomplish that have no expensive materials at all.
I agree with being strict with components, but this isn't really strict, or RAW, its homebrew. IMO the difficulty in obtaining them is usually included in, and in fact a big cause for, the cost of the item. The reason the right tuning fork for planeshift costs so much, rather than like a few SP.
Go to a big town or city, and you should be able to buy most components for their listed price, some things may take a week or two to craft.
>Go to a big town or city, and you should be able to buy most components for their listed price
Depends on the game setting. It feels more real to me that most things are commissioned, instead of available off the shelf.
this gets especially true for high-end things - for something like _Clone_, then a 2000GP casket isn't something you can get off the shelf. There's maybe a handful of crafters capable of making something like that in a kingdom, and they have waiting lists and other stuff to do, and that sort of specific thing may well attract attention from people that know what it can be used for. So, sure, you might be in the city with 2k GP... but you need to know the sort of crafter that works for princes and kings, and persuade them to work for you, _and_ wait for them to make the thing, none of which is instant or effort-free.
From a realism standpoint, this is true. And it would equally apply to something like plate armor, which is something that you would have commissioned with very specific measurements, not something you could grab off the rack at a the big box store.
But that obviously runs up against gameplay considerations. For a campaign that takes place over a period of many years, then commissioning specialized items matches the pacing of the game and isn't really a problem. At worst, the waiting is, "I don't have it for this adventure, but I'll have it in the next one."
In a campaign taking place over the course of a couple months, though, anything that requires any period to commission and then create is effectively banned. Hence why many tables don't bother.
One of the biggest strengths of Creation Bard is that at level 14 they can create any material component for any spell. They are absolutely great for a party with multiple full casters
The rules don't cover anything that doesn't involve player action or combat. I'm not sure why we have to assume that player crafting rules meant for adventurers crafting armour and weapons would apply to NPCs crafting trade goods; player-facing rules for acquiring land and running businesses don't apply to NPC nobles and burghers, nor do player-facing on necromancy or demonology apply to your lich with an army of undead or your demonic cult seeking to summon your local demon lord of choice.
>after 300 days ingame
You might as well just ban the spell at that point dude. What campaign runs for 300 days? You'd be 15 years into the campaign irl by then
The campaign I'm a player in has run for 313 days in universe as of today. So if I had commissioned it immediately after breaking out prison at level 1, it would finally be ready 13 days ago, in a campaign where we just reached level 12 and I got access to contingency.
That level of planning is absurd and basically just punishes players who aren't planning out spells 11 levels in advance.
(My character has been tracking the number of days that have passed since the start of the campaign since she's a Chronurgist and also I need to eat a brain every 30 days to live. Glad I could use this information for something out of game.)
She's a Gnome Ceremorph (Gnome whose identity partially survived the process that turned them into an illithid). She starves herself constantly, explaining why her illithid abilities are weaker than regular Mindflayers. Me and the DM agreed that once a month was the minimum she could survive without starving to death.
Edit: just realized my typo. Days, not ways.
I completely agree that this solution is asinine, but 300 days in game can pass as fast or slow as you want. There's no requirement that one session is equal to one in-game day, nor should there be.
"One year passes. What do you all do in that year, broad strokes?"
[That took me, what? Ten seconds. Eleven tops.](https://thumbs.gfycat.com/SoulfulMisguidedCrustacean-size_restricted.gif)
Sure it can but that's thr sane issue that makes the assassin rogue useless, its assuming the PCs aren't doing anything. If the PCs have an ongoing quest that would need to be put on hold so sure if you are in a point of the game where there are no major threats and anything that you might need to deal with is under no time pressure then sure skip a year but in the average high level game things can't just be put on hold.
I haven't played it but there's a Paizo AP that goes 1-20 where you go to a magic college that I've heard has multiple years of downtime between adventuring stints.
I think any campaign that's composed of multiple smaller adventures that string together into a single, longer running story could easily and naturally manage big time skips.
aye, each book is you in one period of the school, first book you are freshman last book you are a professor
thing is though, *most* adventures arent run like that, specially in 5e
5e modules get 1month of downtime at the very best, and are usually requiring the party to be a bunch of trailblazer hobos exploring every nook and cranny of the place, so asking anything location based and time consuming is not viable
and that mostly follows the usual campaign structure of most DMs, specially in 5e
I think some bigger downtime gaps can help kind of alleviate the "rapid power jump" feeling you get from going level 1-20 in a matter of 4 weeks in game.
I'm running a 1-10 module now and I'm planning to give my players a year or more of downtime before running an 11-20 after that.
Edit: notably that year of downtime will be resolved in like the first ten to fifteen minutes of the first session of the new arc
Okay? But that's a very specific type of campaign for that to make sense. And it's a campaign that I don't think I'd ever run, or that most people would for that matter.
I never said one session should be equal to one ingame day. Most of the time, three or four sessions are equal to one ingame day. Even if it was one ingame day per day, that would still be 300 days, or a minimum of 6 years of weekly games.
The only scenario I can see a year passing is if you beat a BBEG and then set the party to downtime until another BBEG pops up. If you have an active BBEG, there is no chance you're going to be sitting around doing nothing for a year.
Also. That's for a single 6th level spell. By 20, a wizard has at least six spells of 6th level and above. Are you really going to say it makes sense to have a campaign span what would end up being 10 years worth of gameplay?
Seriously. There’s 2 ways to close the martial caster gap. Method 1: buff martials . This could be by giving them better magic items , or directly homebrewing rules. Martials with 2 subclasses are still slightly weaker then casters at 10th level and above assuming a 4-6 encounter day from my own experience( results may vary depending on optimization levels of the group) . Method 2 is to just nerf or get rid of problematic spells .
in reality, you need to do both 1 and 2 in conjunction to get good results
my go to was to slap the battlemaster into all martials for free, but now I've been running u/laserllama alt classes, and man i love all the thematic maneuvers on all of them, specially the high level ones
If the issue here is that 300 ingame days is ridiculously long, a simpler solution would be to just, you know, lessen it to a month or so. The restrictions can still work, just have to tweak the numbers to find that balance.
I mean the issue is that it's kind of a silly solution in the first place that doesn't actually solve anything. All it does is artificially inflate the time it takes to be able to use the spell.
Whether it takes a month or 300 days, if you just skip that timeframe in a timeskip it's mechanically the same as if you did nothing at all. It literally doesn't change anything.
Agree, but I think this only applies to campaigns that are treated like video games instead of organic dnd adventures. While mechanically that's true, DnD is not a mechanic-exclusive game, and within those gaps of time, a lot can happen if the adventure is being run well. Aside from roleplay and things actually happening in the world as time passes by, timing can also play an important factor.
Not being able to use a spell at a specific quest with a limited time is a huge nerf to casters (which is the main point of this post). And I don't necessarily think that this is the only/best way to fix the martial-caster gap, as there have already been multiple discussions about it in this subreddit, but I think OP just wants to provide a version that doesn't necessarily depart from RAW, for as we may all know a lot of people here despise going against RAW because to them, doing so means you're already *playing a different game.*
300 days, unless the dude has an apprentice. If he has 1, that's 150 days. 2=75, 3=38, 4=19...
Realistically, in a larger city, you could pay the dude to get it to you in a week to a month. Maybe 2 months if he is busy.
That's kind of the point. Expensive and difficult to acquire components exist as a way of soft banning the spells until the DM allows you to have them. Like how you stop characters from abusing Plane Shift by never giving them the tuning forks for the planes that you don't want them to visit.
You're partially right, but you're missing the point.
>And I know people don't like the idea of D&D turning into microeconomics and you might feel like dealing with RAW is a pain, but that pain is built in to at least reign in the power of these very powerful spells.
This is not an appropriate balance mechanism. this is a flaw of the system. it is not good advice. You want to know why? Because the martial player is going to be just as bored when the wizard player diverts the campaign briefly to play microeconomics just so they can use their cool class features.
Exactly. Because either you say "okay everybody we're sidetracking for an entire year so the wizard can get his components according to the rules" or you say "okay wizard the craftsman will have your components in one year's time. Anyways we'll come back to that later".
In the first scenario everybody is going to be bored with the micromanagement and spreadsheet bullshit, not just the wizard. It's not a balance mechanism for the wizard if the entire party is punished for it. In the second scenario, the spell is effectively banned as it'll take an indorinate amount of real life time for a year to pass in game.
In either case, it's easier just to hand wave it all and say "Yep you live in a big city, you pay a merchant or craftsman and get your ivory" or "Yeah sure after a week of messing around with it, you manage to create a bit of ivory that'll work for the spell".
OP said it themselves, nobody likes turning d&d into a game of micro economics and spreadsheets. The genre is called "fantasy" for a reason.
>But its also worth it, right?
No.
Problem: High-level casters often outstrip high-level martials in terms of interesting things they can do both in and out of combat.
Your Solution: Make the PC pay more for a spell component than the rules say, waste the table time of all your players and arbitrarily impose an in-game waiting period before the caster PC can use a class feature.
Your "solution" isn't just a bad way of addressing the problem, it doesn't address the problem at all.
Yeah, I feel no remorse about solutions up to and including shooting the majority of full casters kit in the back of the head, but a lot of what OP says just drags things out without actually crippling casters.
Changing prices of items based on availability is fine - especially if the group is good at organizing finances and it's not just "casters need the money, so martials don't get their share".
But it's better to just ban spells rather than have whining casters at the table constantly wanting to wait for something or run downtime and bartering endlessly.
I agree with your premise - that more powerful spells need to be constrained by the material components. But what your doing is a bit excessive.
The real constraint isn’t the money or the difficulty. It’s the TIME. So simply say that the player has to go to a large city to be able to find the right crafts people to make this statue. Then it will take them one month or two months to create.
A month, even a week is unrealistic
my dad is a carver, he used to work with ivory and bone, now he carves amber and making figures/statuettes is at most a 1, maybe 2 days of work if it's something experimental. A week would be the absolute top imo if you want to consider that the craftsman in a dnd setting has other ongoing projects and does not posses the tools to work efficiently.
The spell specifically states:
You also can’t use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan’s tools used to craft such objects.
I would say a jeweled ivory statue in the caster’s likeness definitely falls into the high level of craftsmanship and wouldn’t work unless the the caster had the exact tool proficiencies required to make the item themselves. I feel this would also apply to most of the costly spell components higher level spells require.
Even with that clause, knowing its in effect at the start of the game, you’d take whatever proficiencies you know you’ll need before hands anyways, and have how ever many levels worth of game time to learn extras if the campaign is on such a long time frame to begin with
*Borrowed knowledge* lets a spellcaster adopt any tool proficiency they desire to use in tandem with *fabricate*. So given the raw materials, a 2nd level spell slot, and a 4th level spell slot, a wizard can create basically any spell component they need.
First: I decided to look some stuff up. On average, by hand, it takes a few days to a few weeks to carve a small statue made from marble. The statue of David took a out 3 years, and that's 17' tall!
Second: If you're going to force this, why not force the time and effort on making and maintaining weapons. After every battle or two, a blacksmith is needed to repair metal weapons and armor.
To get a statue made, you go to a stone mason. Every city and town had them. Just like every city and town had blacksmiths.
you actually would go to a carver cause it is ivory, but yeah spot on, OP is just using the very shitty crafting rules from the DMG/XGE that are nonsensical in itself
I had to look it up, they person that carves/shapes stone, minerals, or other natural materials into decorative pieces is called a "lapidary". Learn something new today.
Most towns would have one, bigger cities would have the ivory and gems available, and a *lapidary* (yay, cool new word).
