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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 1694538" data-attributes="member: 2205">Wow, I'm suddenly having tons of opportunities to talk about a subject near and dear to my heart...But I always say the same thing.  I've done a fairly brusque refitting of the system by replacing almost all the classes and borrowing the magic system from the d20 Call of Cthulhu game.  <a href="http://jdyal.cheapwindows.us/main.htm" target="_blank">This site</a> shows specifically how I've done it.  But the short version is that I have no spellcasting classes at all.  No wizards or sorcerors.  No clerics or druids.  Not even any paladins, rangers or bards.  Anyone can learn a spell; I have a third (now fourth) level character that can cast the spell Fist of Yog-Sothoth which does (character level)*d6 damage when cast, but which causes 2 points of strength damage and 1d6 Sanity damage to the caster every time (not to mention the Sanity damage from learning the spell in the first place...)  Since his Sanity is now in the 20s, he only uses that spell if he's desperate.  Really, really desperate.I've also had one magic item turn up, loosely modeled on the Witchfire, made famous in the Witchfire trilogy series of modules from Privateer Press (but known more colloquially to my players as "the big-ass demon sword") -- it's about 8 feet long and is possessed by multiple demons.  It does some serious damage; the entire party would have been killed in a heartbeat without it ignoring 10 points of natural armor bonus on a certain largish bad guy and doing 2d12 + STR modifier damage to his iron-bound arse (good damage rolls helped too), but it also bites its wielder every time it attacks anyone, as well as whispering blasphemous heresies into the very soul of it's user -- after losing 1d6 Sanity and 1d6 hit points every single time he made a successful attack, which was like four times, the third level character was reduced to a gibbering idiot in negative hitpoints who was only too happy to never see the foul weapon again.It really depends on exactly what you mean by low magic, I guess.  A lot of people are happy with something as simple as nerfing half a dozen spells, or house ruling that all dedicated spellcasting classes must not let their spellcasting class level pass up their non-spellcasting class level.  That's low magic, but obviously a much different feel than my campaign.One thing that's really important to keep in mind is that the CR system isn't really balanced all that well without "regular magic."  You have to do exactly what we used to do in the old days; look over the monster/character abilities of your antagonists, mentally stack them up against the abilities of your PCs and make a judgement call on how well they'll be able to perform.  I've been lucky (or good, but modest!) in that I've been able to have some real nail-biter encounters without having any real balance issues -- i.e., encounters that were either much too easy or much too difficult for what I wanted.  I did have a pack of slightly downgraded dire badgers (with a different picture, but mechanically that's what they were) who savaged the PCs a bit more than I thought, and I did have to make some impromptu downgrades to my martial artist iron lich (he didn't cast any spells, and I "forgot" his damage reduction) after already toning down the natural armor bonus to begin with.It takes a bit of practice to do that, though, and a willingness to admit to yourself that "whoops, I slightly flubbed this encounter -- what can I do to make it about the difficulty class I intended it to be?" and then have the ability think on your feet just a bit.  But I've gotten fairly good at that; in fact, I'm just as likely to blow the balance in a regular D&D game as in my low magic game anyway.I dunno.  Anything else you want to talk about specifically?</blockquote>

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