Material Components
Once you’ve decided to ignore encumbrance, material components are usually the next fiddly-bits rules on the chopping block. Sure the bat guano/sulfur of fireball and the amber rod/fur of lightning bolt are amusing, but who wants to deal with all the bookkeeping? Well if you’re anything like Wizard, you understand how these nitty-gritty details can contribute to immersion. The big question becomes whether it’s worth the trade-off.
The answer will vary from mage to mage of course. When I’m the dude wielding the robe and wizard’s hat though, I like to ignore material components until they’re relevant. In other words, I won’t bother to track my stores of spider webs or ashes of mistletoe down to the gram. By the same token, if there’s good reason to wonder whether my component pouch is safe and handy, I’ll begin to pay attention.
Case in point, my group sat down to play Out of the Abyss last year, and that particular adventure begins (SPOILER ALERT) with a prison break. Your stuff has been taken from you by your nefarious jailers, meaning that melee-focused characters have to make do with whatever sharpened bone fragments and board-with-nail-in-it type weapons they can scavenge. My dude was not a melee type though. He was a warlock, and that meant I had only half a spell list to play with. My minor illusion was off the table, sheep being a rarity in the Underdark. I couldn’t pull off hex without a suitably petrified eye of newt, meaning I was on the lookout for amphibians lying in odd puddles. Material components were suddenly more than irrelevant details. They were affecting the game world in concrete ways, and I found myself enjoying the challenge.
My group escaped without recovering our stuff, so this kind of play continued as we leveled up and trekked through the subterranean wilderness. Tactical questions kept popping up, and I had a lot of interesting decisions to make. Should I bother taking invisibility without a ready supply of gum arabic? Was it worth sending my familiar into a danger zone without the necessary incense to summon him back? I’d have killed for an arcane focus of course, but I’d have also liked a rod of lordly might and a piggy back ride from the Demogorgon. All of these things were in short supply.
Understand, this is not the kind of experience I want to have every time I sit down for an adventure. More often than not I just want to throw my arcane weight around and feel like an eldritch badass. But after falling into the habit of hand-waving material components, it was nice to see that part of the game making the game interesting rather than irritating. It made my character’s struggles more concrete, and I think that was worth a little bit of inconvenience.
What about the rest of you guys? Do you bother tracking your material components, or do you prefer not to sweat the small stuff? Let’s hear all about the state of your component pouch down in the comments!
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Firstly, Wizard looks lovely in her old robes even now (and I guess Fighter is slightly more justified in calling it a dress).
Secondly, I cannot find a single spell that uses a carrot or lipstick, so I believe these are more mundane purchases.
Diamonds are traditionally used for resurrection magic, which Wizard cannot cast. However it is always prudent to keep a supply of diamonds on hand so your resident Cleric can raise you when you die. The spider is likely for spiderclimb (though why wizard doesn’t just use Skitter’s is beyond me). The bone is for some sort of necromancy – so far I have found Negative Energy Flood in 5e, and Boneshatter in Pathfinder. I hope Wizard hasn’t gone Goth on us again. I don’t know what type of leaf that is, but I know Melfs Acid Arrow requires a leaf, so I’m going to go with that one.
Strange… That “leaf” seems to have some sort of viscous golden fluid seeping out of it.
Looks more like honey comb to me. A quick search provides Magic Mouth and Suggestion
And then we both realized that Alchemist is also holding an actual leafy plant. Methinks I should have coordinated some kind of cheat sheet with my illustrator. :/
Lipstick is used for the friends cantrip.
Diamonds are used in the glyph of warding spell, the clone spell, the symbol spell, and chromatic orb.
Arcane lock requires gold dust, which I assume is what the gold is for (unless they’re being used to pay).
Animate dead requires bone dust (did wizard’s familiar die again?).
Not sure what the carrot is for. (I was really hoping it would be the component for true seeing or some other sight-improving spell)
Summary: friends, glyph of warding, arcane lock, animate dead, spider climb, suggestion, self’s acid arrow, and carrotify.
Used to be I just got myself an arcane focus, holy symbol, component pouch or similar thingamajib, and, one way or another, I always had them with me when I needed them. Only during a one-shot where I was playing a high elf fighter (and thus had access to a single cantrip), I explicitly bothered getting material components for it – a bit of phosphorus to cast Dancing Lights (which it didn’t consume, because it didn’t explicitly say so).
