The Gaming Den

Prak wrote:

AncientH wrote:For reasons I don't entirely comprehend, the errata for the ghost rigging, wood rot, and shooting stars spells are contained in the spot where they normally put the pithy anecdotes. So I don't know if that's serious or if they thought it merited special attention or if it's some sort of overflow error in layout or not.

I could make an argument for why a lot of the spells are being adjudicated this way - in D&D, a spell wasn't quite like you think of in Shadowrun or Mage. Each spell was its own special snowflake, and it was supposed to basically be its own metaphysical engine taking into account lots of little details of the environment and how it's supposed to work, like the phases of the moon or the size of the emerald you're using as a material component and shit. So spells tended to be a lot more...characterful than utilitarian. I mean each spell, it had its own unique scroll ink whose formula you might have to quest and learn, and if it had material components you could play with those components to see if they changed the effects of the spell - so like gorgon poop might make a more powerful burst of damage than regular bat guano when casting fireball, but in a pinch you could cast the spell by sticking your thumb up your own ass. That kind of thing.

Portions of that survived into D&D3 - most specifically, stuff like metamagic components and power components (which substituted for XP costs). If D&D3.x had been sorted a little better, this could have been integrated into the setting a bit more thoroughly and the system more neatly, a bit like the Rite of AshkEnte in Discworld. But in AD&D, it was a grab-bag clusterfuck of individual efforts. Ironically, this usually meant it was tactically better to load up on obscure spells from hard-to-find supplements, because they were less likely to be errata'd and it was easier to argue with Mister Cavern about what their precise effects were.

I'd actually really like to hear more about this, possibly in another thread, because I love the idea of fucking with spells by tweaking parts of them.

Okay. We can do this. Let's start with the basics.

Material Components
In D&D and most derived games, material components are one the ingredients of the spell. D&D rarely went into much detail that casting a spell entailed - it might have a verbal component (an incantation or word of power), a somatic component (specific hand gestures/dancing/etc.), and/or a material component (stuff that would be consumed in casting the spell). These were very loosely based on the ceremonial ritual magic, but were largely more of a flavor element than anything else - except when they weren't. No material components, no spell. Gag the mage and bind their hands, no spell.

So Eye of Newt went from a line in the Scottish Play to something your witch had to have on their person if they wanted to cast certain spells. And if she wanted to cast it again, she had to get another one.

The more expensive/rare material components also acted as an artificial limiter on mage ambitions - as well as a drain on their resources. Magic was supposed to be rare, and one of the ways D&D kept it relatively scarce was to make it expensive. That sort of backfired because it meant that players tried to cash in on their magic being rare and expensive...but I digress.

Psionics, natch, didn't come from the same source material as "magic" and so didn't have material components. People probably felt this was somehow cheating.

Alternate Material Components
Sometimes called "variant" or "substitute" material components, these were pretty much what it says on the tin. Sure, the fireball spell called for a bit of bat guano, but could you substitute dwarf guano in a pinch? What about the guano of a giant abyssal bat, would that work?...or would it work even better?

Both ideas proliferated in AD&D, mostly under the aegis of Ed Greenwood, who fell in love with (and possibly introduced) the concept. It acted as both a sort of additional reward (yield) from defeated creatures, and a way to vary the power of spells within character levels, which could be quite tricky to do otherwise. They thus acted as a kind of primitive "boost" to spells in some cases. An example is the Sandman, which when killed crumbles to powder:

The powder into which a destroyed sandman crumbles can be used to make a potion of dreaming or sand of truths. If used as the material component in a sleep spell, the spell affects double the normal number of levels or Hit Dice. The dust of a sandman is enough for only one potion or two spells.

Sounds cool, right? Magic item creation was pretty much the Rule of Cool in AD&D, except for one or two systems like permanency, and something Ed Greenwood cooked up because enchant an item was bullshit. Despite there being literally thousands of magic items in the game, and people literally upgrading equipment because they outgrew their magic sword several levels ago...well, Monty Haul was a problem, but not quite the issue it became in D&D3, where they basically embraced it instead of trying to deny players.

