D&D 5E How to De-Magic 5e

[dave2008]

Another 5e/3e heartbreaker that might be close to what you're looking for:

Pickpocket Press

Low Fantasy Gaming and Lowlife 2090

lowfantasygaming.com

It looks pretty good to me; I was thinking about picking it up and running it, but ended up running straight 5e Midgard instead.

I picked that up, but it just wasn't what I was looking for either so I stuck with 5e and my house rules

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Understood if it wasn't quite what you were looking for.

Another idea I had was to run a heavily modified Adventures in Middle Earth, with a spellcasting system that would work something like boons - the ability to cast a spell a few times might come from research, or be a gift from a god or other supernatural entity. But I never quite figured out how exactly to balance it, and decided just to run straight 5e instead.

 

[Don Durito]

If you had Fighters, Rogues and Druids (Circle of the Land - no wildshape - reskinned as "wizards"). You'd have enough there to do something similar to an old school game.

I'm not sure if that would work however, with everyone knowing all the options that are being left out.

 

[Salthorae]

I think taking cantrips away and setting the tone for the game/setting that you're shooting for go a long way towards your goal.

I'm playing in a "low-magic" setting where there are Wizards, but they are pretty much all scheming backstabbing, people (i.e. none are PC's in the G game.) who actively hunt Sorcerer's and Warlocks for their "innate" magic to power/fuel their own spells.

In this game, magic is rare and special for us and we still have cantrips in the game. If you take those away, and set the right tone, I think you can get what you want without too much more work.

I would include the "Cantrip" spell as a 1st level spell though just for the apprentice spellcaster flavor that it brings.

 

[Parmandur]

The basic "unit of currency" in class design in 5e is the spell...

I don't have any particular solid solutions to offer, but I will offer a hot take on this. You have to step back a notch, because the basic unit of currency which underlies Spells and everything else is actually hit points. There is a table in the DMG, meant to work as a guideline to help determine the appropriate hit point contribution of a Spell (damage or healing doesn't matter). Mearls has gone into how this is the basic underwriting of the game's ability economy: hit point contributions in 6-8 encounters of 2-3 rounds between Long Rests, with two Short Rests.

For a magic-minimizing solution, I would suggest looking at ways to reduce the flash while maintaining the HP economy of a Class.

 

[Ratskinner]

I don't want to ban spellcasters.*

I just want to make magic more rare, and more interesting. IMO.



*Again, though, what are we left with RAW?
Fighters (some subclasses)
Rogues (some subclasses)
Monks (some subclasses)
Barbarians (some subclasses)

....and?

Can you be a bit more specific about how rare you want magic to be?

I mean, I see the following (easy) options as all viable.

1) No caster classes. Magical feats still allowed, so a "caster" is just someone with the ritual caster feat and maybe the magical initiate feat. (perhaps modify them a bit.)

2) Same as above, but allow the 1/3 caster (sub)classes.

3) Keep the casters, but make cantrips Vancian as well.

4) Add casting checks (ability Mod + prof bonus) for casting even "reliable" spells, with consequences for failure. (Perhaps some kind of corruption, gaining monstrous traits as you fail more.) The higher the difficulty, the more rare the magic will be. (Also, you could have a middle "safe" zone. So roll 15+ and the spell works as noted, roll under 10 and get a corruption point.) Optional: corruption gained = 1+level of spell. It up to you whether failure burns the spell slot or cantrip, but I would think it should.

 

[Hussar]

That seems to be something of a common thread here.

You ABSOLUTELY need your players to buy into this. Mine... didn't. At least, not entirely and it showed. As I said, I wound up in a "No caster game" having like 4 out of the 5 PC's be partial casters.

I suggest you suggest to your players that everyone MUST play a full caster. Insist on it strongly. Everyone HAS to play a full caster. It's guaranteed that your players will come to the table with three fighters and a rogue.

But, in all seriousness, if your players aren't 100% on board with this, they will simply push back as hard as they can - so, whatever is the top limit of the magic you are allowing, that's where they'll be.

 

[Leatherhead]

What are the best approaches you've found for de-Magicking 5e?

Replace the word "magic" with something else.

No seriously, that's how you do it. Thanks to the abstraction of game rules and how players interact with the world. The only thing that determines if an effect is magical is if it is called "magical". The mechanics are similar because there is only so much you can do with the system.

I guess you could also experiment with banning anything that casts 9th level spells and renaming Paladins into Clerics and Artificers into Wizards, but that seems beyond the scope of what you are doing here.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

To those recommending it: how cross-compatible is Adventures in Middle-Earth with core D&D? Could you just drop the classes into a D&D campaign?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Make six different Battlemaster builds, one for each Fighting Style. Don't let the fighters choose their own maneuvers, decide beforehand which maneuvers go with each Fighting Style build. And at the points where the fighter gets the "extra" feats/ASIs (at 6th level and so on), pre-select the feat each build gets that makes the most sense.

Now write up each of these builds in Word with complete information for the entirety of the 20 levels, all features written out and explained. Give each of them their own special name (like Marksman for Archery style, Slayer for Great Weapon, Armiger for Defense, Dervish for Two-Weapon, Vanguard for Protection, and Myrmidon for Dualist) When you do this, you will now have 6 new and complete non-magical classes for players to select from. Then write up every single one of the rogue subclasses in complete class form (all rogue features plus subclass features) as though they were no all rogues, but instead were their own individual classes.

At this point you have about 12 non-magical classes for players to choose from.

For the Paladin and the Ranger, give both of them the Divine Smite feature that Paladin gets (call the Ranger's "Hunter's Mark" if you want, and write both classes up such that they no longer have spells, they just have the slots to fuel their Divine Smite / Hunter's Mark damage. You now have an additional 6 to 8 non-magical classes.

Then finally, you only use the Cleric and the Wizard as your two lone spellcasting classes. And you remove cantrips from both of them... or at the very least, the only cantrip they get is Thaumaturgy or Prestidigitation, as they are just your basic minor roleplaying magics.

You now have a whole host of warrior types and only a few caster types.