D&D is best when the magic is high, fast and furious!

[hong]

Where do you draw the line?

Wherever it becomes boring. So far, our high-level campaign has reached 18th level and people show no sign of becoming bored.

When will your present high-level/high-magic game become boring and "not-cool-anymore", so that you will have to switch to playing gods to get that sense of awe and wonder?

So why not play gods?

 

[Fenes 2]

Another point to consider is that playstyles differ. One low magic struggle may be pitting the PCs against kobolds, orcs etc., while another may pit the PCs against a plotting and stealing secretary of a merchant, who is in league with the thieves guild, who in turn is compromised by spys from another country preparing a trap for a visiting dignitary.
One low-magic plot may consist of a group of bandits threatening caravans, while another low-magic plot consists of the group of PCs questing for the legendary sword of the true king in order to end internal strife in the kingdom so that the invading orcs may be pushed back with an unified army.

The plots of high and low magic campaigns can be the same, just the methods and details differ. In a low-magic campaign the PCs may not have access to diviantion spells, instead relying on old legends and lore, and dusty libraries, perhaps haunted by some ghosts, to discover the whereabouts of the item in question. While in a high magic campaign the PCs use teleport or windwalk to travel the low-magic group uses a ship whose captain they know from another adventure back a few months, maybe getting even with that pirate who escaped them last adventure in the process, or they travel in the wilderness to use an old portal buried in the ruins of a keep now taken over by rebels.
The high-magic group may face an extend maze with teleport traps and blockers, magical obstacles and summoned monsters as guardians, using every spell at their disposal to survive, while the low-magic group faces an extended maze with pit-traps leading into lower levels, waterways, and undead guardians. Or both grouips could face a tribe guarding the relic faithfully, waiting for the chosen, who have to prove themselves in trials, or have to break into the palace of another ruler to recover the relic.

I don't know what kind of adventure plot you can't do with low-magic, as long as one is not hung up on some spells like teleport etc.

 

[hong]

I don't like over-powered magic very much, but I dislike low-magic settings as well. Finding a magical item should be like unwrapping a birthday gift: not every day, and you're usually very happy with it.

Aha! And HERE we have one reason why magic tends to accumulate in D&D to a much greater degree than in novels or other literature. Let's say you receive a birthday gift every year. At a guess, I'll say that at minimum, you've had at least 20 birthdays. You may well have more, but let's just say you have at least 20 birthdays behind you, and thus you have at least 20 birthday gifts.

Now suppose you never threw away those gifts but accumulated them. (You may well even have a big pile of junk in the basement, consisting of all the gifts you've never thrown away.) You're going to have a lot of gifts, aren't you?

Now suppose all those gifts were magic items. Hey presto, you've just accumulated 20 magic items, even though each one was, as you described it, a "birthday gift". And 20 magic items is probably about what a high-level adventurer will have in 3E.

This is basically what happens in a long-term campaign. Each individual adventure may not hand out a lot of loot, and when it's handed out, it may seem reasonable even to the stereotypical "low magic" DM. When you look over the course of a 3-year campaign, though, it adds up.

So I don't particularly care if a 20th level character is decked out like a Christmas tree with magic rings, bracers, gloves, amulets, armour, yadda yadda. A 20th level character is a few planes of existence removed from everyday peons like you and I, anyway, so what would we know about they're likely to have? Just play the game and stop worrying about it, says I.

 

[Celtavian]

Re

What makes high magic boring is when players depend on it and expect it. If the players are looting every single item off the enemies to sell so they can buy a high plus sword or a make an awsomely powerful staff, then high magic is boring IMO.

I have played games where the players care very little about the story and are more concerned about the acquisition of items. I can't stand this kind of game. I can't run games like this, they don't entertain me. I look at a D&D game as mutual entertainment. As a DM, I certainly don't want to run a game with players that make the experience grueling and boring for me. I wouldn't expect them to play in a game that was grueling and boring to them.

Basically, I feel High Magic can be fun if it is run within the confines of a reasonable story. High magic campaigns run as if the DM and players are playing a video game is definitely not my cup of tea. I won't play in or run such campaigns. I play this game to be part of a story, not to accumulate items like some medieval yuppy in fantasy world.