Anyway, long story short: one of the reasons magic was expensive was material components. This started out as an artificial limitation on player characters (and the start of the infamous "find the final ingredient" plot device), and eventually turned into a bonus for finding even rarer shit. From a fluff standpoint, alternate material components helped encourage the idea that wizards were "experimenting" with the magic - like what they were doing was actually based on obscure metaphysical laws rather than just imposing their will on reality or calling out to Agamotto for aid or whatnot.

More importantly, it got game designers fiddling with spells. This was the beginning of metamagic.

Metamagic Components
Skip forward to D&D3, and things are familiar but not quite the same. You still have material components, filling the general material components function. You also have a couple tweeks: first, the focus. This is an item that's a sunk cost for a spell or series of spells, but isn't consumed. They could have pursued this to make it a kind of repertoire for wizards and sorcerers, but they were never that organized. Second, the Eschew Materials feat and its cousins Still Spell and Silent Spell. All of these were present to some degree in AD&D, but here they were formalized and strategized for a game that was much more combat-oriented. It's no joke that a number of "anti-mage" abilities specifically worked around disrupting their ability to move or speak; Eschew Materials was largely the ability to ignore a legacy element which had been retained but was largely unwelcome.

But this wasn't the end of material components. You still saw - especially in the early days of the edition - feats and abilities that focused on material components, like the Blood Magus' "Blood Component," and feats like the Runesmith feat:

Runesmith

( Races of Faerûn, p. 167)

[General]

You can fashion runes that take the place of material components for your spells.

Prerequisite

4 ranks in Craft (rune),

Benefit

You can make runes that take the place of traditional material components for spells you cast. The runes, often carved into stone talismans or stamped onto small plates of metal, cost 1 gp each and have a Craft (rune) DC of 15. Unlike a material component, a rune does not disappear when you cast a spell; having this feat effectively turns a material component required for a spell into a focus.

You use of runes makes your spells more difficult to counter-spell. Other spellcasters who observe you casting a spell take a -4 penalty on checks to determine which spell you're casting, unless they also have the Runesmith feat.

Spells with costly material components are unaffected by this feat.

D&D3 had, however, already formalized a lot of the metamagic that AD&D had struggled to present in any kind of coherent fashion. Which is why they introduced metamagic components (more expensive components that automatically applied a metamagic feat to your spell), and power components (more expensive components that took up part of the XP cost of a spell). This was basically an adaptation - an expensive, nobody-is-going-to-use-this adaptation - of the old variant material components from AD&D, just a bit more formalized and powerful and expensive. Where before variant material components were largely about experimenting with magic, this was closer to allowing spellcasters to punch a bit above their weightclass - at least for a spell or two - provided they had more money than XP. It's one way to solve the monty haul problem if it hit your d20 campaign, I guess, but the wealth-by-level guidelines were already shot by that point.

So part of what I was talking about originally in the Spacefarer's Handbook OSSR, there was the idea in D&D and AD&D prior to d20 that spells were...kind of mysterious. Like little metaphysical engines: the wizard said the words, made the gestures, played with the material components, and an effect happened. The exact effect was not strictly bound by the write-up of the spell - it had to do with what material components you were using, and where you were casting it; so too, some spells interacted very oddly with other spells - like prismatic sphere and the various spells that cancelled out each color. It's not a point that was ever strictly pursued (unless, like me, you spent hours as a you with a stack of game manuals you could bury a man in and a notebook, crossreferencing), and the line development for the system was such that nothing really came together from it all. Variant components weren't brought into d20 wholesale as part and parcel of the spellcasting system; they were a tack-on added later as an optional system and largely forgotten, they had little or no influence on subsequent spell mechanics design (though WotC did fiddle with adding some other requirements to spells later on).

Material Components (and Lack Thereof) in Other Games
I think that this is partially the reason that material components are largely absent from games like Shadowrun. SR was obviously influenced by D&D in many ways, but its magic system jettisoned a lot of the fluff and clutter and mystery. A fireball spell in Shadowrun generated fireballs. That was it. It didn't recharge a pyre golem or ignite the phlogiston; it didn't care if you cast it while wearing armor or had your hands tied behind your back (for the most part), and bat guano was strictly unnecessary.

