Let's roll some dice, watch some movies, or generally just geek out. New posts at 6:30 pm ET but only if I have something to say. Menu at the top. gsllc@chirp.enworld.org on Mastodon and @gsllc on Twitter.
Save or die in RPGs refers to the notion that a character can be in a position where their life relies on a single saving throw. This is quite common in 1st Edition D&D (“1e”) but was completely eliminated in 4th Edition D&D (“4e”). Despite my enthusiasm of returning to 1e, I think its demise was a good thing. Much like ordinary swings of a sword, devastating but really cool attacks could be unleased on a character without taking them out of the game immediately.
For example, one of my favorite monsters is the medusa, so I want to use them to their full potential and (relatively) often. In 1e, however, one medusa could take out the entire party before they could say, “The Amazon commercial with Medusa is stupid.” That’s quite a buzzkill, and it can destroy a gaming session. In 4e, however, I had no issues unleashing that petrifying gaze upon the group. On a successful attack roll, those in a close blast 5 were slowed. A failed save on their next turn left them immobilized. Finally, if they failed a second save on the turn after that, they’d be petrified. At any point in that process, a single successful save ended the effect. Poison and other fatal (or effectively fatal) effects manifested similarly. A rare few monsters had abilities with aftereffects, which were brilliant. If at any point you successfully saved, it would end the primary effect but would trigger a secondary effect requiring its own save.
I’m not sure how I’d eliminate save or die in 1e, or even whether I should eliminate it. Messing with something so deeply baked into the game could create issues. Or not. 1e is remarkably adaptable to house rules. To start, though, I’m going to keep it.
So, make sure your henchmen go into each room first.
The point I was making applies to games yet to be designed, not to current editions, and the argument is a rather trivial one: The more valuable a thing is, the higher it’s cost should be. We can all get behind that notion, right?
A problem I have with 5th Edition D&D (“5e“), and I think most editions, is that there are a list of go-to spells (or class abilities) that everyone feels they have to take, limiting the diversity of builds at the table. I have no intention of trying to “fix” existing editions to balance material spell component cost and availability with the power of spells. It turns out that for 5e (the subject of that post), that would be a lot of work. Here’s a sample of those spells (and their spell components) that I’ve mathematically proven to be preferred by WotC themselves in creating NPCs, and I suspect players favor as well.
Feather Fall: a piece of down or small feather.
Fireball: bit of guano and sulfur.
Fly: a feather from a bird’s wing.
Hold Person: a small straight piece of iron.
Invisibility: an eyelash encased in gum arabic.
Lightning Bolt: a bit of fur and a rod of amber/crystal/glass.
As you can see, all of these spells have cheap material components that are easily obtained without the DM creating an illogical scarcity. Some popular spells (Counterspell, Dimension Door, and Misty Step) don’t even require material components. So, in 5e, even if you “enforced” components, it wouldn’t change a damn thing. That, to me, is a design flaw, and one I don’t have the desire to fix. However, where there’s a high cost for a spell (e.g., Heroes Feast), I’m going to enforce it.
That said, increasing the cost or scarcity of material components is just one way to increase the cost of spells. In 1st Edition D&D (“1e“), spell cost was assessed using casting times. Combat consisted of 1-minute rounds divided into 6-second segments (i.e., 10 segments per round). Initiative determined the segment in which a character was able to act (with some caveats not relevant here). Because spells had casting times measured in segments, a caster would start casting a spell in one segment, but the casting wouldn’t complete until a later segment. If a caster took a single point of damage during this time, the spell would fail, and the caster would lose the spell slot. Therefore, casters had a choice to make: either cast a weaker spell quickly, assuring it would be of (limited) value, or cast a more powerful spell accepting the risk that it could wind up to be worthless.
In other words, 1e used casting times to increase the cost of spells, and it appears to have done so quite well. Of course, without dividing your rounds into segments, casting times may not be a viable solution.
The moral of this story is that game designers really need to pay better attention to whether their systems lead a majority of players to make the same choices. Sure, some things should be better than others, but like in the real world with food, cars, houses, and everything else, the better things should have a higher cost, regardless of how that cost is assessed. That way, different players will create widely diverse builds, and we’d (or at least I’d) see more dynamic combats.
In 5e, material spell components seem to be the intended way to do that.
