D&D General What *is* D&D? (mild movie spoilers)

[Minigiant]

Dark Sun is low-magic enough that people finding out you're a wizard could lead directly to your death at the hands of essentially a mob of peasants wielding crummy stone pitchforks. Clerics and druids are less unpopular but some of the stigma surely still attaches, especially given the reputation of the templars.

The sorcerer kings are above that sort of persecution, and in order to make the setting work economically a DM actually has to either raise the magic level enough to let them grow more food per square mile, or stretch out the geography by a factor of 10 or more (100+ times more prime farmland per city-state). But Dark Sun as written is low-magic, high-mysticism (via psionics).

But is not that the point?

That Dark Sun is (one of) the Anti-D&D setting.

 

[Remathilis]

Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Mystara, basically any setting they're not currently supporting or planning to support.

Mystara has islands full of high level wizards, a functioning magocracy, an entire continent where people get magical mutant powers, a prestigious family of French (literally) wizards and a freaking nuclear core emanating magic from it. It was also the home of magens, meks, and other magical creations, and the vast majority of Immortals are former adventurers. Mystara is bloated to bursting with magic the minute you look beyond Karameikos and the B series.

 

[Remathilis]

And yet a party of four fighters, a thief, a cleric, and one wizard was and is still a good party in OD&D. It's only the WotC versions of D&D that skew caster-heavy below 10th level.

(And I guess maybe a certain subset of AD&D games with a lot of multiclassing and players who are very good at working around armor limitations on wizard spells.)

Yeah. A party with multi-class fighter/mages, mage/thieves, a cleric (or better, a specialty priest) and a paladin or ranger was the perfect ideal party.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Mystara has islands full of high level wizards, a functioning magocracy, an entire continent where people get magical mutant powers, a prestigious family of French (literally) wizards and a freaking nuclear core emanating magic from it. It was also the home of magens, meks, and other magical creations, and the vast majority of Immortals are former adventurers. Mystara is bloated to bursting with magic the minute you look beyond Karameikos and the B series.

But if you don't look beyond, or you wait until you're higher level to look for that stuff, you can and are in fact assumed to be playing in a much more mundane/low magic world. Not no magic, but not in-your-face magic either. Tons of OSR work, much of which is low magic, is based on the books which introduced that very setting.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah. A party with multi-class fighter/mages, mage/thieves, a cleric (or better, a specialty priest) and a paladin or ranger was the perfect ideal party.

That to me reads as a 2e party very heavily engaged in squeezing every ounce of power out of the mechanical side of the game. Not every party is like that.

 

[MGibster]

D&D has been its own genre for a long time, but I feel that now it's standing up and proudly declaring it.

I first discovered that in the very early 1990s when I attempted to use AD&D 2nd edition to adapt it to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. The more my little teenaged mind thought about it, the more I realized that AD&D resembled very little the fantasy books I had been reading. It was something as a revelation as I had always considered D&D to be rather generic, and in some ways that still holds true, as its my primary source of fantasy for the last 30 years. (I pretty must stopped reading fantasy books more than 25 years ago save for Prachett and wrapping up the Wheel of Time series.)

I hear people say that and I am sure it is true in some sense, but it definitely doesn't need to be played that way. Gold is a precious commodity in our 5e game.

It doesn't have to be, but for most practical considerations it's the truth. Even in a game like Acquisitions, Inc, a game where money should be an issue since you're running a business, the gold flows so freely you don't have to worry about little things like overhead or the cost of labor.

 

[Remathilis]

But if you don't look beyond, or you wait until you're higher level to look for that stuff, you can and are in fact assumed to be playing in a much more mundane/low magic world. Not no magic, but not in-your-face magic either. Tons of OSR work, much of which is low magic, is based on the books which introduced that very setting.

I mean, if you keep your game too one tiny corner of the setting and don't engage with anything above 4th level, ANY setting can be low magic...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

But is not that the point?

That Dark Sun is (one of) the Anti-D&D setting.

Except for the D&D tropes it was designed to rationalize and reinforce, like chainmail bikinis.

 

[dave2008]

It doesn't have to be, but for most practical considerations it's the truth. Even in a game like Acquisitions, Inc, a game where money should be an issue since you're running a business, the gold flows so freely you don't have to worry about little things like overhead or the cost of labor.

My point is gold doesn't flow freely in our games. I am the DM, so I get to control that and I'm pretty stingy

 

[dave2008]

And yet a party of four fighters, a thief, a cleric, and one wizard was and is still a good party in OD&D. It's only the WotC versions of D&D that skew caster-heavy below 10th level.

Actually that works great in 5e as well. Our party is 3 fighters, a ranger (rogue scout), and a wizard. No cleric even!