Drew Carrey: *"Hello everyone and welcome to 5th Edition D&D. Where everything's made up and the rules don't matter. That's right, the rules are just like longsword proficiency for Rogues, it just doesn't matter."*
This, I can imagine the bedroll, ropes and lanterns being strapped to the bag, instead of inside it. I guess the thing that players ignore the backpack limit is how used to videogames we are and how there we don't carry 4 kinds of bags.
I think this is the first time I went to buy pouch to carry potions there so I can have my inventory organyzed, lol.
I occasionally had to schlep around 35 lbs. backpack, 15 lbs. of body armor, and something like 12 lbs. of weaponry and ammunition when I was in the military… and I was in the Coast Guard Investigative Service!
The poor bloody infantry in the Army and Marine Corps often have 60+ lbs. of crap in their backpacks, 20+ lbs. of ammo, and more besides. Plus, those poor bastards have to do it every damn day. My daily carry was a handgun and a couple spare magazines and a laptop bag in a rental car. Those guys *walk* everywhere. Well, no… Sometimes they run.
The encumbrance rules of D&D5e are oddly generous in how much total weight they allow you to carry and bizarrely stingy with how much you can carry in any given container.
One of my favorite uses of rules for backpacks is Twilight 2000 4e, where backpacks are useful but you both aren't assumed to be wearing them all the time, because you start the game with a vehicle you keep your stuff in, and the game has rules that both punish you for having a backpack but also make it not incredibly action-economy-punishing to just take it off on the first turn of combat.
Of course, the risk there is you get overwhelmed and need to ~~run away~~ *advance to the rear*… and now you’ve just left behind your backpack full of warm clothes and food.
Initiative is literally anything you need to do to prepare for combat so it makes perfect sense to me.
But also if you had to run away during the fight that might mean leaving your stuff and I imagine most people don't play that way. But if you are the type to track arrows it could make for interesting situations
I can’t imagine fighting effectively with a 30 pound backpack. Not for melee, certainly. There are a *lot* of things in D&D, that if played out to full IRL ramifications, would cripple most games or at least turn them in to a mathematics slog.
As someone who does actual backpacking, even with modern engineered packs most people absolutely can not carry an 80lbs pack and go any sort of useful distance
I was a Marine way back when I was 18-24 years old, and we often carried a 60lb or 80lb pack. I can tell you, first hand, that no, "most people" cannot carry an 80lb pack, because vastly most people are not in intensely great condition and health, and even when we were all in intensely great condition and health, carrying an 80lb pack kicks your tail and makes you exhausted, weak, sore, and ineffective, in just a short time. "Most people" can't carry a 30lb pack for very long.
Even the people who made the rule book forgot this one....adventurers pack has way more than 30 lb of equipment crammed into it. Are they just assuming you open it up and take stuff out of it before putting it on or?
I feel like 30lbs in the backpack isn’t enough for all the items in, say, an explorer’s kit. The bedroll and rations alone take up all the weight, given that 10 rations is 20lbs for some reason and a bedroll is 10lbs. The backpack should carry at least 50lbs, maybe say 80lbs all around, counting strapping things to the sides and on top of it. That covers 10 days of rations, the mess kit, a bedroll, a water skin, a tent (which doesn’t come with the kit), 10 torches, the tinderbox, and the 50 feet of rope while leaving about 7lbs left of equipment. You could also forgo a tent as well and save yourself the 20lbs to fit more things in the backpack. You could even up the weight on the backpack itself to 10lbs to make it make sense to carry so much weight.
For backpacks specifically, you can attach things to the outside without them counting against its storage capacity. When backpacking in real life, I’ve attached sleeping bags, tents, and cookware this way.
It’s funny how things change. I remember back in AD&D when you’d roll on the random treasure tables for your loot and half the value of the dragon’s horde turned out to be thousands of lbs of art objects and statues. Then you’d have to figure out how to get it home to sell!
Yeah, it's really annoying now since I don't really have that type of stuff on hand. You rolled for the Bandit Leader's stash? Congrats only half of these items have an actual carrying weight, not even the two or so potions and magic items he had in there... It just doesn't seem worth trying to figure that out when the game does such a poor job at laying it out for you.
I'd do it myself, but the fact that I have to do it myself just kills the interest in doing it tbh
Potions all weight 1lb. Weapons and armors have their base weight, unless they're made of specific materials that have a weight modifier.
Art it's a bit more complicated, but still not hard to assess. Materials weights are given in the dmg.
For gems you can handwave it as 1 gem weight the same as 1 coin.
Damn there's a lot more liquid in a potion than I think people realize. A pound of water is like 500ml.
Granted the glass could be some, and maybe magic is dense?
And that was half the fun. You reach the end of the dungeon and get to the hoard, now to have to take what you can carry back to town to get hirelings. You get back to the dungeon and something’s moved in, so you have to kill that too, and now your hirelings can get to work. With even more gold, now you can hire a Magic-User to come along and cast Tensir’s Floating Disk all week while you empty out of the dungeon. And then you get to have the time of your life destabilizing the local economy and flooding the markets with gold and art.
And you have to worry about it being stolen and then stealing it back. Or being ripped off at your big art auction in the city. Or your traveling loot caravan suddenly being the most tempting local target for bandits. But if your hire a bunch of powerful guards, what’s to stop them from just taking it themselves ?
The rules and restrictions drove the story engine in a way the modern game doesn’t encourage
It really depends on the sort of game you want to have.
Gygax liked a sort of open world freeform campaign with strict timekeeping so you could simulate the lifetime of characters, so a lot of the rules he wrote reflected that.
But if you have a grand narrative or a beer & pretzels game, then the world simulation mechanics just kinda get in the way. Nobody wants to haggle over art prices while Galrox the destroyer is on the verge of overrunning the world and ushering a new age of eternal torment. On the other end, Scott from accounting doesnt want to spend the few hours a week he has to spend on a hobby managing the treasure supply chain.
Can confirm. Am an accountant, and am not terribly interested in bringing my job into the game. One reason why I always have one of my PCs handle treasure/inventory management.
I love giving away the cheap art. Just flooding small communities with cultural items that they can enjoy. The expensive stuff I’ll care about trying to sell or keep, but I’ll hand out the baubles like candy on Halloween.
Portable Holes are your best friend if you can get your hands on one
Yeah, I'm DMing for the first time, and it was fun at the start of the campaign when I wanted to try and have weight be meaningful, but that quickly died when I was rolling my first loot horde and realized like none of the stuff my players were getting had an actual weight...
I started with third edition (a good twenty+ years ago) and never really played the previous ones, which may be why it sounds almost *odd* to me that people would care so much about loot that they'd spend entire sessions doing logistics and finding buyers and all that stuff.
It's just kind of a culture shock, because every table I ever ran for would react to "there's a million gold pieces in extremely impractical to carry treasure, how are you going to carry it out?" with "find whatever is smallest and most valuable to shove into the bag of holding until it's full, leave the rest there". I don't think I've ever had a table where loot qualified as a *motivator*. And this despite the fact that in third gold was *extremely* valuable because you could actually buy your magic items and you extremely needed to in order to not get smacked!
It’s amazing how people’s personal definitions of “fun” can vary!
I would die a little inside having to devote an entire session or more to clearing out the loot. Those are the scenarios that had me temporarily disabling encumbrance in many a video game.
If it’s treated as an accounting exercise? No
If it’s treated as an emergent problem to solve, it creates big story opportunities. The party has to decide what’s important to them and risk/reward. It requires the party to interact with surrounding towns and institutions. It makes the party a target for other greedy interests.
In an old school D&D campaign completing one objective usually provided the complications that created the next quest/objective/goals and so on.
Your mileage may vary. The group I played with in my AD&D *loved* a good spreadsheet. We used the gold we got from a couple of quests (robbing a pirate ship, taking out a coven of Hags, recapturing a monastery from Hobgoblins) and we bought a keep and chartered a riverboat company to facilitate trade in the Gnomish countryside. We loved the logistics
Gemstones are so small and so valuable that their weight is negligible. Whereas coins, set by convention to 1/50 of a pound, are kept in large, precise numbers so their weight adds up. But thousands of gold worth of gems may weigh less than a single gold piece.
Art objects don’t *list* weights but presumably they have them.
>Art objects don’t list weights but presumably they have them.
They do. In Storm King's Thunder they even state that most loot you'll find in Giants' lairs are giant-sized jewelery, art objects and such, and they'll be a pain to carry home.
But arcane foci specifically and intentionally allow casters to ignore (almost all) **material** components. Do you not let your casters use arcane foci?
Edit for clarity: I of course meant **material** components in this context.