In our latest campaign, however, I’m playing a Hexblade warlock focused on martial rather than arcane arts, so I didn’t get myself a focus or anything. This, of course, mostly limits my spells to those without material components, the only exceptions being spells that use things I have anyways (e.g. Green-Flame Blade, which uses my weapon as a focus), or spells whose material is usually abundant (e.g. Armor of Agathys, which just needs some water). Still, though, the fact that I don’t just have access to all material components all the time made me care about them a lot more – after all, when I’m escaping a burning city, there isn’t a bucket of water around every corner.
I’m a big fan of self-imposed limitations. It can make for some interesting playstyles when you force yourself to move beyond the “good” choices and make an effective character anyway.
Or maybe I’m just a giant Johnny: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03
Of course, if our group had found some time to play since setting the stage, I’d already be level 3, pick up the Improved Pact Weapon invocation and would always have a focus on me, no matter what happens, so most of this would be moot. And sure, I could still limit myself, but I’m a warlock – resisting temptation isn’t exactly my strength.
I’m with you on the self-imposed limitations thing though. The biggest of which, right now, is that I chose not to take Eldritch Blast, which – let’s face it – is quite possibly the most powerful cantrip out there. But oh well, that’s the price of not going mainstream.
I like being aware of material components when I’m playing a character who only has a few spells available to them, like the phosphorous for your Dancing Lights. It adds a nice bit of flavour to the character, just as having the spell itself does, when spellcasting isn’t the character’s main focus.
On a full spellcaster, though, “meh, it’s all in the pouch somewhere”.
That’s an interesting game design takeaway: Give the player a reasonable amount of resource tracking. Too much and they’ll check out.
Ho Boy. I just started gearing up my new character, an Alchemist with an Intelligence of 20 and way to cautious. “You only die in Dungeons if you are not prepared enough”. And so I took 2 days to go through the alchemy supply, poisons, drugs and mundane items list.
I spend 10,5k Gold mostly in mundane Items, the only magic things being a (completly filled up) Bag of Holding and an efficient Quiver.
His biggest Enemy is the weightlimit. Aside from that he is prepared for pretty much everything. Oh, and one if the Discoverys I made is that Opium is a really badass cheap poison in Pathfinder. Killing your enemys? Nah. Make them addicted to your concoctions, and use them for your goals 🙂
I just had a buddy calm an animated library by donating a book, bribe a cleaning-obsessed pseudodragon with a spong, and pry open a sarcophagus with a crowbar. All at Level 15. A full pack is relevant all the way through. 🙂
I prefer to ignore any and all material components (or anything else really) unless it’s of a significant cost to the character. One of my favorite moments of epiphany on this website was when someone mentioned that they just don’t track how many arrows their character has, because at a few cp each it’s just not worth noticing to any adventurer above 2nd level. The name of the game is “Dungeons & Dragons”, not “Accountants and Audits”.
I think your Underdark-prisonbreak scenario worked out for 2 reasons- first, it was both an equipment-lost AND a hostile-environment scenario. Most of the prison-break campaigns I’ve read about either have their players getting their stuff back almost immediately and/or running into an extremely wealthy but poorly defended merchant just outside the prison gate so they have the gold to resupply at the next town. In your case though, it sounds like a cave full or bat-poop or pointy sticks was considerably more valuable than a dragon’s hoard. The second reason was that it sounds like EVERYONE was getting in on the act, so that tracking every little resource wasn’t just something that one player was doing. If someone in my group wants to mention that every single time we go into town his character is visiting the local magic-mart to stock up, that’s fine; I’m not going to object to another player’s roleplay. But it doesn’t add much for the rest of the group.
In other words, the focus of your game had shifted and resource-tracking was now an integral part of the experience, not just a fluffy bit of window-dressing. It’s not the kind of thing I think I’d want to do every single time, but for a specific arc it could be pretty cool.
I think we’re of the same mind here. That’s roughly what I meant by, “I like to ignore material components until they’re relevant.” Same deal with not tracking rations until you’re trekking across a desert. One is tedious bookkeeping, the other is critical resource tracking. It’s all about the context.
The way I handle arrows is, I ask everyone to write down how many arrows they carry, but I assume that they replenish their stock every time they’re in town, at no meaningful cost. That way, they still need to make a decision balancing how many arrows they expect to need in an adventure versus the awkwardness of carrying around hundreds of arrows, but it’s only ever tracked on a per-expedition basis.
