What is "grim and gritty" and "low magic" anyway?

Bendris Noulg · Mar 15, 2004

Kamikaze Midget said:
#2: Posseidon has a vested interest in making Odysseus & crew go through a long, obnoxious route to get home.

Your mythology's a tad off... It was Posseidon's intention that Odysseus never get home by sea. Naturally, thinking that the world is all about him, Odysseus doesn't tell his men and sets sail, figuring he's too high a level for something like a piddly trip through the Mediteranean Sea to be overly difficult.

Naturally, he was proven wrong.

Bendris Noulg · Mar 15, 2004

Kamikaze Midget said:
You say those like they're bad things....Thousands of people watched/watch those kind of shows and love them.

Actually, I have given the whole Eternia-thing a few considerations as a game world. Granted, it wouldn't be as cheesy as He-Man/She-Ra, but I do see potential in a similar setting.

As for Dragonball Z, assuming that the RPG focused on Training as much as the series does, than I'm all for it. Otherwise it would easier to make an array of mass-destruction Arcane spells class abilities for Epic Monks.

At any rate, you're right about it being a matter of taste (of course, that means I was right earlier about it being a matter of taste, which also makes the hundreds of folks before me right about it being a matter of taste, which means that this conversation is only in continuation because of the pin heads that accuse all low magic GMs of being incompetant, railroading, power-mad GMs, thus proving that they're pin heads and everone else was right).

Wulf Ratbane · Mar 15, 2004

Kamikaze Midget said:
Well, first of all myth != good fiction. And good fiction != good game.

Okay, let's see here, let's do The Odyssey, but within the confines of D&D rules....first, let's do the 'crucial elements of the story.'

#1: Odysseus is a sneaky fighter who has won a great war, and wants to get home. His defining trait is his cunning and wit.
#2: Posseidon has a vested interest in making Odysseus & crew go through a long, obnoxious route to get home.
#3: Through a series of stops on the way, Odysseus is jerked around by some gods, and gets home. Those stops are the adventures in the campaign.

Now, be careful. It almost sounds like the DM is ready to change the rules of magic to railroad his players because he doesn't like it when they use magic to come up with creative solutions.

1) Well, since we have (let's say) 5 players, we'll need 4 main characters. So let's say Odysseus (sneaky fighter) had three of his heroic buds along for the ride: Jozan, Kyrrwyn, Mialee, and Regdar. Yes, I know they don't sound Greek, but that's hardly a problem with the d20 levle of magic.
2) The Trojan War just ended. In it, the Achean fleet and their heroes invaded Troy, killed their people, and took their stuff. So these guys can't be first level -- let's make 'em 15th (hey, they're heroes!), and the GP they get to spend on character wealth is a combination of the equipment they've braught with them to fight, and the stuff they've found on the battlefield.

Why stop at 15th? You running a low magic game or something? Why aren't they 20th level? Are you afraid that 20th level heroes are capable of things that 15th level heroes are not?

3) They want to get home, and but Troy is more than 1500 miles from Ithica

Since when is distance a factor with teleport? What? They changed the spell in 3.5? Now why do you suppose they felt they had to go and do something like that?

Besides, it's not as if they couldn't just plane shift away and back. That'll get you back within range of where you need to be.

Crew, cargo, and all the beer they could want go into their portable hole. Mialee says, "Hold your breath for just 6 seconds, boys!" and bam! They're home.

If they don't have a portable hole, Mialee makes one. Or two. Only a damned fool of a wizard doesn't have Craft Wondrous Items.

Barring that, they send their crew off to enjoy a short vacation in paradise and cut off their ears, taking the ears home with them. On arriving home-- whether by teleport or wind walk, who cares?-- they cast true ressurrection on their crew members. Every crew member who prefers the real world to the afterlife comes back. (Hades starts to object, but realizes that the spell doesn't work that way and he doesn't get a say anymore.)

Perhaps they'd rather cast Gate. They're buddied up with Zeus (good buddy to have) so they open a Gate to Mt. Olympus, party with the nymphs for a while, then Gate home.

Can't cast Gate? Buy a couple of scrolls. Or summon something that can cast it for you.

Ooh! How about Teleportation Circle? That's a great way to move an army and its ill-gotten loot.

[snip]

They pretty much never see the rest of that adventure.

Wulf

Piratecat · Mar 15, 2004

Wulf Ratbane said:
In your last big "plot," after all, there was no divination, no teleportation/etherealness/astral, and to some degree even ressurrection was affected.

No on the latter; resurrection was unaffected. While the other temporary changes were much more for mood (trying to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation) than for tactics or plot channeling, I certainly see your point. I'll be curious whether future adventures which work fine but don't cripple abilities change your opinion slightly on this aspect. We'll have to see.

Wulf Ratbane · Mar 15, 2004

Piratecat said:
No on the latter; resurrection was unaffected. While the other temporary changes were much more for mood (trying to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation) than for tactics or plot channeling, I certainly see your point. I'll be curious whether future adventures which work fine but don't cripple abilities change your opinion slightly on this aspect. We'll have to see.

Well, again, I haven't said that high magic isn't fun, nor that it can't be challenging, just that it doesn't do a very good job of modelling the kinds of challenges which typically face the heroes of myth.