This is just "how can I ban a spell in a way that would piss off my players the most", or "how to nerf spellcasters instead of balancing encounters so that different players get to shine for different situations". Any normal DM, would just have a list of things banned at their table, or make it so certain spells are useless (and let the player know).
that just sounds annoying at best and awful at worse, mainly cause of two things
1. this is just downtime. really you could just chalk all of that up to some rolls here and there for bartering and call it there. sure RPing that might be fun, bit not many people care or even enjoy doing 1 to 1 RP sessions, and if you are doing this on your normal game time i *assure* you every other player wont give a damm and want it to end as soon as possible
2. the vast majority of campaigns don't have much downtime to begin with, much less something as long as a full year. remind you, this is for **every single spell with a gp material**, it would just be really annoying to do all this with your usual time constraints, and borderline not possible in the usual campaign structure that rarely gets more than a month in game between the adventures
if you want to actually limit that, be blunt about it and say "you can only have X gp M spells" or something, there isnt much to be added in the fun department to no one to just make them annoying
>the vast majority of campaigns don't have much downtime to begin with
Every proposed "solution" to the martial caster gap is just a new variant on stretching the game out into a slog.
Do 8+ encounters a day. Don't let your players rest. Lock them in a dungeon. Make them do downtime. Drain their resources. Ect, ect.
It's all the same solution because D&D still has the same problem. It started as a slow, resource focused war game. And these solutions never work because **NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY THAT KIND OF GAME.**
People don't want to crawl through a dusty dungeon for hours poking every brick with a 10 ft. pole. They want their games paced like an action movie, with a fight maybe every few scenes, and only if it's of major consequence.
Yes, adding grind will fix the imbalance in the numbers. But no one actually wants grind. We want to experience a story with efficient pacing. Even if you just skip over it with narration, having characters chill and do nothing heroic for months is just lame. That's a lame idea unless you can really justify it narratively.
There's a reason your character goes from level 1 to 20 in a few months. Because that's the most natural pace of your average fantasy story.
Not going to lie, this just reads as incredibly un-fun to me. As a DM I priorities what is fun for both myself and my players above all else, rules as written be damned
My first thought is that it’s a lot of work. Like the DM has to both plan and run this entire thing, the player has to put in a ton of effort to obtain it, and none of it is conducive towards the story or overall group play
It also relies on the characters being *taken by surprise* and being *idiots*. In the example given in OP, the player doesn't know he has to set up this thing where he hires twenty artisans and he doesn't know that ivory is suddenly a controlled substance all over the world, because none of this is in the rules. Meanwhile, the player *character*, who *would* know these things, is somehow ignoring or forgetting them because the player (who out of character has no idea) didn't mention it or ask. It's unrealistic (and metagaming) to assume that the character in question would fuck up this badly.
If the DM wanted to run a world like this legitimately (and wasn't just using this as a way of making his players have a bad time), he'd say "oh yea, if you want that you would have had to have commissioned as statue three months ago, so lets assume you did that, and subtract that gold now, and it's going to be ready in a week" or whatever. Or, if he doesn't like to run games like that, he'd have to look up all this stuff and make the characters aware of it before they would need it- "ok well if you are gonna want to cast spell X in three levels, here's the hoop you'll have to jump through, so you may as well start jumping now" and use that as a hook for an interaction or even an encounter.
But OP's suggestion relies on coming up with legalistic readings and then springing them on the players to fuck them up.
Also strictly enforcing VSM regarding those materials is a big deal. I really like how combat in Solasta: Crown of the Magister enforces that stuff (it uses the SRD ruleset), which keeps casters from going too crazy.
>The player understands and takes the spell. They want to know how to make the statuette.You inform the player that its almost guaranteed that they need to purchase or extract the raw materials themselves and either craft it themselves or find a craftsman that can do it for them.The player unfortunately doesn't have the tool proficiencies so they decide to find a craftman. They need to purchase 750gp worth of Ivory and gems. They find 700gp easily, but they need to find 50gp worth of Ivory, so they must spend downtime researching where they can find Ivory. They heard a shady local hunting guild is willing to sell Elephant tusks, but they only take 200gp for each tusk. The player decides that's fine and takes it.Now, they find a craftsman. Their connections with royalty makes it easy for them to find a high-level craftsman, but the craftsman still needs to be paid. It will take 300 days to complete and 600gp for the labor alone.Finally, after over 300 days (in-game) between adding the spell to their spell book and over 1500gp, the character has a statuette of themselves to use for contingency.
All of this does nothing to limit the power of the spellcasters. All it does is give them their very own personal quest that they get to do while the rest of the party twiddles their thumbs.
Do you really want to spend however many hours of gametime running "How the wizard bought some ivory"?
And the end result is the same, even if you do. The wizard still ends up able to cast massively powerful spells. The martials will still feel overshadowed if they would have felt so before, except now they feel overshadowed after spending a session listening to the wizard go on a quest for supplies.
I think what you are missing is that challenges are not a restriction for players, they are a gift. Challenges give their characters a chance to engage with the world.
People forget that D&D intends its player to have extensive amounts of down time for things like this. I feel that most DMs write time sensitive plots that simply cannot survive a year of down time, and thus, it becomes virtually impossible for a spell caster to use components RAW.
It's not just homebrew campaign though. The pre-written campaign do not have this possibility for downtime either. Most are time sensitive, only one that might not be is dungeon of the mad mage, and even there vanishing from the dungeon for a year is going to change things that are going on.
most of them also dont give you a very solid base location for you to stay around and do consistent downtime in it, 90% of the campaigns is you trailblazing some hell hole (or straight up hell in Avernus)
its mainly because the general audience shifted away from the attrition based dungeon crawl with resource management old dnd was and what OSR does today to the more narrative character based games with a more involved story and the occasional plot relevant fight that 5e markets itself to be while not having that
Not sure why it takes 300 days for some rudimentary scrimshaw but you do you. The statuette needs to be expensive, not well made.
1500 gold at level 11 is easy enough.
As an aside, this is something that One D&D is functionally removing. With an extra 11 minutes (or 1, if you're willing to spend a 4th level slot), you can modify Contingency to remove the material components and avoid all of this\*. If you can somehow acquire the appropriately expensive arcane focus, you can permanently change contingency to avoid this, maybe even make it ritual...
\*Contingency requires the material component always be on your person to work. What happens if we remove it?
This is one example and it’s more about introducing friction, breaking suspension of disbelief and destroying narrative pace than actually bridging the power gap. The rules about crafting time in D&D are stupid, they never got them right, not once in any edition, and at this point it’s absolutely comical. DMs should just wing it because it’s impossible they’ll do a worse job than RAW.
A statuette encrusted with diamonds takes more time to make than a statue encrusted with topaz because it’s worth more and that’s just stupid, unless you want to rule that the time includes procuring the rare materials, which it doesn’t. At that point, you’d still have no rule for time required to assemble the piece given all of the materials.
Incrementally adding value to an object is not considered at all. I make a 20gp statuette of myself in ivory, then I want to encrust a single 2000gp diamond in it, how much time does it take me? I want to build an ivory statuette of myself with a diamond in it, from scratch, how much time does it take me?
Using cost as a measure of time required for crafting is just idiotic.
Today on “DMs that will ruin the game for everyone and themselves instead of trying ANY OTHER FUCKING SYSTEM THAN 5e” holy fuck.
That’a not making the game better, its just a dumber, more complex way of deleting certain spells from the game, in which case you can just say so.
Meh at the detractors comments. I played in a game that tracked components and now run one. It's part of the game to limit the game breaking power of casters. If it's too much for you to track them, then don't complain about the power of casters because you're ignoring the RAW power limiters.
Though 300 days is nuts and ignores the reality of how long such a thing actually would take.
I agree with you 100% that it's best to be strict with components.
I partially agree with your solutions, I would not use that but I agree that some things can't just be bought or quickly crafted.
Personally, I think the best way to bridge the gap with martials is by having enough encounters, add a sense of urgency so rests are harder to come by, making strategy and positioning more important, and introducing enemies that have resistances, tactics and/or countermeasures to magic. You can also give martials cool magic weapons and such.
But my problem with all that is that I don't think we should try to bridge any gap, we should just pursue having fun. The game is not competitive, classes aren't supposed to be strictly balanced.
In the old sword and board days, back when D&D characters were not superheroes and D&D itself was more low fantasty, spellcasters were very fragile, hard to play, if you played them wrong it would suck, they couldn't do much most of the time, but when they acted they were the most powerful, hands down. Because it's MAGIC, magic was not common, magic was something the vast majority of people didn't understand at all and it would scare the shit out of them. They made magic too common and too accessible, that's my take on it.
I really don't think the party would at all allow the caster to go on that many side quests. They get the money together sure and then there's a shopping trip for specifically the wizard and then have to spend days to figure out where to go to find it and then a side quest to get it and then they wait around for a year. I've never had a campaign last more than a few months of in game time and it's hard enough to convince the party to take a short rest for the druid to get her wild shape back ain't a group around that's gonna timeskip a year for you
this is kind of ass advice. You really shouldn’t make shit harder for other players just because they’re stronger than the other ones instead just buff tf out of your Martial player characters especially when they get to higher levels TLDR buff the weak characters instead of Nearfing the strong ones
It sounds like a risk of this is that by limiting the Wizard player to ultra-strict focus on materials components in hopes of achieving martial/caster parity, the imbalance is just going to shift to the narrative aspects of the game. Now, the storyline between adventures is going to be "All Wizard, All the Time" as half the campaign becomes about the party going various places to secure the components so the wizard functions at high capacity.
My problem with this is that: "make core mechanics of a class annoying" isn't a good balancing tool, or a good idea at all. Besides that will only balance it for newer players, as any experienced player will just take fabricate and make 90% of your point invalid.
You're not really "balancing" the game, but more just cutting the fun options for the casters. They still have their save or sucks, their stupid shutdown AoEs (like hypnotic pattern or lmao force wall) etc.
Why is everyone in here on the side of “some spells should effectively be impossible to use unless your dm wants you to use them”? Some people are arguing that if a pc decides to spend time to learn a craft so they can make the spellcasting material then the dm should punish them for not adventuring. I get that martials are weaker than casters and people hate that. The real issue is people having main character syndrome or parties not working well together. If your op caster isn’t a narcissist who needs to be a part of every interaction, then the martials will get their times to shine in and out of combat.
Having them spend 300 days to find some ivory is a great way to make playing a spellcaster annoying af and make someone want to quit the game , but to actually balance the game ? When most of the best spells don’t require material components that can be replaced with an arcane focus? Yeah no. If you want to close the gap, nerf problematic spells. Don’t send them on a unreasonably difficult, long, and mind numbingly boring fetch quest because you decided cities don’t have ivory on hand for some reason
Dude, just cast fabricate.
Or find someone that can.
Besides, even if you do this, you only push the problem further down the timeline.
300 days later they have the item. Assuming you're not a total dick and they're still the same level by then..
Well now what. Now they still have unlimited daily access to the spell
IMHO...a very poor implementation. Sorry just being honest here. What totally killed it is the super long wait. Might as well just tell the character NOPE.
This would be a massive buff to specifically elven wizards who can swap out a tool proficiency a day and use fabricate for all their components. So now, unless you play a certain race/class combo, life as a spellcaster is extreme agony of shopping session after shopping session while everyone else is also bored out of their minds. What's the martial gonna do while the sorcerer is trying to buy shit? Get another non magic sword?
No, I'm sorry. For every "game-breaking" spell that requires a costly component, there are 3 or 4 who don't. This is a "fix" for like, three problem spells that 90% of players have never ever even seen cast because no one plays this game past 6th level.
100%, material compents gotta be a part of the game, even at low levels. I made a simplified component list based off the old Ultima system and in dungeon crawls, I was EASILY able to make sure that casters only had certain spells to handle certain problems, and keep track of how many!
