Dragonblade said:
Whose concept of magical items in a fantasy world? Certainly not mine. Yours perhaps. And although you are not the first to decry magic items and magic because of the magical arms race you feel takes place at higher levels, my theory is still valid.
But only within the realm of D&D and CRPGs. Outside of these limited examples within the genre, such prolifferation does not occur.
The magic arms race is simply the logical extrapolation of a world where magic works. Just as in the real world, where guns have evolved to replace swords as the weapon of choice, so will more powerful magic items evolve to replace others. Technology is limited only by the laws of physics but magic, since it doesn't exist can only be limited by two things. Writer's fiat or by imposing upon magic a set of internally consistent rules or laws. In other words, magic as science.
Yet the DMG itself warns against using magic in just this very way. Indeed, "where magic becomes technology" is mentioned as the "comical route" of campaign design. Yet, throughout this thread (and many others), this is exactly how magic is explained as being.
Now some of you may prefer magic by writer's fiat, and that's fine. You prefer not to want to know how magic works, you just want to be captivated by it when it does. But ultimately, I'm unsatisfied with this. Since magic isn't real, I have to engage in the willful suspension of disbelief to be captivated by the writer or DM's portrayal of magic. But since the "mysteriousness" of magic is dictated to us by a writer or DM who is just as human as we are, certain logical inconsistencies invariably crop up.
Inconsistancies abound, even in a universe that runs on science instead of magic. But this isn't what is being discussed. What
is being discussed is magic being so abundant as to become blas'e and commonplace rather than exciting and magical. This has nothing to do with solid rules dictating how magic works, but of how much magic is present.
For example, if there exists certain creatures with a certain amount of power, DR, spell resistance, etc. Then I expect those monster to be held in check by characters of a certain power level. If they are not, then I don't find it believable that a certain monster will not rampage uncontrollably across the countryside. A town of 1-3 level NPC commoners cannot exist anywhere near a dungeon filled with CR 10 or higher monsters. The only way it can is by the DM coming up with some metagame rationale for it.
Well, let's look at Dragons. If there are only a few Dragons about, each sleeping for decades or centuries, than not much magic is needed, particularly if they pop up, ravage things for a few months or years, and then vanish. In this image, one dragon could appear and the obtainment of a long lost weapon or group of weapons (such as the long-lost blades of an ancient order of knights, the staff of the Priest-King and so forth) becomes the entire focus of a sizable time-frame within the campaign.
Change this, however, to dozens of dragons in constant motion, meddling with the affairs of "lesser" creatures, eating aplenty, plotting, scheming, etc. Now a great amount of magic is needed. However, this later picture does the same thing to dragons as it does to magic: Rather than being magnificent, terrifying, mysterious creatures, they just become another beasty in a long line of other beasties, to be dealt with by just another magic item in a long line of other magic items.
It is unfortunate that the rules, by supporting common-magic, promote this later image.
Likewise, if mages have access to teleport or fly or can create magic lanterns, then I find it unbelievable that a mage would prefer to walk across the countryside or that magic lanterns wouldn't be commonplace. Either the DM or writer has come up with some metagame reason why they can't or they have decided to impose magical laws upon their world to justify why they can't. But once you impose understandable laws of magic it then becomes possible for people to use those laws to their advantage. To know how to manipulate them to increase their own power or profit by it. Such is human nature. Anything else is arbitrary writer's fiat. And when such writer/DM's fiat is held up to the light of logic, I find it suddenly thrown into sharp relief and I can no longer engage in the willful suspension of disbelief.
Sounds like a personal problem, being that you would prefer to take advantage of a world's flavor rather than just "go with it".
The rules framework of the d20 system can be used to simulate a wide variety of worlds. But you must be prepared to make changes to maintain internal logic and consistency. If you don't want your world to contain high level magic items you either must use DM's fiat to simply say they don't exist and ignore the fact that your game world no longer has any internal consistency. Or you have to change the game system itself. See my previous post for the kinds of changes you would need to make to play in a viable low magic world.
I would question your use of the word "need", since I have done differently (indeed, sometimes even the opposite) and come up with fun, viable, and (dare I say it) balanced campaigns that would be described as low magic (although rare magic is most often more accurate).
If magic was not used in D&D as a balancing factor then you could remove it from the game without having to make any other changes at all. But you can't.
The problem isn't that magic is used as a balancing factor; Rather, it's the amount of magic that was determined as the default. To say that "Character's of [X] Level need [Y] amount of items because they should be able to beast [Monster Z]" is, more or less, telling me to play as written or deal with a broken system (and like it or not, if the system isn't designed the way you play, it is effectively broken even if internally consistant to it's own assumption). After all, I've been playing for over 20 years, and I haven't even heard of a game having so much magic available in a game for well over a decade. Indeed, even now, only on message boards do I find such a drive for the default assumptions to be upheld, since everyone I've met and continue to meet have all "toned down" this ratio in 3E.
