Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I'm going to focus entirely on Revivify... But this question is very generic. In a typical D&D campaign, one would simply buy what was needed in a nearby shop avoiding this situation entirely. But in any situation where that cannot happen, there seems to be a... Discrepancy... In the rules.
In the gemstones section, there are several categories of gemstone values... Let's focus on two... 100 gp and 500 gp. Now... The Revivify spell requires a diamond worth at least 300 gp. There are no such gemstones... It's either 100 or 500. Why list a value that doesn't exist?
Worse... There are no 500 gp diamonds created through random generation... They only exist at the maximum value tier.
What exactly is the intent here? Is it just to irritate the players? Purely an oversight? Is there a gem cutting skill that fixes this? What do people do besides let the players buy non-existent items. :)
Thank you for any insights provided. Because this is really bugging me at the moment.
Just because it's not on a treasure table doesn't make it a "non-existent item". Arguably, the fact that it's listed as a spell component means that it DOES exist. They aren't going to list every possible variation/value of gemstone ever on their treasure tables. In both the 2014 and 2024 DMG the only diamond that I see listed on the gem tables is worth 5000gp. But that does not mean that diamonds of cheaper values don't exist. There are MANY spell components that don't find their way onto these treasure tables. Besides, these are just ideas/random generation tables if you want the randomness to dictate what's in treasure chests/other loot spots. If you want a 300gp diamond in there, just put it there. Or make your own tables and add that to it.
That being said...I always make my players purchase spell components like that, I don't just give it to them. If they want to be able to cast their spells, then it's their responsibility to ensure they have the components to do so. Whether they want to go to a jewelry shop for gems, a magic shop, a temple that might be willing to sell healing spell components, or try for an oddities/antique shop to see what they have - as long as they put the effort into obtaining their own components I make it available to them in limited quantities. A player proficient in Jeweler's Tools could probably make a check to take a 5000gp diamond and cut it down several to 300gp diamonds; I've never had someone ask to do that but I'd probably allow it. I wouldn't allow them to turn a cheaper diamond into a more expensive one, though.
In my campaign, there are no shops. They only have what they can find... So it's an... Anomaly... In the rules that's irritating me at the moment.
I mean, if you cut off shops altogether then you've either killed off a fair number of priced spell components outright- there's plenty that are some kind of custom/specialized item- or you'll need to hand-waive plausibility and be ready to let the players "happen to find" such components in loot. Priced spell components exist on the assumption that players will be receiving regular installments of gold and have the ability to convert them into such materials. If you're nixing that for campaign purposes, it's not the system's fault you're encountering errors from operating outside its parameters.
Nothing is stopping the GM from putting in things which aren't in the book. You can put in a 300 GP diamond wherever it feels appropriate. This amount of very minor tinkering shouldn't be intimidating to a GM.
(Also, if your campaign has no shops, then it seems like there's little reason to have any currency at all in the campaign. Treasure isn't useful if you can't spend it.)
First, I’ll say there is proficiency in jewelers tools, which I, personally, would allow characters to use if they were trying to shave something down, like turn the 500 gp diamond into a 300 gp diamond and 200 gp worth of diamond dust (another important component).
But besides that, I usually see things like this as a check on players using the spell. It’s a way for the DM to throttle the availability of the item, and therefore how often characters can cast the spell. You want a grittier campaign? They don’t find any diamonds.
Another example is something like the tuning fork in plane shift. It makes it so the characters can’t just up and go to another plane unless/until the DM is willing to put the item in and let it happen.
If there is no economy, several of the assumptions in the game rules break down. It’s not just spell components, the crafting rules also assume you’ll be able to purchase raw materials. So it’s not like the players can just make what they can’t find.
You can make up this deficiency with your own house rules that let players acquire the items that allow them to use their abilities without having to purchase them. If you don’t want the PCs establishing their own diamond mine, you might consider changing material components to something the players can reasonably find in-world; specific monster parts are frequently substituted.
What's in the rules obvious does not represent the sum totality of all possible gemstones. If a 100gp gem exists, then a 99gp gem exists, a 101gp gem exists, and so on. The rules just list some options for loot hoards for the purpose of balancing the amounts across sets.
Think of it this way—McDonalds sells fries in a small, medium, or large. Does that mean it's impossible to have fries in any other size? Obviously not, those are just the sizes McDs offers for ease of their menu
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It is to make it so that Revivify and similar spells are ONLY available to the players if the DM decides they are by providing the relevant material components. It's basically a way to say "this spell is an optional rule that requires your DM's buy in to use" without explicitly saying so.
Personally, I prefer games with limited resources to those of abundance where anyone can get anything they want whenever they want it. Abundance makes stuff less valuable, and when it is diamonds for revivify it makes it feel like there's not real threat of dying. Whereas when you've got only one 300 gp diamond and don't know when you'll have access to another you play much more cautiously and maybe don't just fight your way into & out of everywhere.
I totally understand and agree with this... What is bugging me is that the rules are not self consistent.
Per the random generation rules, there's no such thing as a 300 gp diamond. In fact there are only 5000 gp diamonds... With no explicit rules for cutting diamonds.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know how to work around this (by making up whatever rules I want). It's just annoying me that the base rules don't even come close to working.