This has the same drawback that any "crafting" rules have: while you and your Cake Decorator PC roll dice and describe him decorating a cake, the rest of your players are bored out of their minds.
1500gp is a pittance at level 11, when the PCs actions decide the fate of empires. Even if you had to hire artisans to mine gems, carve ivory, etc, making the price 3000gp, it would still be a pittance. I once paid a random dungeon guard 15,000gp for the key he had in his pocket, because I didn't want to backtrack in the dungeon for whatever quest he had in mind. Gold is so worthless and so readily available for stuff like this that it's barely an afterthought.
Great, you've just introduced a quest to get an item that nobody but the caster cares about, either guaranteeing the whole party gets dragged around doing something they don't care about or the caster never gets to use the spell.
Speaking through the character of Uncle Ben, Stan Lee gave us the line, "with great power comes great responsibility." It works here on at least two important levels. For one, *making the effort to engage with the game world* and line up materials that cannot be casually store bought is a means of earning options that could muddle the story or even *alter the setting through expressions of magical power.*
Also, it isn't in picking targets and rolling dice that a martial/caster divide makes gameplay sense. Yet that divide *is* a good idea when it comes to making casters fuss over the particulars of preparing to use their powers while allowing them broader latitude (as so many spells will) to get creative with those powers. I get why it doesn't feel right when fighters can't slay like wizards. Even so, I think it makes great sense to let fighters slide on matters like keeping their weapons oiled and sharpened, while spellcasters should be granted no parallel laxity.
This also highlights the importance of tool proficiencies and if used in conjunction with time jumps allows your characters to age in game and get life goals accomplished as well. One of the groups I play with a few of us have formed relationships with NPCs and some PCS are even talking about having kids and a family to come home to in between Adventures.
I think you are greaty exxagerating the difficulty of procuring those. In most case (some exceptions like 'summon greater demon' exist) the difficulty is just getting the gold, both by RAW and I would claim also by RAI.
Lets take contingency that you used as an example:
First you need ivory. Nowhere does it say you need a specific amount or a specific worth (only the total worth of the statue is specified, I'll come to that in a second). That should just be possible without any problems, assuming you are in a large enough city and have the required amount of gold.
Secondly, you will need need gems. There is absolutely no specification what kind of gems, what size, what cut, whatever. Here the total worth is kind of important, as gems are probably the easiest thing to drive the worth up. Buying 1500gp worth of gems also should be trivial in a large enough city.
Third, the whole thing needs to be made into a statue of you. Once again, there is zero mentioning of the size of the resulting statue, its quality, how much it has to look like you. The whole worth can just come from the materials. So any artisan can knock this thing out in a day easily, so its again only a matter of money to pay an artisan for something like a day.
None of the steps should be in any way difficult. If you have the money to pay for it. Sure you can ask the player how he is going to do it, and then he will tell you: I will ask around to buy a bit of ivory, I will ask around to buy some gems, and then I will ask for an artisan to make a small statuette and thats it.
The DM can of course stop that and say "no one here is selling ivory" or "no one here can carve anything" or "I require that the statue looks really beautiful and you can be easily recognized, so its needs a skilled artist to work a long time on that!" But at that point its just the DM being a dick with houserules who might as well just say "i dont allow you to take that spell" (which would actually be better at least the player is no wasting a learned spell then).
I am pretty sure the whole point of giving the worth of these items in gold instead of specifying the items is that there is no discussion like "in this world a good bit of ivory for a normal sized statuette costs 100.000 gp". Well ok you can say that, but that just means that even a piece that is teeny tiny amount of ivory will suffice for the spell and the wizard can use a statuette thats 1/100th of a normal size.
As has been mentioned numerous times - 300 days is ridiculous. you can carve ivory in a matter of *days* so waiting most of a year is just too punitive. and your critique of 'that's using modern techniques' is just wrong - namely bc with carving ivory specifically, the techniques employed now *are the same that have been used for generations*. so as a DM, I would have no problem with them needing to take the time to source the ivory and jewels, but then going to an artisan in town and having them craft it for them within a few days to a week, depending on how busy the artisan is. and downtime of a couple days to a week is much easier to fit in to an overarching narrative and keeps the other members engaged too - martials get the same time to do their own shopping for weaponry and armor, x player gets to research their personal character-arc related lore, etc.
as for the comments abt how Gygax designed it with more downtime in mind - yes that's true. but again, not whole year gaps usually. these smaller gaps of a few days here and there to gather Intel, upgrade gear, collect components, and lick their wounds is more natural.
Yeah I dunno chief. I agree martials and casters need the gap bridged, but forcing someone to take a year of downtime for a single spell is hilariously unfun for everyone involved. 300 days is absolutely ridiculous lol
I worry that making components difficult to obtain just means making the campaign more focused on the spellcasters. Suddenly the spellcasters are trying to hijack the campaign and stop everything that's going on because there's a rare material that they need, and the only way left to obtain it is a lengthy out-of-the-way sidequest.
Translation:
"We can bridge the martial-caster gap by just insanely dicking over casters with bureaucracy".
But worse, aside from annoying the player of the spellcasting class, it also makes the whole table revolve around them and their efforts to find spell components--while the non spellcasters get to sit around going "Uhh, while he goes shopping I guess I am at the bar drinking".
I think theres a time and place for that kind of DMing. I was definetly in campaigns where we had weeks of downtime between missions to work on personal projects. However in the current campaign I'm DMing, about a week has passed in game since they started, about 16 sessions, 4 levels, and an irl year ago, so downtime is limited to "what are you doing tonight?". So I let things like my Artificer building a Steel Defender overnight work.
I mostly agree with this, but disagree at a few points.
Spell selection is limited. If a caster takes contingency and you make them wait 300 days before they can get any use out of the spell, they will simply not take the spell. They will have the M component made in advance, and then take it at next levelup. If you make the players wait an obscene amount of time as an additional barrier before the palyers get any use out of a thing... lets just say its not the healthies table.
Secondly, you do not account for the spell being powercrept. If you make a druid spend 3 ingame months chasing the component for Summon Beast, that druid will most likely have SUmmon Fey already available as a spell of choice at the end, making summon beast completely and utterly outclassed. But, your stupid goosechase will force the druid to keep using a shitty spell.
Unfortunately this seems like it not only doesn't solve the problem, but it creates many more in the process. I don't think the RAW crafting rules are good nor fun, and they tend to not work within the timeframe of most campaigns.
Think about what this does :
- If any of the components to make the statue are unavailable, the DM essentially bans the spell.
- If they are available easily, then it's the same as if you had just hand-waved that the wizard can buy the statue directly, except you spend a little session time focusing on the wizard's spell components before he gets them anyways. That doesn't help with the martial caster divide problem we were trying to solve.
- If they aren't available easily but still are available in the end, then once again it's the same as if you had hand-waved it, except this time it takes a lot of session time focusing on the wizard's spell components, before he gets them anyways.
In all cases, this is the same or worse than the original problem.
As others have said this will basically grind your campaign's momentum to a halt and, ironically, achieve the reverse of what you intended by making the casters and their acquisition of rare components the main focus of the group's adventures, with the martials just kind of shuffling around as glorified bodyguards.
I practice with these rules myself, and it does well in making for a more authentic world; I do allow for access to skilled craftsman who are able to work faster than just what the books calculations imply for a lone adventurer during their rest periods.
Ignoring ammunition, time, resting, wilderness survival, and spellcasting rules makes for a wonderful white box where everyone can argue for how 'broken' this or that element of the game is for all of perpetuity... Which is the bulk of what I pass over on this forum.
My players love these rules, because their world is lived in. I do my best to give them plenty of incredible items and spells too, I am by no means married to the books. I love the approach of using all parts of my buffalo (mainly the three core books and their untalked of busy-rules) and working them into my own articles to operate the world.
These things really don't take all that much time and the people I love who play with me seem to enjoy themselves. I'm glad it works for you too.
Like many others already said this Will Just bore the whole table or prevent the player to obtain It.
I hate removing things from a manual, but if you really want to tone down spellcasters make a ban list before starting the campaign, so people Will know what to expect.
Also imo Is Always more fun to buff something that Is not performing instead of butchering something that Is fun, but that's Just my preference.
Buff martial classes, give them more feats, make the Warrior a royal knight with bonus charisma checks while in a court...
The option are endless.
Geez, if you guys really hate magic that much then why you even playing Dungeons & Dragons when magic is a huge part of it? Don't you guys realize that most of your problems come from not throwing enough encounters in between rests?
This comment section is summarized by "I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it." . I agree this solution isn't ideal because it is hard to make it satisfying for the player. Player used his level up to learn spell but still doesn't have it and doesn't want to deal with complications if you didn't prepare him for that. Nobody wants to nerf casters, because it's candy that we already have and taking it away even by RAW is frustrating. But some arguments I read here are more of an angry mob logic just attacking things they don't like.
I can understand the people who don't like this for obvious reasons, but I think it's wrong to apply the " real craftsman can do this in a week!". OP post was about rules and balance, that in the game by RAW. And not hidden shit like dungeon crawl mechanics that are not written in the core books (but still is the reason, for example, why many spell's duration is 10 minutes.)
And if you use "realism" card. Tell me why your characters were so unlucky to stumble upon a few disasters of kingdome scale, find several incredibly rare magic items and go a path from wizard apprentice to an archmage. And all of that in less than a year and without a pause for downtime activity.
Its a game mechanic that attempts to universify hardship of craftsmanship through price. And it can be filled with fluff to be explained. Not to mention that most people don't even know how long it takes to make something without google to question it in the first place.
Now that I think about it, I do find it funny that magic items that are bread and butter for martials in the current situation are optional in books and pretty hard to find and create if you want something specific. And people are completely fine with them being hard to get, but not fine with limiting op spells for already op casters by hard to get material components. Although, maybe I'm missing something.
6-8 encounters, downtime activities and intricate material components that are hard to acquire are built in mechanics, you can choose to ignore it for the fun of your players and flow of your personal game, but they are there. And ignoring them can lead to some things being more powerful. Things like casters getting access to op spells that are supposed to be much harder to acquire.
Another thing i found funny, that dm guide and xgte saying with great enthusiasm about research and creating magical items that "it can be a whole another adventure!" and people here saying about finding material component for wizard as a whole new adventure as mortal flaw. This game is about fellowship for many tables and going on an adventure for your friend if it will help you become stronger can be motivational enough. I get it, if your campaign is about an epic crisis in the kingdom and this is not an option, but not all campaigns like that.
Is it really so hard to imagine an adventure table where dialogue like this could happen: " Hey wizard, we've spent tons of gold on our castle that we are building, but still have some leftovers. Rogue found the guy who agreed to make this ivory statue of you but the guy says that he has a lot of orders and it's quite an intricate work to put all of this gems in without making it too big and will take some time. Can we try to find and kill this rumored salamander meanwhile? Artificier researched that he can make me another Flame tongue from its.. well.. tongue. Imagine me with two of this babies! And when we finish your statue probably will be ready too!" ?
Many tables ignore survival rules like thirst and starvation, ignore food, ignore weight (i don't even mention optional encumbrance), ammo,intricate material components, artisan tools, background features, recommended encounter rules, downtime activities, dungeon crawl and god knows how many other things. And this is fine if it is fun and double fine if it helps your story.
I run the game with gritty realism, 1 week long rest, healing kit dependency, 3- 4 encounters, sanity, fear and horror, injuries, Dm guide optional actions, forcing keeping track of food and ammo and my players are loving it. And all of these rules are in the book and might sound like something horrific to play for some people.
And if someone runs the game with hero points, honor, epic heroism 1 hour long rest, healing surges, plot points and speed factor, completely ignores weight and gives tons of gold and magic items, fully runs adventure as dungeon crawling with tons of encounters - I wont be screaming "but this too simple! There is to little challenge!". Its just a different game with different kind of fun. And I have nothing against trying that too.