I’ve never implemented it, but I’ve always been enamored of the whole “buying dice of arrows” thing. A fresh quiver is a d12, but you roll every time you shoot until you get a 1. Then you have a d10 of arrows, then a d8, etc. It’s more abstract, but it involves less tracking and still affords the interesting possibility of running out at a critical moment.
Honey is Suggestion, Carrot is Darkvision (Although Wizard isn’t much of a team player so I don’t see a reason for them to cast it. Better to let Battlemaster Fighter die in the dark so he can roll up a more functional Mountain Dwarf Fighter who has plenty of feats, but also has a resistance, and Darkvision) the rest I’m not sure.
You can use a foci to substitute components unless they have a cost, so I’ve never bothered to track them. That said; my GM lets us use the optional disarming rule. (DMG pg. 271) which she wasn’t expecting for us to use against casters. Me: “So now that they’re disarmed, they can’t use any spells with material components.” GM: Shuffles through spell cards Me: “You’ll notice that almost every blasty spell has a material component.”
Wizard’s new pronouns are she/her/hers. Weirdly though, she still uses “his royal highness” at formal events. 😛
Last time I was stealthing around in Ravenloft, I had an invisibility spell up and my stealin’ fingers were itchy. I thought it would be a good idea to lift the enemy caster’s component pouch while I was casing the joint, but my table was quick to declare it dirty pool and outside the list of available actions in that campaign. Just goes to show, some people are so dedicated to treating components as background details that they disappear from the game entirely, even a possible point of interaction!
Components matter in two contexts: 1. If the have a cost associated with them we pay attention. 2. If they’re taken away your spells that use them are taken away. Stealing a component pouch is no worse than stealing an axe.
Tricksy narrator… we can’t see what’s in her /basket/ now can we?
Dammit… This is the trouble with writing these things before I’ve seen the image. One sec.
…
Fixed!
Because I utilize Spheres of Power instead of vancian spellcasting systems, I don’t bother with material components. However, I am a huge fan of Pathfinder’s Player Companion: Alchemy Manual, and the Spontaneous Alchemy included therein. I definitely enjoyed keeping track of what ingredients and tools I had on hand and even wrote out recipes on notecards, creating a formula book of sorts.
Ever since that game, I have made sure as a GM to include alchemical components (or harvestable creature components) as loot for every encounter.
Ever since I saw this take on the idea…
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/metamagicComponents.htm
…I’ve always wanted to try something like it. Way back when I was just starting Pathfinder, I actually told an alchemist that no, he couldn’t harvest giant scorpion venom because it would upset the expected wealth-by-level charts. I like to think I’ve become a better GM since then.
Magic mouth requires honeycomb (and jade dust), Mordenkainen’s faithful hound requires a piece of bone (and a silver whistle)
…and clone requires a (1000 gp) diamond, but there’s 5 gems on the counter and only 4 party members, althought it’s possible Wizard’s recent transition made it more likely for her to recognise a certain other Elf.
Or it’s the gems you crush for wall of force
checks Xanathar’s Guide for lipstick-based spells
I got nuthin’
Are you sure you’re looking for the right keywords?
It’s obviously for Friends since you need makeup. It’s fresh in my mind from arguing about it’s worth with the Bard in our recent Tomb of Annihilation campaign.
We don’t tend to track components either unless there’s a monetary cost involved in until something extreme happens such as getting jailed or robbed. We did have one Wizard who spent in games year’s and money on an arcane focus that was stored in a tattoo because he was paranoid about being disarmed.
Well I mean, it obviously isn’t for Wizard. She’s more of a winter, and would probably gravitate to a nice dark purple.
Well, there’s dragon’s breath, which is ‘touch one willing creature’ and requires a hot pepp-
‘Hot Pepper’ is totally a lipstick colour, isn’t it…?
My group and I usually go with the rather common approach of “if there is a cost listed, you must have it, otherwise, whatever”.
In the same way, we treated encumbrance as “eh, as long as you’re not trying to carry a statue on your back, whatever”.
We tend to be pretty handwave-y in general. It let us focus on the part of the game we like, namely combat, rp and exploration (but mostly, combat).
I like that material components exist, because it depict magic as a rather complex thing rather than just something abstract, and it’s funny how some of them are clever (like the copper coin for Detect Thoughts). I also like that the fact that this is a pen&paper RPG allows those like my group and I to completely ignore the fact that material components exist because we can’t be bothered tracking them. It’s the best of both worlds.