Mostly. There were fetishes. A fetish in Shadowrun context wasn't just a predilection for brown elf nipples, it was initially a downside to some spells that you could choose to learn - make the spell fetish-dependent, and you needed a fetish to cast it, but the spell cost less to learn so you could learn more spells. The fetish itself - like a lot of magical materials in SR - was generalized. You didn't need to specify that you were getting the tooth of a Rodent of Unusual Size from the Fire Swamp; you didn't need to specify that it involved rodent dentures at all. Many fetishes were expendable, fire-and-forget. Others were reusable. Later on, the rules changed a bit, and they added fetish focuses and expendable spell foci and shit, but you don't really care about any of that.

The point is, Shadowrun largely embraced the idea of a spell as nonthinking, straightforward, what-it-says-on-the-tin; not a mysterious process that you could experiment with, but as reliable as a pistol. It was a solid, forwardthinking move that let them (with the formula system) create spells relatively quickly and easily, entire series and categories of spells that were related could be presented in a small space, and players could easily compare their key attributes and decide which ones made the most sense in the given tactical situation.

It's an idea that D&D took a long time to even really begin to grasp. D20 still has a fuckload of spells that are overcomplicated, overpriced, overly wordy, and just plain too much hassle to fuckwith. Even FASA didn't really repeat the success of Shadowrun, because when they made Earthdawn, they replicated the same sort of esoteric, "who knows how magic works" spells instead of the straightforward...

"I bet I can write this spell in 50 words."
"I bet I can write this spell in 25 words."
"I bet I can write this spell in 15 words."
"Write that spell."

...sort of fashion.

Now, Earthdawn didn't go in for much of this material component stuff either. It had a couple talents and knacks where you could use blood magic to make a spell do better and weave threads faster and shit, but it wasn't really trying to charge you with getting a dragon scale dipped in moon blood to cast a spell, or a diamond worth 5,000 orichalcum coins or any of that nonsense. Even when FASA was trying to rigorously follow a lot of D&D tropes, they didn't quite follow through with everything, and material components were left out.

Other games..simply didn't formalize it. A lot of World of Darkness spells/rotes/powers required some material component, but it wasn't usually formalized as a Material Component. It's really weird to go back and read the early Vampire rituals that require a piece of sard soaked in vinegar or something versus the ones written later in the edition, which more closely resembled ceremonial magick rituals, with a fair bit of borrowing from Chaos Magick and the like for solo practitioners. I think they didn't need to formalize it. Vampire didn't usually deal with how many bucks your player character charged for a blow job; the idea that they would specify how much you had to spend on such-and-such components was anathema to the setting.

Usually, the "components" weren't expensive at all, just occasionally difficult to get and squicky - but most of the rituals were the shit goth kids could play-act together in a well-stocked kitchen, provided they had a sharp knife. For WoD, like the simpler parts of D&D, it was more about mood than it was any kind of mechanical advantage or limitation to the spellcaster. Of course, the more powerful Vampire rituals often required more extensive (and expensive) props, but the PCs weren't going to cast those anyway.

You know for a long post on "Material components? Whut do?" you missed the ONE fucking obvious point that it is criminal of you to fail to mention.

Material Components are fucking ass and no one anywhere ever fucking uses them because they are shitty and annoying
SURE they are a core official D&D game mechanic.

But not one fucking uses them, like, EVER. Because they are mechanically A PILE OF ASS to keep track of.

Also no one fucking uses them because they are ALSO thematically bullshit.

But mostly it's just a big fat boring chore so rarely used in actual play that you will be hard pressed to find actual players who actually know what material components are or how they are supposed work in any given edition. Because, AGAIN, NO ONE FUCKING USES THIS SHIT GAME MECHANIC IN ACTUAL PRACTICE.

Seriously, I know that TTRPG communities and peoples experience there of are fractured and parochial, I've seen myself in practice just how different they can be. But I have NEVER IN MY ENTIRE LIFE seen an ACTUAL D&D game in the real fucking world ACTUALLY use fucking material components mechanics.

Sure you'd get the odd incident of (intermittent) enforcement of "wait, maybe you need a holy symbol for that one" or that one time someone actually remembers that resurrection is supposed to require a pile of diamonds or something rite? Does anyone remember? Well OK I suppose we didn't charge eddy anything for his last couple of spare lives so well just skip it this time... again... But actual proper accross the board attention paid to material components? Fuck that, you're lucky if a group even knows about Verbal and Somatic.