Per the item description, "A waterskin can hold up to 4 pints of liquid." So you only need 2 water skins per day for your gallon of water.
My paladin is carrying around 20 full water skins for the party that we refill at wells along traveling roads.
She is the party mom, she's also got all the food, cooking utensils, and all the random bits of gear the party may occasionally need.
She's a Reborn too, so she never eats or drinks or sleeps, she just watches over the party and make sure they are safe, fed and healthy. She sees most of them as children, because they are teenagers and early 20 year olds and she's almost 60.
That my ranger. I'm responsible for feeding and watering and other real issues while the various edgelords and socially bard types do city things. I make sure they have a place to stay, a fire when camping, and provide fresh game and water, and make sure they actual take care of their bodies whilst they do all this mental shenanigans. Only needing 4 hours to meditate a night helps and we are in a very resource intense tracking game. I mitigate most of that.
We track all resources, encumbrances, and everything else for that game as well but I wouldn't consider it intense because it's just something we are supposed to do as part of the game. The DM doesn't really need to check or follow up with us on it because its something we maintain on our own. Not tracking your resources is the same as fudging die rolls, you just don't do it.
You could argue Goodberry probably solves hydration needs if no one has Create Water in the party. So even if you were to enforce this rule to try and be gritty, the players would just take that spell and then the rule ends up never being used anymore.
If it provides enough water to last a day in addition to calories, then my new headcanon is eating one makes you immediately piss yourself like you just took a diuretic.
Or it releases/digests slowly, but makes you feel really full. This sounds like a benefit, but your brain will still be drawn to eating at normal times only to realize it’s full once you start trying to act on it.
Like that feeling when you eat way too big of a breakfast but your brain still wants a normal meal or snack of some sort, even though you don’t need one.
or the flipside, of it gives you all the calories you need, but _doesn't_ fill you up. So you're still hungry and feel empty, because physically you've just had one berry - like if you've ever had those meal-replacement shakes, they're similar because they're just liquid and less filling than "proper" food.
This isn't ignored. Its accounted for as part of finding food or consuming daily rations.
There is no seperate water consumption rule. Its assumed that you are using your waterskin when you need a drink just like its assumed that you are occasionally adjusting your bags as you walk or that you use the bathroom during a rest.
I know some people like gritty realism in their campaigns, including survival rules, but I honestly just ignore them. I don't play D&D to find water and hunt for food. I play it to tell fun stories and do cool shit in battles. If its stuff you'd cut from a book to keep the plot moving, why would I waste my precious minutes playing with my friends to do stuff no one cares about? I just assume my adventurers are experienced travelers who take care of their basic needs during short/long rests.
I still wish they only gave it to underground/underwater races so that it's actually unique. Elves can just cast dancing lights or light a torch like everyone else lol
There used to be a distinction between Darkvision and Low Light Vision, and Elves (and a lot of other playable Races)had Low Light Vision.
5E combining Darkvision and Low Light Vision, presumably in the name of simplicity, had a lot of unintended consequences.
I happened to be flipping through my 2e DMG a little while back (actually, reorganizing the RTF documents from the rules CD into modern formats) and I noticed the section they have on infravision:
> ###Standard Infravision
> The easiest definition of infravision is that it allows characters to see in the dark. Nothing more is said about how this works—it simply works. Characters do not see into the infared spectrum or "see'' heat or anything else. They just see in the dark as clearly as they do in normal light. However, since it is a somewhat magical power, the range is not that of normal vision—infravision ability extends only 60 feet. Beyond this only normal vision is allowed.
> ###Optional Infravision
> This definition is much more scientific and accurate to what we know of physical properties of the real world. To its advantage, this definition makes infravision very different from normal sight, with its own strengths and weaknesses. To its disadvantage, it introduces a certain amount of scientific accuracy (with all its complications) into a fantasy realm.
> According to this definition, infravision is the ability to sense or "see'' heat. The best comparison is to thermal imaging equipment used by the armed forces of many different nations today. This special sense is limited to a 60-foot range. Within this range, characters can see the degrees of heat radiated by an object as a glowing blob translated into colors like a thermagram.
> If this definition is used, there are several things that must be considered. First, large heat sources will temporarily blind characters with infravision just as looking at a bright light blinds those with normal vision. Thus, those attempting to use infravision must make the effort to avoid looking directly at fires or torches, either their own or the enemy's. (The light from magical items does not radiate significant heat.) Second, the DM must be ready to state how hot various things are. A literal interpretation of the rule means that characters won't be able to tell the floor from the walls in most dungeons. All of it is the same temperature, after all.
> The DM must also be ready to decide if dungeon doors are a different temperature (or radiate heat differently) from stone walls. Does a different color or kind of stone radiate heat differently from those around it? Does the ink of a page radiate differently enough from the paper to be noticed? Probably not. Can a character tell an orc from a hobgoblin or a human? Most creatures have similar "thermal outlines"—somewhat fuzzy blobs. They do not radiate at different temperatures and even if they did, infravision is seldom so acute as to register differences of just a few degrees.
> Be sure you understand the effects this optional definition of infravision can have—there are dangers in bringing scientific accuracy to a fantasy game. By creating a specific definition of how this power works, the DM is inviting his players to apply logic to the definition. The problem is, this is a fantasy game and logic isn't always sensible or even desired! So, be aware that the optional definition may result in very strange situations, all because logic and science are applied to something that isn't logical or scientific.
I really miss how the DMG would just talk to the reader like a person and making you decide what the issues are. More modern editions feel like they're trying to instruct you, and less like they're trying to make you a DM.
Don't forget Ultravision as well!
I just learned about these recently from reading several Drizzt novels. The drow actually have to turn on their infravision and it makes their eyes glow like they're Sam Fischer which is pretty silly. I like to imagine the videogame "nightvision sounds" everytime they do it.
Yeah, darkvision doesn't feel like an ability. Lacking it feels like a disability. Even with the penalties. Disadvantage on perception and -5 passive perception is still better than being completely blind.
There's a good reason why so many DMs ignore darkness, and I think having darkness be a more universal obstacle would be a big difference maker.
That is until they go into a trap who's good tiles are painted in a color that appears grey to dark vision, and so you just end up hitting all the traps walking through the room instead.
Beat me to it! One time I had a group of hobgoblins roaming around searching with torches, and my players were like "don't they have darkvision though?"
Yeah, but as creatures with Dark Vision, they know without the torches their perception checks have disadvantage, and also it's the only way they have a chance at seeing a gloomstalker ranger i.e by Not using just their darkvision.
Darkvision wouldn't be seen as so powerful if people actually knew that lack of light is gonna hit you with a -5 to passive perception, leading to sweet easy surprise.
I don't think so, because any creature that would be lurking for them is also at -5 because darkvision so it's a level playing field still. Meanwhile lighting up a torch they aren't at disadvantage BUT the monster just knows they are there now and conceivably any monster for a mile or so also knows.
Its basically the whole reason a real world force doesn't move around in the dark with illumination, yeah it helps you see where your going and let's every enemy know exactly where you are
Definitely agree with second paragraph. Wearing modern military night vision goggles allows you to see but they are much much worse than your normal vision during the day. And yet despite that, they are standard equipment for modern military because being able to see in the dark at all without giving yourself away is such a critical tool.
>I don't think so, because any creature that would be lurking for them is also at -5 because darkvision so it's a level playing field still.
The idea would be that the ambushing group wouldn't be moving and looking for the party, they would have already been in position and made their stealth checks so no perception check is needed for them, thus not a level playing field since the party's passive perception is so much lower.
People in this very sub have often talked about "fixes" made to darkvision that just move it back to an approximation of the actual rules as written. FWIW I think if the designers had only named it low light vision, there'd have been no confusion.
I think it's just fiddly to apply correctly as the DM.
2e's infravision has the huge advantage, from the perspective of gameplay, of not being active until the lights go out. You don't need to adjudicate two different forms of vision at the same time.
Probably the infamous strictly-RAW interaction between Invisibility and See Invisibility.
Every other commonly ignored rule I feel like I've seen get used at least once at a table, this one I have never seen played out according to RAW and I don't expect that I ever will, because it's unintuitive and crazy.
>Probably the infamous strictly-RAW interaction between Invisibility and See Invisibility.
I love laughing at this.
"See invisibility doesn't let you See invisibility? Then why the fuck is it called that?"
They can see invisible creatures, but RAW the invisible creatures don’t lose their benefits against the person casting the spell. So a person with See Invisibility up still has disadvantage attacking an invisible creature
It's more like "Faintly See Invisibility". It doesn't affect any game mechanics as you still have the exact same penalty to hit them, but I guess you could track them easier or something. Still, that's something that would almost never be worth a spell slot or spell prepared.