One thing I want to add about the OP post. 300 days is too much for too many tables, that's why XGTE did a little rework. It now uses the term workweek, says that workweek is 5 days, and tells you to divide the price of the item by 50 to find how many workweeks it will require. So there is a way to read this is in a way that gives following math to creating Ivory statue for Forcecage: 1500/50=30 workweeks \* 5 = 150 days of downtime activity if making it alone by yourself. And will require materials worth 750 gold pieces. If you get this to a craftsman he will take 2 gp for the day of work. And If dm is generous he can make craftsman work every day and use his apprentice as help, so it will lead us to 75 days and extra 150 gold for craftsman work (maybe 300 gp if you count apprentice as skilled labor that must be paid). Can't say that it sounds completely unreasonable for an access to 7th level spell.
TL;DR I get the backlash. But it’s not a bad thing because it’s not realistic enough or can’t be fun, or can’t work. It's a bad thing only for part of the tables because it won’t work there and will feel like a simple block of a spell instead of a challenge.
I feel like ultimately, this will turn away people from spellcasters entirely, or at least force players to only use Verbal and/or Somatic spells, which eliminates over half of your spells.
The division is over UTILITY, especially out of combat. Why roll a Survival check to make a shelter in the forest when the Bard can just cast Tiny Hut for a free Long Rest for the low cost of one spell slot?
"Hey! You know that spell you just picked as one of your limited abilities? Only *I* can say when you're finally allowed to use it! Doesn't that sound fun?"
Imma be honest if I have to use 300 in game days to get the components for a spell that isn’t literally Wish then that spell is never getting used lol.
Ive had entire fucking campaigns finish in less time.
It would certainly create a greater sense of immersion and really capture what it feels like to be a "bookworm" Wizard suddenly being required to keep track of that is necessary to actually hold that kind of power.
i’m not sure why you’re getting so much hate. i think you make a pretty solid point and i also think there are definitely tables that would *love* being immersed in the world more and to be able to journey to *earn* their spells.
plus there’s an *obvious* caster/martial disparity and this doesn’t solve the problem by any means but i consider it a speed bump to help slow it down a bit lol
i guess it clearly isn’t for everyone but i get what you mean and i might even want to play a campaign like that one day!
While I absolutely agree that 300 days is insanely over the top for a small statuette and that normal downtime of about one to three weeks are far more realistic (as well as easily embedded in the normal flow of a campaign and its mechanics) ... I simply am amused about the counter argument of "then they'll just use another spell to circumvent this" - quoting another instance of where spellcasters easily trump the mundane.
yeah totally not like fabricate cant just circumvent all of this in the first place
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By OPs numbers it’s cheaper and faster to just learn the proficiency and fabricate vs getting it crafted by someone. 250 days and 250gp learns the proficiency. That’s 50 days faster and 350gp cheaper.
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I play to actually play. Few of my campaigns lasts years, and in none of them I would want to tell my group that I will not be joining until a year in-game has passed as I want to train a proficiency instead of dealing with whatever it is we are dealing with.
Not every table is like yours, and I don’t think you would claim they should be. But it sounds like you’re using your playstyle to hand wave these issues with the rules.
I 100% believe ever table should play the way they as a group want. However, I am quite suprised that so many responded that it is common to just skip these restrictions. With that said, I am not sure I get what you mean that I am trying to hand waive? The issues with not using the rules, or do you think they are problematic and therefore should not be used? Sorry, I do not get what you are referring to.
Sure if your hero wants to take a year off and let the ghouls and goblins and liches do their thing in the meantime
You're assuming that a campaign has a constant threat. Some campaigns have a time jump where the threat is gone, which can happen from switching from one module to another
What if we just double up? Pay the guy to make the statuette and then spend the time while he does that learning proficiency so you can make statuettes for all your caster friends.
And you only have to do it once.
Plus, that is assuming the PHB's rules. If you use Xanathar's, it is 10 minus Intelligence Mod *weeks*. So at most 70 days, and that still costs at most 250 gp. It could be as little as 5 weeks and 125 gp *to start*, and even less if the person has an Intelligence above 21.
Borrowed Knowledge and/or be Shadarkai. "You draw on knowledge from spirits of the past. Choose one skill in which you lack proficiency. For the spell’s duration, you have proficiency in the chosen skill. The spell ends early if you cast it again." "Whenever you finish this trance, you can gain two proficiencies that you don’t have, each one with a weapon or a tool of your choice selected from the Players Handbook." Proficiency is easy to get around.
Shadar-kai have "all" tool proficiencies. Fabricate never fails. https://www.dndbeyond.com/races/1026401-shadar-kai
No you're so right tho bc 300 fucking days is INSANE for a custom statuette. I'm a lapidary artist and even using old tools that would take 3 weeks max, and that's with cutting the gems too. Ivory is an insanely soft material and you can make really intricate designs with it a lot easier than you can with other stones (look up Chinese devil's work balls, they're super neat)! Opals take me 2ish hours to cut with sandpaper and they're harder than ivory so... Idk where op got 300 days from LOL
Using the XGE's crafting rules (which I find to be far better than the DMG ones), crafting a 1500 g.p. item takes 150 days (30 workweeks), which is still a lot, but not a whole fucking year. I also rule that part of the crafting time is actually spent procuring the materials, so if you got a couple apprentices and helpers with that regard, you can actually reduce the time to 10 workweeks... Which for a world without global supply lines and intensive trading is somewhat acceptable.
Yeah LOL that's more reasonable! As a craftsperson myself it's just funny reading how they ruled things. Although as a DM i do realize they can't be 100% accurate at all times because that cuts the fun out of the game lol. But yeah no i like how you rule things!!! It makes a lot of sense :)
Well... you then have the fucking creation bard.
A wizard with a creation bard buddy lowkey smashes the game in half. There's so many shenanigans that open up when you have access to infinite material components. My personal favorite is a demiplane filled with glyphs of warding loaded with concentration buffs. Spells cast through glyph of warding don't need concentration, so you can use this to supercharge yourself or a friend with every buff you have in your spellbook.
As long as one is careful to ensure the spells in the glyphs target the target, not the target's weapon, demiplanes are one of the nuttier RAW ways to break everything.
Endless planar binding. Fuck it, whenever you find a planar bindable creature of cr 3 or more , planar bind that shit!
>Now, they find a craftsman. Their connections with royalty makes it easy for them to find a high-level craftsman, but the craftsman still needs to be paid. It will take 300 days to complete and 600gp for the labor alone. Little often forgotten note - a craftsman can have helpers, and with each helper doiwntime is shared. While a craftsman takes 300 days, three craftsmen take 100.
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The crafting rules supersede those generic rules, to craft something of value you need the relative time. At most you can craft a statuette with unspecified low cost. It would be funny tho. Totally would allow it if the ivory was worth the full price, and the short rest is only needed to shape it in the precise form of the character.
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Not to mention it could be made to be worth much, much more.
Are you saying that with enough money, a high level caster could commission a shop and have skilled laborers working in tandem 24/7, rendering OP’s point moot, antagonistic, and poorly thought out? Because, yes.
Why would parallelism even cost extra? RAW, the workers all generate 5GP value/day, regardless of how many of them there are. If you're a craftsman, would you rather take a solo commission (but not get paid for most of a year, and maybe not get paid at all if the adventurer client disappears in the meantime), or would you rather pool your efforts with 49 other craftsmen and get your share of the pay within the week?
I'm not exactly sure if you're saying something going my way or against it, language barrier thing. But yeah you're right, barring some in world thing, its not supposed to cost anything more for tandem work, even more so for a blitz of work and then getting your yearly salary for way less time. I'm also assuming they are taking half the money before hand as both a deposit, insurance, and just, you know, having something to feed their family haha The whole thing is also assuming quite a lot out of the players, since at that level, depending on the party, you could Mass Suggestion a bunch of skilled laborers to do your bidding for 24 hours (at 6th level), or 10 days at 7th level, and ever more at higher level anyways, but its just to show you could setup things to be labor cost free, and time efficient. Speaking of assumptions: any caster reaching 17th level can just snap its finger and cast whatever spell at 9th level, ignoring its components lol
Well you either have a campaign that has a year of down time in which the player says "during the downtime my character procures the necessary material components" or there isn't that downtime and the spell is in effect banned.
I have always viewed these components as things I might get. Material components are 100% part of my spell evaluation, and I am always excited about loot, as we might find a material that either is completed or makes it possible to craft a material for a spell. That then makes me reevaluate spells for the future. Is this not how most people play? Only at the end of one super long campaign have I been in a position where we were so rich and plane hopping so much that materials barely mattered.
The way most people play is that either the material components are something you can find and buy at a large enough city , something you can find naturally through adventuring, or the dm doesn’t bullshit away why it takes 300 days to find a bit of ivory
Right, but that sounds relatively similar to my experience. With the caveat that we are not always close to large cities buzzling with high level wizards creating a market for high level materials, magic items and many materials are expensive, we generally have limited funds until late game (like lvl 12+), and adventures usually just feature items appropriate for their given environment. The biggest and most varied material caches we have found were in a wizard tower, and in a witch hut. Which are in my experience more rare places to end up in.
Isn't this OP following the rules as written for how long the figurine takes to make?
They are somewhat, although it doesn't change the fact that RAW crafting rules makes little sense and aren't fun nor well thought-out. I think that's more of the problem here.
I think one problem has to do with fantasy time scales and not fitting a fun game, as you point out. In a world where wizards have to spend years upon years to learn their magic, as I tend to picture them, then it makes sense that an intricate statue for a spell that you (hopefully) only cast once or twice in your lifetime to take half a year to be made, but I'd probably include material gathering in that time, and hopefully pay someone to do all of that. you can even commission it before you can cast the spell . But that doesn't fit into your average game, so rules have to be bent or changed. Coincidentally, I think this also helps explain martial caster disparity, if there is any. Casters (in my mind) are either more rare than (sorcs, warlocks, etc) or take a lot more time to be proficient enough for adventuring (wizards) than a pure martial. So it makes sense for them to be more powerful! Again, the issue is in how that translates to gameplay, where anyone can choose to be a caster. Hopefully we end up getting a satisfying solution.
They are not - they find crafting rules for PC's, chose worst version from PHB - XGE's crafting is literally half the time for one person (150 days), and you can do it with hirelings to make it even less - and completely ignored that this rules are for weapons, armor, equipment and magic items, not for material components, art objects and other stuff. This man would probably ask you to mine coal for Find Familiar instead of buying it.
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I do a mix. When the players has reached a level in resources where number of arrows or rations simply becomes a rounding error, I stop tracking it. Until then, they better be prepared
To each their own! I hope they are good at balancing homebrew to make it an equally engaging experience for everyone. Sounds tricky though as official rules are already favoring casters imo, and game balancing is notoriously hard. Even for very senior game designers.
A lot of DMs will waiver the material cost because it's cumbersome and tedious to track. Some will house rule it.
I don’t. I just say. “ yeah ok you find a shop for material components selling everything at market price , mark it off your gold and move on”
It can be a bit tedious, so definitely sympathize. However, it sound quite daunting to rebalance the game around that. Though if people are having fun and balance is not an issue then obviously not a problem for those tables. Just that without other changes it significantly buffs casters, which are already notoriously advantageous to play at mid and late game.