I had a brief interaction with Erik on Twitter (yes, him again) within the context of 5th Edition D&D (“5e”).
A twig or an owl's feather are one thing, but a bowl worth 1,000 gp is a material component that shouldn't be ignored.
— Rob Bodine, #Attorney by Day, #Nerd by Day & Night (@GSLLC) February 10, 2022
Material Components
I stand by my statement but want to clarify it. The spell, Fly, has a single material component: a feather. As Erik mentioned, Heroes’ Feast has a significant one: A bowl worth 1,000 gps. The reason there’s a distinction between the material components for these items is that Heroes’ Feast is far more powerful in the long run. It’s a 6th-level spell vs. a 3rd-level spell, so there needs to be something to balance that effect. This is obvious. What’s less obvious is that the bowl has to be encrusted with jewels, which requires a long process by a skilled craftsman. That’s a spell component with far more limited availability than “a wing feather from any bird.” Such scarcity puts a check on overpowered spells, or at least an overpowered application of such spells.
Lawyers and rules are not a fun party and apparently no food either.
This isn’t rules lawyering; it’s game mechanics. If you don’t want game mechanics, why are you playing a game?
If a DM tracks material components that have a high financial or logistical cost but largely ignores those with a low cost, game balance is maintained without turning the game into a spreadsheet. It also gives players another strategic dimension. A player must choose between having to collect 1,000 gp bowls to heal up and fortify defenses, or an offensive implement that prevents that damage in the first place. The decision isn’t merely mechanical; it also affects what kind of character a player wants to play.
Somatic and Verbal Components
Speaking of strategy, non-monetary components are also important. Ignoring components robs players of some of the fun. For example, Shatter has a verbal component. That makes sense. You shout to produce sound waves, then magically manipulate those waves to produce the damaging effect. If you remove that requirement, then the Silence spell is completely nerfed for combat, and with few remaining useful applications, the spell will largely be ignored by players. This means that everyone reverts to the same, short list of spells they choose. That’s boring (q.v., though it’s what’s happened for other reasons). This isn’t boring: Because NPCs may use Silence to prevent casting spells, PCs are given yet another strategy to consider during character design.
The same is true of somatic components. Most players ignore somatic components when their PCs have been placed in shackles or tied together. PCs should have to pay attention to the components required by the spells they’ve chosen and make sure they haven’t placed their eggs in too many baskets. That is, they must make sure that some spells have no material components, some have no somatic components, and some have no verbal components. Do enough such spells exist?
How This Impacts Game Design
If there’s a problem here, it’s probably that there are too many spells with verbal or somatic components, so there’s no effective strategy to be had.
Let’s test that hypothesis.
As you may recall, I have a database of all 5e spells that I created for my one stop stat blocks project. You can find details for my methodology buried within this post, but I’ll point out that there are a total of 457 spells in those sources (deleting duplicates between the Elemental Evil’s Player Companion and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything). A simple query gives me the following:
Number (Percentage)
V
52 (11.38%)
VS
149 (32.60%)
VM
11 (2.41%)
VSM
220 (48.14%)
S
17 (3.72%)
SM
8 (1.75%)
Number (Percentage) of Spells by Combination of Components Required
Material components are required by over 52% of spells, but never is there a spell that can be cast by a caster who’s bound and gagged but manages to pull a material component out of a hidden pocket. That is, there are no spells that require only a material component. 15% of spells can be cast with either a verbal or somatic component by itself, so those spells should be quite useful if material components are tracked. Almost 95% of spells require a verbal component, and over 84% require a somatic component. Clearly, the game designers didn’t intend for casters to be able to cast while bound and/or gagged.
Source
Level
Spell
Player’s Handbook
8
Demiplane
Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravinca
0
Encode Thoughts
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
0
Control Flames
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
0
Mold Earth
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
0
Shape Water
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
0
Thunderclap
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
1
Absorb Elements
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
1
Catapult
Elemental Evil Player’s Guide
1
Ice Knife
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
0
Primal Savagery
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
1
Snare
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
2
Mind Spike
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
3
Catnap
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
5
Steel Wind Strike
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
6
Mental Prison
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
8
Illusory Dragon
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
9
Psychic Scream
Spells requiring no verbal component.