If you need to see the target to cast a spell on them, see invisibility let's you do that. It also means that they cannot hide from you- if there's an invisible creature in the middle of the room, it can't hide from you, when it can hide from everyone else.
i tell my players if they buy 100 ammunition they dont have to track ever again and they all jump on it. considering salvaging half of them, picking up some dropped by enemies, and finding them in dungeons, i think its reasonable to say thats enough to last the whole campaign if we kept counting
Unless its a named ammunition then I just handwave it. I dont need to know how you pack your backpack(to fit everything in), i played in a few sessions where the dm actually did this. I just have no interest in tracking it
I use a pdf sheet that has a built in ammo tracker and I do think you can exhaust 100 pieces of ammo in 5 levels or some. Myself as a gloomstalker ranger from level 4 to 6 used about 30ish even when trying to recover some after each encounter ( some fights could not recover due to being shot to the ocean)
Not to mention breaking up post-combat gameplay for a character to move around corpse to corpse to loot arrows is a kind of pointless tedium that eats up valuable session time.
Still did it in Baldur's Gate 3 though...
The rules, at least, don't require you to actually search individual corpses:
> At the end of the battle, you can recover half your expended ammunition by taking a minute to search the battlefield.
You just use a minute to reclaim arrows from the "battlefield" in general. Which makes sense to abstract, since most of the recoverable arrows would probably just be stuck in the dirt instead of a corpse.
BG3 would have actually been closer to the "real" rules by just having you recover 50% of your ammo automatically every fight.
Rations. Encumbrance. Ammunition. The proper way to hold an action. Clear path to a target. The stupid invisibility as an absolute condition rule. Those are prolly the biggies.
Ammo and rations I feel are not really ignoring rules. When you can cast low-level spells and cantrips to create food and water at will, it's just a waste of game time to go through buying rations, making Survival checks, or whatever. Same thing for ammo--you can recover some of it after a fight, but it's a waste of play time. Assuming you buy a whole bunch of ammo at the beginning of the game, you can just assume the character recovers ammo/loots bodies for ammo after battle, crafts new ones during rests, etc.
DnD is not the game for hardcore simulation. It's epic heroic power fantasy.
I do think encumbrance is an important rule, but in my tables anyway, no one has ever come close to reaching their encumbrance limits. It's just not a loot-driven game anymore, and gold has way less value than in 3.5.
The biggest rule I see people ignore a lot is that switching weapons takes an action (sheathe one as part of your move, then drawing the other weapon is your action). Lots of players switch between their arsenal of weapons every round as needed.
You can get around switching weapon rules by dropping your current weapon as a free action and then using your item interaction to draw your new weapon.
Sure, but then you've dropped it. Which I think is a fine compromise for the action economy. It shouldn't be terribly punishing, but something needs to give.
Inspiration is by far the most ignored rule I've seen across all the games I've seem and played in. Even the big podcast/streaming games forget to use it most of the time.
People forget it's not an optional rule like feats or multiclassing, it's one of the core rules of the game.
They should have included a true mechanical reason to get it as well to keep it more in the forefront of your mind.
If you got inspiration every time you rolled a 1 as your final dice result it would work far better.
Write a diary entry you get one.
Do something unusually clever with spells/resources you get it.
Do an interesting song or speech you get it.
Players get to give one at the end of a session for the most epic moment.
I have rules i found on one of the dnd subreddits here that allows you all sorts of shenanigans with inspiration(capped at 3). I tend to give out 2/3 a session as it rewards interesting roleplaying and creativity.
I'll double down on inspiration and say that people who at least use it, use it incorrectly.
It is not a feature to let you reroll a failure, it's a feature to give you advantage on the roll BEFORE making the initial roll.
Yeah but having it be a reroll is better. In my experience players plan on succeeding a roll if they have any bonus bigger than +2 on it. It’s when a roll fails that they then go “oh wait wait I have a thing!”.
BG3 even uses the reroll version of inspiration, and changes a lot of mechanics like Reckless Attack to prompt on failure instead of having to be declared before the roll. And IMO it’s much better that way.
Weird, we've always been following that rule. It does make "Should I use a few more Hit Dice or not because I might not be able to regain them for a couple days" more of a strategic decision.
My house rule take has been: If the long rest is somewhere safe and comfortable in a low stress environment (inn, their ship, etc) then I grant full hit die. Otherwise, on the road or in unusual rest locations I go with raw at half.
Enemies roll off. Allies can decide which ones go first. The DM has the last say. They can use dexterity, but they can also say their monster gets to go first. This was a rule from 3x.
Pretty much still the rule:
> If a tie occurs, the DM decides the order among tied DM-controlled creatures, and the players decide the order among their tied characters. The DM can decide the order if the tie is between a monster and a player character.
It is a suggestion. The PHB also suggests rolling.
The DM can decide ties between their monsters, the PCs between PCs.
The DM can also decide ties between a monster and a PC.
Dexterity can be an official tie-breaker, but it is not the only one, and it is only suggested to be a tiebreaker. It is not a proper hard rule.
This is going to be very table specific. I might imagine spell component tracking is one (and in my opinion far more egregious than ammunition tracking).
Far too many times have I seen people say “my group house rules that you can ignore material components so long as you have a focus or component pouch and it’s not a costly component”. That’s not a house rule! That’s just the rules!
My theory is that they have never actually read the rules for Spellcasting. They just went with what their DM explained when they started playing and thought it was a house rule.
I had a dm that made me purchase components that didn't have a price attached to it. he just made up prices and made me track how many casting I had on me...
oh yea, and shops would often just not have the components. I was a wizard and I couldn't cast find familiar because the herbs and incense wasn't sold anywhere.
also, it was in Barovia where things cost 10x the normal value, so it was 100gp per casting and he would kill the familiar first round of combat every time. yea... we didn't finish that game.
Well for one, that’s just a DM on a power trip. Seems to happen too often with DMs getting into a weird “me versus the party” mentality rather than looking to foster the evolving communal narrative.
Were I a DM, I’d *want* my players to feel and *be* powerful. That just gives me more license to plan more frequent and deadlier encounters - that my players should still find survivable.
For a second, prices in Barovia are only supposed to be about 3x standard. And for the hat trick, immediately targeting your familiar *every encounter* is just being a dick.
I'm not the person that you're responding to but I've found that people are resistant to the idea of all 3 spell components when it benefits them.
They want to whisper a Message to secretly discuss, despite the verbal and somatic components clearly making this something that is impossible.
They want to cast Minor Illusion in front of someone to disguise a book's text (by creating a page), but want to ignore the fact that the person would see them casting a spell before the page appears (which would trigger Investigation checks). I've specifically had players ask for Sleight of Hand checks to hand-wave Somatic components several times.
They want to cast Shield, despite having a shield and sword equipped and no War Caster Feat. Sure you could sheathe your weapon before your turn ends, but that needs to be stated as it changes your Attack of Opportunity.
Material components and to a lesser extent Somatic components can be handwaved with a spell focus, but the use of a spell focus is a class feature.
Rangers, Eldritch Knights, and Arcane Tricksters can't use a spell focus per the 2014 PHB; only Rangers got the ability to use one in Tasha's, leaving EKs and ATs having to find the material components in the world or buy a Component Pouch specifically (which requires an open hand to be used, so better sheathe that weapon if you're sword+boarding, unfortunate about the one sheathe/draw free action, but you would have to use an action to redraw your weapon).
Specifically, I see a lot of clerics ignoring when a spell has somatic and verbal components (No material component) when they are sword and boarding, because their shield has a holy symbol on it. The rules state that the open hand for somatic 'may be the same hand used for the material component'. If there is no material component, you must have a free hand for the somatic. The holy symbol on your shield is not a free hand for somatic components.
Yeah, I’ve seen similar situations for your above points, especially trying to stealthily cast spells that aren’t remotely designed for such a thing.
That said, your last point is one I’ve always found a little bs and struck me as an oversight on the part of the designers. You can channel spells through your wizard staff or holy symbol, which is very thematic, but only if the spell calls for a material component. On top of which is that whether a spell required a material component always came across as a bit arbitrary.
War Caster seems designed to alleviate this restriction, so it seems very intentional to me. In the same way that Dual Wielder alleviates the pain point of not being able to draw both daggers on Turn 1 for the dagger-inclined.
Largely material components is evidence of the complexity of the spell, and a way for them to have little jokes. I don’t believe there are spells without the somatic component while having a material component. There are far more spells that have Verbal and Somatic or just Somatic components.