What bugs me is that there are more than a few sandbox modules where having a monetary economy makes no sense. As for me, I'm running The Lost City... Dreamers do not make good shop keepers. But there's also the mega dungeons where I think they just randomly have a room with a shop in it... Which seems bizarre to me but is apparently the convention.
So... It seems like there's a opportunity here.
There are no explicit rules on how to cross a busy street with wagons, carriages, and pedestrians passing by... does that mean no one can cross a street? It's not possible to list every single item in possible existence on the loot tables.
Playing D&D since 1982
Have played every version of the game since Basic (original Red Box Set), except that abomination sometimes called 4e.
I think this is one of those feature-not-a-bug situations.
As several of us have been saying, they’re not in the random loot table so they show up when, and only when, the DM wants them to. It’s expected that the DM will place treasure appropriate to the campaign, the world and, to an extent, appropriate to the party. The loot tables are not meant to be an exhaustive inventory of everything that exists in the world. They're more of a quick roll to figure out what an art piece looks like, instead of spending a time thinking about it. The gem tables, in particular, are little more than flavor so everything isn't big piles of gold pieces. (Gems were super handy in 1e when you tracked weight and encumbrance as they were much easier to carry than coins. Back then 1gp=1xp, so the more loot you could carry out of the dungeon, the faster you leveled. That's kind of where it started, and now it's just tradition.) But in modern times, I've very rarely really known a player to say they want their character to hang on to that 10gp turquoise. Most just write down 10 gp on their sheet and move on.
So the specific kind of gem doesn't matter unless it's a spell component. And as several of us have said, its a back door throttle so things only happen if the DM wants to let something happen. Casting Awaken requires a 1,000 gp Agate. The only agate on the random loot chart is an eye agate for 10 gp. That doesn't mean the 1,000 gp version doesn't exist. It means that if someone want to make their pet dog sentient, the DM has to agree and allow them to find the component.
And as I said in an earlier post, jeweler's tools exist. They're not going to put everything you could possibly do with every set of artisan's tools, that would take up enough space to fill a book in itself. They don't specify that you could use carpenter's tools to make a picture frame, or mason's tools to build a brick wall, because of course you can. Sometimes the game developers just kind of trust you to do the obvious stuff without them writing it down.
I think that's a fair complaint. If there's no opportunity to resupply for extended periods, it makes sense for common spell components to be available as loot and the designers should probably have anticipated that when they made the random loot tables. After all if you assume other adventurers died there, mega dungeons should be chock full of the spell components they brought in with them.
Circle Magic from Heroes of Faerûn is one option to offset the need for expensive material components, but it's a pretty limited one. There's absolutely room for more options there and it'd be great if more get published. In the interim it's worth considering that the material components listed for spells are not the only components that work, they're probably just the cheapest or most convenient ones to carry. In previous editions there was residuum, a substance made by disenchanting magic items, that could be used in place of an equivalent value of material component for rituals. A universal component felt a little too convenient sometimes, but revivify is a case where there isn't any strong thematic or functional link between the component and the spell. For spells like that it's reasonable to treat the component as a sacrifice where the value is more important than the form it takes. A single diamond is certainly more convenient to carry in a component pouch than 6 pounds of gold, but I don't think you gain much by insisting the spell only works with 300 gp worth of diamond.
I agree completely, but making a larger, less-valuable diamond into a smaller, more-valuable diamond is exactly what happens when cutting diamonds. I might even allow it given time, tools and a really high DC. Comparable to crafting a magic item perhaps.
Even if you let players divide gemstones into stones of lesser value, parties aren’t going to be finding many 5,000 gp diamonds to fuel spells if they’re reliant on random loot and they probably wouldn’t find any until they were fairly high-level. Given how many are consumed as spell components, diamonds’ utility relative to other gemstones would be making them a pretty scare commodity. I‘d feel better about the state of things if magic jar and sequester weren’t the only spells I could find that accept any gem as a material component out of the dozens of spells with gem-based material components. It many cases the choice of gem just seems like a legacy holdover from when rules were far more arbitrarily restrictive and you have a situation with diamonds being worth anywhere from 50 gp to 25,000 gp.
Powdered gemstones or gemstone dust components are also strange to me. For one I don’t know if those are supposed to be the same thing or if there’s some distinction that would require you to keep your stoneskin diamond dust out of your glyph of warding powdered diamond. The other thing is gem dust as a material would ordinarily have negligible value, and you wouldn’t be able to grind a 100 gp diamond into 100 gp worth of diamond dust because 100 gp worth of diamond dust should be measured in pounds not carats. It’s something you can ignore, but then you might be treating diamond as a fungible material like gold while simultaneously suggesting players need to jump through hoops to get their 300 gp diamonds.
If you remove shops either as a temp problem or a permanent campaign issue there are tons of components you wont be able to use. Which is fine for the most part, most spells can be avoided. if a cleric can't raise people take that into account while you venture forth and when designing encounters.
That being said i kind of wish they would toss specific components entirely go fully with the magical focusses,(require all spells to use them so casters can be disarmed easily) come up with some other way to limit spells with costly components.