I’d like to think that having a verbal component to, for example, a Power Word spell is more a question of flavor than mechanics. Even if that’s the normal approach, playtesters were probably forced to abide by the relevant rules when playtesting, and so the balance in the game was inevitably shaken out requiring components in most scenarios.
Consider that one of my criticisms of how D&D monsters are designed is that they all use the same spell selection. This list of spells is heavily weighted towards spells that are either overpowered or simple to remember without having to look up their details. For the first five levels, here are the top five spells by use by NPCs in the relevant sourcebooks (“preferred spells”). I skipped preferred spells higher than 5th level because there are far too few of those spells even used for a “top 5” list to make any sense, and besides, above 5th level none of those spells are used more than 8 times in all the sourcebooks combined.
Cantrips: Mage Hand, Prestidigitation, Light, Minor Illusion, Ray of Frost
5th: Scrying, Hold Monster, Cloudkill, Wall of Force, Cone of Cold
I’ve played with hundreds of different people through organized play, organized weekly game days across the Washington, DC area for a gaming club over about 250 members, and ran a convention for a couple of years. In my anecdotal experience, this is nearly identical to the list used by PCs, but I can’t technically prove that. Almost no one responds to my polls. 🙂
I'm adding an image to an attached tweet containing a list of 5th edition #DnD spells by level (cantrips to 5th). For any spellcasters you're current playing, what percentage (usually if not always) of those #spells are prepared when your #character starts a session? #RPG (1/2)
— Rob Bodine, #Attorney by Day, #Nerd by Day & Night (@GSLLC) February 11, 2022
So, just for shits and giggles, let’s look at what happens to the numbers above when we limit ourselves to preferred spells.
Number (Percentage)
V
2 (6.67%)
VS
11 (36.67%)
VM
1 (3.33%)
VSM
14 (46.67%)
S
1 (3.33%)
SM
1 (3.33%)
Number (Percentage) of Common Spells by Combination of Components Required
The numbers are too small to take too seriously, but they look about the same with the exception of spells requiring only verbal components (only Dimension Door and Misty Step). In case you’re curious, Counterspell is the only preferred spell requiring only a somatic component. So, preferred spells can be even more often nerfed if we enforce components. If we do so, perhaps we’ll see a more varied suite of spells at the table, but not by much in 5e. There don’t seem to be many alternatives that avoid the need for particular components.
What Have We Learned? Not Much.
I think this was a bit of work to say simply that the game was balanced during playtesting under a strong assumption that casters could be nerfed, especially by one another. Not enforcing components just further aggravates the existing problem of only a few spells ever being used. In the end, I’m sure people are having fun even if they don’t worry about components, but if a DM wants to remove spell components, I’d much rather see the DM remove them to urge players to choose spells other than the ones on the preferred (spell list, giving several spells the ability to be cast with only one type of component.
Food for thought for game designers of the future and those willing to do the work in changing 5e now.
Sundays now are lazy days for me. I either post something silly or other people’s work. Usually both. Today, it’s a continuation of my obsession with how to deal with aquatic encounters.
I discussed how there are plenty of viable aquatic PC races in 1st Edition D&D (“1e“). This image contains more threats, much of which don’t appear (as far as I can tell) among official 1e bestiaries, and I’m sure there are plenty of options from other eras to add to what we have. If 1e weren’t so human-centric, the writers may have done a better job contemplating aquatic campaigns, and then we’d have more of these. Perhaps some reskinning is in order.
Oh, and happy Super Bowl Sunday! Go Sean McVay! Remind Daniel Snyder how much of a dipshit he is!
Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to, nor endorsed, the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)
Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to, nor endorsed, the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)
I had a discussion during Winter Vantasy: The Return with Erik with respect to Wizards of the Coast’s (“WotC”) new stat block format. The new stat block has some rearranging of material, but that wasn’t the subject matter of the conversation. We were discussing the removal of spells and spell-like abilities from the new WotC stat block. Erik doesn’t like it and referenced my concerns about the complexity within the current stat block format. Erik referred to my position as “ridiculous,” but WotC’s switch proves that Erik’s view is the minority one. I didn’t have a large enough internet footprint to prove it on my own. More importantly, however, Erik understandably mischaracterized my position. I wasn’t saying that the Monster Manual got it wrong. In fact, quite the opposite. I’ve mentioned before that I think it’s the best RPG bestiary I’ve ever read. My concern is that WotC didn’t supplement it properly, then attempted to shut me down when I did.