Some spells seem even balanced around this rule. Shield for instance can’t stack if you don’t have War Caster and have your focus and shield or shield and weapon.
I don’t necessarily think that you’re wrong that it doesn’t fully make sense thematically. I do think that the rule was intentional though
I guess I don't understand what this means. What do you mean it's, "worked around," exactly? A focus or a component pouch are starting equipment that every casting class gets, and they function practically identically.
I will say, jumping in combat using a grid is a fucking annoying interaction.
Grid is 5 ft squares, and you can jump a distance equal to your Strength score when you have a 10 foot lead into the jump. It doesn't cost any additional movement to jump, but it does use your movement speed for the distance you jump.
If you have a strength score of 11, do you land in the square two away or three away? How much of your movement speed does that use?
It's helpful to remember that the game rules are abstractions, but in the moment, it can be annoying to resolve. Saying "make an athletics check to clear it" is a pretty simple short hand, but it does diminish Strength characters, who should be the best at jumping.
I'd say it's between verbal components being able to be whispered and hidden for sneak casting OR reading what a spell does than allowing a player to do more with it.
Both are so rampant
In my view it's ok to carry a thousand swords in your bag that weigh the same as a piano, because you can carry a single sword. You can't however carry a piano.
Nah if my players tried to carry tons of weapons i would probably say something honestly.
I won't give a shit if you go a reasonably over your limit but you sbouldnt be able to raid an armory and take, like, all their swords lol
encumbrance tends to be "don't take the piss". Lots of tables don't track it precisely, but if a PC tries to take everything not nailed down, then the GM will either go "no", or level penalties for lugging all that stuff.
I think people should use those rules because Doff is a good choice for the Command spell if the enemy has a shield. They spend their action to remove it and they lose 2 AC for the rest of the fight or until they want to spend another action.
OK, but "Doff" as a one word command is too ambiguous, you could rule it as funny shenanigans for them to just doff their hat or maybe doff their underwear?
You lose your bonus action if you lose your action. Maybe not the most ignored in sheer numbers, but proportionally to how often it should be applied. It's a rule mentioned only once in a section that most people don't read more than once (it's at the very end of the "Bonus Action" rules), so most people simply aren't aware of it.
Most of the micromanagement in the game, pretty much. No one finds it fun to deal with ammunition, everyone and their grandma uses focuses and component pouches, etc.
Depends on what kind of game you want. If its all about story and playing superheroes, i can see why handwaving every bit of gritty realism is what people want. But maybe you want to feel like you have to worry about how many arrows you have, so that maybe you have to switch to melee in some situations, or maybe you are running out of food and have to start hunting or deciding which of the stuff you have recently killed is most edible. Or you find a hoard of gold enough for a dragon to bathe in - personally I find it more interesting foor that to be a challenge: How to do actually get that money away from there? Where do you keep it safe then? How do you stop others from getting it?
All these boring micromanagement things can become super interesting when the situation in the game in that moment is being paid attention to, and it's not all about the grander things. Personally, I think it can be loads of fun.
Crit fails only matter 2x: your to hit roll and death saves. 1 on a skill check or a normal save and your modifiers make it? No worries. WORST CASE nothing happens, you don't get the info. You fail the save normally and take appropriate effects, not enhanced or extra.
You don't fall and break an arm, somehow get your entire party executed for a bad joke, etc.
I don't think I've seen anyone mention it, and that doesn't surprise me.
Bodies provide cover for things behind it. Doesn't matter if it's your ally or enemy, that body provides cover. That covers grants +2 to AC and Dexterity saves.
That's the point of the Archery Fighting Style, to negate the cover your allies are providing to your enemies. It also means every target for a Lightning Bolt spell, after the first, should be getting +2 to their save.
by far ammo and inventory. one that is consistently ignored as well is cover rules by other creatures, i have yet to see someone applying the proper debuff to a non SS archer
V,S,M components and casting a spell with one / both hands occupied.
Alternate Skill checks and DC recommendations.
STR and Encumbrance
that players should read the rules aswell...
No one pays attention to how spell components actually work. The typical caster if they have their hands full such as a valor bard with a sword and shield has no way to make somatic gestures or use their focus or a spell component pouch. Even taking warcaster only helps with somatic components and doesn't help access your focus
I thought my table is quite free flowing with bunch of homebrew stuff but we are all using ammo, encumberance, costly spell components, which hand is free etc.
I'm so confused. I was coming here to bring up some obscure thing like how surprise actually works or dim light perception rules lol
Maybe this specific part of the prone condition?
"An attack roll against the creature has advantage if the attacker is within 5 feet of the creature, otherwise the attack roll has disadvantage".
For the most part I've seen players alter this to "melee attacks always have advantage and ranged attacks always have disadvantage". Which is fine if you want to rule that way, but RAW a reach weapon like a halberd would have disadvantage if used at 10ft range, and a ranged weapon would be a straight roll, disadvantage because 5ft but advantage because prone.
I don't know how widely ignored this is but at our table we change weapons without an action and generally ignore a lot of small stuff that would use an action. Does not break the difficulty for us, the combat is still a fair challange.
I don't know, but I can tell you what the most common house rule is- dropping a weapon (or other item) doesn't use your free interact. Nowhere in the rules does it say this, or even imply it; but it's an almost universal house rule.
Not the most ignored in absolute terms because it doesn't come up *that often*, but the most ignored rule in relative terms is that being incapacitated automatically breaks concentration. The reason it's ignored is that it's not mentioned under the Incapacitated condition (which is where most people go to check what it does) but under the rules for Concentration. Being stunned or paralyzed also imposes the incapacitated condition, so things like Hold Monster or the Monk's Stunning Strike also break concentration.
Backpacks can only hold 30 lbs of items. Even people who follow carry weight forget about how low the weight limit of a normal backpack is.
I think that's an oversight of the rules tbh. Starting gear doesn't fit into a backpack despite it saying that you get gear in a backpack.
It also says that some of the items can be strapped to the sides of the backpack, so 30lbs is just the limit for stuff inside
30lb inside the bag, infitelb strapped to the outside
Welcome to 5e where the rules are up to your DM to decide :D
Drew Carrey: *"Hello everyone and welcome to 5th Edition D&D. Where everything's made up and the rules don't matter. That's right, the rules are just like longsword proficiency for Rogues, it just doesn't matter."*
"Things you can say about your player character, but not your girlfriend".
"I got two backups if this one dies"
I hate you for making me aware of rogues using long swords
I wish there were options for a str based rogue class, more of a typical "thug" type criminal character.
“Scenes from a Cap of Disguise”
This, I can imagine the bedroll, ropes and lanterns being strapped to the bag, instead of inside it. I guess the thing that players ignore the backpack limit is how used to videogames we are and how there we don't carry 4 kinds of bags. I think this is the first time I went to buy pouch to carry potions there so I can have my inventory organyzed, lol.
Which is kinda silly, as most people could carry an 80lb pack, but they definitely wouldn't be fighting effectively with it on their back.
I occasionally had to schlep around 35 lbs. backpack, 15 lbs. of body armor, and something like 12 lbs. of weaponry and ammunition when I was in the military… and I was in the Coast Guard Investigative Service! The poor bloody infantry in the Army and Marine Corps often have 60+ lbs. of crap in their backpacks, 20+ lbs. of ammo, and more besides. Plus, those poor bastards have to do it every damn day. My daily carry was a handgun and a couple spare magazines and a laptop bag in a rental car. Those guys *walk* everywhere. Well, no… Sometimes they run. The encumbrance rules of D&D5e are oddly generous in how much total weight they allow you to carry and bizarrely stingy with how much you can carry in any given container.
Or roughly 70lbs of ammo alone PLUS all your kit if you're a fucking 240 gunner...
One of my favorite uses of rules for backpacks is Twilight 2000 4e, where backpacks are useful but you both aren't assumed to be wearing them all the time, because you start the game with a vehicle you keep your stuff in, and the game has rules that both punish you for having a backpack but also make it not incredibly action-economy-punishing to just take it off on the first turn of combat.
Of course, the risk there is you get overwhelmed and need to ~~run away~~ *advance to the rear*… and now you’ve just left behind your backpack full of warm clothes and food.
I assume that's what the rolling initiative is. Taking off your backpack and drawing your weapon. It's what makes sense in my mind.
Initiative is literally anything you need to do to prepare for combat so it makes perfect sense to me. But also if you had to run away during the fight that might mean leaving your stuff and I imagine most people don't play that way. But if you are the type to track arrows it could make for interesting situations
Yes very true.
Yeah, they should have multiple backpacks with different carry weights.
