Quote from: Malfi;1115479Depends on how the game is designed and if you care to play within the rules of this design.
For example in the dnd 3.5 Conan campaign you might ignore magic items and just roll around with your 10th-20th level fighter, just dont expect the CR system and class balance to work at all.
Honestly at that point maybe you should just play Mythras/runequest or sth though.
Another solution is the pathfinder one with the automatic bonuses from pathfinder unchained.

However in dnd this no magic items game generally doesn't work. It works pretty well in dnd 5e, maybe in old school dnd up to a point, but not really in dnd 3rd and 4th edition.
Also all editions basically require the melee guys having a magic sword capable of hurting magical creatures, the Pundit has a solution to this, which he call the +0 magic weapon which is a magic weapon that simply adds no bonus and can fit a low magic setting very easily.

To be fair, I couldn't get on with 3rd/3.5, possibly because it was a tightly bound ruleset. I prefer 1st/2nd/5th Ed. Then minimal rules changes are needed to cope with a low magic setting. But the +0 magic sword seems a very sensible solution if needed to avoid major work elsewhere.

Quote from: Malfi;1115479However in dnd this no magic items game generally doesn't work. It works pretty well in dnd 5e, maybe in old school dnd up to a point, but not really in dnd 3rd and 4th edition.

4E had a widely used option called "inherent bonuses" that let you run a no-magic item campaign more easily than any version of D&D I've ever seen. The warlord class also enabled a literal no-magic campaign with zero house-ruling needed beyond restricting race to human and the classes to the martial ones.

Quote from: spon;1115473Depends on the magic level of the campaign. If you're doing a Conan/Nehwon inspired, low-magic campaign, then anything should be killable by a 20th level character with a sword - it should be pretty difficult though. If you're doing a high-magic campaign, then even a lowly imp might require magic weapons to hurt to permanently - or it could be that certain classes can kill anything with (say) a metal cup as their attacks count as magical anyway.

If I remember my Conan stories correctly there are plenty of creatures that he can not fight and runs away from.  Maybe it is just DnD type games where you are expected to be able to fight everything.

QuoteHowever, I do think that having the appropriate equipment should make it easier to kill/subdue creatures which are protected from mundane weapons. But it's nice to mix things up a little (e.g target is vulnerable when in sunlight, starlight, can hear sound of singing, screams of terror - depends on the target).

Exactly.

ONE 20th level character against a CR20 monster? That's more than three times a deadly encounter; I don't think that average magic items are going to make up that gap in general, although certainly lacking them does hurt.

I agree with Jan Paparazzi that this is not a good topic, although I don't blame D&D.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;1115478Yep, this entire discussion is what I think it too meta. It's all about the numbers and rolls and that gets me out of the zone. I like this way of thinking where you are trying to win at all costs in board games and in card games, but I like roleplaying games being an immersive experience. This is why I don't play D&D.

I have none of these issues in OD&D. Zero. If you can't beat the monster, you escape (or die). For us, its always about the immersive experience of being an adventurer in a fantasy world. Sometimes you were lucky and had the right gear at the right moment (finally, that potion of animal control was useful!), and sometimes your mage only had fire spells memorized when you ran into those fire elementals.

PCs should try to win at all costs - but within the confines of the game world. Note I said PCs, not players. The lives of the characters are on the line and they should pull out all the stops to survive and win, but not players yanking out books and whining about rule issues.

Quote from: rawma;1115521ONE 20th level character against a CR20 monster? That's more than three times a deadly encounter; I don't think that average magic items are going to make up that gap in general, although certainly lacking them does hurt.

IME I'd expect most level 20 5e PCs to be able to kerbstomp a typical CR 20 monster even without items, although it depends on circumstances (if the ancient red dragon ambushes the Wizard it won't go well). The system is very generous at higher level. An even match for a level 20 Barbarian PC is around CR 25; I'd expect a party of 4 can take down a CR 30.  I tend not to bother calculating CRs in my E20 game but I think my version of Xin's Reliquary was around CR 30 and they beat it ok on Saturday, a couple PCs went to 0 hp. It had ATT +15 with 4 attacks (plus 3 legendary action) doing 47 (crit 62) damage each, if 2 hit then could Rend for another 47. So with a few good hits it could drop most level 20 PCs in 1 round and did drop both the Paladin and the Rogue, who was Polymorphed into a giant ape.