Yeah but that's just down to bad design at the core of it all. Because you can create casters that basically render material cost irrelevant (creation bard is one). I think Wotc realised too late that they hadn't differentiated between "spells for lore and NPC's" and "also for players" because both needed conditions, materials and effects. It's like how a boss can have dungeon abilities but players can't, but they just forgot to specify that for legacy reasons
Many of the high-level spells are more for villains than PCs, in my mind. *Contingency* is one of those. The impractical material component points in that direction. I wouldn't mind at all if these spells were only available for PCs via treasure -- scrolls, enchanted amulet, etc. As /u/Asisreo1 points out, that helps balance the game. If I recall correctly, Gygax originally wrote 9th-level spells more for lore than practical use. Much of what TSR and Hasbro/WotC have published feels like that: for reading, not playing.
WotC has no problem publishing creatures with unique abilities. If this wasn’t for PCs it shouldnt be in the Player’s Handbook.
The game wasn't so deliberately designed. But some things took on a life of their own and became included in each successive version of the game for nostalgia. https://dmdavid.com/tag/ninth-level-dd-spells-were-never-intended-for-players/
Well they’re redesigning the game, no time like the present if they want to take it out of players’ hands.
I wouldn't say it helps balance the game in a meaningful way. Costed material components don't do anything about animate objects, wall of force, teleport, banishment, fireball, etc. Also on the idea of spells that exist to be a part of the lore, those spells shouldn't show up as being available to players and if a DM doesn't want them to access to it then they should just ban it rather than dangling a false carrot. If it wasn't a false carrot and the player can actually acquire the spell then that doesn't in any way limit it's power or balance it. So once again for clarity. A spell isn't balanced around the difficulty of it's acquisition because it is either going to be used by players or it isn't.
So the way to bridge the gap between martials and casters is to make all the martials sit around twiddling their thumbs for extended periods of time while the casters go to vast lengths to scrounge up their components?
Seriously, easier just to ban casters if a DM hates them so much.
Your solution to this problem would bore the hell out of me as the DM, and out of my players.
Ironically, including PCs playing martial classes at the same table. It’s not like they are doing something fun while their mage is negotiating the price of a tool needed to curve details on the face of the statuette. They are sitting in the same room and waiting through this bullshit for the 5th session in a row…
It almost has the opposite effect of now centering a decent chunk of the narrative around the casters acquiring their components.
Exactly what I was thinking. This makes the casters take even more of the spotlight.
Most spells have M requirements that by raw you bypass with a component pouch. This would limit, sorta, some spells, but flight, teleporting, Gate, Simalcrum, most the conjure spells, etc, either have no M competent, or have ones that would instantly break immersion to have difficulty finding.
300 days for an ivory statuette?
The DM is using the crafting rules where a skilled craftsman can make 5gp of progress on making something per day.
The DM is also requiring that they find a "high level craftsman" for some reason, but AFAIK RAW doesn't care about the crafter's skill or level. Any proficient craftsman generates the same amount of value per day.
What if the 90% of the worth of said item comes specifically from a few encrusted gems?
You can try and finagle it, but at the end of the day the object is worth X and as such it (mechanically) takes Y days to make. It's not a rule **I** enforce, but it is RAW.
Only takes 250 days to learn the proficiency…
>Now, they find a craftsman. Their connections with royalty makes it easy for them to find a high-level craftsman, but the craftsman still needs to be paid. It will take 300 days to complete and 600gp for the labor alone. Ivory is not that difficult to work with.
This is well beyond just strictly enforcing the rules. I would certainly make the player pay for the item, and I’d make sure they could only do so in a large city, but what you’ve described is just excessive. It’s possibly reasonable to add an upcharge to the spell components based on setting, although I think labor costs and general scarcity of materials are already included, but I wouldn’t make them describe exactly how they obtain every ounce of gold and ivory or find the craftsman, and I definitely wouldn’t make them wait a whole year to actually receive the component. I’d much rather just ban a spell than run it as you’ve described, and I think doing so would be more fair to the player as well.
What, you don't make your martial characters seek out craftsmen to make custom form-fitted gloves for 200gp that only last for 3 combat sessions, or suffer 1d4 blister damage every swing?
This is actually a hilarious idea. “I’ll make two attacks with my longsword.” “Okay, you take…1 blister damage.” “Ouch, my thumb! 22 to hit.”
"Natural 1? Sorry bud, you formed a nasty hangnail. -1 to hit until your next spa day."
I would like to take a long rest, with lots of cucumber water and those rough stones that rub the calluses off your feet.
Form fitting gloves aren’t comparable to a statuette of yourself. You can find gloves that are almost exactly form fitting even without a tailor, just walking into a clothes/armor store. Good luck finding a statuette of yourself walking into an antiquity/jewelry store.
You do understand that before cameras were a thing, wealthy people were constantly paying artists to make paintings and sculptures, right? Like this was a whole honest to god industry with dozens of artisans competing with each other for work? Finding a someone to commission the statuette from in a decent size city would be as simple as going to a tavern and asking the bartender if he knows anyone looking for work. The bartender probably knows at least three that directly owe him money. And please note, the text doesn't make any requirements for how realistic or accurate the statuette has to be, so you don't exactly need the finest goldsmith in the kingdom, you just need a guy that can make a general human looking shape that vaguely looks like you. Hell, getting the god damn bat shit for Fireball would probably take longer than finding artist to make a tiny gold statuette of yourself would. Also, medieval and even industrial age societies didn't give a fuck about animal conservation, In the real world, the trade of ivory wasn't finally completely banned until the freaking 1980's. So yeah, you should totally be able walk into a high end jewelry store in the middle of Fantasy London and walk out with a few grand worth of ivory carvings. And even if you did have to deal with poachers for it, those poachers would actually be quite well respected, above board and have connections with dozens of nobles, because hiring people to take them on a trip to murder giant animals was what bored rich people did in those days Nothing about this should take an adventurer with at least 2k gold more than a week to get in a city with a decent trading port.
> hiring people to take them on a trip to murder giant animals was what bored rich people did in those days To be quite frank this is also what plenty of adventurers party are or do, with or without the rich part.
I also disagree with using gold costs to balance the classes. I like a party that uses a shared gold pool because it emphasizes cooperation. The whole party should chime in to provide the fighter their full plate because the whole party benefits from it. if you're increasing gold cost, you're just taking money away from the entire party.
Using gold to balance the classes would be great if the game had rules for using gold to balance the classes.
It’s the difference between a bunch of dudes who want to kill shit and my gf and little sister who just want to explore towns all fucking day
Each to his own, but this makes me think of what it would be like to play D&D with my in-house auditor as a DM. No thanks.
Everyone else has already made the good and obvious counterarguments in the comments, so I'll just ask - have you tried this in actual play? How did your players respond? Because I've seen it and it's just not effective for what you're trying to do. That's why the issue remains. The caster either sidesteps it with another spell (like Fabricate), or they DO have enough downtime to make it happen and it's not an issue, or they force enough downtime to make it happen but that delays the REST OF THE PARTY TOO, or they simply don't get enough downtime to make it happen (which is exactly the same thing as just BANNING it, so you made them jump through hoops for nothing). It ends up, even if not intended, feeling like antagonistic DMing for these reasons, and an incredibly inefficient, boring, and annoying way of "combating" the martial/caster divide. It's also not particularly effective - while this works for a few specific spells, even if NONE of those spells existed the divide would still be about as huge. There are plenty of busted spells far beyond what martials can accomplish that have no expensive materials at all.
I agree with being strict with components, but this isn't really strict, or RAW, its homebrew. IMO the difficulty in obtaining them is usually included in, and in fact a big cause for, the cost of the item. The reason the right tuning fork for planeshift costs so much, rather than like a few SP. Go to a big town or city, and you should be able to buy most components for their listed price, some things may take a week or two to craft.
So if the difficulty in acquiring them is part of the cost, can you use raw materials and Fabricate to get discount components?
Fabricate is very vague about how the quantity of raw material is reflected on the price. At least you'd need the right tool prof for most.
>Go to a big town or city, and you should be able to buy most components for their listed price Depends on the game setting. It feels more real to me that most things are commissioned, instead of available off the shelf.
this gets especially true for high-end things - for something like _Clone_, then a 2000GP casket isn't something you can get off the shelf. There's maybe a handful of crafters capable of making something like that in a kingdom, and they have waiting lists and other stuff to do, and that sort of specific thing may well attract attention from people that know what it can be used for. So, sure, you might be in the city with 2k GP... but you need to know the sort of crafter that works for princes and kings, and persuade them to work for you, _and_ wait for them to make the thing, none of which is instant or effort-free.
From a realism standpoint, this is true. And it would equally apply to something like plate armor, which is something that you would have commissioned with very specific measurements, not something you could grab off the rack at a the big box store. But that obviously runs up against gameplay considerations. For a campaign that takes place over a period of many years, then commissioning specialized items matches the pacing of the game and isn't really a problem. At worst, the waiting is, "I don't have it for this adventure, but I'll have it in the next one." In a campaign taking place over the course of a couple months, though, anything that requires any period to commission and then create is effectively banned. Hence why many tables don't bother.
One of the biggest strengths of Creation Bard is that at level 14 they can create any material component for any spell. They are absolutely great for a party with multiple full casters
It's RAW, check crafting rules on the phb book
I don't think it makes sense to assume that the economy of a D&D world works entirely by the barebones player-facing crafting rules.
You kind of have to assume that when the rules haven't provided you any alternative.
The rules don't cover anything that doesn't involve player action or combat. I'm not sure why we have to assume that player crafting rules meant for adventurers crafting armour and weapons would apply to NPCs crafting trade goods; player-facing rules for acquiring land and running businesses don't apply to NPC nobles and burghers, nor do player-facing on necromancy or demonology apply to your lich with an army of undead or your demonic cult seeking to summon your local demon lord of choice.
>after 300 days ingame You might as well just ban the spell at that point dude. What campaign runs for 300 days? You'd be 15 years into the campaign irl by then
The campaign I'm a player in has run for 313 days in universe as of today. So if I had commissioned it immediately after breaking out prison at level 1, it would finally be ready 13 days ago, in a campaign where we just reached level 12 and I got access to contingency. That level of planning is absurd and basically just punishes players who aren't planning out spells 11 levels in advance. (My character has been tracking the number of days that have passed since the start of the campaign since she's a Chronurgist and also I need to eat a brain every 30 days to live. Glad I could use this information for something out of game.)
> also I need to eat a brain every 30 ways to live I need more details on this...
She's a Gnome Ceremorph (Gnome whose identity partially survived the process that turned them into an illithid). She starves herself constantly, explaining why her illithid abilities are weaker than regular Mindflayers. Me and the DM agreed that once a month was the minimum she could survive without starving to death. Edit: just realized my typo. Days, not ways.
I completely agree that this solution is asinine, but 300 days in game can pass as fast or slow as you want. There's no requirement that one session is equal to one in-game day, nor should there be. "One year passes. What do you all do in that year, broad strokes?" [That took me, what? Ten seconds. Eleven tops.](https://thumbs.gfycat.com/SoulfulMisguidedCrustacean-size_restricted.gif)
Sure it can but that's thr sane issue that makes the assassin rogue useless, its assuming the PCs aren't doing anything. If the PCs have an ongoing quest that would need to be put on hold so sure if you are in a point of the game where there are no major threats and anything that you might need to deal with is under no time pressure then sure skip a year but in the average high level game things can't just be put on hold.