Nine times out of ten, that’s my approach as well. 🙂
It’s interesting to me that both sides of this question are concerned with immersion:
–No, we don’t track them because it distracts from the actually interesting parts of the game.
–Yes, of course we track them because it makes the world seem more alive.
You picks your poison and you makes your choice.
Surely the diamonds are for Stoneskin? That one’s a Wizardly staple.
Also, why were piggyback rides from Demogorgon in short supply in your campaign? I’m sure he’d be glad to give one if you only ask.
One of his heads might wanna give a piggyback ride, but they never agree on anything.
The constant sanity checks make it hard to ask Demogorgon anything.
Sanity is overrated. Just ask that flying angel tarrasque over there!
So funny story aboot tracking shit your character carries. I had a character sheet I was using for a year-ish. We were away from civilization for a while and didn’t have time to go shopping. Inevitably I forgot aboot stuff I had and a lot of stuff faded. I kept wishing I had a crowbar.
Then when I was copying to a new sheet I saw some really faded writing that turned out was a crowbar. It doesn’t help that my penmanship is a warcrime. I also got to anoint the new sheet with someone else’s blood. I squished a mosquito on it so there’s a blood smear over the death saves.
I feel ya, bro. This one was a bit autobiographical:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/arcane-notation
I once crafted a 3.5 sorcerer that would utilize the narrow list of verbal-only spells, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the issue of spell components while still being able to use heavy armor (which the character was proficient with) without worry of spell-casting failure chance.
But the one character I did make that required spell components was a Beguiler-Swiftblade that basically required heavily upon his licorice root. Since Haste and Distract Assailant were his most frequently used spells, he just kept the components in two marked belt-pouches.
Basically, I avoid having to use spell-components. On the plus side, I found a way to use all of those “Power Word X” spells that were added in Races of the Dragon!
I was looking at that “verbal only” strategy for an eldritch knight over in PF. It wasn’t an especially impressive spell list, but it was definitely enough to work with. I may have to revisit the concept one day.
I’m in a material component relevance situation in an online game right now. I’m playing a level 2 magical child vigilante (who, as a 52-year-old human woman, only nominally fits that description), and we just got ambushed by bandits in our sleep. They rousted us up out of our bedrolls at crossbow-point, meaning that not only am I not wearing my armour, I don’t have my spell component pouch. This made me check over my spell list, and I discovered that without my spell component pouch, all I can cast is Acid Splash, Detect Magic and Feather Fall. If they end up dragging us back to their camp as slaves, I’m gonna have to hope they make me work in the kitchen, so I can get some butter for Grease.
Now see, I think that’s exactly the moment that components are supposed to create. It’s a Batman-style ,”If only I could reach my utility belt!” And that’s just good fun.
Either Sorcerer was taller than I remembered, or Wizard got significantly shorter…
I talked to Laurel about it. “Girl wizard is shorter. Because I felt like it. So there.”
I’m pretty solidly in the camp of “I don’t want to do all this bookkeeping”, but done in certain ways it is interesting. Like in your example where you’re doing it entirely because you have so few of the resources to keep track of. Having to make decisions based on small resource management is interesting. Having to do bookkeeping when there’s no real risk of being out of resources isn’t.
As an example, I’m starting up a homebrewed game with very few rules where the characters are explorers. I’ve asked them to name every item they have. Because in this it will hopefully be interesting when things break, get lost, run out, or they realize something they didn’t think to bring would be really useful and all of that is part of the experience of being an beginner to world traveling.
But in the same token, if they say they’re taking supplies for things like “starting fires” or “making glasswork” I’m fine with them just saying that and not needed to tell me every one of those items and how they work. As those details aren’t an essential part of the experience and it’s unreasonable to not assume that characters living in a world of that kind wouldn’t have a better understanding of what they need to do those things than we do.
I always liked the idea of class kits to start. It saves a lot of trouble at character gen when you can just say, “I buy a barbarian’s kit,” rather than, “I buy a backpack, a belt pouch, a blanket, a flint and steel, an iron pot, rope, soap, torches (10), trail rations (5 days), and a waterskin.”
So what happened to Alc’s muscles, tumor, tentacles, and other assorted body-horror?
Glamers / duration expired.
