Quote from: VincentTakeda;1104064*clears throat* back in mah day the way you kept young nimble fingered characters from pilfering the town dry was you had ludicrously powerful wizards keeping a whole wizard school's worth of watchful eyes on their entire towns and quickly reprimanding the dirty thieves in the name of the crown they are loyal to.  In order for wizards to not all become a hunted class, they have to prove to the common folk that they will not use their powers for evil and will keep their own kind in check.

If the owner of the local magic item shop needed to hit the road for a few days well... He sells magic items for a living. Pretty sure he can afford to pay a powerful party to escort him from place to place if he hasnt already set himself up with magical transportation of his own.  Thats the thing about society.  Towns come together so that their communities can depend on each other to behave well with each other and watch out for each other.  A pickpockety 2nd level wizard should be visited by the local mage's guild long before he gets to be a pickpockety 5th level wizard or he's gonna have to quickly be the kind of wizard that isn't welcome in town at all anymore.

Thats why the good guys are supposed to always win.  In fantasy settings, unlike the real world, its easy for good guys to put together 20 really powerful good guys who want to do the right thing for the right reasons, and the bad guys are like the sith or saruman or starscream. Disperate individuals or pairs at each others throats in back handed one upmanship with upstart backstabbing powerhungry minions that you also have to keep in check and under thumb to prevent them from being the student that becomes the teacher or murdering you in your sleep.  In a fantasy setting its hard to be powerful evil because your days as a weak evil are under no mentorship and lots of scrutiny.  Its hard to form large groups of evil because bad people dont play well with others and lonely is dangerous especially in a world with magic.  The only way for bad guys to get any degree of power being bad particularly in groups is with isolation, secrecy and discretion. Not downtown.

Combine natural power structure with the idea that its easy for good to come together and difficult for evil to find sponsors patronage and fellowship.  Its supposed to be a self policing system.

Frankly by the time you're poweful enough to scry and go invisible at the local mage's academy, it wouldnt surprise me at all if part of your duties included a shift as security and surveilance at the local magic item shop.

Look at hogwarts. They've got ghosts floating through the halls and dead people living in pictureframes hanging on the walls.  I'm surprised theres a square inch of that place that isnt under constant surveillance. Thanks to moaning myrtle even the bathroom isnt safe.

I think a lot of you guys GM for different reasons.

The party steals brooms and apples without consequences by creatively applying game mechanics? Great they are PCs and relatively rare (especially in 5e where NPCs don't have class levels).

Quote from: S'mon;1104072I would think if it was that easy I'd have seen a player try it sometime!

This seems a really strange thing to worry about, and your anti mage hand powder destroys the actual utility of the cantrip in play, which tends to be more stuff like lifting the jailer's key from a wall hook to free the imprisoned PCs, not stealing an apple from the market stall.

I'd say just ban the cantrip, but then that is impinging on a significant class ability of the Arcane Trickster. The one IMC does the remote lockpick/disarm thing a lot and avoids a lot of traps that way.

Yes, adventurers don't steal fruit much. I'm thinking more about how a pseudo-medieval world could function when that kind of infinite ability is readily available. Jailers don't hang keys within 30' of a cells, obviously...and criminal arcane casters are probably blinded immediately, since any who want it can gain a short range teleport as a bonus action anyway.

It's the same thing with "assassins"...why would anyone bother paying an assassin a few thousand gold to kill someone when "raise dead" only costs a thousand? Coming back from the dead is super-easy, barely an inconvenience in 5e, and yet supposedly there's an "assassin" archetype.

Quote from: Doom;1104105It's the same thing with "assassins"...why would anyone bother paying an assassin a few thousand gold to kill someone when "raise dead" only costs a thousand? Coming back from the dead is super-easy, barely an inconvenience in 5e, and yet supposedly there's an "assassin" archetype.

Makes you wonder how diamonds are seen in D&D worlds. They are literally the currency of (returning to) life, so anyone with costly diamond jewelry is basically showing contempt for those that might need to be raised from the dead. Do "cleric cartels" seek to maintain a monopoly over diamonds?

Quote from: HappyDaze;1104110Makes you wonder how diamonds are seen in D&D worlds. They are literally the currency of (returning to) life, so anyone with costly diamond jewelry is basically showing contempt for those that might need to be raised from the dead. Do "cleric cartels" seek to maintain a monopoly over diamonds?

In my game world, the dwarves (main source of such gemstones) try a new scheme every few yearss to make more profit off of 1,000 gp diamonds. One year, you needed to buy "official appraisals" for well over a thousand, or there are coupons you need to buy first. Currently they have a Gem Fair in the Dwarven Capital, where you can buy a single 1,000gp diamond. Of course, you need to buy a ticket to get into the fair...

I find that if you start worrying about how a D&D world works logically, then you either start drifting off into playing in a world that has no relationship to the real world you live in or you end up playing GURPS.

Quote from: Omega;1103541um? Too slow? We found most combats were over fairly quickly.

It's a relative thing. Faster than some games, a lot slower than OSR D&D still though.

Quote from: Daztur;1104189It's a relative thing. Faster than some games, a lot slower than OSR D&D still though.

Epic battles in 5e take a long time, but at least they're playable. Yesterday my Red Hand of Doom 5e D&D session was nearly all taken up with a huge fight between 5 level 7 PCs and 6 59 hp ogres, 2 85 hp ettins, a hobgoblin bard-type, a goblin Ranger-type, and a black dragon. There were a couple minutes of Mexican-stand-off in between two huge battles, about 3 hours total combat time before the non-dragon enemies were all dead (the dragon had swam off to summon its lizardman horde).

