altering d20/d&d for low magic games

[Afrodyte]

The result is a "rarer magic" campaign. Magic exists, but it is rarer than it is in a normal DnD campaign, and tends to be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful individuals.

Ah, cool!

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Of course I recommend the ENnie nominated GRIM TALES.

 

[Red Spire Press]

What if I find the entire campaign premise, regardless of magic power level, to be quite distasteful?

I wish I had more time to keep up with threads here! To respond to your post, Dark Legacies is a complete low-magic ruleset as well as a campaign setting, so you're not bound by the Earth-based environment. I hate the terms "crunch" and "fluff" but if I must use them, there's a whole lot of crunch in the Player's Guide, meaning new and alternate rules that we took great pains to ensure were fun, complete, and -- ultimately -- work. Cheers.

 

[der_kluge]

I like the idea of building a low-magic environment, but I shudder at the idea of having so many house rules to try to accomplish that. I myself have numerous pages of minor tweaks to the rules, and while many of them are campaign specific, a lot are not. I've found it somewhat difficult to manage them all just because they are often times easy to forget, since they are found in the rulebooks - the first place we go to look stuff up.

So, ideally, low-magic should work well without tons of rules.

I do agree that the easiest way is the multi-class rule. I'm also in favor of the Bard/Paladin/Ranger as prestige classes from the Unearthed Arcana. And I would like to implement Elements of Magic (keep hearing good things about that) to spice up magic a bit more.

Beyond that, everything else should remain the same from the players' perspective. I think the big thing is to tone down the number of magic items that are presented, and keep them extremely rare. I also think limiting the amount of starting gold also helps, and keep treasure extremely rare.

I've always had a problem with the economics of D&D. By the time any character can afford full plate armor, they're walking around in something magical that's far better. No one ever buys masterwork weapons, because by the time you have 300+ gold to spend on one, you've already got a +1 whatever.

Fix those problems and you've gotten 95% (IMHO) of what you've likely set out to accomplish.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I, too, like to see the efforts folks have been putting into to lowering the superheroes-like gaming that high-level D&D has become. I miss a bunch of how the OD&D rules did things.

1. There are now 4 core classes - The Warrior, the Rogue, the Talist Magi (wizard) and an, as yet unnammed, Druid class. They are designed to be flexible enough to accomodate a lot of different themes. Prestige classes do exist, but they are campaign specific.

I'm doing something like this too. A Warrior, a Rogue, a Path Mage (arcane caster selects exclusive, narrowly defined spell list), a modified anti-undead druid. There are churches, but they are filled with Experts, and I made the cleric a prestige class. I have the paladin, ranger and bard PrC options from UA, also.

I'm also looking at building in Epic advancement right into the charts I'm giving to PCs so as to make it a smooth, fluid step; and not a jarring thematic change. Very much like how OD&D did it.

6. Misc: Oh, let's see... everyone has a single BAB value. If you want to make multiple attacks you take a -4 penalty (cumulative) that applies to each additional attack. eg. 1 attack at +12, 2 attacks at +8 (each), 3 attacks at +4 (each), etc. to a min of +0 BAB.

I LOVE this idea! It took me a moment to think about this and digest what you described... but I get it now. I like it!


Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I can't go through a list right now, but I should have been more precise in my original post: of the spells above 6th level that I have kept, ALL have been transformed into "incantations" (using a modified version of the UA guidelines).

I understand not wanting to go into the complex dirty details, but this has my interest. I'm curious if you could at least give some quick guidelines how you approached each different spell for alteration into incantations?


Regards,
Eric Anondson