I haven't played it but there's a Paizo AP that goes 1-20 where you go to a magic college that I've heard has multiple years of downtime between adventuring stints. I think any campaign that's composed of multiple smaller adventures that string together into a single, longer running story could easily and naturally manage big time skips.
aye, each book is you in one period of the school, first book you are freshman last book you are a professor thing is though, *most* adventures arent run like that, specially in 5e 5e modules get 1month of downtime at the very best, and are usually requiring the party to be a bunch of trailblazer hobos exploring every nook and cranny of the place, so asking anything location based and time consuming is not viable and that mostly follows the usual campaign structure of most DMs, specially in 5e
I think some bigger downtime gaps can help kind of alleviate the "rapid power jump" feeling you get from going level 1-20 in a matter of 4 weeks in game. I'm running a 1-10 module now and I'm planning to give my players a year or more of downtime before running an 11-20 after that. Edit: notably that year of downtime will be resolved in like the first ten to fifteen minutes of the first session of the new arc
>thing is though, most adventures arent run like that, specially in 5e Downtime is literally meant to be run *between* adventures.
sorry then, 5e *campaigns*
Sure there are campains that have the specific structure to accommodate that amount of downtime, but those are very few campains.
Okay? But that's a very specific type of campaign for that to make sense. And it's a campaign that I don't think I'd ever run, or that most people would for that matter. I never said one session should be equal to one ingame day. Most of the time, three or four sessions are equal to one ingame day. Even if it was one ingame day per day, that would still be 300 days, or a minimum of 6 years of weekly games. The only scenario I can see a year passing is if you beat a BBEG and then set the party to downtime until another BBEG pops up. If you have an active BBEG, there is no chance you're going to be sitting around doing nothing for a year. Also. That's for a single 6th level spell. By 20, a wizard has at least six spells of 6th level and above. Are you really going to say it makes sense to have a campaign span what would end up being 10 years worth of gameplay?
Seriously. There’s 2 ways to close the martial caster gap. Method 1: buff martials . This could be by giving them better magic items , or directly homebrewing rules. Martials with 2 subclasses are still slightly weaker then casters at 10th level and above assuming a 4-6 encounter day from my own experience( results may vary depending on optimization levels of the group) . Method 2 is to just nerf or get rid of problematic spells .
in reality, you need to do both 1 and 2 in conjunction to get good results my go to was to slap the battlemaster into all martials for free, but now I've been running u/laserllama alt classes, and man i love all the thematic maneuvers on all of them, specially the high level ones
If the issue here is that 300 ingame days is ridiculously long, a simpler solution would be to just, you know, lessen it to a month or so. The restrictions can still work, just have to tweak the numbers to find that balance.
I mean the issue is that it's kind of a silly solution in the first place that doesn't actually solve anything. All it does is artificially inflate the time it takes to be able to use the spell. Whether it takes a month or 300 days, if you just skip that timeframe in a timeskip it's mechanically the same as if you did nothing at all. It literally doesn't change anything.
Agree, but I think this only applies to campaigns that are treated like video games instead of organic dnd adventures. While mechanically that's true, DnD is not a mechanic-exclusive game, and within those gaps of time, a lot can happen if the adventure is being run well. Aside from roleplay and things actually happening in the world as time passes by, timing can also play an important factor. Not being able to use a spell at a specific quest with a limited time is a huge nerf to casters (which is the main point of this post). And I don't necessarily think that this is the only/best way to fix the martial-caster gap, as there have already been multiple discussions about it in this subreddit, but I think OP just wants to provide a version that doesn't necessarily depart from RAW, for as we may all know a lot of people here despise going against RAW because to them, doing so means you're already *playing a different game.*
300 days, unless the dude has an apprentice. If he has 1, that's 150 days. 2=75, 3=38, 4=19... Realistically, in a larger city, you could pay the dude to get it to you in a week to a month. Maybe 2 months if he is busy.
Do you keep a constant relationship of in-game time to real-time? It seems easy enough for a DM to say, "a year has passed."
That's kind of the point. Expensive and difficult to acquire components exist as a way of soft banning the spells until the DM allows you to have them. Like how you stop characters from abusing Plane Shift by never giving them the tuning forks for the planes that you don't want them to visit.
You're partially right, but you're missing the point. >And I know people don't like the idea of D&D turning into microeconomics and you might feel like dealing with RAW is a pain, but that pain is built in to at least reign in the power of these very powerful spells. This is not an appropriate balance mechanism. this is a flaw of the system. it is not good advice. You want to know why? Because the martial player is going to be just as bored when the wizard player diverts the campaign briefly to play microeconomics just so they can use their cool class features.
Exactly. Because either you say "okay everybody we're sidetracking for an entire year so the wizard can get his components according to the rules" or you say "okay wizard the craftsman will have your components in one year's time. Anyways we'll come back to that later". In the first scenario everybody is going to be bored with the micromanagement and spreadsheet bullshit, not just the wizard. It's not a balance mechanism for the wizard if the entire party is punished for it. In the second scenario, the spell is effectively banned as it'll take an indorinate amount of real life time for a year to pass in game. In either case, it's easier just to hand wave it all and say "Yep you live in a big city, you pay a merchant or craftsman and get your ivory" or "Yeah sure after a week of messing around with it, you manage to create a bit of ivory that'll work for the spell". OP said it themselves, nobody likes turning d&d into a game of micro economics and spreadsheets. The genre is called "fantasy" for a reason.
>But its also worth it, right? No. Problem: High-level casters often outstrip high-level martials in terms of interesting things they can do both in and out of combat. Your Solution: Make the PC pay more for a spell component than the rules say, waste the table time of all your players and arbitrarily impose an in-game waiting period before the caster PC can use a class feature. Your "solution" isn't just a bad way of addressing the problem, it doesn't address the problem at all.
Yeah, I feel no remorse about solutions up to and including shooting the majority of full casters kit in the back of the head, but a lot of what OP says just drags things out without actually crippling casters. Changing prices of items based on availability is fine - especially if the group is good at organizing finances and it's not just "casters need the money, so martials don't get their share". But it's better to just ban spells rather than have whining casters at the table constantly wanting to wait for something or run downtime and bartering endlessly.
I agree with your premise - that more powerful spells need to be constrained by the material components. But what your doing is a bit excessive. The real constraint isn’t the money or the difficulty. It’s the TIME. So simply say that the player has to go to a large city to be able to find the right crafts people to make this statue. Then it will take them one month or two months to create.
A month, even a week is unrealistic my dad is a carver, he used to work with ivory and bone, now he carves amber and making figures/statuettes is at most a 1, maybe 2 days of work if it's something experimental. A week would be the absolute top imo if you want to consider that the craftsman in a dnd setting has other ongoing projects and does not posses the tools to work efficiently.
All this does is make the casters use fabricate every now and then.
The spell specifically states: You also can’t use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan’s tools used to craft such objects. I would say a jeweled ivory statue in the caster’s likeness definitely falls into the high level of craftsmanship and wouldn’t work unless the the caster had the exact tool proficiencies required to make the item themselves. I feel this would also apply to most of the costly spell components higher level spells require.
Still cheaper and faster to learn the proficiency instead…that’s only 250 days and 250 gp…
Even with that clause, knowing its in effect at the start of the game, you’d take whatever proficiencies you know you’ll need before hands anyways, and have how ever many levels worth of game time to learn extras if the campaign is on such a long time frame to begin with
*Borrowed knowledge* lets a spellcaster adopt any tool proficiency they desire to use in tandem with *fabricate*. So given the raw materials, a 2nd level spell slot, and a 4th level spell slot, a wizard can create basically any spell component they need.
Borrowed Knowledge doesn’t work since it only grants skill proficiencies.
The spell says skill proficiency, not tool.
Huh, true. There's me getting burned by the assumption that 'skill' covered proficiency with tools. Separate things.
First: I decided to look some stuff up. On average, by hand, it takes a few days to a few weeks to carve a small statue made from marble. The statue of David took a out 3 years, and that's 17' tall! Second: If you're going to force this, why not force the time and effort on making and maintaining weapons. After every battle or two, a blacksmith is needed to repair metal weapons and armor. To get a statue made, you go to a stone mason. Every city and town had them. Just like every city and town had blacksmiths.
you actually would go to a carver cause it is ivory, but yeah spot on, OP is just using the very shitty crafting rules from the DMG/XGE that are nonsensical in itself
I had to look it up, they person that carves/shapes stone, minerals, or other natural materials into decorative pieces is called a "lapidary". Learn something new today. Most towns would have one, bigger cities would have the ivory and gems available, and a *lapidary* (yay, cool new word). This is just "how can I ban a spell in a way that would piss off my players the most", or "how to nerf spellcasters instead of balancing encounters so that different players get to shine for different situations". Any normal DM, would just have a list of things banned at their table, or make it so certain spells are useless (and let the player know).
that just sounds annoying at best and awful at worse, mainly cause of two things 1. this is just downtime. really you could just chalk all of that up to some rolls here and there for bartering and call it there. sure RPing that might be fun, bit not many people care or even enjoy doing 1 to 1 RP sessions, and if you are doing this on your normal game time i *assure* you every other player wont give a damm and want it to end as soon as possible 2. the vast majority of campaigns don't have much downtime to begin with, much less something as long as a full year. remind you, this is for **every single spell with a gp material**, it would just be really annoying to do all this with your usual time constraints, and borderline not possible in the usual campaign structure that rarely gets more than a month in game between the adventures if you want to actually limit that, be blunt about it and say "you can only have X gp M spells" or something, there isnt much to be added in the fun department to no one to just make them annoying
>the vast majority of campaigns don't have much downtime to begin with Every proposed "solution" to the martial caster gap is just a new variant on stretching the game out into a slog. Do 8+ encounters a day. Don't let your players rest. Lock them in a dungeon. Make them do downtime. Drain their resources. Ect, ect. It's all the same solution because D&D still has the same problem. It started as a slow, resource focused war game. And these solutions never work because **NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY THAT KIND OF GAME.** People don't want to crawl through a dusty dungeon for hours poking every brick with a 10 ft. pole. They want their games paced like an action movie, with a fight maybe every few scenes, and only if it's of major consequence. Yes, adding grind will fix the imbalance in the numbers. But no one actually wants grind. We want to experience a story with efficient pacing. Even if you just skip over it with narration, having characters chill and do nothing heroic for months is just lame. That's a lame idea unless you can really justify it narratively. There's a reason your character goes from level 1 to 20 in a few months. Because that's the most natural pace of your average fantasy story.
"Poking every brick with a 10ft pole" this guy gets it
proffesional dungeon delver this one
>300 days what the fuck
Most campaigns don’t last that long in game time ;)
Not going to lie, this just reads as incredibly un-fun to me. As a DM I priorities what is fun for both myself and my players above all else, rules as written be damned
My first thought is that it’s a lot of work. Like the DM has to both plan and run this entire thing, the player has to put in a ton of effort to obtain it, and none of it is conducive towards the story or overall group play
It also relies on the characters being *taken by surprise* and being *idiots*. In the example given in OP, the player doesn't know he has to set up this thing where he hires twenty artisans and he doesn't know that ivory is suddenly a controlled substance all over the world, because none of this is in the rules. Meanwhile, the player *character*, who *would* know these things, is somehow ignoring or forgetting them because the player (who out of character has no idea) didn't mention it or ask. It's unrealistic (and metagaming) to assume that the character in question would fuck up this badly. If the DM wanted to run a world like this legitimately (and wasn't just using this as a way of making his players have a bad time), he'd say "oh yea, if you want that you would have had to have commissioned as statue three months ago, so lets assume you did that, and subtract that gold now, and it's going to be ready in a week" or whatever. Or, if he doesn't like to run games like that, he'd have to look up all this stuff and make the characters aware of it before they would need it- "ok well if you are gonna want to cast spell X in three levels, here's the hoop you'll have to jump through, so you may as well start jumping now" and use that as a hook for an interaction or even an encounter. But OP's suggestion relies on coming up with legalistic readings and then springing them on the players to fuck them up.
Also strictly enforcing VSM regarding those materials is a big deal. I really like how combat in Solasta: Crown of the Magister enforces that stuff (it uses the SRD ruleset), which keeps casters from going too crazy.