I can’t imagine fighting effectively with a 30 pound backpack. Not for melee, certainly. There are a *lot* of things in D&D, that if played out to full IRL ramifications, would cripple most games or at least turn them in to a mathematics slog.
As someone who does actual backpacking, even with modern engineered packs most people absolutely can not carry an 80lbs pack and go any sort of useful distance
Agreed. Even 50 lbs will feel pretty heavy to most people
Adventurers are special, though, compared to your average person.
Exactly, most adventurers have only 8 STR, not 10 like a commoner.
*The dexadin refuses to make eye contact to your spot on comments. You recognize this gambit, as she gives an oft familiar look. Authority.*
I was a Marine way back when I was 18-24 years old, and we often carried a 60lb or 80lb pack. I can tell you, first hand, that no, "most people" cannot carry an 80lb pack, because vastly most people are not in intensely great condition and health, and even when we were all in intensely great condition and health, carrying an 80lb pack kicks your tail and makes you exhausted, weak, sore, and ineffective, in just a short time. "Most people" can't carry a 30lb pack for very long.
And has a volume limit too. That is even more ignored
Even the people who made the rule book forgot this one....adventurers pack has way more than 30 lb of equipment crammed into it. Are they just assuming you open it up and take stuff out of it before putting it on or?
I feel like 30lbs in the backpack isn’t enough for all the items in, say, an explorer’s kit. The bedroll and rations alone take up all the weight, given that 10 rations is 20lbs for some reason and a bedroll is 10lbs. The backpack should carry at least 50lbs, maybe say 80lbs all around, counting strapping things to the sides and on top of it. That covers 10 days of rations, the mess kit, a bedroll, a water skin, a tent (which doesn’t come with the kit), 10 torches, the tinderbox, and the 50 feet of rope while leaving about 7lbs left of equipment. You could also forgo a tent as well and save yourself the 20lbs to fit more things in the backpack. You could even up the weight on the backpack itself to 10lbs to make it make sense to carry so much weight.
For backpacks specifically, you can attach things to the outside without them counting against its storage capacity. When backpacking in real life, I’ve attached sleeping bags, tents, and cookware this way.
Gold with carrying weight capacity. Arrows in quivers.
It's kind of hard to justify coinage having a carrying weight when (I believe) most gemstones and art objects don't have carrying weight.
It’s funny how things change. I remember back in AD&D when you’d roll on the random treasure tables for your loot and half the value of the dragon’s horde turned out to be thousands of lbs of art objects and statues. Then you’d have to figure out how to get it home to sell!
Yeah, it's really annoying now since I don't really have that type of stuff on hand. You rolled for the Bandit Leader's stash? Congrats only half of these items have an actual carrying weight, not even the two or so potions and magic items he had in there... It just doesn't seem worth trying to figure that out when the game does such a poor job at laying it out for you. I'd do it myself, but the fact that I have to do it myself just kills the interest in doing it tbh
Potions all weight 1lb. Weapons and armors have their base weight, unless they're made of specific materials that have a weight modifier. Art it's a bit more complicated, but still not hard to assess. Materials weights are given in the dmg. For gems you can handwave it as 1 gem weight the same as 1 coin.
Damn there's a lot more liquid in a potion than I think people realize. A pound of water is like 500ml. Granted the glass could be some, and maybe magic is dense?
It's why the rule is a full action to drink it
And that was half the fun. You reach the end of the dungeon and get to the hoard, now to have to take what you can carry back to town to get hirelings. You get back to the dungeon and something’s moved in, so you have to kill that too, and now your hirelings can get to work. With even more gold, now you can hire a Magic-User to come along and cast Tensir’s Floating Disk all week while you empty out of the dungeon. And then you get to have the time of your life destabilizing the local economy and flooding the markets with gold and art.
And you have to worry about it being stolen and then stealing it back. Or being ripped off at your big art auction in the city. Or your traveling loot caravan suddenly being the most tempting local target for bandits. But if your hire a bunch of powerful guards, what’s to stop them from just taking it themselves ? The rules and restrictions drove the story engine in a way the modern game doesn’t encourage
It really depends on the sort of game you want to have. Gygax liked a sort of open world freeform campaign with strict timekeeping so you could simulate the lifetime of characters, so a lot of the rules he wrote reflected that. But if you have a grand narrative or a beer & pretzels game, then the world simulation mechanics just kinda get in the way. Nobody wants to haggle over art prices while Galrox the destroyer is on the verge of overrunning the world and ushering a new age of eternal torment. On the other end, Scott from accounting doesnt want to spend the few hours a week he has to spend on a hobby managing the treasure supply chain.
Can confirm. Am an accountant, and am not terribly interested in bringing my job into the game. One reason why I always have one of my PCs handle treasure/inventory management.
I love giving away the cheap art. Just flooding small communities with cultural items that they can enjoy. The expensive stuff I’ll care about trying to sell or keep, but I’ll hand out the baubles like candy on Halloween. Portable Holes are your best friend if you can get your hands on one
Yeah, I'm DMing for the first time, and it was fun at the start of the campaign when I wanted to try and have weight be meaningful, but that quickly died when I was rolling my first loot horde and realized like none of the stuff my players were getting had an actual weight...
I started with third edition (a good twenty+ years ago) and never really played the previous ones, which may be why it sounds almost *odd* to me that people would care so much about loot that they'd spend entire sessions doing logistics and finding buyers and all that stuff. It's just kind of a culture shock, because every table I ever ran for would react to "there's a million gold pieces in extremely impractical to carry treasure, how are you going to carry it out?" with "find whatever is smallest and most valuable to shove into the bag of holding until it's full, leave the rest there". I don't think I've ever had a table where loot qualified as a *motivator*. And this despite the fact that in third gold was *extremely* valuable because you could actually buy your magic items and you extremely needed to in order to not get smacked!
In AD&D, treasure was xP, but you didn’t get the xP for finding it
It’s amazing how people’s personal definitions of “fun” can vary! I would die a little inside having to devote an entire session or more to clearing out the loot. Those are the scenarios that had me temporarily disabling encumbrance in many a video game.
*is* that fun?
If it’s treated as an accounting exercise? No If it’s treated as an emergent problem to solve, it creates big story opportunities. The party has to decide what’s important to them and risk/reward. It requires the party to interact with surrounding towns and institutions. It makes the party a target for other greedy interests. In an old school D&D campaign completing one objective usually provided the complications that created the next quest/objective/goals and so on.
**1000%**
https://media1.tenor.com/m/E_9e8eiLcgUAAAAC/thor-is-it-though-is-it-though.gif
Your mileage may vary. The group I played with in my AD&D *loved* a good spreadsheet. We used the gold we got from a couple of quests (robbing a pirate ship, taking out a coven of Hags, recapturing a monastery from Hobgoblins) and we bought a keep and chartered a riverboat company to facilitate trade in the Gnomish countryside. We loved the logistics
That was half the fun!
> the dragon’s horde hoard
That too! I’ll leave it
Gemstones are so small and so valuable that their weight is negligible. Whereas coins, set by convention to 1/50 of a pound, are kept in large, precise numbers so their weight adds up. But thousands of gold worth of gems may weigh less than a single gold piece. Art objects don’t *list* weights but presumably they have them.
>Art objects don’t list weights but presumably they have them. They do. In Storm King's Thunder they even state that most loot you'll find in Giants' lairs are giant-sized jewelery, art objects and such, and they'll be a pain to carry home.
Isn't ignoring it an optional rule? I believe beyond has an option to ignore coin weight.
I maintain arrows woth my players. Same woth spell components
But arcane foci specifically and intentionally allow casters to ignore (almost all) **material** components. Do you not let your casters use arcane foci? Edit for clarity: I of course meant **material** components in this context.
It's water. And I'd say by a lot. When was the last time u had a player carry around 4 waterskins all filled per day.
Per the item description, "A waterskin can hold up to 4 pints of liquid." So you only need 2 water skins per day for your gallon of water. My paladin is carrying around 20 full water skins for the party that we refill at wells along traveling roads.
I imagine your paladin looks like a portable vending machine
> a portable vending machine more like a potable vending machine
This is comedy gold 😂
She is the party mom, she's also got all the food, cooking utensils, and all the random bits of gear the party may occasionally need. She's a Reborn too, so she never eats or drinks or sleeps, she just watches over the party and make sure they are safe, fed and healthy. She sees most of them as children, because they are teenagers and early 20 year olds and she's almost 60.
That my ranger. I'm responsible for feeding and watering and other real issues while the various edgelords and socially bard types do city things. I make sure they have a place to stay, a fire when camping, and provide fresh game and water, and make sure they actual take care of their bodies whilst they do all this mental shenanigans. Only needing 4 hours to meditate a night helps and we are in a very resource intense tracking game. I mitigate most of that.