Important Note: I’m not 100% certain that WotC’s stat blocks have been changed in the way we’re all assuming they were. I’ve seen a sample of the new format (below), but it was for a low level creature whose stat block would be simple anyway. Thus, this discussion comes from a place of partial ignorance, and I may get some things wrong. Take this all with a grain of salt.
When you look at a complex stat block (e.g., Mummy Lord), unless you have a truly eidetic or nearly eidetic memory, there’s no way you can effectively run that stat block as written, especially if the encounter is a combat encounter. There’s too much going on, and what we’ve all seen (and I actually got Erik to admit to an extent!) is that every DM just gives up and resorts to using the common spells they all know: Magic Missile, Hold Person, Fireball, Counterspell, etc., even for higher spell slots. Why? Well, first you must figure out which sourcebook contains the spell in order to look it up. If it isn’t a Player’s Handbook spell, you may not know, so you wind up searching through a couple of books before finding the correct one. Second, you must read the spell, which could take a while if it’s not one like Fly. If it were a spell like Fly, you may not have to look it up at all, which is why Fly is one of the spells to which DMs eventually resort. Something like Control Weather has far too much going on for most people to memorize. Erik is sometimes willing to do that, but there are very few players whose eyes don’t glaze over with boredom during that long process. Moreover, if you’re playing with a real-world time limit (e.g., convention play), that’s certainly not time you have to waste. At the table, the spell’s details should be right in front of your face. I don’t understand why anyone would disagree, and those with eidetic memories shouldn’t care one way or the other.
That said, in theory these stat blocks provide a framework for the culture of that creature. (In my second stat block/copyright post, I mathematically proved that WotC fails to do so, but that’s not relevant here.) So, the Monster Manual itself shouldn’t eliminate that complexity (I know; WotC can’t win with me), but rather use it as a framework for creating specific monsters within that cultural framework but suited to the encounter at hand. That last sentence is a tough read, so here’s an example. (I’m going from my memory, which is not eidetic.) The Couatl has both offensive and divination spells. If your encounter involved the Couatl using Detect Thoughts to aid in an interrogation, then you wouldn’t need the Couatl to have Shield. On the other hand, that position would be reversed if the Couatl were to engage in combat against the PCs (i.e., it would need Shield but I don’t think, from memory, Detect Thoughts would have value). The Monster Manual stat block provides you the spells a Couatl needs for all situations, but not every Couatl will appear in all situations. In fact, I doubt any will unless the Couatl is a PC, but a Couatl PC is clearly not what I’m talking about. For NPCs at the table, you need only the spells that that specific NPC will need in that specific encounter. Everything else muddies the water. However, it’s good that all situations are covered by the general stat block in the Monster Manual, because that’s what you use to build such table-based stat blocks.
So, in my ideal world, this is how WotC (or any game designer with sufficient resources) should approach their stat blocks. Make them as complex as WotC did in the Monster Manual, using only spell names as shorthand to make the stat block printable, but modify their online tools with check boxes allowing DMs to pick which spells and spell-like abilities appear on a final stat block at the table (whether in hard or soft copy). For that final stat block at the table, make sure that the spell descriptions are presented fully so that there’s no need to resort to multiple hardcopy resources to know details that are relevant to the combat, but at the same time make sure that the stat block isn’t cluttered with irrelevant details. If there are no online tools, provide one-stop stat blocks for all NPCs (as I did) as a PDF. They could also provide PDFs containing generic spell entries with coded placeholders such as, “Magic Missile, Atk: [L]+3+IntMod, . . . .” (or whatever it is), so that DMs could copy and paste them into their own stat blocks as needed. All my project did was the one part of that process that I could, which is something WotC didn’t do.
I fully appreciate that some (most?) game designers can’t do this. Online tools are a huge investment of time and resources they may not have, but some in the gaming community do. Game designers simply need to stay out of the way and allow the community to do that heavy lifting for them. On the other hand, WotC has both the time and resources to create this ideal that appeals to the most people, but they’re still getting it wrong, probably because there’s more profit in selling a new hardcopy (which I suspect will be very good nonetheless).
