Joshua Dyal said:
Rather than saying "low magic sucks just because" I think a more useful discussion would be how to make low magic, grim and gritty d20 games work.
Nice idea. Okay, here are a few for me:
> You need a more detailed Masterwork system, with multiple levels of bonus and a lot more "exotic material" modifiers. That way, the famous Excalibur-type weapons can still be better than a plain old sword, without requiring magic.
> You need better rules for nonmagical healing. The Heal skill isn't really effective enough; if you've played NWN, you know how the Heal skill in that game is significantly more useful. Make it too good and it's simply a healing potion in another form, but there needs to be some ability to patch up wounds without waiting a week.
> Creatures with DR, regeneration, resists, incorporeality, or any undead need to be reassessed for purposes of CR before being used.
> You need to add a "wound" system, nonmagical defense bonuses, and possibly armor-as-DR system to keep player combat scaling correctly as level increases.
And on the magical side,
> Clarify what you intend by "low magic". If spellcasting classes are rare, it's still easily possible that the majority of the party would be that rare exception, since those'd be the types drawn to the adventuring lifestyle. If you don't want the players to have access to magic either, then it's a lot more work.
> Magic-using classes need to have a less exponential power curve. While their max spell level can keep increasing, they shouldn't ALSO get so many more spells per day.
> Mages need to be prevented from casting all their biggest spells in one shot (the 1-encounter problem that is exemplified by the Scry-Buff-Teleport debate). For example, a drain-based magic system works nicely here; if you have to recover between big spells, it spaces things out nicely.
> If you still want to keep magic in the game, you need to compensate for the fact that the typical person will no longer have the +save items and feats that'd allow him to resist the magic. Otherwise, PC wizards would be unstoppable killing machines, and enemy wizards would be worse. For example, you could give everyone Spell Resistance equal to their CHA plus their racial HD. When the average commoner has SR 10, no one will be playing a low-level Wizard. And, it keeps CHA from being a dump stat. Or, just add a straight save bonus for non-magic classes.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make earlier was that the changes needed to make a good* low-magic system are so extensive that you're better off working the other direction, adding a magic system to a game already balanced for zero-magic. My friends and I have already done that, and it's worked VERY nicely for us. One of these days I'll get around to posting it on the House Rules forum.
*- "Good system" and "system that can lead to good games" are two different things. If I took D&D and removed every spell above 4th level, I could still make a good campaign out of it, as long as the players cooperated, but that wouldn't make it a balanced game system.