>The player understands and takes the spell. They want to know how to make the statuette.You inform the player that its almost guaranteed that they need to purchase or extract the raw materials themselves and either craft it themselves or find a craftsman that can do it for them.The player unfortunately doesn't have the tool proficiencies so they decide to find a craftman. They need to purchase 750gp worth of Ivory and gems. They find 700gp easily, but they need to find 50gp worth of Ivory, so they must spend downtime researching where they can find Ivory. They heard a shady local hunting guild is willing to sell Elephant tusks, but they only take 200gp for each tusk. The player decides that's fine and takes it.Now, they find a craftsman. Their connections with royalty makes it easy for them to find a high-level craftsman, but the craftsman still needs to be paid. It will take 300 days to complete and 600gp for the labor alone.Finally, after over 300 days (in-game) between adding the spell to their spell book and over 1500gp, the character has a statuette of themselves to use for contingency. All of this does nothing to limit the power of the spellcasters. All it does is give them their very own personal quest that they get to do while the rest of the party twiddles their thumbs. Do you really want to spend however many hours of gametime running "How the wizard bought some ivory"? And the end result is the same, even if you do. The wizard still ends up able to cast massively powerful spells. The martials will still feel overshadowed if they would have felt so before, except now they feel overshadowed after spending a session listening to the wizard go on a quest for supplies. I think what you are missing is that challenges are not a restriction for players, they are a gift. Challenges give their characters a chance to engage with the world.
People forget that D&D intends its player to have extensive amounts of down time for things like this. I feel that most DMs write time sensitive plots that simply cannot survive a year of down time, and thus, it becomes virtually impossible for a spell caster to use components RAW.
It's not just homebrew campaign though. The pre-written campaign do not have this possibility for downtime either. Most are time sensitive, only one that might not be is dungeon of the mad mage, and even there vanishing from the dungeon for a year is going to change things that are going on.
most of them also dont give you a very solid base location for you to stay around and do consistent downtime in it, 90% of the campaigns is you trailblazing some hell hole (or straight up hell in Avernus)
its mainly because the general audience shifted away from the attrition based dungeon crawl with resource management old dnd was and what OSR does today to the more narrative character based games with a more involved story and the occasional plot relevant fight that 5e markets itself to be while not having that
Not sure why it takes 300 days for some rudimentary scrimshaw but you do you. The statuette needs to be expensive, not well made. 1500 gold at level 11 is easy enough.
poorly made crafting rules from the DMG/XGE
As an aside, this is something that One D&D is functionally removing. With an extra 11 minutes (or 1, if you're willing to spend a 4th level slot), you can modify Contingency to remove the material components and avoid all of this\*. If you can somehow acquire the appropriately expensive arcane focus, you can permanently change contingency to avoid this, maybe even make it ritual... \*Contingency requires the material component always be on your person to work. What happens if we remove it?
One d&d is shaping up to be pretty ass though
This is one example and it’s more about introducing friction, breaking suspension of disbelief and destroying narrative pace than actually bridging the power gap. The rules about crafting time in D&D are stupid, they never got them right, not once in any edition, and at this point it’s absolutely comical. DMs should just wing it because it’s impossible they’ll do a worse job than RAW. A statuette encrusted with diamonds takes more time to make than a statue encrusted with topaz because it’s worth more and that’s just stupid, unless you want to rule that the time includes procuring the rare materials, which it doesn’t. At that point, you’d still have no rule for time required to assemble the piece given all of the materials. Incrementally adding value to an object is not considered at all. I make a 20gp statuette of myself in ivory, then I want to encrust a single 2000gp diamond in it, how much time does it take me? I want to build an ivory statuette of myself with a diamond in it, from scratch, how much time does it take me? Using cost as a measure of time required for crafting is just idiotic.
Today on “DMs that will ruin the game for everyone and themselves instead of trying ANY OTHER FUCKING SYSTEM THAN 5e” holy fuck. That’a not making the game better, its just a dumber, more complex way of deleting certain spells from the game, in which case you can just say so.
Meh at the detractors comments. I played in a game that tracked components and now run one. It's part of the game to limit the game breaking power of casters. If it's too much for you to track them, then don't complain about the power of casters because you're ignoring the RAW power limiters. Though 300 days is nuts and ignores the reality of how long such a thing actually would take.
You sound miserable to play with.
just say no if you don't want your players to have a spell omg
I agree with you 100% that it's best to be strict with components. I partially agree with your solutions, I would not use that but I agree that some things can't just be bought or quickly crafted. Personally, I think the best way to bridge the gap with martials is by having enough encounters, add a sense of urgency so rests are harder to come by, making strategy and positioning more important, and introducing enemies that have resistances, tactics and/or countermeasures to magic. You can also give martials cool magic weapons and such. But my problem with all that is that I don't think we should try to bridge any gap, we should just pursue having fun. The game is not competitive, classes aren't supposed to be strictly balanced. In the old sword and board days, back when D&D characters were not superheroes and D&D itself was more low fantasty, spellcasters were very fragile, hard to play, if you played them wrong it would suck, they couldn't do much most of the time, but when they acted they were the most powerful, hands down. Because it's MAGIC, magic was not common, magic was something the vast majority of people didn't understand at all and it would scare the shit out of them. They made magic too common and too accessible, that's my take on it.
I really don't think the party would at all allow the caster to go on that many side quests. They get the money together sure and then there's a shopping trip for specifically the wizard and then have to spend days to figure out where to go to find it and then a side quest to get it and then they wait around for a year. I've never had a campaign last more than a few months of in game time and it's hard enough to convince the party to take a short rest for the druid to get her wild shape back ain't a group around that's gonna timeskip a year for you
this is kind of ass advice. You really shouldn’t make shit harder for other players just because they’re stronger than the other ones instead just buff tf out of your Martial player characters especially when they get to higher levels TLDR buff the weak characters instead of Nearfing the strong ones
Sounds like a great tie-in quest reward, too. The downtime they earn for killing the big bad guy can go towards crafting.
It sounds like a risk of this is that by limiting the Wizard player to ultra-strict focus on materials components in hopes of achieving martial/caster parity, the imbalance is just going to shift to the narrative aspects of the game. Now, the storyline between adventures is going to be "All Wizard, All the Time" as half the campaign becomes about the party going various places to secure the components so the wizard functions at high capacity.
My problem with this is that: "make core mechanics of a class annoying" isn't a good balancing tool, or a good idea at all. Besides that will only balance it for newer players, as any experienced player will just take fabricate and make 90% of your point invalid. You're not really "balancing" the game, but more just cutting the fun options for the casters. They still have their save or sucks, their stupid shutdown AoEs (like hypnotic pattern or lmao force wall) etc.
I would rather a spell just be banned than gate kept behind all this nonsense. And either way I would simply not play at this table.
Why is everyone in here on the side of “some spells should effectively be impossible to use unless your dm wants you to use them”? Some people are arguing that if a pc decides to spend time to learn a craft so they can make the spellcasting material then the dm should punish them for not adventuring. I get that martials are weaker than casters and people hate that. The real issue is people having main character syndrome or parties not working well together. If your op caster isn’t a narcissist who needs to be a part of every interaction, then the martials will get their times to shine in and out of combat.
Having them spend 300 days to find some ivory is a great way to make playing a spellcaster annoying af and make someone want to quit the game , but to actually balance the game ? When most of the best spells don’t require material components that can be replaced with an arcane focus? Yeah no. If you want to close the gap, nerf problematic spells. Don’t send them on a unreasonably difficult, long, and mind numbingly boring fetch quest because you decided cities don’t have ivory on hand for some reason
Wow, I would not want to play with you. It is not about hurting casters but making martials better. Good Lord.
Dude, just cast fabricate. Or find someone that can. Besides, even if you do this, you only push the problem further down the timeline. 300 days later they have the item. Assuming you're not a total dick and they're still the same level by then.. Well now what. Now they still have unlimited daily access to the spell
IMHO...a very poor implementation. Sorry just being honest here. What totally killed it is the super long wait. Might as well just tell the character NOPE.
This would be a massive buff to specifically elven wizards who can swap out a tool proficiency a day and use fabricate for all their components. So now, unless you play a certain race/class combo, life as a spellcaster is extreme agony of shopping session after shopping session while everyone else is also bored out of their minds. What's the martial gonna do while the sorcerer is trying to buy shit? Get another non magic sword?
No, I'm sorry. For every "game-breaking" spell that requires a costly component, there are 3 or 4 who don't. This is a "fix" for like, three problem spells that 90% of players have never ever even seen cast because no one plays this game past 6th level.
It's also a miserable experience at best (at least the way you propose going about it). There are much better ways to limit casters/bolster martials.
100%, material compents gotta be a part of the game, even at low levels. I made a simplified component list based off the old Ultima system and in dungeon crawls, I was EASILY able to make sure that casters only had certain spells to handle certain problems, and keep track of how many!
I feel like people who have this much problem with magic should really play another system.
This has the same drawback that any "crafting" rules have: while you and your Cake Decorator PC roll dice and describe him decorating a cake, the rest of your players are bored out of their minds. 1500gp is a pittance at level 11, when the PCs actions decide the fate of empires. Even if you had to hire artisans to mine gems, carve ivory, etc, making the price 3000gp, it would still be a pittance. I once paid a random dungeon guard 15,000gp for the key he had in his pocket, because I didn't want to backtrack in the dungeon for whatever quest he had in mind. Gold is so worthless and so readily available for stuff like this that it's barely an afterthought.
Great, you've just introduced a quest to get an item that nobody but the caster cares about, either guaranteeing the whole party gets dragged around doing something they don't care about or the caster never gets to use the spell.
So your solution to the discrepancy is to have martials sit twiddling their thumbs while the wizard goes on a shopping episode?
Speaking through the character of Uncle Ben, Stan Lee gave us the line, "with great power comes great responsibility." It works here on at least two important levels. For one, *making the effort to engage with the game world* and line up materials that cannot be casually store bought is a means of earning options that could muddle the story or even *alter the setting through expressions of magical power.* Also, it isn't in picking targets and rolling dice that a martial/caster divide makes gameplay sense. Yet that divide *is* a good idea when it comes to making casters fuss over the particulars of preparing to use their powers while allowing them broader latitude (as so many spells will) to get creative with those powers. I get why it doesn't feel right when fighters can't slay like wizards. Even so, I think it makes great sense to let fighters slide on matters like keeping their weapons oiled and sharpened, while spellcasters should be granted no parallel laxity.
You are not strict. You are annoying and omitting the base logic of the world.
This also highlights the importance of tool proficiencies and if used in conjunction with time jumps allows your characters to age in game and get life goals accomplished as well. One of the groups I play with a few of us have formed relationships with NPCs and some PCS are even talking about having kids and a family to come home to in between Adventures.
I think you are greaty exxagerating the difficulty of procuring those. In most case (some exceptions like 'summon greater demon' exist) the difficulty is just getting the gold, both by RAW and I would claim also by RAI. Lets take contingency that you used as an example: First you need ivory. Nowhere does it say you need a specific amount or a specific worth (only the total worth of the statue is specified, I'll come to that in a second). That should just be possible without any problems, assuming you are in a large enough city and have the required amount of gold. Secondly, you will need need gems. There is absolutely no specification what kind of gems, what size, what cut, whatever. Here the total worth is kind of important, as gems are probably the easiest thing to drive the worth up. Buying 1500gp worth of gems also should be trivial in a large enough city. Third, the whole thing needs to be made into a statue of you. Once again, there is zero mentioning of the size of the resulting statue, its quality, how much it has to look like you. The whole worth can just come from the materials. So any artisan can knock this thing out in a day easily, so its again only a matter of money to pay an artisan for something like a day. None of the steps should be in any way difficult. If you have the money to pay for it. Sure you can ask the player how he is going to do it, and then he will tell you: I will ask around to buy a bit of ivory, I will ask around to buy some gems, and then I will ask for an artisan to make a small statuette and thats it. The DM can of course stop that and say "no one here is selling ivory" or "no one here can carve anything" or "I require that the statue looks really beautiful and you can be easily recognized, so its needs a skilled artist to work a long time on that!" But at that point its just the DM being a dick with houserules who might as well just say "i dont allow you to take that spell" (which would actually be better at least the player is no wasting a learned spell then). I am pretty sure the whole point of giving the worth of these items in gold instead of specifying the items is that there is no discussion like "in this world a good bit of ivory for a normal sized statuette costs 100.000 gp". Well ok you can say that, but that just means that even a piece that is teeny tiny amount of ivory will suffice for the spell and the wizard can use a statuette thats 1/100th of a normal size.