Quote from: Doom;1104185In my game world, the dwarves (main source of such gemstones) try a new scheme every few yearss to make more profit off of 1,000 gp diamonds. One year, you needed to buy "official appraisals" for well over a thousand, or there are coupons you need to buy first. Currently they have a Gem Fair in the Dwarven Capital, where you can buy a single 1,000gp diamond. Of course, you need to buy a ticket to get into the fair...

I think that the diamond market must be pretty fixed on prices as I don't think the gods or their divine magic will allow a gem cutter or diamond merchant to shift the price of diamond to allow/disallow it to qualify for raise dead. I think the price is based upon a diamond of "size x+ and purity y+" and the magic won't care how much it was actually sold for. Who knows, perhaps all prices in the world are based off of this diamond standard--they sure would be important enough.

Quote from: Doom;1104052The 5e version of Mage Hand lets you grab things from 30' away. You can't pick a lock with it, sure, but no open air stall can defend against that. An urchin might be a threat...but mage hand is the same threat, with a 30' head start  from all directions. Toss in possibly doing this from an adjacent rooftop or something. It's just too easy.

I have to ask.....does your setting include a disproportionate number of mage hand-wielding wizards with a penchant for thievery, so much so that they are a more inimical threat to shoplifting than street urchins are?

Call me crazy, but I would expect in any D&D fantasy city to see a significantly higher ratio of urchins to wizards.

Quote from: camazotz;1104250I have to ask.....does your setting include a disproportionate number of mage hand-wielding wizards with a penchant for thievery, so much so that they are a more inimical threat to shoplifting than street urchins are?

Call me crazy, but I would expect in any D&D fantasy city to see a significantly higher ratio of urchins to wizards.

This is a good point. Also in that vein: what amazing wares are these vendors selling in plain sight on the open streets that would make those goods worthwhile targets for leveled Wizards? So much so they'd willingly risk the legal consequences for thievery, rather than just paying for them with some of that excess gold?

Quote from: Zalman;1104251This is a good point. Also in that vein: what amazing wares are these vendors selling in plain sight on the open streets that would make those goods worthwhile targets for leveled Wizards? So much so they'd willingly risk the legal consequences for thievery, rather than just paying for them with some of that excess gold?

I think you are missing the point, the entire setting is written around preventing the PCs from doing things with their cool powers. It doesn't matter that basically no-one else can do these things. Those NPCs aren't a PC the DM can tell no too.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1104256I think you are missing the point, the entire setting is written around preventing the PCs from doing things with their cool powers. It doesn't matter that basically no-one else can do these things. Those NPCs aren't a PC the DM can tell no too.

I can buy that. The plot potential of this metalogic applied in-game is enticingly wonderful and awful all at once:

"We merchants realized that you wiley adventurers are always using mage hand to filch our precious fruits. While the actual cost is nominal...there's only six of you, after all, we still nonetheless decided that the exhorbitant cost of a magical spray that we could then later market to the dungeons and evil mages you regularly invade the territories of was worth the initial funding cost. Now, I sold 1,000 pounds of the toxic stuff to that death knight the Black Currant last week, paid 10,000 gold for it he did! And he says for me to tell you lot that he's 'looking forward to your next sojourn into his dungeons, bitches.' His words, not mine!"



My group always has at least one filcher. I just have them roll a quick thievery test (whether its got mage hand involved or not) and tell them they filch X number of fruits or silver pieces over Y DC, problem solved. If they crit fumble then apparently someone important noticed....but as a rule, this is what I call "attention getting behavior" that can derail the rest of the session easily so I just downplay it as much as possible. This removes some of the lustre....for example in a recent Pathfinder 2E game I ran the group was in downtime mode, and when the thief decided to go on a filching spree I turned in to their "earn income" roll using Thievery, instead. When the disruptiveness of the task is removed, it loses its lustre and the rest of the players will be grateful that the rogue didn't get to hog the spotlight over filching fruit or loose change for thirty minutes.

Quote from: camazotz;1104264My group always has at least one filcher. I just have them roll a quick thievery test (whether its got mage hand involved or not) and tell them they filch X number of fruits or silver pieces over Y DC, problem solved. If they crit fumble then apparently someone important noticed....but as a rule, this is what I call "attention getting behavior" that can derail the rest of the session easily so I just downplay it as much as possible. This removes some of the lustre....for example in a recent Pathfinder 2E game I ran the group was in downtime mode, and when the thief decided to go on a filching spree I turned in to their "earn income" roll using Thievery, instead. When the disruptiveness of the task is removed, it loses its lustre and the rest of the players will be grateful that the rogue didn't get to hog the spotlight over filching fruit or loose change for thirty minutes.

I like this idea.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1104256I think you are missing the point, the entire setting is written around preventing the PCs from doing things with their cool powers. It doesn't matter that basically no-one else can do these things. Those NPCs aren't a PC the DM can tell no too.

Oh I get the point. My point is that the setting is silly to be concerned with such a thing.

Mage Hand is an infinite use cantrip...don't have to be a leveled wizard, don't even have to be a wizard. Why are people who don't play 5e even bothering to post in this thread?

Don't need to be a bunch of people with this ability...a handful can wander from town taking stuff so casually it's laughable. The spray is only good for a month, so no real affect on PCs digging through abandoned tombs and whatnot.

It's not about the players at all, it's about how the world would function, although probably best to have this discussion with people who have at least passing familiarity with 5e.