Whetstone and Chalk

grittier games can call for more realism as can games that do more tracking. Further, some folks (both DMs and players) want/need more than the "bare essentials" when designing dungeons and bastion spaces so leaving in those container types etc. can be useful for some of us. If they aren't for you just ignore them. I'm kinda tired of folks that don't want/need things I do want/need trying to tell me I can't/shouldn't have them because they don't need/want them.

Quote from TheGnome5786 >>

Carry some rations and water.

 

Plus how do you feed and water your horses?

Horses can pull wagons of food and water.

 

The DM does not need to disable Goodberry. Your group just doesn't have a caster with the spell.

Twisting a non druid character into something that can cast the spell is normally not needed and something better for that character can be picked.

I am firmly part of the "realism isn't fun regarding tracking supplies" camp. A lot of it is busy work, and as someone who has played Joel Hardin's Mogul to the end...busy paperwork is not fun for me.

Rangers & several subclasses can learn Goodberry, too.

Can we not descend into Simulationist VS Abstractionist gameplay style arguments? They are tedious and unproductive as edition wars.

Different stroke for different folks. Move on with your lives.

Quote from TheGnome5786 >>

The DM does not need to disable Goodberry. Your group just doesn't have a caster with the spell.

I am curious: how many times have you brought new players into a campaign where you are clear with players that tracking rations and food is going to be a thing you do as dm, that severe environments will be a common thing, how many times do you do that and no one chose to build a charavter that can magically create food?

Druids and rangers can cast goodberry. Clerics, paladins, and artificers can cast create food and water.

Thats 5 different classes that could prepare one spell and make the problem go away. Plus the Guide background gives folks access to the goodberry spell and shillelagh cantrip, which can be used by many other builds, since you can select int, wis, or cha as your spellcasting ability.

How many times have you seen a party in a extreme survival envirment campaign, and no one had a magical means to make it go away?

How many parties saw an extreme environment with possible starbation being a refular ocurence, and everyone said, you know what, im NOT taking goodberry spell?

The only party ive ever seen where no one had the goodberry spell was a campaign where the dm banned it cause they thought trying tonstarve us would be something players would enjoy.

Quote from GnollitAll78450 >>

Can we not descend into Simulationist VS Abstractionist gameplay style arguments?

Hasn't that been the focus of this discussion from the start?

There are a couple of basic ways of handling a PC announcing "I'm going to mark our path with chalk" (or whatever)

1. Let them do it if they have chalk on their character sheet. Keep track of how much chalk they use.
2. Let them do it if they have chalk on their character sheet. Don't bother tracking how much they use, unless they try to do something silly.
3. Let them do it if they have some other composite component on their character sheet.
4. Give the player a roll to see if they thought to bring chalk. Or let them use some sort of metagame currency to 'buy' chalk.
5. Just assume they can have chalk if they want it.

Simulationist play tends towards the top of that list, abstract or cinematic play tends towards the bottom. D&D isn't all that consistent though its default is probably closest to (3). There's an argument for having some exploration type tool proficiencies, and having abstract equipment kits (like component pouch), so a Spelunker's Kit would have a bunch of stuff appropriate for exploring caves.

Funny that this player is OK with micromanaging spell components but not gear.  How Ironic.

Quote from Moxys >>

The original discussion is why did WotC decide to remove items that have been on equipment lists for decades.  The most common actual answer I have seen in table bloat. As if a few extra kilobytes of data will break Hasbro's budget.  Ridiculous.  The answer should have basically been, "Because they are stupid."

Remember, physical books exist, and everything you put in a book is taking up space that you can't use for something else. My only issue with removing chalk is that there are so many more deserving things for removal.

Quote from Moxys >>

The original discussion is why did WotC decide to remove items that have been on equipment lists for decades.  The most common actual answer I have seen in table bloat. As if a few extra kilobytes of data will break Hasbro's budget.  Ridiculous.  The answer should have basically been, "Because they are stupid."

 
As has already been pointed out to you multiple times now it's not a website thing. It's a physical printing thing. Every word, every space of every page, has a cost. The less words, the less pages - the less cost to make the book. When making the physical book they also have to think about how much content versus how much cost. Add more content in one place then you need to reduce content somewhere else to avoid inflating the cost. This becomes particularly relevant when you're hiring artists to make more artwork. Also, due to how mass book production works, books are made in set number of sheets called "signatures" - even if you're one page over, you end up paying for the whole signature (for bigger books typically 16 or 32 pages per signature). So content volume needs to match the number of signatures to avoid paying for many blank pages. Cutting back to avoid a mostly blank signature can be a saving of about $30,000 or so in a single printing run. And a book can have multiple printing runs. 

For you, content management of a book might seem stupid. But for WotC they are large and important decisions which affect many thousands of dollars. And this is just the oversimplified quickie explanation - it is actually a far greater and more complex thing than I can give words to.

Just because you don't understand how it works doesn't mean you get to call other people stupid. So, no, the answer is most assuredly not them "being stupid". 

Quote from Moxys >>

Funny that this player is OK with micromanaging spell components but not gear.  How Ironic.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/phb-2024/spells#MaterialM

"If a spell doesn’t consume its materials and doesn’t specify a cost for them, a spellcaster can use a Component Pouch or ... a Spellcasting Focus"

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/phb-2024/equipment#ArcaneFocusVaries

An arcane focus staff costs 5gp. So even a level 1 caster can afford one.

And then the only material components a spellcaster needs to worry about are the ones that the spell says costs some amount of gold "diamond dust worth 300 gp" or the spell says it consumes the component.

Most dms just let players subtract the gold value of a consumed component from the gold in their inventory, wxcept perhaps some of the more extreme components "blood of a humanoid killed innthe last 24 hours".

No player i know wants to micromanage food, ammunition, or fiddly little spell components. Weirdly, the times ive had s dm enforce micromanagement in these sorts of things, they always say that it creates more. "Realism" for the game, insisting the players prefer it. But talking with players in these games, they invariably tell me (when the dm isnt listening) that they absolutely hate micromanaging, and theyre only in the campaign because the dm is in their group and its their turn to dm. Players roll their eyes and tolerate a dm insisting on micromanaging.

This is what i was talking about when i said no one eants to play a game of "balance your imaginary checkbook with random dice rolls". No one finds micromanaging fun. Players sometimes do it because they got burned by a dm before so they count every item in their pack because one time a dm refused to let them do something unless the player showed the receipts. When dms do it, i swear it feels like theyre just power tripping over the players.  When i am planning the next encounter for mynplayers I usually am thinking of ways to tie in specific pc things to give them the spotlight. But there is definitely a strain of dm who ia far more focused on thinking of ways to limit, deny, and shut down the players. Counting ammunition, food, carrying capacity, and spell components is one way to do that.

Just assume archers recover most ammunition and craft some new ones durijg long rests. Use goodberry for food when needed. Give every player a bag of holding so you can ignore encumbrance and carry capacity for most things. And casters use foci so no one has to list every single spell component in their inventory sheet or component pouch.

Then, focus on story related things like saving the world or whatever. People play dnd to be heroic, not accountants.