So yeah, WotC can’t win with me, but only because they’re choosing to lose. We’ll see how the final product shakes out.
Settle in, kiddies, for a tale of wonder, natural disaster, danger, tragedy, friendship, and redemption. It sounds much better than it will actually be.
Well, another Winter Vantasy/Fantasy is in the books, and this year was bittersweet. As I’m sure you can appreciate, when I take long-distance vacation for a week or so, I’m ready to come home no matter how much fun I had. After this trip. I wasn’t ready to come home.
I don’t go to Winter Fantasy to play games; I come to hang out with friends. However, the pandemic is still having its effect. This year, many of my friends couldn’t make it, so I have yet to hang out with them. Hence, my reluctance to leave Ft. Wayne.
Some Touristy Things
There was a slight bit of tourism to do of which I wasn’t previously aware. I had the perfect room in my hotel. When I opened the door to my room, I was staring at the entrance to the indoor walkway to the convention center. Very convenient. The walkway took me through the Embassy Theater, which has more history than I realized. The first thing I saw when I entered the theater was a neat model of it.
Next up, I saw some the history.
I thought about seeing a show there. An orchestra was playing the music of the Beatles on Saturday night, and I like when songs are reimagined in other styles or with differing instrumentation. However, I chose not to and wisely so, as you will see. If it were the music of Iron Maiden, then maybe I would have. In any case, a seed was planted for the future.
As I continued through the walkway, I took a picture.
This may seem like an ordinary picture — it is — but it represents no small point. The week didn’t start well. The first two days each received 3-5 inches of snow, shutting down almost every restaurant in the area. I would have thought that Indiana was better at dealing with the snow, but everything was closed. I was fine because I brought food with me so I could maintain some semblance of my diet, and those with cars could drive out of the area to grocery stores, but many were forced to rely on a single pizza-by-the-slice restaurant for the first two days. I don’t know how they survived.
And then here’s a stupid photo of an icicle I pulled off an awning on my walk back to my hotel. I was ready for action.
I could take your eye out, kid.
The Hotel and O’Reilly’s
It’s about to get better, but there are two more things that annoyed me. I was in the hotel for 6 days and 5 nights, and they never once cleaned my room. I didn’t have this issue in Vegas, but James travels quite a bit and told me that this was normal during the pandemic. I guess I can’t hold that against the hotel. The other thing that bugged me was O’Reilly’s. This has been our preferred watering hole for years, but it was a major disappointment this year. Every year, the staff changed a little bit, but we appreciated the large degree of consistency from year to year. The pandemic caused a complete change of staff; Cassie and Stephanie are gone. Their replacements were few in number, and as a result their hours went from closing at 3 am to closing at midnight. This doesn’t work well for gamers leaving the convention as late as 11:45 pm. None of that is the fault of the bar — the pandemic is to blame — but some of the staff were, let’s just say, less than enthusiastic. I couldn’t get my drink refilled, and the reason was stated plainly: “No way are we staying late. I’m leaving as soon as I can.” It wasn’t the same.
The Trip Is Saved!!!
Everything that annoyed me was redeemed by a new discovery, the Brass Rail, and some new friends. On Friday night, four of us braved the arctic air and walked three blocks to the Brass Rail. Almost immediately upon entering the bar, we connected with a group of people less than half our ages, but we all clicked with each other. Arianna, Jameson (named after a whiskey?), Jack (named after masturbation?), and a few others whose names escape me. We drank and bullshitted (bullshat?) all night and knew we had found our new watering hole. Oh, and did I mention the live music?!?!
As great as Friday night was, Saturday night was even better. I was walking over there with three guys that weren’t there the night before. They were complaining about the weather and the walk. Like Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park, I told them, “In five minutes, I’ll be accepting your apology.” Five minutes later, they were apologizing to me for complaining. The Brass Rail is worth every step of those extra three blocks. It was karaoke night, and some of us went nuts. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to capture video of the two best performances of the night, but I’ve got quick videos of two others.
I accepted Josh and Chris’s apologies that evening.
