[RPG] In Critical Role Campaign 2, did Caleb keep a stock of pearls for casting Fortune’s Favor

Spell components allow the player characters to be given an ability at a certain level while restricting how frequently or how readily they can use it.

Placing raise dead at 5th level spell essentially means that 9th level characters unlock the ability to return to life if slain. You don't want to allow low-level characters that ability, or it cheapens death, and the game relies on that to build tension; but you don't want players who have invested much time in their high level characters to be so afraid of being killed that they never take risks.

But you still want there to be some reason why players can't just raise dead freely, so that there's still a drawback to being killed. You have to fear your character dying or there's no tension, no risk, and less excitement as a result. There must be a cost to raising the dead to stop you using it repeatedly.

There are just some spells that you want the players to have access to, but not use too frequently. Divination, for example, your players will use repeatedly if they can. They will make heavier use of area-defence spells like arcane lock, glyph of warding, hallow, and magic circle. They will eat a heroes' feast every day and identify every item they find with legend lore.

D&D 5th edition's non-consumed material components, what D&D 3.5 used to term a focus, have a different mechanical effect. It allows the game to keep certain spells at or near their traditional level, but deny them to characters who are new to that level. Identify, for example, is still a 1st level spell but its 100 gp non-consumed component makes it unavailable to starting characters.

The 50 gp component of chromatic orb discourages new players from taking this spell and encourages more traditional spells like magic missile; upon reaching level 2, most characters will have acquired enough money to buy the gemstone required for this spell, and they can take the new spell then. (The game may do this to avoid confusing new players with attack roll and element choice, or to artificially protect traditional newbie spells like magic missile which ordinarily do less damage but hit more reliably; missing with one of two high-level spells per day is frustrating to new players who may be familiar with videogame RPGs which typically allow many spells with a relatively fast recharge.)

Since treasure tends to scale with level, in many cases components have the effect of giving high-level characters something to use in lower-level slots. When you're very high level, you really can eat heroes' feast every day, but without consuming a more high level spell slot. Lower-level characters can only afford to use it on some days, so components can effectively create a type of spell that can only practically be cast less often than daily, which is something you otherwise can't do within the spell slot system.

Material components also give the players a goal, and make for some interesting choices. The wizard wants to find a pearl worth 100 gp for his identify spell, and will gladly give up his share of the gold to keep such a pearl. The party may be forced to sacrifice a very valuable 5,000 gp diamond because it's the only one they have worth at least 1,000 gp and required for an important spell.

There's also the effect you mentioned that material components allow the DM to hand out the unique component for a given spell (e.g. to manually limit the number of uses of raise dead per adventure). However, I don't believe that this is the primary reason for spell components.

Many of the components are shared between different spells, and are relatively well-known and easily-purchased (with the right amount of money), such as diamonds. Most groups I've gamed with simply hand-wave the exact components as long as you expend the right amount of gold. The DM can use it as a way to manually limit uses of certain spells in an in-game way, but in my experience it's a way to make certain actions more expensive.

If you remove expensive spell components, players will use those spells more readily. They're still limited by the number of spell slots they have per day, so it's not actually entirely broken. The main concern is abilities which can be used out-of-combat. You could make an everburning torch for free each day in your downtime. You could cast divination every day at no cost. Your players never have to think, "Do I spend the money to legend lore here?", but will fully identify the lore of each and every item in downtime.

These aren't necessarily bad things. The video game Dark Souls tells huge amounts of its story through item descriptions. You can use divination to give players hints they missed or forewarn them of danger. Your players may enjoy cheap access to raise dead, and you might enjoy a higher likelihood that PCs will survive to follow the character plots you've got planned.

Simply be aware of the spells that are intended to be of limited use, and think carefully about how frequent use will change your game, and how it may change your game world if this type of magic is more readily available to NPCs.

The first bullet point of your modified Two Weapon fighting style seems to rely upon another, unstated house rule: That you must declare all your attack targets up front and make all the attack rolls at the same time, before you learn which ones hit and how much damage they deal.

That's not a normal part of the rules, though it might be a common shortcut to streamline things at your table. The rules as written let you roll one attack, find out if it hit, then roll its damage and learn the results of that damage, all before you go on to make any further attacks you're capable of. You can even move in between attacks, which is very useful when you killed your first target with one attack and need to move to engage another one.

So your modified fighting style isn't unbalanced, per se, but rather sort of nonsensical when otherwise playing with the rules as written, since you don't normally make multiple attack rolls at the same time. You might be able to rephrase it to better explain how it's modifying the normal rules, and then a balance consideration might be possible:

• If you use your bonus action for two weapon fighting, you may make the attack roll for your second weapon at the same time you roll an attack against the same target with your primary weapon. If you do so, you may apply a positive modifier of up to +5 to any one of the attack rolls, and a negative modifier of the same magnitude to the other attack roll. You must choose the modifier to use before you know whether either of the dice resulted in a hit or a miss.

I suspect this is too strong, though I'm not a balance expert. It gives you two main advantages:

First, if you roll one mediocre roll and one very bad one, you can dump the bad one by -5 (which doesn't really cost you anything since it was going to miss anyway) and get a +5 to the better one. That means you'll almost never completely whiff when attacking twice. This is substantially better than getting advantage on one attack, since you also get +5 on the better of the two rolls!

Second, it helps when you have one very good roll, and one mediocre one. You can take a penalty on the good roll to turn the bad one into something a bit better. This can mean you go from one hit and one miss to two hits. If you have deduced the enemy's exact AC (which is pretty easy to do after they've been attacked a few times, and many DMs will just tell it to you, especially when the AC is from something obvious, like chainmail), you will know exactly how large of a modifier you can safely apply. So I suspect the potential downside of missing with both attacks when penalizing your better roll will be almost nonexistent in practice. The house rule should probably forbid putting a -5 modifier on a critical hit (since a natural 20 always hits, regardless of modifiers or AC).

A few changes might make it a bit more balanced. You could require the player using the ability to decide how to apply the modifiers before rolling (e.g. "I'll take a -2 on my dagger for a +2 on my shortsword"). Or you could limit how the modifiers can be applied. Maybe the negative modifier can only be put on the off-hand attack roll? Or only on the higher of the two rolls, to prevent the dumping of a -5 on an obvious miss?