 

[hong]

I don't know what kind of adventure plot you can't do with low-magic, as long as one is not hung up on some spells like teleport etc.

Descend into the Abyss and kill Orcus.

 

[TiQuinn]

High magic vs. low magic is not the distinction I make. Either kind of campaign can work. I look at it as being a matter of high plot, low plot. 40th level characters against an onslaught of 20 winter wights is fine with me if there's a great story behind it. What I dread, and what I find so often, is that a lot of campaigns fall back on bland dungeon crawls that could easily be randomly generated by a computer for all I know. Once upon a time, this was even entertaining for me and occassionally still is. But after 12 years of playing this game, that is becoming very stale. What I don't want after a long week of work is something that I can do by just pulling out my old computer and playing Eye of the Beholder.

 

[Fenes 2]

Wherever it becomes boring. So far, our high-level campaign has reached 18th level and people show no sign of becoming bored.

So why not play gods?

Because it is a whole lot of work for the DM (that means me in my case) just to create and adventures each week for a party with low-magic ressources. If I had to adjust the adventures to take godly powers into account the work needed would exceed my free time by far. I am not willing to spend the additional hours just so that PCs can cast meteor swarm instead of fireball (while having the same %-effect on the target's hitpoints).

One of my weekly campaigns is at level 14 since over half a year. The PCs have more relative power, socially and in battle, in the campaign than the PCs of my last high-level 2E campaign had at 18, but it is much easier to prepare an adventure for them since they don't have tons of magic items and spells and psionic powers at their disposal. Without raise dead/resurrect I don't have to go to great lengths just to have an assassination plot. Without teleport I don't have to go to great lengths constructing reasons for the party to go on a ship or travel with a caravan if that is my adventure hook - but if I don't want to make an adventure out of traveling I can still fast forward to the arrival. Without powerful divinations, especially scry, I don't have to prepare each plotting NPC with mindblank and other spells.

I can use that preparation time instead on creating more detailed NPCs, their ambitions, and their weaknesses, plots and subplots and locations without worrying each time about the players bringing up the question "Why don't/didn't we/the just use ... to solve/do that?"

I have seen plots getting smashed to bits in minutes with a few choice combos in 2E, finally resulting in a "standard array" of counter measures BBEGs had to have just to survive, or even contemplate their plots - which rendered most of the powers of the PCs null in the process. IMHO it is just not worth the trouble.

 

[hong]

Because it is a whole lot of work for the DM (that means me in my case) just to create and adventures each week for a party with low-magic ressources. If I had to adjust the adventures to take godly powers into account the work needed would exceed my free time by far.

If this is REALLY your beef with high-magic/deific gaming (as opposed to "it's boring" or "it's munchkin" or anything similar):

Exalted.
Nobilis.
Champions.
OD&D Companions and Immortals, even.

There are plenty of ways to do over-the-top superheroics that don't involve the overhead of 3E.

 

[Fenes 2]

Descend into the Abyss and kill Orcus.

No problem. My low-magic PCs will need an artefact to kill him (or may have to bathe their weapons in the pool of blood orcus left when he battled a God of Good in ancient times to be able to wound him), and have to quest for that. After that they will have to find the legendary portal to the abyss Orcus used when he ravaged the kingdom of X 1000s of years back, use the portal with a key recovered from yet another quest, and descend into the abyss. The forces of good may grant them some (one-time) protection on their assault to survive the enviroment of the abyss (perhaps a drink from the fountian in the avlley of the gods), and orcus himself will be tailored so that the fight is challenging but not impossible. My PCs don't need boatloads of magic they have access to every day to succeed in such an epic quest.

 

[Fenes 2]

If this is REALLY your beef with high-magic/deific gaming (as opposed to "it's boring" or "it's munchkin" or anything similar):

Exalted.
Nobilis.
Champions.
OD&D Companions and Immortals, even.

There are plenty of ways to do over-the-top superheroics that don't involve the overhead of 3E.

This is really my beef (apart from the problem with the suspension of disbelief I get in magic shop-campaigns still modelled after medieval europe), but why should I change systems when d20 offers me the same? I don't have a problem playing D&D my way, which consists in reducing the amount of magic itemns and spells available to the PCs and NPCs.