Honestly, that’s one of my biggest gripes: so many character abilities are just “turn this part of the game off.” Something like Goodberry completely obviates the need to worry about food, and darkvision leads to annoying assymetry, and incentivizes the GM to just gloss over it, or hand the one player who doesn’t get it from their race or class some magic goggles and be done with it.
If you don’t want to play worrying about light sources or food, you can just do that. If you want to track those things, you can make it fun. But 5e’s approach is kind of neither. It’s there, but it sucks, so it doesn’t matter. Bleh.
I’m playing a human wizard and for like 70% of the campaign, I was working with 2 spell slots constantly being used. One for dark vision and one for mage armor. Now I can cast mage armor without using a slot, so I’m only down one slot when we are traveling through the underdark. We have plenty of light sources, but we don’t use them because we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.
Wizard with find familiar. Just have a bat or owl sit on your shoulder and use their senses (as an action) while traveling. It’s different in combat, but at least you save the spell slot.
Honestly, that’s one of my biggest gripes: so many character abilities are just “turn this part of the game off.” Something like Goodberry completely obviates the need to worry about food, and darkvision leads to annoying assymetry, and incentivizes the GM to just gloss over it, or hand the one player who doesn’t get it from their race or class some magic goggles and be done with it.
If you don’t want to play worrying about light sources or food, you can just do that. If you want to track those things, you can make it fun. But 5e’s approach is kind of neither. It’s there, but it sucks, so it doesn’t matter. Bleh.
I’m playing a human wizard and for like 70% of the campaign, I was working with 2 spell slots constantly being used. One for dark vision and one for mage armor. Now I can cast mage armor without using a slot, so I’m only down one slot when we are traveling through the underdark. We have plenty of light sources, but we don’t use them because we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.
Wizard with find familiar. Just have a bat or owl sit on your shoulder and use their senses (as an action) while traveling. It’s different in combat, but at least you save the spell slot.
I don’t like 5e familiars because they feel disposable. We use 3.5 familiars and it’s dope lol
100% agree. I like DMs having more hazards and obstacles at their disposal.
It’s almost not worth picking up at character creation if the DM is probably going to ignore it.