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.
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.
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.