The DMG says a typical CR 30 has AC 19, 806-850 hp, ATT +14 and 303-320 damage/round. The Reliquary had AC 25, 442 hp (but Resist All unless attacker had the Sihedron), ATT +15, max damage without crits 47x9 = 423. It was backed up by 5 minions around CR 10-12 while the PCs had Shastaak the Rune Giant, worth around 2-3 of the minions. The PCs were level 20E Barbarian, Rogue, Druid & Paladin.

Quote from: Chris24601;11154914E had a widely used option called "inherent bonuses" that let you run a no-magic item campaign more easily than any version of D&D I've ever seen. The warlord class also enabled a literal no-magic campaign with zero house-ruling needed beyond restricting race to human and the classes to the martial ones.

And pathfinder unchained had automatic bonuses and it had an option that could allow a "no magic item" campaign but do note that the players would still have magical bonuses, so they would arguably be more superhuman than the ones in old school dnd and 5e, which could end up defeating the point.

Also completely no magic items both in pathfinder unchained and 4e isn't exactly a perfect fit to the system(you don't get item power and properties you are supposed to), but it almost is in 5e.

My take for 4e is that a lot of people used inherent bonuses with magic items so they wouldn't have to worry too much about magic items themselves. Which is pretty great, but not exactly what we are talking about.

Quote from: rawma;1115521ONE 20th level character against a CR20 monster? That's more than three times a deadly encounter; I don't think that average magic items are going to make up that gap in general, although certainly lacking them does hurt.

I agree with Jan Paparazzi that this is not a good topic, although I don't blame D&D.

In what dnd edition?
In 3.5 it is the highest challenge. A level 20th character with his normal wealth by level is supposed to have 50% of victory against a CR 20 creature. Ofcourse monsters and characters being so diverse, its better to look at it as a party of 4 20th level pc's with the appropriate equipment vs 4 CR 20 monsters.

In 5e you are correct.

Quote from: S'mon;1115535IME I'd expect most level 20 5e PCs to be able to kerbstomp a typical CR 20 monster even without items, although it depends on circumstances (if the ancient red dragon ambushes the Wizard it won't go well). The system is very generous at higher level. An even match for a level 20 Barbarian PC is around CR 25; I'd expect a party of 4 can take down a CR 30.  I tend not to bother calculating CRs in my E20 game but I think my version of Xin's Reliquary was around CR 30 and they beat it ok on Saturday, a couple PCs went to 0 hp. It had ATT +15 with 4 attacks (plus 3 legendary action) doing 47 (crit 62) damage each, if 2 hit then could Rend for another 47. So with a few good hits it could drop most level 20 PCs in 1 round and did drop both the Paladin and the Rogue, who was Polymorphed into a giant ape.

The DMG says a typical CR 30 has AC 19, 806-850 hp, ATT +14 and 303-320 damage/round. The Reliquary had AC 25, 442 hp (but Resist All unless attacker had the Sihedron), ATT +15, max damage without crits 47x9 = 423. It was backed up by 5 minions around CR 10-12 while the PCs had Shastaak the Rune Giant, worth around 2-3 of the minions. The PCs were level 20E Barbarian, Rogue, Druid & Paladin.

Really?! I have never played at high levels in 5e.
I have heard about the whole high level monsters are kinda weak in 5e multiple times, but didn't know what to make of it.
Maybe the designers balanced the whole thing, thinking that you wouldn't take feats or multiclass?

I haven't played many high level campaigns, but in my experience characters in D&D can generally roflstomp encounters of comparable level, and the higher the level and more decked out in stacking magical crap the worse it tends to get. IMO the rules don't accurately account for scaling power as you add up a bunch of special abilities and magic items. The one 20+ level group I played in 2e became so laughably powerful the dual-wielding fighter--decked out in +5 scimitars, weapon mastery and two-weapon fighting abilities--and my chain lightning spamming witch could take out a great wyrm in a single round or two, IIRC. Granted this was 2e, where dragons were weaker, but that fighter could routinely make called shots to the head (-8 penalty) against fully armored warriors, with like 5 attacks per round, and not miss.

There was nothing in the Monsters Manual that could give them a challenge--the only way to do it was to make crap up, and the rules didn't account for ridiculously low THAC0 with weapon mastery, uber strength and magic bonuses. The only way to make the fighter miss was to artificially inflate an encounter's AC just so that particular character (who was a freak) would have a hard time at things. Granted, this group was using special weapon mastery rules, but I did the math at the time and even removing that ability, he would still have been able to routinely call shot to the head (or at least have a decent chance of success) anything in the Monsters Manual.

