D&D (2024) 2024 - Do magic weapons bypass resistance now?

[Stalker0]

So I know a lot of the monsters in the new MM just have resistance to BPS, no mention of magic. And we have seen a lot of "your attack is like a magic weapon" changed to "you now do force damage".


Is that how straight up +1 magic weapons work now, or do they no longer help against that BPS resistance a lot of monsters have?

 

[mellored]

They no longer help beyond the +1.
But less monsters have BPS resistance.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Do any monsters have BPS immunity now?

 

[Stormonu]

Yeah, it's pretty much as @mellored states. I'm more than a bit bummed about it, but non-magical BPS resistance/immunity was a bit of an unfair hit against the martials. Still, to me things like ghosts should have non-magical BPS immunity, and a few others should have resistance (such as Gargoyles). But it should be a much smaller group than even in 5E 2014.

 

[aco175]

One of the problems I've run into is using older monsters with the new rules. Some of the old monsters have not been updated and have this resistance. It is not really a problem and it plays fine.

 

[mellored]

Do any monsters have BPS immunity now?

Not that I'm aware of. Even the Rakshasa lost it's weapon resistance, replaced with double the hit points.

 

[jgsugden]

From my perspective, this is a blunder in the new edition. There are creatures that had an iconic element in their ability to be unaffected by nonmagical weapons. The Jackwere, for example, was a creature that could be encountered at low enough levels that PCs had no magic weapons - and that required the PCs to 'solve the problem' of how to handle them.

This new edition wilts beneath the idea of problem solving. It says, "Hey, we don't want to present a challenge to PCs that does not have an obvious solution." To me, that misses the mark.

I'd rather the 2025 edition Jackalwere maintained the old immunity to non-magical weapons. In the alternative, I wish it was immune to all piercing, slashing and bludgeoning. This move to having no immunity, or even resistance ... is just stripping it of a defining characteristic. To me, that is on par with removing the ability for a Medusa to turn someone to stone.

Needless to say - there are quite a few monsters in my games that sport additional resistances and immunities in the new edition - just like many of them have enhanced vision other than darkvision (like low light vision, infravision, ultravision, sonar, etc...)

 

[mellored]

This new edition wilts beneath the idea of problem solving. It says, "Hey, we don't want to present a challenge to PCs that does not have an obvious solution." To me, that misses the mark.

IMO "get magic weapon" was never a puzzle.

It's not like going out of your way to find wolfbane, adding silver to your weapons, or coating it in wyvern venom. You would simply use any +1 weapon you could find as soon as you could. Irrelevant of what creature you where against.

Also, if your doing anything like that, you need better run away options. "Our weapons aren't working" needs to be followed up with the option to try something else, instead of dying.

 

[jgsugden]

...The Jackwere, for example, was a creature that could be encountered at low enough levels that PCs had no magic weapons - and that required the PCs to 'solve the problem' of how to handle them.

IMO "get magic weapon" was never a puzzle...

You didn't catch my point here. The puzzle was not to get a magic weapon. It was how to deal with a foe you couldn't damage when you didn't have one. The challenge presented to a low level party was similar to the challenge protagonists face in horror movies when they fight an invulnerable supernatural foe. "I may not be able to kill you, but I can XXXXX". What is XXXXX? That is the puzzle.

In the 1980s I encountered my first Jackalwere. I was a fighter named Dryken DeLerosh - a son of a Thayan Red Wizard that had been changed to Lawful Good by a Helm of Opposite Alignment - going from the most selfish and cruel being to the most noble self sacrificing personality I could must. Our thief was scouting just ahead of the group when he fell into a pit trap. The DM and the player went into another room ... and the DM came back. When we heard nothing the party followed and the wizard took a look into the pit - and fell unconcious ... into the pit. Dryken didn't look ... he lept. He landed in the pit to find a 'werewolf' biting into the corpse of the thief while the wizard (who died just from the 30 foot fall) lay in a crumbled heap. The DM made me make a save to avoid falling asleep when I met its gaze - which I made against the odds - and then the beast attacked. My first attack hit, but did nothing.

That moment sticks with me. It is one of the top 10 encounters from 46 years of D&D. From that point to the end of the encounter was perhaps 4 minutes ... but the DM (who was a 0 for rules understanding at the time ... and 10 for storytelling) made it feel like I was a character in a horror story ... but not the one likely to reach the end of it. He dropped in 3 or 4 tiny hooks that I could have figured out and could have been used to save me, but I missed all of them as my favorite PC was on the edge of disaster. Instead, I caught my attention on a thing he said that I saw when I was falling - the loose earth of the side of the pit. I used the DM's weird grappling rules and flipped the Jackwere into a corner, attacked the wall and collapsed it to bury the beast. I then recovered the bodies and escaped before it freed itself. It doesn't sound that exciting when you write it out - but it was one of those moments we all talked about for decades ... if I called that DM today and said, "Feeling like I'm in a Jackalwere pit ..." he would get it.

THAT is what we're robbing from the game when we take out all the rough edges. That is the type of success you get to experience when the rules say, "You can't" and you find a way to anyways. We lost some of that type of challenge in each edition since. "Fair" replaced "%$@#ed". Fair has advantages ... but what we lost also gave us something that could make the game moments iconic.

 

[Nebulous]

One of my absolute favorite fights from Curse of Strahd was when the PCs fought a vampire spawn at low level, had no good way to really hurt it, and used the druid's bear shape to wrestle it into a creek so that running water annihilated the spawn. It got carried downstream, screaming and sparking and smoking and gurgled under the surface. It was awesome.