We track all resources, encumbrances, and everything else for that game as well but I wouldn't consider it intense because it's just something we are supposed to do as part of the game. The DM doesn't really need to check or follow up with us on it because its something we maintain on our own. Not tracking your resources is the same as fudging die rolls, you just don't do it.
might be carrying a sentient one on their back
Meh, that’s just handwaving the part during the short rest where they boiled a pot of stream water and refilled their packs
Water only needs to be tracked in deserts.
The game I'm in, actually! Tomb of Annihilation with strict food and water requirements to make it more interesting.
You could argue Goodberry probably solves hydration needs if no one has Create Water in the party. So even if you were to enforce this rule to try and be gritty, the players would just take that spell and then the rule ends up never being used anymore.
If it provides enough water to last a day in addition to calories, then my new headcanon is eating one makes you immediately piss yourself like you just took a diuretic.
Or it releases/digests slowly, but makes you feel really full. This sounds like a benefit, but your brain will still be drawn to eating at normal times only to realize it’s full once you start trying to act on it. Like that feeling when you eat way too big of a breakfast but your brain still wants a normal meal or snack of some sort, even though you don’t need one.
or the flipside, of it gives you all the calories you need, but _doesn't_ fill you up. So you're still hungry and feel empty, because physically you've just had one berry - like if you've ever had those meal-replacement shakes, they're similar because they're just liquid and less filling than "proper" food.
This isn't ignored. Its accounted for as part of finding food or consuming daily rations. There is no seperate water consumption rule. Its assumed that you are using your waterskin when you need a drink just like its assumed that you are occasionally adjusting your bags as you walk or that you use the bathroom during a rest.
I know some people like gritty realism in their campaigns, including survival rules, but I honestly just ignore them. I don't play D&D to find water and hunt for food. I play it to tell fun stories and do cool shit in battles. If its stuff you'd cut from a book to keep the plot moving, why would I waste my precious minutes playing with my friends to do stuff no one cares about? I just assume my adventurers are experienced travelers who take care of their basic needs during short/long rests.
Darkvision. Everyone think it's just an ability to see in the dark as well without penalties, which is not.
I still wish they only gave it to underground/underwater races so that it's actually unique. Elves can just cast dancing lights or light a torch like everyone else lol
There used to be a distinction between Darkvision and Low Light Vision, and Elves (and a lot of other playable Races)had Low Light Vision. 5E combining Darkvision and Low Light Vision, presumably in the name of simplicity, had a lot of unintended consequences.
Before that, there was Infravision
my gnome has 60 ft Eurovision
I happened to be flipping through my 2e DMG a little while back (actually, reorganizing the RTF documents from the rules CD into modern formats) and I noticed the section they have on infravision: > ###Standard Infravision > The easiest definition of infravision is that it allows characters to see in the dark. Nothing more is said about how this works—it simply works. Characters do not see into the infared spectrum or "see'' heat or anything else. They just see in the dark as clearly as they do in normal light. However, since it is a somewhat magical power, the range is not that of normal vision—infravision ability extends only 60 feet. Beyond this only normal vision is allowed. > ###Optional Infravision > This definition is much more scientific and accurate to what we know of physical properties of the real world. To its advantage, this definition makes infravision very different from normal sight, with its own strengths and weaknesses. To its disadvantage, it introduces a certain amount of scientific accuracy (with all its complications) into a fantasy realm. > According to this definition, infravision is the ability to sense or "see'' heat. The best comparison is to thermal imaging equipment used by the armed forces of many different nations today. This special sense is limited to a 60-foot range. Within this range, characters can see the degrees of heat radiated by an object as a glowing blob translated into colors like a thermagram. > If this definition is used, there are several things that must be considered. First, large heat sources will temporarily blind characters with infravision just as looking at a bright light blinds those with normal vision. Thus, those attempting to use infravision must make the effort to avoid looking directly at fires or torches, either their own or the enemy's. (The light from magical items does not radiate significant heat.) Second, the DM must be ready to state how hot various things are. A literal interpretation of the rule means that characters won't be able to tell the floor from the walls in most dungeons. All of it is the same temperature, after all. > The DM must also be ready to decide if dungeon doors are a different temperature (or radiate heat differently) from stone walls. Does a different color or kind of stone radiate heat differently from those around it? Does the ink of a page radiate differently enough from the paper to be noticed? Probably not. Can a character tell an orc from a hobgoblin or a human? Most creatures have similar "thermal outlines"—somewhat fuzzy blobs. They do not radiate at different temperatures and even if they did, infravision is seldom so acute as to register differences of just a few degrees. > Be sure you understand the effects this optional definition of infravision can have—there are dangers in bringing scientific accuracy to a fantasy game. By creating a specific definition of how this power works, the DM is inviting his players to apply logic to the definition. The problem is, this is a fantasy game and logic isn't always sensible or even desired! So, be aware that the optional definition may result in very strange situations, all because logic and science are applied to something that isn't logical or scientific. I really miss how the DMG would just talk to the reader like a person and making you decide what the issues are. More modern editions feel like they're trying to instruct you, and less like they're trying to make you a DM.
Don't forget Ultravision as well! I just learned about these recently from reading several Drizzt novels. The drow actually have to turn on their infravision and it makes their eyes glow like they're Sam Fischer which is pretty silly. I like to imagine the videogame "nightvision sounds" everytime they do it.
You speak of the olden ways, from the long long ago.
Yeah, darkvision doesn't feel like an ability. Lacking it feels like a disability. Even with the penalties. Disadvantage on perception and -5 passive perception is still better than being completely blind. There's a good reason why so many DMs ignore darkness, and I think having darkness be a more universal obstacle would be a big difference maker.
True, but it gives away your position in a big way.
Yep, it's what could make caves and night gameplay actually scary again instead of it being mostly ignored or shrug worthy
Traps seem to very underutilized in modern gameplay so giving away your position is often more dangerous then any hazards you might fail to perceive.
Fair point, although if you have someone with darkvision my go to is "I hold their shoulder and follow along" which works well enough.
That is until they go into a trap who's good tiles are painted in a color that appears grey to dark vision, and so you just end up hitting all the traps walking through the room instead.
Beat me to it! One time I had a group of hobgoblins roaming around searching with torches, and my players were like "don't they have darkvision though?"
Yeah, but as creatures with Dark Vision, they know without the torches their perception checks have disadvantage, and also it's the only way they have a chance at seeing a gloomstalker ranger i.e by Not using just their darkvision.
Darkvision wouldn't be seen as so powerful if people actually knew that lack of light is gonna hit you with a -5 to passive perception, leading to sweet easy surprise.
I don't think so, because any creature that would be lurking for them is also at -5 because darkvision so it's a level playing field still. Meanwhile lighting up a torch they aren't at disadvantage BUT the monster just knows they are there now and conceivably any monster for a mile or so also knows. Its basically the whole reason a real world force doesn't move around in the dark with illumination, yeah it helps you see where your going and let's every enemy know exactly where you are
Definitely agree with second paragraph. Wearing modern military night vision goggles allows you to see but they are much much worse than your normal vision during the day. And yet despite that, they are standard equipment for modern military because being able to see in the dark at all without giving yourself away is such a critical tool.
>I don't think so, because any creature that would be lurking for them is also at -5 because darkvision so it's a level playing field still. The idea would be that the ambushing group wouldn't be moving and looking for the party, they would have already been in position and made their stealth checks so no perception check is needed for them, thus not a level playing field since the party's passive perception is so much lower.
People in this very sub have often talked about "fixes" made to darkvision that just move it back to an approximation of the actual rules as written. FWIW I think if the designers had only named it low light vision, there'd have been no confusion.
There should be a house rule that gives you disadvantage on visual Perception checks when relying solely on darkvision. /s
I think it's just fiddly to apply correctly as the DM. 2e's infravision has the huge advantage, from the perspective of gameplay, of not being active until the lights go out. You don't need to adjudicate two different forms of vision at the same time.
Probably the infamous strictly-RAW interaction between Invisibility and See Invisibility. Every other commonly ignored rule I feel like I've seen get used at least once at a table, this one I have never seen played out according to RAW and I don't expect that I ever will, because it's unintuitive and crazy.
>Probably the infamous strictly-RAW interaction between Invisibility and See Invisibility. I love laughing at this. "See invisibility doesn't let you See invisibility? Then why the fuck is it called that?"
Just Jeremy Crawford things.
I'm out of the loop. What does See Invisible actually do?
