Pathfinder 1E D & D and/or Pathfinder, the effects of selective spell exclusions

[Hereticus]

There will be problems when the DM is not well versed and proficient in spell combat. I can say this confidently... in no game I have been in for over 30 years, there has not been a player or DM more competent in spell combat, arcane or divine. As DM, no player has been able to catch me off guard (maybe surprise me a bit) with a spell combo. An unprepared DM will make a system seem broken, and as a player I can sense blood.

This is why I do not have small mom and do magic shops in my campaign world. Guilds have branch shops where items can be purchased. The really good stuff is only sold to people who are known by the guild. There are no jewelry cases full of magic weapons, ready to be stolen. I consider this to be more like real life, how I would do it myself if D&D was real.

As a wizard, I would be a member of a guild. As as sorcerer, I would be an individualist living in the underbelly of society.

As a lord, I would ally myself with the guilds, and have rival rogue's guilds spying on the known sorcerers.

 

[Eubani]

I am thinking that if teleport was not available for mortals, spellcasters would depend upon the school of Illusion to make getaways either that or 2 other options come to mind 1. Wizards would have to be more creative with other spells when enemies are about and escape may be needed or 2. Wizards will be more wary about operating behind enemy lines or unsupported.

 

[Hereticus]

Druidic wildshape (and the various polymorph-type spells) would become one of the better modes of transit.

 

[Eman Resu]

to stress a few points of emphasis...spellcasters of any sort, divine or arcane are not trusted, they are actively hunted by the nearest Clericy and their Inquisitors...lawful good to cha evil

sorcerer - gets his norm bloodline spell selection to choose from as well as his cha mod in spells. These spells he gets to use metamagic with more efficiently. Starting with no full round casting and eventually getting the feat "easy metamagic" twice, but only with these spells. Are they nerfed a little yah but this was a party democratic vote we all agreed on, having tossed the crazy decision aside. IF your a sorcerer in a area that you are known in you wont be hunted down and killed. If your a spellcaster of any sort in a foreign land, forget about it. If you escape & survive, great, if not, its the hangman, or worse!

wizards - are really the magical makers of the world and dont travel. They need to stay put and do their work. It would take an exalted GOOD aligned king, court and wizard to work well with one another. And yes this would be powerful, as it is in most campaigns now. As for the rest of the known world, there are zero magic shops, they do not exist. Just like the sorcerer if your in a familiar town where everybody knows you, OK, you wont be hung...welllll until somebody gets sick or anything bad happens then you WILL eventually be blamed. Kings/lordships will have secret aliances with them of course...but this opens them up to enchantments and becoming a puppet...So its rare to say the least.

 

[Hereticus]

wizards - are really the magical makers of the world and dont travel. They need to stay put and do their work. It would take an exalted GOOD aligned king, court and wizard to work well with one another. And yes this would be powerful, as it is in most campaigns now. As for the rest of the known world, there are zero magic shops, they do not exist. Just like the sorcerer if your in a familiar town where everybody knows you, OK, you wont be hung...welllll until somebody gets sick or anything bad happens then you WILL eventually be blamed. Kings/lordships will have secret aliances with them of course...but this opens them up to enchantments and becoming a puppet...So its rare to say the least.

Actually, that would kinda stink to play a wizard.

 

[Eman Resu]

no pc is a wizard, nobody wanted to be locked down to a lab as wizards make horrible travelers and do so as little as possible

This is a dark era where human cities dominate the landscape. Demihuman relations are at best tenuous and thats the good aligned races including elves, dwarves, halflings (aka hobbits or pecks) & gnomes (pecks). There exists no allied agreement with most all are treated as slight heretics. The gnolls, goblinoids, some barbarians and Orcs are treated as severe heretics and are hated outright. Very few are excepted given unique circumstance. Most have a bounty on their heads.

No such thing as a "half elf or half orc population" oh sure there might be 1 or 2 here in there, but a rarity for sure, a population percentage? never, just a small handful thru out the lands

The paranoia's of the masses, the fears and jealousies of the masses work against spell casters in this campaign. The people are quick to report suspicious behavior to local authorities and/or clericy. It is customary for families with spell-casters to hide the abilities or to ostracize that member in fear of being labeled witches themselves.

Religion is a big (er) influence in this campaign and heretics are hunted down. What is done with them then?? alignment would strongly influence. Brief imprisonment, beaten, beaten and stripped naked & ostracized, branded imprisoned indefinitely and so on so forth to drawn quartered, burned at stake, public torture disemboweled Braveheart style.