I’ve had the occasional dilemma when someone needs a LOT of Material Components. A small splash of oil or a lizard’s eye we just assume the player has on hand, but what about the high-level spells that require thousands of GP worth of materials? What does a thousand gold worth of oil look like? Is it a small bottle of the essence of something exotic, or a dozen barrels of silken coconut oil? Does burning a thousand gold’s worth of incense mean lighting one extremely expensive candle, or a cathedral’s worth of small ones? The spell doesn’t specify. Can you mix and match?
To avoid headaches I’ve usually opted for smaller quantities, and instructed my spellcasters to ask for “the good stuff” when buying expensive spell components.
My assumption when they ask for those kind of expensive components, it is code for some in-universe specific items that has certain qualities which are of magical importance, with the reduction to a gold cost just being for the convenience of us, the players/gms that sits around the table.
So a spell requiring a thousands gold worth of rare oils, will need some specific mixture and type of rare oil, rather than just any oil that isn’t common and whose price add up to 1000 gp.
Normally I assume that this defaults to a small amount, but “ritual type spells” (anything with a casting time measured in minutes or more) might very well require a lot more, mostly because I think it might look cool if the cleric lights a hundred candles.
Last time Laurel’s rogue ate a faceful of scythe, we had the good fortune to be in a port town. Turns out that, when it comes to reincarnate, 1,000 gp worth of whale oil will do the trick.
For a less conventional approach, I’ve toyed with the idea of “forge spirits” that need to be appeased. If you give them X amount of gp they will do what you ask, whether that’s spell casting or item making. Of course, you need different breeds to get different effects, and some of them are particular about the quality of diamonds and the amount of raw gold. That gives you a good excuse to be inconsistent: one spirit might make do with a cathedral’s worth of candles, while another demands the one special one, while a third is willing to take either/or.
One thing I was considering when making my “PCs shipwrecked on a haunted island” campaign was that a wizard who lived there before everything went wrong (and had tried and failed to contain the situation) built a bunch of safehouses which included wondrous machines that could generate most any object if you poured a sufficiently large amount of valuable material into it. So it functioned sort of like the Recycler/Fabricator in the video game Prey – you loot everything, keep the stuff you can use and dump the rest of it into the machine to be converted into cash, which can be used to buy/upgrade stuff despite the lack of friendly civilization.
I didn’t end up using the idea, but I could see it working in other contexts.
Great art for Wizard! You should use this for the updated Role Call picture.
Adding it to the to-do list! We need to get Street Samurai and Arcane Archer up there as well.
You know, I don’t consider this a negative, but it seems like Wizard’s recent change has caused some shifting in her behavior. In the old days I feel like Wizard, when confronted with a question like that, would have condescended with the haughty ‘Spreadsheets ARE magic’ of a player long-suffering under the thumb of the rest of the table finding his excessive bookkeeping habits to be tedious. But now Wizard is smiling and bright-eyed while she says it in a tone that when considering her facial expression, seems to come off more as ‘Spreadsheets ARE magic, let me explain how!’
Did that robe have an accompanying Charisma boost, I wonder?
This genderflip has revitalized the character for Wizard’s player. Before, things were getting stale, but now roleplaying this character is fresh and exciting! That is often the case when a PC finds themselves with a new character arc or connection to ongoing events. Especially since Wizard’s player seems to be the RP-heavy type.
It will be interesting to see what some good old fashioned manic outrage looks like on the new Wizard:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-time
I used to think, like most people, that components were a boring distraction to the actual fun bits of playing a wizard.
Until I played a wizard.
Tracking down and collecting components suddenly became the focus of my character – components weren’t an item I needed to gather so I could go adventuring, my character went adventuring so he could gather components. It became an additional treasure type that was exclusively for me. Whenever we hit an alchemical lab, a cave full of weird plants and mushrooms, or even killed a new rare creature, my character came alive sifting through what all the other characters considered worthless crap to extract items that might prove useful one day as a spell component. My Bag of Holding was crammed with jars and bottles containing eyes, scales, blood samples, and myriad other internal organs and liquids syphoned from rare and fantastic creatures.
Granted, me and my DM then starting working on a houserule system for using substitute components (no Bulls Blood for Bull’s Strength, how about Gorilla Blood), and began introducing rare components which varied the effects of spells where they are used (This rare white sulphur causes a Fireball to do cold Damage).
Rather than being an admin task, it quickly became a defining feature of my characters RP.
You know that scene in “Fellowship” where all the hobbits are sorting through the remnants of Farmer Maggot’s crop? Right before the “get off the road” scene? That’s my mental image of wizards encountering fungus.