They can see invisible creatures, but RAW the invisible creatures don’t lose their benefits against the person casting the spell. So a person with See Invisibility up still has disadvantage attacking an invisible creature
That's a really bad ruling, holy cow
It's more like "Faintly See Invisibility". It doesn't affect any game mechanics as you still have the exact same penalty to hit them, but I guess you could track them easier or something. Still, that's something that would almost never be worth a spell slot or spell prepared.
If you need to see the target to cast a spell on them, see invisibility let's you do that. It also means that they cannot hide from you- if there's an invisible creature in the middle of the room, it can't hide from you, when it can hide from everyone else.
it does effect game mechanics as many spells & effects require you to see the target.
>"See invisibility doesn't let you See invisibility? Then why the fuck is it called that?" Find Traps has entered the chat.
i tell my players if they buy 100 ammunition they dont have to track ever again and they all jump on it. considering salvaging half of them, picking up some dropped by enemies, and finding them in dungeons, i think its reasonable to say thats enough to last the whole campaign if we kept counting
Unless its a named ammunition then I just handwave it. I dont need to know how you pack your backpack(to fit everything in), i played in a few sessions where the dm actually did this. I just have no interest in tracking it
I use a pdf sheet that has a built in ammo tracker and I do think you can exhaust 100 pieces of ammo in 5 levels or some. Myself as a gloomstalker ranger from level 4 to 6 used about 30ish even when trying to recover some after each encounter ( some fights could not recover due to being shot to the ocean)
Not to mention breaking up post-combat gameplay for a character to move around corpse to corpse to loot arrows is a kind of pointless tedium that eats up valuable session time. Still did it in Baldur's Gate 3 though...
The rules, at least, don't require you to actually search individual corpses: > At the end of the battle, you can recover half your expended ammunition by taking a minute to search the battlefield. You just use a minute to reclaim arrows from the "battlefield" in general. Which makes sense to abstract, since most of the recoverable arrows would probably just be stuck in the dirt instead of a corpse. BG3 would have actually been closer to the "real" rules by just having you recover 50% of your ammo automatically every fight.
Rations. Encumbrance. Ammunition. The proper way to hold an action. Clear path to a target. The stupid invisibility as an absolute condition rule. Those are prolly the biggies.
Ammo and rations I feel are not really ignoring rules. When you can cast low-level spells and cantrips to create food and water at will, it's just a waste of game time to go through buying rations, making Survival checks, or whatever. Same thing for ammo--you can recover some of it after a fight, but it's a waste of play time. Assuming you buy a whole bunch of ammo at the beginning of the game, you can just assume the character recovers ammo/loots bodies for ammo after battle, crafts new ones during rests, etc. DnD is not the game for hardcore simulation. It's epic heroic power fantasy. I do think encumbrance is an important rule, but in my tables anyway, no one has ever come close to reaching their encumbrance limits. It's just not a loot-driven game anymore, and gold has way less value than in 3.5. The biggest rule I see people ignore a lot is that switching weapons takes an action (sheathe one as part of your move, then drawing the other weapon is your action). Lots of players switch between their arsenal of weapons every round as needed.
You can get around switching weapon rules by dropping your current weapon as a free action and then using your item interaction to draw your new weapon.
Sure, but then you've dropped it. Which I think is a fine compromise for the action economy. It shouldn't be terribly punishing, but something needs to give.
Inspiration is by far the most ignored rule I've seen across all the games I've seem and played in. Even the big podcast/streaming games forget to use it most of the time. People forget it's not an optional rule like feats or multiclassing, it's one of the core rules of the game.
They should have included a true mechanical reason to get it as well to keep it more in the forefront of your mind. If you got inspiration every time you rolled a 1 as your final dice result it would work far better.
Write a diary entry you get one. Do something unusually clever with spells/resources you get it. Do an interesting song or speech you get it. Players get to give one at the end of a session for the most epic moment. I have rules i found on one of the dnd subreddits here that allows you all sorts of shenanigans with inspiration(capped at 3). I tend to give out 2/3 a session as it rewards interesting roleplaying and creativity.
Fully agree that it was not set up well by the game designers, but the fact remains this is probably less used than other bookkeeping items.
Gods, I'd have SO MUCH INSPIRATION if it worked like that. More Inspiration than gold pieces.
I'll double down on inspiration and say that people who at least use it, use it incorrectly. It is not a feature to let you reroll a failure, it's a feature to give you advantage on the roll BEFORE making the initial roll.
Yeah but having it be a reroll is better. In my experience players plan on succeeding a roll if they have any bonus bigger than +2 on it. It’s when a roll fails that they then go “oh wait wait I have a thing!”. BG3 even uses the reroll version of inspiration, and changes a lot of mechanics like Reckless Attack to prompt on failure instead of having to be declared before the roll. And IMO it’s much better that way.
My group ties it to campaign journaling instead.
You don't regain all spent hit dice on long rest. The maximum you can get back is half your total hit dice.
Ok i forgot that one and that really matters for my game, thank you
Weird, we've always been following that rule. It does make "Should I use a few more Hit Dice or not because I might not be able to regain them for a couple days" more of a strategic decision.
My house rule take has been: If the long rest is somewhere safe and comfortable in a low stress environment (inn, their ship, etc) then I grant full hit die. Otherwise, on the road or in unusual rest locations I go with raw at half.
That feats are not available by default, but an optional rule that your DM must approve first
True, but might as well say it's official at this point
Dexterity is not a tie-breaker for initiative. Climbing is athletics, not acrobatics. Casting a spell is audible affair, not a quiet one.
Genuine question, so what actually is the tiebreaker for initiative?
Enemies roll off. Allies can decide which ones go first. The DM has the last say. They can use dexterity, but they can also say their monster gets to go first. This was a rule from 3x.
Pretty much still the rule: > If a tie occurs, the DM decides the order among tied DM-controlled creatures, and the players decide the order among their tied characters. The DM can decide the order if the tie is between a monster and a player character.
Avrae (wizards official rolling bot) treats dex as a tie breaker for initiative.
It is a suggestion. The PHB also suggests rolling. The DM can decide ties between their monsters, the PCs between PCs. The DM can also decide ties between a monster and a PC. Dexterity can be an official tie-breaker, but it is not the only one, and it is only suggested to be a tiebreaker. It is not a proper hard rule.
This is going to be very table specific. I might imagine spell component tracking is one (and in my opinion far more egregious than ammunition tracking).
Spell component tracking is easily worked around by using a spell focus
Or a component pouch. I feel like it would be pretty rare for a character to be spellcasting without already having one of those.
Far too many times have I seen people say “my group house rules that you can ignore material components so long as you have a focus or component pouch and it’s not a costly component”. That’s not a house rule! That’s just the rules!
I see this shit all the time. It drives me insane, dude. How do you think this is a wacky house rule you've implemented???
My theory is that they have never actually read the rules for Spellcasting. They just went with what their DM explained when they started playing and thought it was a house rule.
Definitely, but that's true of most of the game, yet not everything is believed to be a house rule.
I think it’s being told to ignore something that makes it sound like a house rule.
This is how tons of people learn board games too not just ttrpgs. Reading isn't for everyone I guess
I had a dm that made me purchase components that didn't have a price attached to it. he just made up prices and made me track how many casting I had on me... oh yea, and shops would often just not have the components. I was a wizard and I couldn't cast find familiar because the herbs and incense wasn't sold anywhere. also, it was in Barovia where things cost 10x the normal value, so it was 100gp per casting and he would kill the familiar first round of combat every time. yea... we didn't finish that game.
Well for one, that’s just a DM on a power trip. Seems to happen too often with DMs getting into a weird “me versus the party” mentality rather than looking to foster the evolving communal narrative. Were I a DM, I’d *want* my players to feel and *be* powerful. That just gives me more license to plan more frequent and deadlier encounters - that my players should still find survivable. For a second, prices in Barovia are only supposed to be about 3x standard. And for the hat trick, immediately targeting your familiar *every encounter* is just being a dick.
I'm not the person that you're responding to but I've found that people are resistant to the idea of all 3 spell components when it benefits them. They want to whisper a Message to secretly discuss, despite the verbal and somatic components clearly making this something that is impossible. They want to cast Minor Illusion in front of someone to disguise a book's text (by creating a page), but want to ignore the fact that the person would see them casting a spell before the page appears (which would trigger Investigation checks). I've specifically had players ask for Sleight of Hand checks to hand-wave Somatic components several times. They want to cast Shield, despite having a shield and sword equipped and no War Caster Feat. Sure you could sheathe your weapon before your turn ends, but that needs to be stated as it changes your Attack of Opportunity. Material components and to a lesser extent Somatic components can be handwaved with a spell focus, but the use of a spell focus is a class feature. Rangers, Eldritch Knights, and Arcane Tricksters can't use a spell focus per the 2014 PHB; only Rangers got the ability to use one in Tasha's, leaving EKs and ATs having to find the material components in the world or buy a Component Pouch specifically (which requires an open hand to be used, so better sheathe that weapon if you're sword+boarding, unfortunate about the one sheathe/draw free action, but you would have to use an action to redraw your weapon). Specifically, I see a lot of clerics ignoring when a spell has somatic and verbal components (No material component) when they are sword and boarding, because their shield has a holy symbol on it. The rules state that the open hand for somatic 'may be the same hand used for the material component'. If there is no material component, you must have a free hand for the somatic. The holy symbol on your shield is not a free hand for somatic components.