Even in 3rd edition which made technically using material components while practically ignoring them in game easier than ever before... everyone STILL didn't use material components as a game mechanic because it was an annoying pile of shit idea abortion.

I've seen material components used in the specific case of: if you strip the wizard naked, suddenly he can't cast a bunch of spells. That's pretty much it. They are indeed something nobody keeps track of, but in the aggregate, material components are a thing that can, very rarely, come up. So essentially material components are turned into a 'spellpouch of stuff' that the wizard needs to carry at all times. No one has the slightest idea what it contains, but it has mechanical importance.

And, as annoying as components are, the ability to strip a spellcaster naked and dump them in a cell and thereby prevent them from using their powers is a clear distinction versus certain other kinds of magic (like psionics, or, more frequently encountered, The Force), and actually makes imprisonment a thing you can do, as opposed to every villain with a brain having the Jedi decapitated if they're foolish enough to surrender. So I can certainly see why you want a limitation system like that in place. Still, it's probably simpler to just make everyone carry an arcane focus or whatever as the relevant token and be done with it.

I've seen DM's pull a "they stole your spell book, and, um, somehow? drained all your current memorized spells" more often than I've seen someone use spell components to do that.

Not that it was that hard. As I have never seen someone use spell components to do that. Which is unsurprising because as a "oh THAT'S what this bullshit mechanic no one uses is for" its a bit of a dud. And a redundant dud at that what with Verbal and Somatic components already having the potential to cover that base in a much more interesting way.

What, no one's heard of an antimagic field?

The fact that people did not use the design feature does not invalidate that the design feature was there and proved influential in subsequent game development.

Ancient History wrote:The fact that people did not use the design feature does not invalidate that the design feature was there and proved influential in subsequent game development.

Buuuut... it's kinda THE key fact you should mention rather than ignore when discussing said feature and it's history.

Not really the kinda thing you get away with just omitting.

PhoneLobster wrote: Sure you'd get the odd incident of (intermittent) enforcement of "wait, maybe you need a holy symbol for that one" or that one time someone actually remembers that resurrection is supposed to require a pile of diamonds or something rite? Does anyone remember? Well OK I suppose we didn't charge eddy anything for his last couple of spare lives so well just skip it this time... again...

I guess my group is playing D&D wrong (of course we are, we're playing 5e) but we track focuses and the need to get large piles of diamonds to cast Raise Dead and shit like that. Of course, as moderate level D&D 5e we have more gold than we know what to do with and flying mounts and Teleport spells and can just go buy piles of diamonds, so it's more an accounting exercise than anything else, but we do track them.

Material components as a whole aren't ever used, though.

Wait, PL, are you saying nobody ever charges for Resurrection at all or just that nobody tracks diamonds specifically? Because while my games have all included tracking Resurrection diamonds (or, more relevantly, Identify pearls), I can at least imagine games where it just costs 10kgp. But "we didn't charge eddy anything" indicates completely free spells, which... I mean, I'm pretty sure I didn't just make up all the fucking conversations about Blood Money, so I'm not alone here.

Yes, cheap ones are dumb and you buy a spell component pouch (or three, if you're playing the sort of game where it's gonna get sundered, which is niche, but also a real thing in the real world) but if you're claiming that not only do expensive ones get ignored, their cost does too, well, you need to tone down your projection of that onto all D&D ever, because I'm having a hard time even believing that's true of your personal experience it's that foreign to me.

I found out last month my group of ~11 years has been using components for plane shift. Apparently we are supposed to have a uniquely tuned fork for each plane, and it can only be purchased on that plane and created by some ritual thats totally in an obscure splatbook i can't remember right now. It had never come up before that i had paid attention to, and I'd just been using the spell all the time without it.

I pointed out that because i had a components kit, which " is assumed to have all the material components and focuses needed for spellcasting, except for those components that have a specific cost, divine focuses, and focuses that wouldn’t fit in a pouch", I either had an almost infinite number of tuning forks in there, or could tune the single one i had myself as a free action as part of casting the spell. We went with the latter, but i suspect we will have that chat again in 6-12 months when we have forgotten.

TLDR - most of the time we ignore them, unless we randomly decide to screw someone.

Also, I think having new ones that modify spells is actually cool, and we should see more of.

