D&D 5E I feel like my world is drifting towards low magic, any tips?

[Cap'n Kobold]

I was tired when I posted that, I don't know what I was thinking. On the subject of Overpowered, that is not the issue I have with magic. It is simply that magic in my world is much more wild and untamed than the default, and I would like a mechanical way to reflect that. I intend to test various changes over time, until I find the best one for my world.

Weakening/reducing Cantrips isn't at the top of my list, but it is one of the things that I feel makes magic look much more tamed. Other thoughts I have had is simply limiting Cantrips known, or having some sort of mini-surge table for cantrips, that causes them to misbehave every now and then.

How about Cantrips dealing double damage on the roll of a 20 to hit, (or enemy save of a 1). However, if natural 1 or 20 are rolled on either roll, the caster loses a spell slot. If they have no remaining spell slots, they take a level of exhaustion.
So even cantrips can run wild and surge a little, but there is a chance that they will still drain the caster.

 

[L R Ballard]

I set my campaign in the Primeval Thule setting, and I run adventures written for that setting intermixed with adventures written for the World of Xoth setting (introduced in the excellent The Spider God's Bride adventure collectuon). Here and there I use other stuff too, but mostly of it is Thule and Xoth.

Now, Xoth is actually written for the Pathfinder rules set, but makes a big deal about being low-magic. Thule is written for multiple systems, but I use the 5e versions. For both/all of them, I regularly need to swap out magic treasure for non-native treasure and swap out enemy casters for non-casters.

Thanks for the references. I looked carefully at the settings this evening. Conan art inspired the creation of some of my group's old characters. I'm thinking of one character in particular that I made who owed his aesthetic origin to the art of Boris Vallejo. My friends and I later drew inspiration from Larry Elmore's Dragonlance art and the novels. Our campaign developed noble, high-magic bloodlines rather than delve further into low magic and barbarism. That said, the Conan-inspired character I made led the most successful, most powerful characters of all time in our childhood campaigns. And he emerged from a low-magic world, small towns dotted across a frontier land.

 

[Roadkill101]

Well for damage dealing, par the amount of damage down so that it equates the same range as for weapons. Basically just scale down the mechanical effects (i.e duration, range, damage) based on the spell level.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Well for damage dealing, par the amount of damage down so that it equates the same range as for weapons. Basically just scale down the mechanical effects (i.e duration, range, damage) based on the spell level.

Cantrips already generally deal less damage than weapons, because weapons add an ability modifier to their damage.