The definition of heretic is as flexible as it is ambiguous. It could be anybody acting in a way that is merely perceived as going against, undermining, maybe even just questioning the church or state. Any spell-caster, any race that is suspicious or loathed, anybody standing on a soap box, a foreigner, could be somebody who looks funny or strange. The church has a say to outright command over local law enforcement, with the local inquisitor(s) being a very influential position.

 

[Hereticus]

no pc is a wizard, nobody wanted to be locked down to a lab as wizards make horrible travelers and do so as little as possible.

No such thing as a "half elf or half orc population" oh sure there might be 1 or 2 here in there, but a rarity for sure, a population percentage? never, just a small handful thru out the lands.

This does not sound like a game where the DM moderates the story the players want to tell, instead they play a part in the DM's story.

Not for me.

 

[Celebrim]

This does not sound like a game where the DM moderates the story the players want to tell, instead they play a part in the DM's story.

Not for me.

More to the point, it sounds like a world the DM is excited to run, but not necessarily a world player's would be excited to play in.

 

[Celebrim]

to stress a few points of emphasis...spellcasters of any sort, divine or arcane are not trusted, they are actively hunted by the nearest Clericy and their Inquisitors

First, wouldn't any nation that failed to conform to this culture have a massive advantage over anyone that did? If a hypothetical nation, lets call it Starkoverhill, declares, "Free refuge for all spellcasters.", considering how powerful magic is in D&D, then it's quite possible that if the entire rest of the world declared war on Starkoverhill, that Starkoverhill would still win that war.

Secondly, when you say "divine spellcasters" the first thing that comes into my mind is clerics. I'm not really clear on whether you are saying clerical divine spellcasters are not trusted, or not. But if you are saying that clerical divine spellcasters aren't trusted, how does this work or how did this come into being? Are you saying that the vast majority of the population choose to distrust the very people who could heal their diseases, raise their loved ones from the dead, cure their wounds, bless and prosper their crops, and choose to trust the people who could not perform those miracles? That seems a pretty strange situation.

Finally, while on the one hand I want to applaud you for trying to work out a more realistic situation than you are apparently accustomed to, but in many ways I think you are overreacting with simplistic stereotypes. Perhaps in play it won't work out as simplistic and one dimensional as it is coming across in your descriptions of your ideas, but in a world where magic is real I think people are going to evolve to a more nuanced situation than either 'Magic-Marts' or the sort of Dark Ages stereotype you describe. I think you really need to start thinking about what happens when societies question the assumptions you've made. As a simple example, suppose some evil aligned culture decides to welcome spellcasters into their midst rather than reviling them. This culture, whether its goblins or just a ruthless nation, will have a huge advantage over their rivals while at the same time appearing to any spellcaster to be more tolerant and welcoming than their own hostile, belligerent, and violent culture. It would be easy to assume that they are no worse than ones own culture in a case like that. Or what happens when a culture is actually taken over or conquered by a spellcaster of great power. His foes will have relinquished their most potent means of combating the threat he represents.

I think that the long term stable situation is probably not what you describe, but some equilibrium where spell-casters are given respect but expected to act responsibly. And if they will not act responsibly, then sure, they burn them at the stake. As for your fears regarding how a society would respond to threats like charms and enchantments, or illusions, the best responses to those threats aren't simply to try to crush all spell-casters, but to devise cheap protections. For example, a crown which granted a permanent 'protection from evil' to its wearer, would block most forms of enchantment. A court could be enchanted such that any time a spell was cast within it, an alarm of some sort would sound. A court magician could then quickly cast detect magic, which even a 1st level wizard of little threat to the sovereign could manage, to determine the source of the lingering aura, and by this means no spellcaster could get away with threatening the King. Likewise, scales could be easily devised so that any object with a magical aura on it would trigger an alarm, foiling most attempts to fool the merchant. These do not require powerful magic, and would be long enduring to be passed down from hand to hand over decades, so any well appointed shop would likely be able to afford such a device and thieves would of course have to assume such protections are present. And so on and so forth. In short, a society would meet the threats of magic by leveraging magic of their own, and societies that acted in this rational manner would be far better equipped to actually protect themselves from rogue wizards and sorcerers than those that simply tried to oppress all magic.

 

[Celebrim]

double post