D&D General Greyhawk and "Low Magic" : Why Low Magic is in the Eyes of Beholder

[MarkB]

Well....the Frogoten Realms has roughly 100 arcane spellcasters alive at any one time that can cast wish, plus at least 100 divine ones that can cast miracle.

Mystara...the Empire of Alphatia has 1,000 wizards of 36th level (say 20th)

The Volo guides for FR, as well as many other things written by Ed Greenwood show a good 'high magic' world for common folks: plenty of shops or taverns have a guardian golem, powerful spell wards, magic items and a high level spellcaster or six. Aurora's shops alone operate a world wide teleport/portal system. And that is just the stuff covered by the rules, as FR has tons of 'unknown mysterious magic'.

None of which is even a tiny fraction of the magic level of your example of several trillion people who can all cast Wish at-will. As a point of comparison to judge whether a particular setting is high-magic or not, it's a ludicrous strawman.

 

[Ace]

Another option, and one I have used, is have the only PC caster options be the Ritual Caster feat and the Warlock class.

But really, to my mind "low magic" is as much about a society's perception of magic as anything else. If your commoners freak out at even the hint of magic and disown magical healing as evil or "witchcraft" or what have you, your world will feel very different than if such things are just taken in stride.

Even real world societies (and plenty of these still exist) that eschew and fear witchcraft, do have a split between good magic and bad magic based on itent and use Brujo /Curendero Witch/Clever Folk and similar splits seem to be pretty common in many parts of the world.

In OD&D terms this pencils out very nicely as Magic User (often chaotic, maybe neutral) and Cleric (often lawful, may be neutral)

Your solution of "Warlocks/Ceremonial Caster only" is pretty good if you include a wide range of of pacts, Celestial Pact warlocks would not be feared once known (he serves the Ancient Ones) but others might be.

 

[Hussar]

I tried to do "low magic" 5e. It's not really possible to be honest.

I banned all classes with cantrips. So, that took out most of the casters (with the players endlessly, exhaustingly, whinging about how there were NPC casters so, why couldn't they be casters too). The group wound up with two rangers and a paladin. There were still so many spells whizzing around, that it might as well be high magic.

5e is Potterverse level magic. That's just the way it is.

 

[Voadam]

5e's lack of a warlord really hurts the nonmagical party concept, although hit dice and long rest healing make it a little more feasible than AD&D's sometimes weeks long rest to regain 20 hp.

4e would probably work best if you want really low magic PCs in Greyhawk D&D. Limit everyone to martial power source, use inherent bonuses from Dungeon Master's Guide 2 so the math works out and you have a really functional adventuring group of fighters, rogues, nonmagical kickass rangers, and nonmagical warlord healers shouting at you to walk it off. Magic can be completely paced by the DM and NPCs are different. Being on general par with baseline parties means you could go into Greyhawk module type scenarios without tons of adjustment.

 

[Ace]

I tried to do "low magic" 5e. It's not really possible to be honest.

I banned all classes with cantrips. So, that took out most of the casters (with the players endlessly, exhaustingly, whinging about how there were NPC casters so, why couldn't they be casters too). The group wound up with two rangers and a paladin. There were still so many spells whizzing around, that it might as well be high magic.

5e is Potterverse level magic. That's just the way it is.

It sounds to me like your players don't like lower magic levels and they selected the most magical classes they could because its what they like to play. No player buy in isn't a problem really unless you as GM lack buy in to what they like in which case one party needs a new game or a new group.

If you want to try again with different players the trick to low magic D&D is limiting classes and archetypes, Rangers needs to be the "no spell variant" and most spell casters banned. This needs to include the various "arcane" this and Paladins and more,

This leaves you with (PHB/UA) 7 or 8 fighters 2 ranger archetypes , 5 rogues and 2 barbarians as well as a few extra very limited spells options if you like them. Its also a good time to use balanced 3rd party stuff from the SRD if you like even classes like EN Publishing Noble.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Even real world societies (and plenty of these still exist) that eschew and fear witchcraft, do have a split between good magic and bad magic based on itent and use Brujo /Curendero Witch/Clever Folk and similar splits seem to be pretty common in many parts of the world.

In OD&D terms this pencils out very nicely as Magic User (often chaotic, maybe neutral) and Cleric (often lawful, may be neutral)

Your solution of "Warlocks/Ceremonial Caster only" is pretty good if you include a wide range of of pacts, Celestial Pact warlocks would not be feared once known (he serves the Ancient Ones) but others might be.

I don't like the cleric/wizard dichotomy as a proxy for black/white magic; the old TSR takes on Lankhmar tried it that way and it was an ill fit at best even then.

As far as warlocks go, I allow(ed) any pact as an option and reskinned eldritch blast to match the patron and be less video game-y (for example, a warlock devoted to Shub-Niggurath had an EB that functioned as vines and leaves springing out from within the target's body; all mechanical aspects of the spell remain intact).

But I also a) don't run very combat-heavy games and b) have been lucky enough to have groups happy to play outside the box a little so we could try out different things. Seems like, for example, @Hussar ran into much more pushback while running low magic games than I did.