There are different challenges, and there are different solutions. It's different, and inasmuch as one wants an experience that is not different from classic myth and fiction, that can be a problem.

That's all I'm sayin'. I think that's all anybody who's on the GnG side of this argument is saying.

Wulf

WizarDru · Mar 15, 2004

The further the discussion goes, the more I see hong's point.

Even without magic items, in a totally non-magic setting, D&D won't create the 'grim-and-gritty' setting that I think some folks envision for it. A 20th level fighter or barbarian is still a thing of terror, magic weapons or no.

A human fighter has something on the odds of 13 feats, four attacks at the maximum BAB for PCs in the game, one excellent save (and in a low magic world, the most important of the three) and the ability to use virtually any weapon or armor he can lay his hands upon (though it may bost him a feat to do so). A rogue is equally puissant in such sitautions. An appropriately tricked out archer can drop whole armies, if he has the breathing room.

Does that accurately reflect fiction or myth? I'm not sure that it does. I'm not saying there's a problem with either approach, but it seems to me that a lm/gng game would need to do far more than just remove magic from the equation. The very nature of the game would preclude it.

Myths and stories don't need to concern themselves with the trifles of what makes a good game, which like the 'what makes a good book doesn't necesarrily make a good movie' argument may be beyond the scope of this discussion, I think. The point merely is that Beowulf had only a couple of monsters in his world to battle, not dozens of thriving monster ecologies existing parallel to each other.

I both agree and disagree with some of the things Wulf has said, for example. Having run "Lich Queen's Beloved", where the PCs go to the Astral and take the smack to the Lich Queen of the Githyanki herself, I can say that Wulf is right in that the PCs dropped 250 Githyanki warriors in a matter of rounds. Taking out the whole invasion force, if it bunched up for those area damage spells, wouldn't have been hard. They didn't after that encounter, of course, but the point still stands.

However, I've also got a shadowdancer who rolled an 86 on a skill check, and an elven archer who can routinely his the mid-50s on her spot checks. The wizard isn't the one deactivating that Sphere of Annihilation trap. Could he? He could have almost certainly done so, if he could have discovered it. But seeing as he lacked the skill to detect the trap, it would have been lethal to him. Which is why they sent the rogue on ahead to find and deal with the problem. The wizard can trump many abilities, if he's prepared for the situations...but the wizard and the other players often don't get to choose their own battlefields, or the time of the battle. I routinely hear "what do you mean, we're out of teleports?" or "I didn't prepare that today. I can do it tomorrow..." just as often at 23rd level as we did at 3rd. In all three of the last three sessions, in fact.

And there are plenty of things that even 23rd level characters can't do in 6 spells. Convince a rogue group of Celestials to change their minds about leaving the host and becoming guardians of the Prime, for example, or forcing a deity to involve himself directly in a inter-planar war, for another.

Ultimately, I see both styles as having appeal. Sometimes I want to be in Lankhmar, other times I want to be in Dragaera. Both are fun.

Bendris Noulg · Mar 15, 2004

Wulf Ratbane said:
That's all I'm sayin'. I think that's all anybody who's on the GnG side of this argument is saying.

Pretty much sums it up.

tauton_ikhnos · Mar 15, 2004

For me, low magic == some combination of following factors:

- rare magic
- lack of strategic magic, possibly tactical magic
- magic which has high cost (such as 1 CON per spell level)
- magic which is culture/society restricted (cast Invis, go to Jail)

From story perspective, successful game stories are about either challenge or relationships. Magic (high, low, or other) only affects challenge.

It affects other things as well, but they are not story. At most they are "feel", "mood", "genre". Star Trek was Old West stories in space - only difference from story perspective was what challenges they faced.

I prefer high magic. I like the feel, mood, genre. And I am good at challenges at that level. But that's all it is.

To use Odysseus & Poseidon example:

Fundamental relationships are Poseidon & Odysseus, Odysseus & His Men, Odysseus & Strange/Dangerous Places. The challenges are what Poseidon puts in way of Odysseus.

In a low magic game, that is distance and man-eating islands.

In a high magic game, that is interplanar journey on River Styx, with Odysseus divinely cursed with dimensional anchor... sure, he could send men home, but can't get there himself.

Wulf Ratbane · Mar 15, 2004

WizarDru said:
Even without magic items, in a totally non-magic setting, D&D won't create the 'grim-and-gritty' setting that I think some folks envision for it. A 20th level fighter or barbarian is still a thing of terror, magic weapons or no.

I don't think anyone has suggested that the only change necessary for a low-magic, grim and gritty setting is the removal of magic-using classes and magic items.

Does that accurately reflect fiction or myth?

Well, yes, it accurately reflects a great many myths.

There's nothing wrong with Samson slaying whole armies armed with nothing but a jawbone and his mullet, but at the end of the day he has to walk home, he has to eat, he has to sleep, and he's mortal-- he retains certain essential qualities of humanity with which we can identify, and the world in which he lives has a verisimilitude more analogous to the realities of our own world than the Forgotten Realms.

Superhuman characters abound in mythology, but they still have a resonance (not to get to Jungian here) that you just don't get from high magic D&D.

Again, whether or not that is a good thing is a matter of taste. If you are lucky enough to have a DM like K.M. or Piratecat, you can still be entertained and challenged by high magic D&D.

Wulf