Our New Friend
It’s amazing to me how familiar Arianna was with music from my generation. It wasn’t just this song. We had a brief discussion in which she was belting out references I didn’t expect. Sadly, she refused to sing any Rush. Nobody’s perfect. 🙂
The Brass Rail salvaged this trip for me. Everything I wrote above shouldn’t be taken as “Winter Fantasy sucks now.” It’s simply evolved into something just as good, if not better, and some of what we lost will probably be coming back next year or the year after. Overall, the trip was a success.
Going Home
The pandemic also affected our customary lunch stop for both our trip out and back, but fortunately, Black Bear Burritos still has one of their locations open, so we got to eat there. One the way back, I took two photos.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Morgantown, West Virginia
Safe and Sound
So, one last note. When I got home, I received a package. Actually, it arrived the afternoon I was on the road to Indiana. I was happy to see that it didn’t get stolen or damaged by the elements during my trip. Here’s a quick unpacking. Sorry in advance that I was out of breath.
Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to, nor endorsed, the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)
A Twitter conversation last week led me down a rabbit hole.
Dragons by far.
— Rob Bodine, #Attorney by Day, #Nerd by Day & Night (@GSLLC) January 26, 2022
In case DoubleDM’s tweet is deleted, it asks, “So have you had more Dungeons or Dragons in your #DnD Games?” I responded, “Dragons by far.” Another person’s reply brought up the adventure, Horde of the Dragon Queen, for 5th Edition D&D (“5e“). This had me remembering Balasar Kimbatuul, one of my favorite D&D characters, known for invoking honor duels in Sly Flourish’s home game. For those who haven’t played it, the party faces a blue dragonborn, Lennithon, at the end of the first act. One PC has to face him, and there’s no chance the PC will win, even rolling all crits. It’s just impossible. At some point in the next act, the PCs meet Lennithon again, but are far better suited for the challenge. Despite Balasar insisting on an honor duel, he’s able to defeat Lennithon on his own, with his fellow PCs picking off Lennithon’s allies.
So, why bring this up? Because this segment of Horde of the Dragon Queen is essentially the plot of Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons.
Imagine these two with scaly skin. Or not.
In many of the cartoons, and in the live-action motion picture with Robin Williams, Popeye has two fights with Bluto/Brutus. The first one, he loses, and after some story and/or character development, Popeye exacts his revenge. While Popeye relies on spinach for that final push, PCs in Horde of the Dragon Queen rely on hit point and ability increases and the acquisition of better equipment that comes with leveling up.
Of course, this is a trope, so it’s not unique to Popeye. A scene in Only the Strong immediately popped into my head in which the protagonist claims that this time he isn’t playing around. This eventually gave the viewers (all three of us, I presume) the same result in the final, cheesy battle for supreme control over high school kids.
Winning a fight always comes down to what music is playing, right? Right?
There are other, better-known examples. Nevertheless, this is the first time I drew the connection, in part because I don’t recall ever seeing that before in a TTRPG story, and in other part because of the distance between those two scenes with Lennithon. With respect to the former, I’ve had characters meet a BBEG before their final fight, and sometimes on not-so-friendly terms, but I’ve never had a direct fight with one. I find it interesting that this isn’t a more common trope in D&D. It reinforces my belief that players are far too averse to losing a fight, and adventure writers write their adventures accordingly.
Before you purchase any used materials for Advanced, Basic, or Original D&D, please visit the Acaeum at https://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/rulebooks.html. Their main homepage is here, and their methodology is here. Someone posted a list of D&D materials to the Facebook 1st Edition D&D group earlier this week. The prices were generally double what the Acaeum lists.
Last printing of 1st Edition D&D PHB in fair condition only $300!
The guy wasn’t trying to be an asshole. He seemed like a reasonably nice guy, but his claimed success, if true, is relying on gullibility and desperation to make his sales. He may not realize that.
As rare as it is, I know there are some gamers that have a decent amount of disposable income. I, myself, have made several 1st Edition D&D purchases recently (though most were new). It doesn’t matter. If anyone is selling materials for higher prices than what’s listed at the Acaeum, don’t freaking buy them. Things cost whatever people will pay for them, but that’s exactly why you should rely on a neutral third party to assess the fair price. Otherwise, you encourage overpricing, and buyers suffer. Be patient. If everyone plays it cool, prices will lower.
I wish there was a resource for 3rd Edition D&D material. There are a couple of items I’d like, but they’re way too expensive at the moment.
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Play What You Want 