This why I tend to give monsters class levels and access to every single ability that PCs have. And I've been seriously considering Pundit's +0 magic weapon rule, cuz the +X magic bonuses just throw things out of wack. And creature resistance to non-magic weapons is an artificial measure anyways that DOES NOT increase challenge the moment that characters acquire magic weapons--especially when you consider that the +X bonuses actually increase both, damage AND hit rates. So it ultimately DECREASES challenge once characters are equipped with the required uber weapons.

Quote from: Malfi;1115601Really?! I have never played at high levels in 5e.
I have heard about the whole high level monsters are kinda weak in 5e multiple times, but didn't know what to make of it.
Maybe the designers balanced the whole thing, thinking that you wouldn't take feats or multiclass?

The system is very playable without feats or multiclassing. Those do not necessarily even give a big boost.

Quote from: Malfi;1115598My take for 4e is that a lot of people used inherent bonuses with magic items so they wouldn't have to worry too much about magic items themselves. Which is pretty great, but not exactly what we are talking about.

We used inherent bonuses and humans/martials only for a Robin Hood-style campaign to very good effect. All inherent really do is keep you mostly in line with the system's +1/level presumptions for attack and defense.

You could forego the inherent bonuses too if you just subtracted 1/4 levels from the PCs when determining encounter difficulty (i.e. a 12th level PC with no items is about equal to a level 9 with expected items). Given the dearth of level 24+ monsters this actually makes going not only no magic items, but no inherent bonuses almost a feature instead of a flaw since a 30th level no-items PC is about equal to a 23rd level with items and there are plenty of low epic monsters you can challenge them with for as long as your campaign needs to finish up.

In practice, item powers in 4E were a non-issue at our table. No one used them even if they got them because they were sub-par to your personal powers by design (a daily item power is only as strong as a class encounter power) and fights were over before they'd matter. Theme abilities and powers were far more important to players than items ever were.

Honestly, the only items players ever cared about were the ones that added static bonuses to things (ex. the staff of ruin was what every wizard wanted because of the matching item bonus to damage was more valuable than any 1/day encounter power would ever be). Item powers in 4E, as designed were one of the biggest misfires of the edition (and I say that as a huge 4E fan).

As a result, it was pretty easy to just leave out magic items entirely for the most part. Players had more than enough powers just from their race/class/theme already and the only practical difference in terms of game-play to just using inherent bonuses was that on-level fights weren't automatic curb-stomps in the party's favor.

Frankly, leaving out magic items and using just inherent bonuses (or NOT using inherent bonuses or items) resulted a LOT more fun play experience in 4E overall.

Quote from: Haffrung;1114973Published adventures in the TSR era had ridiculous numbers of magic items. At the end of each module we'd hold a magic item draft, with each PC selecting an item in turn until they were all gone. For a typical adventure, our party of 6 or 7 PCs would walk away with 5-6 magic items each, sometimes more.

In the period where I went mostly with homebrew content, I dialled that back dramatically. Few, but better, items.

Now 5E has dialled things back as well. Dungeon of the Mad Mage has huge levels, with 30-50 rooms each. And each level there are around 4 or 5 magic items (including consumables). I feel it's actually too few for a dungeon-crawl campaign, and I've added a few more.

Which ones? Ive gone through some of the BX modules and they are surprisingly light on magic items. Scrolls and potions seemed the most common items to find. The occasional +1 weapon or armour.

Quote from: Chris24601;1115449Should a wizard's spellbook include solutions for every situation? Should they have to maybe use something other than their core class feature in order to adapt to different encounters?

Quote from: Shasarak;1115460Should a Wizard have to use one spell for their whole career?  There are classes like the Warlock that spam Eldritch Blast over and over but the Wizard is supposed to be the swiss army knife.

I dont really see the problem of the Fighter having to use a +1 Silver Holy weapon instead of their +5 weapon if that is the best tool for the job.

Keep in mind that prior a wizard had on hand to apply to problems only the spells they had memorized for each spell slot. They were not "swiss army knives" they were "Batman utility belts". Make do with what you happened to prep before going out to smack evil around today.

My favorite option in 4e was upgrading magic items to grow progression-wise along with your character; so you might find one or two magic items near the start that are relatively low-powered, and magic items could be rare in general, but then later you slaughter a dragon king (leveling up in the process), dip your sword in its blood and gain a +1 or a new power or whatever.

Out of curiosity, does 5e have anything like that?