Krusk wrote:I found out last month my group of ~11 years has been using components for plane shift.

That's weird, because you also found that out October of last year. What's up with the deja vu?

He already acknowledged that the arguement will probably be forgotten and rekindled again. Doubt that's the first time this has happened.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

Krusk wrote:I found out last month my group of ~11 years has been using components for plane shift.

That's weird, because you also found that out October of last year. What's up with the deja vu?

poor sense of time? I dunno. Apparently it was 8 months ago, not as recent as i thought. or i/we keep forgetting.

Krusk wrote:I found out last month my group of ~11 years has been using components for plane shift.

That's weird, because you also found that out October of last year. What's up with the deja vu?

How the hell did you remember an odd bit like THAT?

codeGlaze wrote:

Krusk wrote:I found out last month my group of ~11 years has been using components for plane shift.

That's weird, because you also found that out October of last year. What's up with the deja vu?

How the hell did you remember an odd bit like THAT?

angel just failed the Turing test.

momothefiddler wrote:Wait, PL, are you saying nobody ever charges for Resurrection at all or just that nobody tracks diamonds specifically?

I said fairly specifically that sometimes someone inconsistently gets around to charging for Resurrection or some other spell with a more notable component cost.

Effectively those few groups that ever apply any component requirement do what Krusk said "most of the time we ignore them, unless we randomly decide to screw someone", and that isn't really remotely what the mechanic as written is supposed to be.

Sure. Material components as written are like encumbrance. They're designed to screw everyone all of the time - but even the game designers often forget about it. How many NPCs do you see stat'd out with material components?

PhoneLobster wrote:Effectively those few groups that ever apply any component requirement do what Krusk said "most of the time we ignore them, unless we randomly decide to screw someone"

Weird. Also, like, things I just said:

momothefiddler wrote:I mean, I'm pretty sure I didn't just make up all the fucking conversations about Blood Money, so I'm not alone here.

Yes, cheap ones are dumb and you buy a spell component pouch (or three, if you're playing the sort of game where it's gonna get sundered, which is niche, but also a real thing in the real world)

Seriously, am I alone in this experience? Like, I guess I could be persuaded that I've made it all up, but that'd take some surprising evidence. But like I said, my experiences lean strongly towards the exact components side of things and I'm really pretty sure I've never played in even one game where expensive material components were completely ignored for even one spell.

Expensive material components are not ignored in games I've played.

codeGlaze wrote:How the hell did you remember an odd bit like THAT?

It sounded familiar, so I used the search function. I've been a bit sensitive since silva and his continual 'just discovering' BearWorld.

My games use a 'casting focus' for negligible cost components, so it can be a component pouch or a wizard staff or Presto's hat. But expensive components have always been enforced.

I have actually gone all the way down the rabbit hole and played in a 1e game that managed individual components based on Dobson's 'Living in a material world' article. It was actually quite a bit of fun, scratching the same sort of itch as a scrounging/survival video game, but if the game hadn't ended for unrelated reasons I'm sure it would have gotten very old.

I've played in a fair few OSR games and every one has had material components tracked to one extent or another. Some of the original components were bizarre enough to force a "Am I carrying enough live goldfish to cast identify?" minigame.

I've played with tracking ritual components in 4e. There was an Arcane, Religion and Nature specific-material, and a catchall 'good for everything' supermaterial. We got the components from looting, butchering and salvaging monster corpses and enemy hideouts. It felt like a nice way to go about giving the resource to make use of the rituals regularly (basically the only source for utility stuff in 4e). Would probably never bought components, but definitely used them instead of selling.

Well 3e made a big step towards sanity, while compromising with giving DM's the ability to hose PCs:

SRD / 3e PHB wrote: Spell Component Pouch
A spellcaster with a spell component pouch is assumed to have all the material components and focuses needed for spellcasting, except for those components that have a specific cost, divine focuses, and focuses that wouldn’t fit in a pouch.

So you could still have wizards captured or pickpocketed or whatnot and therefore unable to cast spells tagged with M, but unless there was a specific $$$ or XP cost you could otherwise ignore tracking individual components.

Some of the D&D3.x alternate spell components were at least flavorful. Book of Vile Darkness let you use captured souls to power some spells, as I recall.