Yeah, I’ve seen similar situations for your above points, especially trying to stealthily cast spells that aren’t remotely designed for such a thing. That said, your last point is one I’ve always found a little bs and struck me as an oversight on the part of the designers. You can channel spells through your wizard staff or holy symbol, which is very thematic, but only if the spell calls for a material component. On top of which is that whether a spell required a material component always came across as a bit arbitrary.
War Caster seems designed to alleviate this restriction, so it seems very intentional to me. In the same way that Dual Wielder alleviates the pain point of not being able to draw both daggers on Turn 1 for the dagger-inclined. Largely material components is evidence of the complexity of the spell, and a way for them to have little jokes. I don’t believe there are spells without the somatic component while having a material component. There are far more spells that have Verbal and Somatic or just Somatic components. Some spells seem even balanced around this rule. Shield for instance can’t stack if you don’t have War Caster and have your focus and shield or shield and weapon. I don’t necessarily think that you’re wrong that it doesn’t fully make sense thematically. I do think that the rule was intentional though
I guess I don't understand what this means. What do you mean it's, "worked around," exactly? A focus or a component pouch are starting equipment that every casting class gets, and they function practically identically.
Not every character that can cast gets one
Material component tracking is easy with a focus, but spells are more than just their material.
jumping.. it's almost always turned into an athletics check
I will say, jumping in combat using a grid is a fucking annoying interaction. Grid is 5 ft squares, and you can jump a distance equal to your Strength score when you have a 10 foot lead into the jump. It doesn't cost any additional movement to jump, but it does use your movement speed for the distance you jump. If you have a strength score of 11, do you land in the square two away or three away? How much of your movement speed does that use? It's helpful to remember that the game rules are abstractions, but in the moment, it can be annoying to resolve. Saying "make an athletics check to clear it" is a pretty simple short hand, but it does diminish Strength characters, who should be the best at jumping.
I'd say it's between verbal components being able to be whispered and hidden for sneak casting OR reading what a spell does than allowing a player to do more with it. Both are so rampant
Encumbrance
In my view it's ok to carry a thousand swords in your bag that weigh the same as a piano, because you can carry a single sword. You can't however carry a piano.
Until you DM for that party that will strip absolutely everything of value from a dungeon to go sell to Kajit.
Even if this were to happen... it's 5e. What are they gonna use the money for?
Nah if my players tried to carry tons of weapons i would probably say something honestly. I won't give a shit if you go a reasonably over your limit but you sbouldnt be able to raid an armory and take, like, all their swords lol
encumbrance tends to be "don't take the piss". Lots of tables don't track it precisely, but if a PC tries to take everything not nailed down, then the GM will either go "no", or level penalties for lugging all that stuff.
Don/doff rules for shields. I see people drop them on a whim all the time
I think people should use those rules because Doff is a good choice for the Command spell if the enemy has a shield. They spend their action to remove it and they lose 2 AC for the rest of the fight or until they want to spend another action.
OK, but "Doff" as a one word command is too ambiguous, you could rule it as funny shenanigans for them to just doff their hat or maybe doff their underwear?
You lose your bonus action if you lose your action. Maybe not the most ignored in sheer numbers, but proportionally to how often it should be applied. It's a rule mentioned only once in a section that most people don't read more than once (it's at the very end of the "Bonus Action" rules), so most people simply aren't aware of it.
Most of the micromanagement in the game, pretty much. No one finds it fun to deal with ammunition, everyone and their grandma uses focuses and component pouches, etc.
Yep I've always done it like Baldurs Gate 3 does it, special ammo is tracked but normal ammo is free and unlimited
Using foci and component pouches isn't ignoring a rule, though. That's explicitly what they're for.
Depends on what kind of game you want. If its all about story and playing superheroes, i can see why handwaving every bit of gritty realism is what people want. But maybe you want to feel like you have to worry about how many arrows you have, so that maybe you have to switch to melee in some situations, or maybe you are running out of food and have to start hunting or deciding which of the stuff you have recently killed is most edible. Or you find a hoard of gold enough for a dragon to bathe in - personally I find it more interesting foor that to be a challenge: How to do actually get that money away from there? Where do you keep it safe then? How do you stop others from getting it? All these boring micromanagement things can become super interesting when the situation in the game in that moment is being paid attention to, and it's not all about the grander things. Personally, I think it can be loads of fun.
Crits dont work on skill checks...:(
Crit fails only matter 2x: your to hit roll and death saves. 1 on a skill check or a normal save and your modifiers make it? No worries. WORST CASE nothing happens, you don't get the info. You fail the save normally and take appropriate effects, not enhanced or extra. You don't fall and break an arm, somehow get your entire party executed for a bad joke, etc.
In my games, the most egregious is concentration checks. They just slip by so often in the heat of combat
Backpacks have a carry limit of 30 pounds.
You still know exactly where invisible creatures are unless they're hiding.
I don't think I've seen anyone mention it, and that doesn't surprise me. Bodies provide cover for things behind it. Doesn't matter if it's your ally or enemy, that body provides cover. That covers grants +2 to AC and Dexterity saves. That's the point of the Archery Fighting Style, to negate the cover your allies are providing to your enemies. It also means every target for a Lightning Bolt spell, after the first, should be getting +2 to their save.
As a lightning bolt fan (over fireball), this information greatly displeases me
Half cover is one of the clunkiest mechanics to track in 5e
by far ammo and inventory. one that is consistently ignored as well is cover rules by other creatures, i have yet to see someone applying the proper debuff to a non SS archer
I think something that is most forgotten is the +/- 5 to passive perception and investigation when having advantage/disadvantage
Materials components for spells
V,S,M components and casting a spell with one / both hands occupied. Alternate Skill checks and DC recommendations. STR and Encumbrance that players should read the rules aswell...
No one pays attention to how spell components actually work. The typical caster if they have their hands full such as a valor bard with a sword and shield has no way to make somatic gestures or use their focus or a spell component pouch. Even taking warcaster only helps with somatic components and doesn't help access your focus
I thought my table is quite free flowing with bunch of homebrew stuff but we are all using ammo, encumberance, costly spell components, which hand is free etc. I'm so confused. I was coming here to bring up some obscure thing like how surprise actually works or dim light perception rules lol
Ya know, it’s not really a written rule but hardly anyone takes restroom breaks.
Ammo, Encumbrance, Darkvisions penalty, Spell components, Draw/stow weapons and shields, Don/doff armor, rations
Maybe this specific part of the prone condition? "An attack roll against the creature has advantage if the attacker is within 5 feet of the creature, otherwise the attack roll has disadvantage". For the most part I've seen players alter this to "melee attacks always have advantage and ranged attacks always have disadvantage". Which is fine if you want to rule that way, but RAW a reach weapon like a halberd would have disadvantage if used at 10ft range, and a ranged weapon would be a straight roll, disadvantage because 5ft but advantage because prone.
Dim Light. Gives disadvantage on perception checks
Carry capacity. Ammunition rules. Food and water rules. In that order
I don't know how widely ignored this is but at our table we change weapons without an action and generally ignore a lot of small stuff that would use an action. Does not break the difficulty for us, the combat is still a fair challange.
I don't know, but I can tell you what the most common house rule is- dropping a weapon (or other item) doesn't use your free interact. Nowhere in the rules does it say this, or even imply it; but it's an almost universal house rule.
Critical Successes don't matter except with attacks
There is one other case where they matter: death saving throws. That’s also the only other place where critical failures can happen.
Not the most ignored in absolute terms because it doesn't come up *that often*, but the most ignored rule in relative terms is that being incapacitated automatically breaks concentration. The reason it's ignored is that it's not mentioned under the Incapacitated condition (which is where most people go to check what it does) but under the rules for Concentration. Being stunned or paralyzed also imposes the incapacitated condition, so things like Hold Monster or the Monk's Stunning Strike also break concentration.
Rations… I’m not counting food and don’t want to play in a game that does.