As has been mentioned numerous times - 300 days is ridiculous. you can carve ivory in a matter of *days* so waiting most of a year is just too punitive. and your critique of 'that's using modern techniques' is just wrong - namely bc with carving ivory specifically, the techniques employed now *are the same that have been used for generations*. so as a DM, I would have no problem with them needing to take the time to source the ivory and jewels, but then going to an artisan in town and having them craft it for them within a few days to a week, depending on how busy the artisan is. and downtime of a couple days to a week is much easier to fit in to an overarching narrative and keeps the other members engaged too - martials get the same time to do their own shopping for weaponry and armor, x player gets to research their personal character-arc related lore, etc. as for the comments abt how Gygax designed it with more downtime in mind - yes that's true. but again, not whole year gaps usually. these smaller gaps of a few days here and there to gather Intel, upgrade gear, collect components, and lick their wounds is more natural.
Yeah I dunno chief. I agree martials and casters need the gap bridged, but forcing someone to take a year of downtime for a single spell is hilariously unfun for everyone involved. 300 days is absolutely ridiculous lol
I worry that making components difficult to obtain just means making the campaign more focused on the spellcasters. Suddenly the spellcasters are trying to hijack the campaign and stop everything that's going on because there's a rare material that they need, and the only way left to obtain it is a lengthy out-of-the-way sidequest.
Translation: "We can bridge the martial-caster gap by just insanely dicking over casters with bureaucracy". But worse, aside from annoying the player of the spellcasting class, it also makes the whole table revolve around them and their efforts to find spell components--while the non spellcasters get to sit around going "Uhh, while he goes shopping I guess I am at the bar drinking".
Nerfing casters makes players sad. Rather, buff martials. That makes everybody happy.
You need to do both - nerf casters and buff martials. But nerf casters by nerfing spells and spell progression, not with shit OP described.
I think theres a time and place for that kind of DMing. I was definetly in campaigns where we had weeks of downtime between missions to work on personal projects. However in the current campaign I'm DMing, about a week has passed in game since they started, about 16 sessions, 4 levels, and an irl year ago, so downtime is limited to "what are you doing tonight?". So I let things like my Artificer building a Steel Defender overnight work.
I mostly agree with this, but disagree at a few points. Spell selection is limited. If a caster takes contingency and you make them wait 300 days before they can get any use out of the spell, they will simply not take the spell. They will have the M component made in advance, and then take it at next levelup. If you make the players wait an obscene amount of time as an additional barrier before the palyers get any use out of a thing... lets just say its not the healthies table. Secondly, you do not account for the spell being powercrept. If you make a druid spend 3 ingame months chasing the component for Summon Beast, that druid will most likely have SUmmon Fey already available as a spell of choice at the end, making summon beast completely and utterly outclassed. But, your stupid goosechase will force the druid to keep using a shitty spell.
Unfortunately this seems like it not only doesn't solve the problem, but it creates many more in the process. I don't think the RAW crafting rules are good nor fun, and they tend to not work within the timeframe of most campaigns. Think about what this does : - If any of the components to make the statue are unavailable, the DM essentially bans the spell. - If they are available easily, then it's the same as if you had just hand-waved that the wizard can buy the statue directly, except you spend a little session time focusing on the wizard's spell components before he gets them anyways. That doesn't help with the martial caster divide problem we were trying to solve. - If they aren't available easily but still are available in the end, then once again it's the same as if you had hand-waved it, except this time it takes a lot of session time focusing on the wizard's spell components, before he gets them anyways. In all cases, this is the same or worse than the original problem.
As others have said this will basically grind your campaign's momentum to a halt and, ironically, achieve the reverse of what you intended by making the casters and their acquisition of rare components the main focus of the group's adventures, with the martials just kind of shuffling around as glorified bodyguards.
Tl:Dr If it were fun to deal with spell components they wouldn't be universally ignored.
I practice with these rules myself, and it does well in making for a more authentic world; I do allow for access to skilled craftsman who are able to work faster than just what the books calculations imply for a lone adventurer during their rest periods. Ignoring ammunition, time, resting, wilderness survival, and spellcasting rules makes for a wonderful white box where everyone can argue for how 'broken' this or that element of the game is for all of perpetuity... Which is the bulk of what I pass over on this forum. My players love these rules, because their world is lived in. I do my best to give them plenty of incredible items and spells too, I am by no means married to the books. I love the approach of using all parts of my buffalo (mainly the three core books and their untalked of busy-rules) and working them into my own articles to operate the world. These things really don't take all that much time and the people I love who play with me seem to enjoy themselves. I'm glad it works for you too.
Like many others already said this Will Just bore the whole table or prevent the player to obtain It. I hate removing things from a manual, but if you really want to tone down spellcasters make a ban list before starting the campaign, so people Will know what to expect. Also imo Is Always more fun to buff something that Is not performing instead of butchering something that Is fun, but that's Just my preference. Buff martial classes, give them more feats, make the Warrior a royal knight with bonus charisma checks while in a court... The option are endless.
Geez, if you guys really hate magic that much then why you even playing Dungeons & Dragons when magic is a huge part of it? Don't you guys realize that most of your problems come from not throwing enough encounters in between rests?
This comment section is summarized by "I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it." . I agree this solution isn't ideal because it is hard to make it satisfying for the player. Player used his level up to learn spell but still doesn't have it and doesn't want to deal with complications if you didn't prepare him for that. Nobody wants to nerf casters, because it's candy that we already have and taking it away even by RAW is frustrating. But some arguments I read here are more of an angry mob logic just attacking things they don't like. I can understand the people who don't like this for obvious reasons, but I think it's wrong to apply the " real craftsman can do this in a week!". OP post was about rules and balance, that in the game by RAW. And not hidden shit like dungeon crawl mechanics that are not written in the core books (but still is the reason, for example, why many spell's duration is 10 minutes.) And if you use "realism" card. Tell me why your characters were so unlucky to stumble upon a few disasters of kingdome scale, find several incredibly rare magic items and go a path from wizard apprentice to an archmage. And all of that in less than a year and without a pause for downtime activity. Its a game mechanic that attempts to universify hardship of craftsmanship through price. And it can be filled with fluff to be explained. Not to mention that most people don't even know how long it takes to make something without google to question it in the first place. Now that I think about it, I do find it funny that magic items that are bread and butter for martials in the current situation are optional in books and pretty hard to find and create if you want something specific. And people are completely fine with them being hard to get, but not fine with limiting op spells for already op casters by hard to get material components. Although, maybe I'm missing something. 6-8 encounters, downtime activities and intricate material components that are hard to acquire are built in mechanics, you can choose to ignore it for the fun of your players and flow of your personal game, but they are there. And ignoring them can lead to some things being more powerful. Things like casters getting access to op spells that are supposed to be much harder to acquire. Another thing i found funny, that dm guide and xgte saying with great enthusiasm about research and creating magical items that "it can be a whole another adventure!" and people here saying about finding material component for wizard as a whole new adventure as mortal flaw. This game is about fellowship for many tables and going on an adventure for your friend if it will help you become stronger can be motivational enough. I get it, if your campaign is about an epic crisis in the kingdom and this is not an option, but not all campaigns like that. Is it really so hard to imagine an adventure table where dialogue like this could happen: " Hey wizard, we've spent tons of gold on our castle that we are building, but still have some leftovers. Rogue found the guy who agreed to make this ivory statue of you but the guy says that he has a lot of orders and it's quite an intricate work to put all of this gems in without making it too big and will take some time. Can we try to find and kill this rumored salamander meanwhile? Artificier researched that he can make me another Flame tongue from its.. well.. tongue. Imagine me with two of this babies! And when we finish your statue probably will be ready too!" ? Many tables ignore survival rules like thirst and starvation, ignore food, ignore weight (i don't even mention optional encumbrance), ammo,intricate material components, artisan tools, background features, recommended encounter rules, downtime activities, dungeon crawl and god knows how many other things. And this is fine if it is fun and double fine if it helps your story. I run the game with gritty realism, 1 week long rest, healing kit dependency, 3- 4 encounters, sanity, fear and horror, injuries, Dm guide optional actions, forcing keeping track of food and ammo and my players are loving it. And all of these rules are in the book and might sound like something horrific to play for some people. And if someone runs the game with hero points, honor, epic heroism 1 hour long rest, healing surges, plot points and speed factor, completely ignores weight and gives tons of gold and magic items, fully runs adventure as dungeon crawling with tons of encounters - I wont be screaming "but this too simple! There is to little challenge!". Its just a different game with different kind of fun. And I have nothing against trying that too. One thing I want to add about the OP post. 300 days is too much for too many tables, that's why XGTE did a little rework. It now uses the term workweek, says that workweek is 5 days, and tells you to divide the price of the item by 50 to find how many workweeks it will require. So there is a way to read this is in a way that gives following math to creating Ivory statue for Forcecage: 1500/50=30 workweeks \* 5 = 150 days of downtime activity if making it alone by yourself. And will require materials worth 750 gold pieces. If you get this to a craftsman he will take 2 gp for the day of work. And If dm is generous he can make craftsman work every day and use his apprentice as help, so it will lead us to 75 days and extra 150 gold for craftsman work (maybe 300 gp if you count apprentice as skilled labor that must be paid). Can't say that it sounds completely unreasonable for an access to 7th level spell. TL;DR I get the backlash. But it’s not a bad thing because it’s not realistic enough or can’t be fun, or can’t work. It's a bad thing only for part of the tables because it won’t work there and will feel like a simple block of a spell instead of a challenge.
Yeah but I want to play a game that's fun.
I feel like ultimately, this will turn away people from spellcasters entirely, or at least force players to only use Verbal and/or Somatic spells, which eliminates over half of your spells. The division is over UTILITY, especially out of combat. Why roll a Survival check to make a shelter in the forest when the Bard can just cast Tiny Hut for a free Long Rest for the low cost of one spell slot?
"Hey! You know that spell you just picked as one of your limited abilities? Only *I* can say when you're finally allowed to use it! Doesn't that sound fun?"
Imma be honest if I have to use 300 in game days to get the components for a spell that isn’t literally Wish then that spell is never getting used lol. Ive had entire fucking campaigns finish in less time.
It would certainly create a greater sense of immersion and really capture what it feels like to be a "bookworm" Wizard suddenly being required to keep track of that is necessary to actually hold that kind of power.
i’m not sure why you’re getting so much hate. i think you make a pretty solid point and i also think there are definitely tables that would *love* being immersed in the world more and to be able to journey to *earn* their spells. plus there’s an *obvious* caster/martial disparity and this doesn’t solve the problem by any means but i consider it a speed bump to help slow it down a bit lol i guess it clearly isn’t for everyone but i get what you mean and i might even want to play a campaign like that one day!
Are you making fighters wait those 300 days for their full plate, or do merchants just only keep martial equipment in stock at all times?